Decisions. Life is filled with them. Some are easy. Fruit Loops or Apple Jacks? Milk or Soda? Small pillow or big pillow? Duck-billed platypus or raccoon? (That one’s SUPER easy–platypus every time.) Others aren’t so easy. Who will you marry? What degree will you choose? How many children–or no children? Where will we live? Where
We all have beliefs, particularly about sin. But what happens when our beliefs about sin become beliefs about people, or worse–about friends? How do we share Truth without looking like cold, uncaring people?
Let’s be hypothetical here, shall we? Let’s say I believe that cleaning an umbrella is wrong. (What, don’t you ever clean your umbrella? No? YOU SICK, SICK PEOPLE!) Anyone who cleans their umbrella is, in fact, “sinning”. So say someone, we’ll call him John, jumps into “sin” and begins cleaning his umbrella every day, even when it’s not dirty.
John MacArthur recently held a conference called “Strange Fire” to tell as many people as would listen that the Charismatic movement is bad–very, very, very bad (but in a LOT more words than that).
I googled “strange fire” images for this post. Interestingly, I only found images of normal fire. So now the only thing I can ponder is what exactly “strange fire” might look like. Perhaps it looks like little drops of rain? That would certainly be strange. Or maybe it looks like duck-billed platypuses. No, that wouldn’t be strange; that would just be cute. So I’m left all verklempt!
Thanks MacArthur. You’ve ruined my day.
Not only do I think his title is kinda crazy, but I also think his conclusions are significantly flawed. After reading through many of the transcripts from the conference, I completely disagree with MacArthur’s broad, lumping generalizations. They lumped all of us together in sweeping generalizations and demonized the entire Pentecostal and Charismatic movements—literally.
But with that said, in hopes of not adding to the negativity of this whole thing, I pulled a few positive notes from what I’ve read. Here are three observations from MacArthur’s Strange-Fire-whatever-that-looks-like-conference that I think are worthwhile:
There are ministers and there are performers. And unfortunately, there are some ministers who act more like performers.
I hate unpreparedness. Nothing irks me more than when someone, particularly in a church service, gets up to do something without having prepared. I believe in doing everything with excellence, and when leading, I try not to let anything but the best occur under my watch and supervision. Anything less is inexcusable, although some things inevitably slip through the cracks.
But at the same time, there’s a fine line between excellence and perfection, or between preparedness and performance, particularly in church.
I’ve come to believe that when your goal is perfection, it can easily move from ministry to performance, and those are VERY different things.