More than you want, probably

Sunday we will confess/state/declare our faith using the Apostles' Creed.
Instead of:
"I believe in the holy catholic church" we have printed:
"I believe in the holy worldwide church"
It ain't perfect. Nothing is. (except maybe raiders super bowl XI
victory over Vikings)
Planning to post more later and use an illustration that involves the
word "gay".

(HERE is that more.)

Rob Pendley

Sunday we state creed and experience baptism

--Creed

"It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a little encouragement to practice it. The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ."

--Dorothy Sayers, "Creed or Chaos?" The Whimsical Christian (New York: Macmillan, 1978) 34-35.

--Baptism

I’m always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the Eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.

Very often when I leave a place of worship, the first impression I have of the so-called “outside world” is how small it is—how puny its politics, paltry its appetites, squint-eyed its interests. I have just spent an hour or so with friends reorienting myself in the realities of the world—the huge sweep of salvation and the minute particularities of holiness—and I blink my eyes in disbelief that so many are willing to live in such reduced and cramped conditions. But after a few hours or days, I find myself getting used to it and going along with its assumptions, since most of the politicians and journalists, artists and entertainers, stockbrokers and shoppers seem to assume that it’s the real world.

And then

some pastor or priest

calls me back to reality with “Let us worship God,”

and I get it straight again,

see it whole.

—Eugene H. Peterson, Take & Read

(tomorrow gonna be great day)

"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." --GK Chesterton

creed or chaos

If doctrine is rightly understood, however, not as dry and dusty speculations, but as the biblical indicatives of God's work in creation, providence, redemption, and consummation of all things in Christ, then the doctrine is the gospel. In her book, Creed or Chaos, mystery novelist and playwright Dorothy Sayers wrote,

Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as 'a bad press.' We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine-'dull dogma,' as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man-and the dogma is the drama....Now we may call that doctrine exhilarating or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all. That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find Him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed.