MacFrazier.com

6 Comments (and 2 trackbacks)

• #1 by Mac on 2009.07.01 - 1:17am

  

  Make that “yesterday”, if you’re on the East Coast (like my website officially is).

• #2 by Derrick on 2009.07.01 - 1:43pm

  

  Or if you are in Africa, like this reader is.

  • #3 by Mac on 2009.07.03 - 6:39pm

    

    True.

    We need to talk some time. I’m going on vacation in a handful of hours, and I don’t know how good net access will be. If no sooner, then when I get back in the office in a week I’ll try to connect with you.

• #4 by Stephen Simons on 2009.07.01 - 8:30pm

  

  Interested to know more about the mutual support across denominations.

  • #5 by Mac on 2009.07.03 - 6:38pm

    

    The event had sixteen participants, if I remember correctly. About fifty-fifty men and women. Many were pastors, but some were lay leaders. While it was hosted at a General Church facility (Sunrise Chapel) and led by a retired GC pastor (Frank Rose), it was a transdenominational event. General Church, Swedenborgian Church (aka “Convention”) and Lord’s New Church all had multiple representatives there. I came away feeling both a sense of camaraderie and a sense of loss. Camaraderie from all the fellow growth pastors and church planters I grew close with, and loss due to what could have been all these years.

    My growing vision for a church planting movement started as a GC-centered thing, then awhile back expanded to include independent Swedenborgians and New Christians, and now I see really has plenty of room (and even need) for participation across all denominations of Swedenborgiana. I mean, it’s hard to think of us as “competing”, when each one of us separately (and all of us combined) have approximately 0% “market share” in church world!

    • #6 by Stephen Simons on 2009.07.04 - 4:11pm

      

      I like where you are going.

      Jesus never intended that the way we explain things would be uniform or be the binding force to unify Christianity. Jesus prayed that all believers would be one, just as He and the Father are one. There is no greater oneness than this single soul of Christ giving life to the single body of Christ. It is each believer’s reception of His will for our lives that unites us, not the understanding of He gives us of how we will accomplish it.

      A Christian believer is any person who accepts the full gospel of salvation that lives in the fact that Jesus and the Father are one — that Jesus alone is to be approached and worshipped because He alone is God.

      So here’s what I see, there have been Christians since the time of Christ, and those who accept the actual gospel even today often are unaware that Jesus has already returned. I founded Second Advent Christianity™ because I wanted to take the “New” off of “Christian” and be part of the church that Jesus founded and then renewed. Jesus did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it and Jesus certainly didn’t return to add to the gospel, but to establish it more completely and permanently. There is no new truth, only new Christians when people like you and me introduce someone to the one and only God of heaven and earth, Jesus Christ, for the first time.

      So, yes. I think you are on the right path. Keep it growing man!

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