Category Answers for your Fellowship

Jim van Heiningen

In some research on the topic I found that the pagan Gaia community in the US have a baby dedication service, so have Unitarian Universalists, Buddhists, Wiccans, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Baptists, some Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Community Churches, not to speak of many house churches. How about your fellowship??

To sprinkle or not to sprinkle

Let us suppose that you are a citizen of a country where most people are either RC, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Calvinist or Methodist. It so happens that you discover that the baptismal sprinkling of babies is not scriptural. You are appalled that so many could have this so wrong for so long, but, still, whether their babies are sprinkled or not, doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference to you.

But then! Your own ...

The Psychologizing of the Church

William MacDonald

One of the phenomena of the age in which we live is the way the church has been infiltrated by secular psychology. Contrary to 2 Timothy 3:16-17, the Bible is no longer sufficient as a basis for counseling. We need psychotherapy. The Holy Spirit is no longer depended on to produce needed changes in the lives of believers. Elders are no longer competent to counsel. They must refer their people to a professional therapist. This in spite of the fact that God has given us in the Word and by the Spirit all that is necessary for life and godliness (2 Pet. 1:3).

For generations believers took their problems to the Lord in prayer. Now they must take them to a psychiatrist or psychologist. Young men are no longer urged to preach the Word...

Jim van Heiningen

“On this rock I will build my church,

and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it”

(Matthew 16:18).

When Jesus mentions the ‘gates of Hades’ in the New Testament, He is not coining a new expression or introducing the disciples to a new concept. In the Old Testament they are mentioned some six times (Job, Psalms and Isaiah); God himself speaks about them in Job 38. Now, the seventh time, it is the Son who mentions the ‘gates of Hades’ – and it is the only time in the New Testament.

Should you wonder about “Ekklesia” – the word we’re using in this article – it is the actual word used by Matthew for “church”. It means “congregation”, or the “company of the called out ones”...

Jim van Heiningen

The conditioned mind

This saying of our Lord in Matthew’s Gospel (16:18) is the rock on which Roman Catholicism is built. What would our RC friends do without it? There would be no Holy See, no Holy Father, no Vatican, no encyclicals, no white smoke, no cardinals, no “spokesman for Christianity”, no “symbol of unity” as Joseph Ratzinger has called the pope in the past.

Without these three words of Jesus, the RC church would be just another “denomination”, seeking to navigate the storms of time. Having a pope is what truly sets them apart from all the others who go by the name of “Christian”...

Not the impartial student of Roman Catholic history. He encounters too many rivers of blood, that is, the blood of the untold millions, who were supposedly unworthy to live because of some perceived heresy.

Not the millions, who were in with Rome, but then, when they found the living Christ in the living Word of God, had no choice but to follow him and turn their backs on mere forms and traditions. The “old wineskins” had been good enough for the “old wine”, but how to pour their “new wine” into anything but “new wineskins”?!

Not the Christian, who lives in a traditionally Roman Catholic culture, like that of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Latin America, etc...