We Have A Home

My prayer of 6 years was most graciously answered by Father this last Wednesday when I was officially accepted to be a member of Grace Covenant Reformed Church, a congregation of the Vanguard Presbytery in Clovis, New Mexico. The dear brothers and sisters I am privileged to pray with weekly are from here. Their reverence of the Triune God is evident by how they pray. The many ways God pours out His blessing upon us is clear evidence of their faithful and loving intercession on our behalf. Prayer is a very good gauge of a person's spiritual temperature and mindset. Listening to how a person prays gives me a clear picture of his/her heart.

Furthermore, an understanding of the covenants, beginning from Adam all the way to the consummation of Christ, of God being the covenant God, was also pivotal in making the gospel all the more clear for us. I bless my Father as He has always been steering me steadily into a greater revelation of His truths from when He first started with me. One of the LORD's precious gifts to us is the daily family worship that the whole church intentionally participates in. Father's hand of blessing for us to know Christ reverently is evident in the lives of our small gathering. He has been faithfully guiding it 7 days a week since April of this year.

We will now start a formal petition, Lord willing, to be accepted by the presbytery as a mission church plant of Vanguard here in the Philippines. 

It has taken me a long time to get to this point in my life. My family and I switched from our Baptist conviction to a much better and more appropriate Presbyterian form of church government thanks to Father's benevolent hand. While the former is certainly praiseworthy, it cannot be said to be dependable given the Filipino mindset, which is highly susceptible to poor management. Filipinos have the terrible habit of preferring silence to mistreatment. Transgressions such as rumors, favoritism, and conceit frequently go unopposed until everyone comes to accept them as the standard. Who knows what else is ignored to allow the program to continue uninterrupted?  I needed to submit to biblical church authority, but for that authority to be biblically mature was equally crucial. Ideally, no established church should be without ruling or teaching elders, evangelists, or deacons. It is counter-productive and even harmful for all the governing authority to be given to just one man, where leaving membership (even formally) or the church's chat group (even humbly) is seen as rebellion and being anti-Christ. In this light, having a single elder, autonomous and with no accountability, is a sanitized form of lording over the flock. That is why the Presbyterian form of church government is one I can wholeheartedly submit to. However, maintaining adherence to accurate doctrine, confessions, and creeds—which I believe to be just as important—is a different matter.

This experience, however unsavory, showed me the importance of having as overseers a body of biblically mature elders. The absence of a biblically robust church order also endangers the flock, and as I have learned it is not something new here. It is a silent plague and a major dilemma of many sincere brethren who have been burned and condemned by zealous but egoistic ministers who enjoy uncontested autonomy.