The event we held was a Creation Seminar led by Dr. Emil Silvestru, a geologist with Creation Ministries International (formerly Answers in Genesis). The question, as I understand it, is essentially this: How does your sponsorship of this event square with your previously stated views on separation?<\/em><\/p>\n I think the question is a fair question, as I stated in my initial brief reply:<\/p>\n In deciding on this particular event, I had some misgivings and am still not certain we made the right decision.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Now for a more detailed answer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My misgivings concerning hosting the event stemmed from the fact that CMI in this same tour on the Island were appearing in churches with which we have strong disagreements, so strong that I would not participate in any joint religious effort with those churches of any kind. That is not to say they are non-Christian churches, far from it! But we do have significant differences. I do not wish to seem to approve (in any way) their ministries and associations.<\/p>\n With those misgivings, here is the thought process I went through in arriving at my conclusion:<\/p>\n With these thoughts, I still have some misgivings about hosting such events in the future. While nothing was said in the Seminar that presented any problem for us, some of our private conversations revealed that we are truly different in our approach to the overall ministry \u2013 CMI generally is pretty well evangelical in its thinking, and we are not. I don’t care to go into details, but some of the things said reveal to me that we would not choose to proclaim the whole counsel in the same way.<\/p>\n In spite of those differences, I think the meetings were well received by our people and profitable for them.<\/p>\n It seems to me that Creation Ministry people are a unique sort of group. They go into churches as agents of change, if the church is weak on creation. I appreciate that. I can’t really think of any other ministries that are really doing such things. The nearest parallel I could imagine is something like Scott Aniol’s Religious Affections Ministries. What would you say if Scott were able to go into some CCM church and teach basic Christian music philosophy? (I’m not holding my breath on that one!) If such a hypothetical became reality, I wouldn’t be against it. The focus of such ministry would be fairly one-dimensional, it would be reformational, it would be calling such a church to repentance. I don’t think I would have a problem with that.<\/p>\n The way that I would have a problem is if instead of CMI we were approached by an evangelist, let’s say, who had a much broader ministry emphasis, but was known as a specialist on creation. If he was one who was known for certain associations and compromises, who preached on all sorts of general topics, who sought to build ties between people of all stripes, fundies, conservatives, and beyond, then I would be much more worried about that association.<\/p>\n Well, I am getting pretty tired. I still have about a half hour of videotaping to do, but I think I may not be making much sense as it is. I think I will stop there and seek follow-up questions from my readers so I can flesh this out a bit more if more specifics are wanted.<\/p>\n It’s been a long (but blessed) day. See previous post. I am still up late after an early morning. I am attempting to make a DVD of the funeral for family members to take home to loved ones who were too ill to attend. While I wait for the process to conclude, I thought I’d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[37,71,44],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-iS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1170"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1172,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions\/1172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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