Professing evangelicals who hold very high office in Northern Ireland are at the forefront of promoting a form of ecumenism that is utterly offensive to Christian people as well as flying in the face of the teaching of Scripture.
It was somewhat disconcerting to hear Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), Matt Baggot, advocating very strongly the getting together of 'faith communities' and describing this as the work of God.
Mr Baggot, an Englishman who said he knew nothing about Northern Ireland prior to his appointment as Chief Constable (this was evidenced by his not knowing the correct name of our second city, Londonderry), spoke about the need to go to the people we don't necessarily like, and cited the example of Jesus as his authority for saying so.
This is yet another example of how Scripture can be made to say whatever we want it to say, Louis Carroll style ("a word means what I want it to men, no more and no less"). When Jesus approached the outcasts of society, including outcasts from religious society, it was usually with a view to winning them to Himself. He never went to them merely to be friends with them and to say that what they have done and how they lived was OK. His purpose was always redemptive; He sought to forgive them the moment they repented of their sins. He worked towards getting them, as sinners, to repent of their sins so that they could know the experience of forgiveness.
Jesus was not blinded or mesmerised by those who were deemed to be important people in His day, nor was He taken in by their smooth, sugared, words. He did not commit Himself to them because He knew what was in man (Jn.2:25). Jesus was not into taking people at face value because He was not a superficial Person. He was not a 'back slapper.'
However, we like to be seen with the 'big men' of society, with the important people, with those who may be able to advance our careers a bit. In fact, Jesus was most critical of those who claimed to be 'religious' and yet who were taking the people away from God and His way.
Mr Baggot celebrated the coming together of 'faith communities,' a term that he studiously avoided defining. But by this I believe he means the coming together spiritually of evangelicals, liberal protestants, Roman Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, and anything else that calls itself 'religious.' He is promoting unbiblical ecumenism of a most nauseating kind. He is advocating evangelical and reformed Christians working together as spiritual equals with those who not only do not believe the Christian faith, but actually by their religion, deny it.
Mr Baggot contends that the Lord is bringing people together, from 'faith communities' as he calls them. He blames the Lord for doing what he condemned the people in the OT for doing - introducing syncretism into the Hebrew religion. The Chief is working hard to create a 'melting pot' religion that he thinks is of the Lord.
To do this, of course, one needs to disregard the teaching of the Scriptures, to use the Bible selectively, but to throw in the odd 'evangelical text' so that unsuspecting evangelicals can be reeled in by this bait. If the true Christian faith is confined and limited to those who have been justified by faith in Christ alone; and if only the forgiven belong to Christ, how is it that a professing Christian man can say in effect that both Jesus and Paul and Peter got it all wrong and that now because of our superior twenty-first century knowledge, we know better than they did?
This is sheer arrogance of the worst kind. And it demonstrates how liberalism's methodology has infiltrated the Christan Church and also those para-church organisations that have traditionally stood for evangelical truth. Those who mix biblical religion with religion of the ecumenical kind are set to take themselves and those who follow them on a road that leads to hell and eternal destruction.
What makes this so much the more disturbing is the fact it is as a professing evangelical that he is doing this. And because of his position within Northern Ireland society, evangelicals are being deceived by what he is saying; not a few Christians whom I would have regarded as sound men spoke very highly of the Chief Constable's remarks.
But what he is doing is precisely what the liberal and ecumenical churchmen of the mainline denominations in Ulster have been doing for many decades, with the effect of virtually silencing the Gospel of Christ in many congregations. This is the ecumenism that gets the applause of most people, but not of God. It shows an utter lack of discernment and discrimination, something that is not true of the Lord. While Matt Baggot is made very welcome in many churches and para-church organisations, liberal ecumenical churchmen from the apostate churches would never be invited to speak in those same churches or Christian organisations.
In no way am I saying that he is not as Christian, far from it. But what I am saying is that Christians need to be very careful when high profile people who claim to be evangelicals talk about going down a road that many of them would ever trod in a month of Sundays.
I must say, I found his words most insulting and hurtful both as a Christian and as a victim of terrorism.
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