Our plan this weekend was to worship with our home congregation on Friday and then support Bruce at Eucharist on Sunday. But he is too ill to go. So we were thinking, last night, about where to worship. As Bruce is Anglican, and there is an Anglo-Catholic congregation, we thought we would go there. This puritan pukeko can tolerate a occaisional dose of Papism. What he cannot tolerate is heresy.
When we read the website, to find the time for service, we found this.
Welcome to All Saints’ Anglican Church. We are a vibrant, lively Anglo-Catholic faith community based in North Dunedin.
Our families are an important part of our parish. Sunday school operates most Sundays, while once a month we have a combined Family Mass where the children help lead the service.
Students from the nearby university and polytech bring lots of youthful energy and we are strongly affiliated with SCM (Student Christian Movement), who are the progressive Christian group on the Otago campus.
Our congregation is built on a strong foundation of regular mature parishioners who bring a wealth of experience and wisdom, linked to our roots in the life of the local community which go back 150 years.
With Jesus Christ at the centre, we are theologically orthodox and socially progressive. We welcome and affirm people of every ethnicity, gender, orientation, ability, and background. We hope you will join us in our shared mission to build up the body of Christ in the Parish of Dunedin North through service, worship, fellowship and witness.
I perceive the signalling of virtue and liberal, progressive teaching under the beauty of the Full and high sung liturgy. The parallels with Knox, where the music is wonderful but the teaching horrible, are there. Teaching matters.
And the church matters. So we will sleep longer and go to the second service at Grace Presbyterian: it is our second congregation when the main one is in recess.
19When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
34Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality,35but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.36You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ — he is Lord of all. 37That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: 38how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. 39We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; 40but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, 41not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. 42He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. 43All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”
The one purpose of the church is to preach the gospel. It is to proclaim the death of Christ, by preaching, by word, by sacrament, until he comes. The world will hate the church, and appeasing the elite will always emasculate the church.
Brother Mundabor is Papist, and tells me he prays for my heretic soul. This puritan prays for him not as much as I ought. But his description of the dilution of the gospel is true in this: the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
Today, on Maundy Thursday, we will see this process at work everywhere.
First is the Fear of the Lord. People are scared of hell, and behave accordingly. They might do so according to a wrong set of rules, and be more or less culpable for it; but the Fear of the Lord is there. This is, for example, the Church of England of Jane Austin’s days.
At some point the fear of the Lord goes out of the window; but the buildings, the ministers, the entire apparatus remains. At this point hell isn’t part of the conversation anymore. Once hell is not feared, being good is not anymore obedience to God, but a sugary feeling of being good because one is so beautiful. The Church of England becomes the Church of Social Justice or, more broadly, the Church of Feeling Beautiful.
This is a slippery slope, though, and this desire of feeling beautiful will, after a while, not tolerate any encumbrance or obstacle. Why would one, say, condemn perversion? Because a) it’s disgusting to God and b) it’s disgusting to us. But once the fear of the Lord is gone a) is out of the window, and once feeling beautiful is the moral imperative this will require willingly ignoring the disgust for perversion, covering its stench with a bigger dose of the new parfume, “Tolerance No 5”. In time, the parfume will be used in such doses that perversion will be forgotten altogether, helped by a new vocabulary (“gay”) and a new moral code (“inclusion”).
At this point even the Church of Social Justice is clearly obsolete, and the Church of Feeling Beautiful has taken over. Every mention of God is now either avoided, or inserted into a completely deformed, actually perverted context: God is now the Great Master Parfumier In The Sky, who encourages and inspires us to choke more and more in the pungent smell of Tolerance No 5, so that we may lose every conscience of the stink surrounding us.
This is now a process common to both the false churches and the Only One. Francis and a good part of the hierarchy openly peddle Tolerance No 5 to the masses exactly as an homosexual Anglican wannabe priest would. The Barque of Peter is completed invaded by it. I smell the stink as I write this, and I know that this evening the Evil Clown will go around spreading it with a huge vaporiser, his message amplified worldwide by willing and interested (though less and less so) media.
Tolerance No 5 has already factually destroyed a lot of Protestant outfits, and has reduced the so-called Church of England in such a state that if the PM were to order, today, to just shut it down few people would notice, even fewer would complain, and after three weeks the matter would be forgotten altogether.
I grieve that the Anglican church is in this state. I’m aware of priests who are replanting the church: one of them married us. I am quite aware of the work done by the faithful Anglican laymen and women: Bruce is one of them.
But the leadership has gone for inclusion. What stops the takeover is that the bulk of Anglicans are African: believers, and they have chosen to not take the monies from the heretics, for they want the heretics to repent.
And on this Easter Sunday, we all need to repent.
Our churches are broken, for the leaders think more of pleasing man and being inclusive than our primary goal. Which is to preach Christ crucified, particularly when the idea of sin is triggering, repentance is unthinkable, and redemption by his blood horrifying.
We are only accepted by Christ on our knees and in tears. Throwing our pride and self-esteem away. For the salvation of our soul is worth more than any praise or satisfaction we can have in this world.
For Christ did rise from the dead. He is risen indeed.
UPDATE
Bruce was able to get to his church today. We went with him.
