Oy what a mess,
1) You have a church adding an unbiblical requirement to church membership (and extending its mission to the sphere reserved for the civil magistrate)
2) Then you have a congregation "voting(!)" members "out of the church" rather than following any biblically prescribed methodology for church discipline such as Matthew 18 or 1 Cor. 5 Not to mention the fact that they didn't specify what sins the ousted members were committing that they refused to repent of (willyfully refusing to vote for Bush is not actually covered in the Decalogue).
3) Then to compound the problem, you have the ejected members bringing in civil lawyers in order to force a reversal of the decision - which is actually the most ominous infringement on the separation of church and state in the article.
Guys, I know that many of you see this insanity as an example of why Christianity must be excluded from the political sphere, but I see it as a much clearer example of:
1) What happens when the bible is abandoned (lets face it, in this example "not even consulted" would be nearer the truth) as the guiding light for church order and mission.
2) The kind of thing that happens when politics, and social concerns are made the driving concern of the church rather than following the pattern set for the church in the great commission. And sadly its not just Republicans co-opting the church. Both parties "cynically" use churches for achieving their political ends.
The saddest thing is, that they have effectively abandoned a concern for men's souls and the eternal issues of life in favor of bickering over purely temporal concerns, as though the outcome of the 2004 election were more important than where a person spends eternity. Truly we have become so earthly minded we are doing no heavenly good. They'd do well to remember the underlying lesson of Shelly's poem, Ozymandius:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Let the Church be about the work of the eternal Kingdom, not frittering away her time with the petty politicking of passing earthly kingdoms.
- SEAGOON
