Embrace Christianity as Total World and Life View, Ministry Leaders Say
The time is now for the church to return to the sufficiency of Scripture, said a ministry head.
Scott T. Brown, director of the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches, opened a three-day conference on Thursday calling attention to the urgency of the matter.
"What is at stake here is the question of the sufficiency of God," he wrote in his blog, recalling his address to thousands of conference attendees. "God did not breathe into the Scripture; He breathed the Scripture."
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To embrace the sufficiency of Scripture is to embrace the sufficiency of God Himself, Brown asserted.
The conference at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center was organized out of concerns that the church has abandoned the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, consequently affecting families and the whole of the nation.
The doctrine teaches that Scripture is fully adequate in both content and clarity for "everything pertaining to life (salvation) and godliness (sanctification)," according to the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches. The center believes that the recovery of Sola Scriptura is vital to the reformation of the Church.
Brown on Thursday listed five widely held assumptions in the modern church that have supported the abandonment of the sufficiency of Scripture to the creativity of man. They are: the red letters are the most important part; if it is not mentioned in the Bible, it is automatically lawful; if there is no command, it is not required; if it is not condemned in Scripture, it is authorized; and the Old Testament is automatically void unless repeated in the New Testament.
He lamented that the church today has become a mirror of the world rather than a mirror of God.
Also lamenting several practices in the church today, Doug Phillips, founder and director of Vision Forum, noted that churches often question whether God speaks to everything and seem to look everywhere else but the Bible for answers.
By definition, Phillips underscored, a true understanding of the sufficiency of Scripture requires that we embrace Christianity as a total world and life view and the Bible as the comprehensive source book on that world and life view.
Speakers at the Dec. 10-12 conference aim to call Christians back to their foundation in affirming that Scripture alone is sufficient to direct their lives and the life of their families, churches and the country.
Brown appealed to churches to repent of their "faithless creativity" and inventions and urged them to cast themselves on every single word of Scripture.
