Harvest of Souls International Ministries Web Site

Via Dave Black Online and Nick’s blog I found that biblioblogger Nick Norelli’s church, Harvest of Souls International Ministries, has a new web site.

Now why do I link to this particular church web site at this moment? Is it merely to congratulate them? Well, I do congratulate them, but I had something more specific in mind. Recently I’ve been going back to one of my favorite topics, Christian essentials. One of my hopes in this area is that Christians will spend more time thinking about this topic. (Bob MacDonald has written a very interesting post that takes a substantially different view than I do, and I want to link that here.)

I want to call attention to the Harvest of Souls page regarding their beliefs. I really like this page, even though it expresses beliefs that would probably mean I would never become a member there. We start out explicitly stating the basic position, and then defining what is essential. Following that we have a list of more detailed doctrines. It is in these more detailed doctrines that I would find some significant disagreements.

But based on the second paragraph, I find it easy to believe that I would be comfortable as a brother in Christ in working with folks from that congregation even if we tended to disagree enough regarding the second rank doctrines that we might not fit in the same congregation.

I find this outline for a belief statement to be very admirable. It lets the reader get a clear idea both of what’s most important to the particular church family, but also what they hold to be important, though not essential. I’m again reminded of my friend Alden Thompson’s illustration of the castle. There’s a keep, a courtyard, and there’s “outside the walls.” In the keep are essentials, in the courtyard are things that are important to us, but not critical, while outside the walls are all the issues that we really aren’t taking a position on. As Nick notes in his blog post, he can “can affirm the statement of faith with one or two small variations, none of which concern any of the major doctrinal tenets set forth therein.”

The issue I’m raising right now is not whether we agree on the list, but whether we have thought about what beliefs (if any) are critical for each of us and for our respective fellowships.

So both congratulations and “good job!”