Here is a link to Part 1, if you haven’t read that yet.
In 1990 I finished the 8th grade, started high school and got my learner’s permit. That’s my yearbook photo, just before I turned 15. I had the physical stature of an adult and with a suit and tie looked like a proper grown up, albeit a very young one. I was very solidly grounded in the truth of scripture; I wasn’t searching for God, purpose, meaning or anything else. The King James Bible was the Word of God and any other “version” was written by men in an attempt to change the Bible. Boys were not supposed to wear earrings, only prisoners and sailors wore tattoos, ladies wore long dresses and long hair. Seminary was for men who chose to pastor churches and no real man of God “chose” to become a pastor, you had to be called. It was wrong to want to pastor; you had to be called, not want to do it, and then surrender to God’s will. Unless you were called to be a missionary which I was hoping didn’t happen because that meant leaving the United States and only coming back every few years to show slides. I took two years of Spanish in high school just in case because in my childhood experience missionaries spoke Spanish. Yes, I’m serious about that. That was the world I knew existed and was preparing to enter. Continue reading
Why do you believe what you believe? Are you Baptist, Methodist or Presbyterian and more importantly why or why not? Are these things you thought through systematically or do you still go to the same church as your parents? Within your denomination, are you conservative, liberal or moderate? What are your thoughts on election (Romans 8 not Sanders vs. Biden)? These questions are rhetorical, something to think about, but the one I really want to address today is this: Are your answers to these questions today the same as they would have been 10 or 20 years ago? How many iterations of systematic theology did you go through to get where you are today?
