Greg McRitchie

Ted Sorry for the delayed response. I did not say "perfect people only can “go to church”"I said "only perfect people go to heaven"Perfection is impossible to "attain" by keeping the Law.(That's why I quoted Phil 3:) It comes only through receiving the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ through faith alone. This righteousness was "earned" by Jesus through active and perfect obedience to the Law and imputed to our account by Grace through Faith."God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."I appreciated that you included this;"Yes, this doesn’t exclude repentance and faith."The question of acceptance of homosexuals in the Church is one that does require some refinement. Do you have to be repentant to attend a church? No. Do you have to be repentant to be considered a member of the Church and a forgiven adopted son of God? The answer is yes. Homosexuality is not some super sin the same standards apply to sexually immoral Heterosexuals. Paul is very clear on dealing forcefully with unrepentant, and open public sin.I am not sure McLaren would agree. In fact his comments at Princeton would seem to indicate that He thinks "God makes them Gay".

Greg McRitchie

Thank you for your comments Shawn. I think they are right on target. I was also raised in a liberal Church and never saw the uniqueness of Christ or the need of a Savior put forth in any kind of compelling way. Jesus was a nice guy but only one of many nice guys. I was drawn to Christ as Lord and Savior later in life. When my three children were born we decided to have them baptized in the Presbyterian Church of my in-laws but I made sure to let the minister know that I did not believe Jesus was “the only way”. He just smiled and never challenged that. I thought it quite odd that they seemed to make a point of telling people that you did not have to believe in the virgin birth/conception of Jesus. That seemed to me to be a fairly essential part of the whole God/Man thing but since I didn’t believe it anyway I didn’t give it much thought. We decided to take the kids to Sunday school but I always felt uncomfortable participating in something I did not believe. I started reading the bible in an effort to refute some fundamentalist stuff I heard on TV and soon became fascinated with it. I continued to read the bible, more for information but the Holy Spirit had me in His sights. I started reading the NT straight through and then I got to Romans. As I read Romans one, I found myself agreeing with God’s righteous condemnation of those (not me) nasty evil men and women. I was saying “get em God, they deserve to die” but then I turned the page and like the prophet Nathan did to David, the Holy Spirit put His finger on my chest and said “you are that man!” I was floored literally. I fell on my face and cried out to Christ to forgive me. I went back to Church with a whole new perspective and I could not understand why no one was as excited as me about it. The church had a small library and I began to take out books and read them. One day I picked up a little paper back by some guy named Francis Schaeffer I think it was called The Church Before The Watching World. It was my first exposure to any critique of Liberalism and I instantly recognized many of the things he identified as unfaithfulness and compromise in the Church I was attending. When I went to the minister to ask him about it he became defensive and told me someone had put that book in the library without permission but he never answered any of my questions. One day my oldest son (now a pastor) began to tell me how his Sunday school class was learning about the
discrepancies in the Gospels and Acts, with the idea being that the bible was not true. As I began to protest these types of things I was sneeringly called a (wait for it) a “Bibliolator” and a “fundamentalist”. There was never any substantive attempt to answer any questions. At that point I felt it was time to go and we went to an evangelical Church closer to our home that actually believed the Bible was the word of God. Both my boys are now Pastors and my daughter is in her final year of bible school but all is not well in the Evangelical Church. I took a seminary course on Ephesians and was shocked to learn that Paul did not write Ephesians. When I pointed out that that was not consistent with the schools statement of faith (never mind that the evidence used was weak and based mostly on conjecture) I was labeled a trouble maker and you begin again to hear sneering words like “Bibliolator”. Hmmmmmmmmm Makes you wonder whats really going on doesn’t it?