Should the Church be Conservative?

Should the church be conservative? Yes and no, absolutely, and absolutely not. Here's why.

The Church should be conservative.

The Church has been entrusted with a deposit, the Gospel, to proclaim and protect for the next generation. We don't have a theory to improve or a hypothesis to prove, but a truth to pass on. We must protect these truth, as generations before us have protected it. Who will preach the Gospel in 2080 if we get it wrong in 2012? Who will preach to our grandkids if our kids think Jesus is just one way among many? Every so often in history, one group has had to call us back to a particular truth, whether it was the Church Fathers, the Reformers or the Puritans, each one had a slightly different emphasis as a result of which truth was under attack at the time. But they always brought us back to the book, to the Bible.

We must also, in our faith, be brought back to the Bible, this is where we are conservative, this is where our faith and practice stand or fall. This will always make us look odd to the outside world. In a society where, for shame, old fashioned has turned into an insult, being led by an old book will look weird at best.

The church should be conservative when it comes to who leads and speaks at it's meetings. Every evangelical church that i've come across has some kind of system whereby teachers and leaders are recognised. We don't let men in off the streets to teach. Whether that's seminary training within a denomination or the recognising of gifts within a local body, it has to happen.

The church must be conservative when it comes to protecting and proclaiming the Gospel.

The Church should not be conservative.

We worship a guy who got murdered, we worship a man who was God, born to a virgin. How can any of that lead to being conservative!? We worship a God who loves us so much that He gave us His Son to die in the most brutal way we can imagine. How can we be conservative within our four walls? let's throw open the doors and invite 'whosoever' in. Let's go to the highways and hedge and compel people to join us. Let's live in such a way that people say to us, 'let us join you, for God is with you!' Let's say to those without money, come and eat food without price or payment.

We must not, ever, be conservative in our love, or with our lives. The men who have done the most for the Kingdom in their four score and ten have been the men who have counted their lives cheap, and flung them away for the sake of the Gospel. The ones who have, far from being conservative, 'let goods and kindred go.' We must not be conservative in how we love, or we love. Imagine how Mary, Joseph and Jesus would have smelt the morning after Jesus' birth. What would you think about people about that? The Gospel calls us to love 'them,' to serve 'them' and to lay our lives down for 'them.'

But here's the kicker. We can only be liberal with our love when we're conservative with our truth. We can only afford to love all when the truth of the Gospel is well proclaimed and well protected. Our love is only worth a snap of our fingers when it flows from the right understanding of the historic, transcendent Gospel. Love without truth will make us soft, truth without love will make us hard. Our conservatism in regard to the truth and liberalism with love have to held in the right balance and got in the right order.

Be conservative with the truth today. Beware novelty. Don't be conservative with your love today, beware cold orthodoxy. I want to get here. I want to love 'them,' because of what i read in the morning. I want to live liberally because of the conservative doctrine that should be filling my heart. When the Holy Spirit leads us in truth and love, we'll not go far wrong.