YeKengalé

It will be a mark of maturity when people of faith no longer find it essential to use the word ‘belief’ or ‘believers’ in referencing their spiritual practice. Rather than talking about one’s beliefs, how much more enlightened to speak of one’s understanding. Beliefs are a conversation killer. Everyone has them and everyone is equally sure they’re absolutely right. Great opportunity for egomaniacs, time-wasters and chatter-boxes, but hardly productive. Everyone however can benefit from a clearer understanding (even if the subject better understood is intent of speaker if not content of speech).

Almost every church website I know identifies itself in terms of its beliefs – information which I neither find of interest nor in any way useful. Click on the About us button and you will invariably find What we believe, as if that is somehow a statement of faith. I find much truer indices of faith in the sections titled Mission Statement, Vision Statement and Core Values. Congruence in these areas are far more healthy grounds for association.

In the ongoing conversation on the church’s approach to eschatology (one’s vision of THE END) for instance, I have very little coherent responses to questions such as “Do you believe in the rapture?” and (even more positively annoying) “When do you believe the rapture takes place?” Given the popular infantile approach to contemporary religious discourse, hardly anyone asks the more pertinent question which would actually lead to  much more meaningful conversation: “What do you understand ‘rapture’ to be? Immediately the conversation becomes grounded in something more substantial rather than floating in a sea of speculation parading in garments of certainty about things of which no one can truly be certain.

Followers of my blog would have recognized by now a coded vision statement in the tripartite series Incorruptible which I constantly reference. This for me is not doctrine but goal. Being ‘caught up’ is all I desire in life, but you won’t hear me waste my breath debating  pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib dispensationalist nonsense. If you want to know about a subject, consult the ‘experts’ (from ‘experience’) not the theorists.

If one wants to hear sound teaching on the ‘rapture’, might I recommend Enoch and Elijah, who most assuredly, in the context of scripture, would speak to all the zealous, misguided End Time Prophecy seminar-attendees of today about what is utmost in importance – that you ‘walk with God’ in faith and faithfulness until your ‘change’ comes.