St. Boniface House

Well, I suppose it wasn’t meant this way, but I think it’s quite an honor to have our church included in a list of churches all of which are pastored by men whose shoelaces I am not fit to tie.  August company indeed!   But don’t worry, I won’t quote you on it. 

One of the things that I think has been lost in all the FV hubbub is the fact that the conference where all this began was a Pastor’s Conference.  Of course it didn’t really begin there, but that’s where some folks noticed that there were people in Reformed Churches that were talking like Calvin again.

I suspect that at least some of the “talking past each other” that we’ve witnessed for the last several years could be traced to this.  The anti-FV folks want to make abstract hypothetical propositions about what happens in the ordo salutis, and the FV folks are discussing what the Bible calls them as pastors to say to Mr. and Mrs. M. who sit in the fourth row of seats in the middle section with all their children.  This is surely an oversimplification, and doesn’t begin to account for the whole disagreement.  But I am convinced that at the heart of the disagreement is a failure to understand that we are trying to recover a theology that is pastorally useful and consistent with the way the Apostles and Prophets address God’s people.

I have a fruit tree in my back yard. Last year it dropped some fruit on the ground, and I left it there. This year, a young sapling has grown up next to my fruit tree. I watered it once. I am not sure if it is a good tree or not, though, so when I go to water my fruit tree, I make sure not to get any on the sapling. When I fertilize my fruit tree, I make sure that none of the fertilizer gets on the sapling. I even built a little shed over the sapling so that no rain or sunshine would get on it. I want to see if it bears any fruit before I tend it. It did grow a flower once, but it’s just a sapling, so it couldn’t have been a real flower. So I plucked it off.