Religious Separation

We'll continue with our church mission statement. So I've been going through our church covenant, church doctrinal statement, church mission statement. So this will be the final point in the Morris Corner Church mission statement.

It says, the purpose of this church is to glorify God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. And we covered all the points up until now. So we seek to glorify God in cooperation with Christian activity, functioning in harmony with God's holy word, the Bible.

So if I can just put that in a different way, whatever this church does, whatever organization we support, whatever events we as a church take part in, other churches we fellowship with, they all have to be in line with the scripture.

We're not going to yoke together with or get involved with someone or some group that is doing things that are unbiblical. So part of this statement, what's behind it really is the biblical doctrine of separation.

This is something that a lot of churches, not only do they not preach it, a lot of churches aren't even really practicing separation these days. But 2 Corinthians 6, 17, the apostle Paul quoting the Old Testament, he says, come out from among them.

And really this is God speaking, come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. So we know that Christians and the Christian church is called to be separate. We are called to be holy, set apart, consecrated unto God.

So religious separation is the idea, just to put this in practical terms. This church will not have any associations with things that are of the world. Morse Corner Church is never going to donate to Planned Parenthood or something like that.

And I know someone might say, well, that's obvious. Well, there's churches that do that. Our church is never going to partner or hold a joint prayer service with our Buddhist neighbors in Leverett. We love them as human beings, we pray for them and we would want them to be saved, but we would never have any joint events.

And again, you might think, well, obviously, but in the day and age we live in, there's a lot of institutional churches that will have joint services with anybody and everybody and support all sorts of ungodly things.

So the very word church in Greek is ekklesia, which means a called out assembly. So the church of Jesus Christ is to be called out of the world. We are to be separate, we are to be different. Now, on the other hand, biblical separation does not require Christians to have no contact with unbelievers.

Like Jesus, we should befriend the sinner without partaking of the sin, Luke 7, 34. The apostle Paul, I think, expressed a balanced view of separatism where he basically said, if you had to be completely separate from those who were ungodly or immoral, you would basically have to leave planet earth, Paul said.

So we are to be in the world, but not of the world.