The Nazarenes reject the Levitical texts because, according to them, such texts fail to show the love of God. Instead, they come from “ancient cultural biases.” The authors of “Why the Church” base their subjective argumentation on the power of love. God’s love must be shown to practicing homosexuals; to determine that their sexual practice is against the law of God is to show them hatred rather than love.

We are now obliged to hallow an entire month of Gay Pride celebrations of homosexual practice. Nude men and drag queens parade through our cities, while children look on. Children attending parades used to climb on the fire engines or walk next to a police officer. Now the police are obliged to march in step with the agenda, while military representatives wear a “pride patch” on their uniforms.
How and why has our culture come to accept such perverted sexuality as a ho-hum reality? No doubt the new DEI social justice theory of “oppressed and oppressor” has identified minority sexual identities as one of the oppressed communities. In this “pride” month I discovered a 469-page book with the intriguing title, Why the Church of the Nazarene Should be Fully LGBTQ+ Affirming by Thomas Jay Oord and Lexa Oord (SacraSage, 2023). The authors are a pastor and wife couple, members of the Nazarene church. They found some 90 key church members and leaders to write short chapters encouraging the Nazarene church to accept LBGTQ+ practitioners as members and elders of the church, and to adopt the full practice of same-sex marriage.
The Church of the Nazarene: Beginnings and Current Beliefs
The Church of the Nazarene is an evangelical Christian denomination that emerged in North American Methodism and the 19th century Holiness Movement/Revival. The name was born of a genuine desire to emulate Jesus’ compassion for the poor, as well as to follow the passion for the poor exhibited in the life of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. The “Articles of Faith” in the Manual of Church of the Nazarene, states:
We believe in one God – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit:

That the Old and New Testament scriptures, given by plenary inspiration, contain all truth necessary to faith and Christian living.
That man is born with a fallen nature and is, therefore, inclined to evil, and that continually.
That the finally impenitent are hopelessly and eternally lost.
That the atonement through Christ is for the whole human race; and that whosoever repents and believes in the Lord Jesus Christ is justified and regenerated and saved from the dominion of sin.
That believers are to be sanctified wholly, subsequent to regeneration, through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
That the Holy Spirit bears witness to the new birth and also the entire sanctification of believers.
That our Lord will return, the dead will be raised, and the final judgment will take place.[1]

It is a major loss for Christian orthodoxy to lose such a powerful denomination. Alas, the mother-church of orthodox Methodism, namely United Methodism, is collapsing. United Methodism’s governing General Conference, from April 23 to May 3, 2024, deleted (!) the “denomination’s specific disapproval of adultery, premarital/extramarital sex, and homosexual behavior from its Book of Discipline.” Nearly two million conservative African Methodists have resolved to exit United Methodism.[2]
How to Read Scripture
Those favoring the normalization of homosexuality have a strange way of interpreting the Scriptures, since they consider them to be divinely inspired. Their reasoning is this: Methodism found a way of interpreting Paul’s teaching on the ordination of women, and there are now women pastors throughout Methodist churches. Methodism must now find a way of interpreting not only Paul’s teaching on sexuality, but explicit texts in Old Testament passages such as Leviticus 18:20–23, which includes homosexuality with incest, child sacrifice, and bestiality as examples of Canaanite (pagan) abominations:
And you shall not lie sexually with your neighbor’s wife and so make yourself unclean with her.
You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the LORD.
You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.
And you shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion. (Lev 18:20–23)
Since this text is concerned with the holiness of God (and thus Israel’s holiness) it also includes reminders to Israel in symbolic practice in everyday things.
Read More
Related Posts:

The magic act of Covid vanishing from media view and public perception is not due to any medical miracle or the natural trajectory of a virus losing its potency. It was performed by those who manufactured this reality and committed countless crimes, coordinated in an attempt to slip out the back door, avoid further public inquiry and escape any legal consequences.

COVID-19 has magically disappeared.
After more than two years of non-stop bombardment with Covid “news”, there has been none at all in mainstream headlines for over a week. The media giveth and the media taketh away.
Through the immaculate erasure of the ‘Covid Crisis,’ those responsible for these harms are attempting to make us forget what they did to us, our families, and the permanent damage they caused to society.
Think back to what life was like two years ago and imagine if someone told you that a “health emergency” would require a crackdown on all social and economic life.
Remarkably, the public health orders moved quickly from “flattening the curve” and “slowing the spread” to containment, suppression, contact tracing, social isolation, quarantine, face coverings, de facto house arrest aka “lockdowns” (a prison/slave camp term), and mandated experimental injections.
In order to “keep us safe” government policies mushroomed from innocuous instructions into draconian decrees.
The limitation of the right to engage in basic economic transactions; the limitation of the right to freedom of movement; limitations on the right to practice religion; the suspension of the right to an education; the denial of the right to a livelihood; the removal of the right to receive or refuse medical attention; suspension of public meetings; suspension of juries; suppression of the right to freedom of expression; denial of the right to assembly; and much else became the new operating principles of “The Covid World.”
The institution of a bio-security police state was birthed according to health authorities and others the power to quarantine someone considered “infected” or simply to have been in contact with a purported “case.”
To make this appear necessary and acceptable, an intensive full-spectrum psychological assault on our sensibilities was implemented. Covid-19 was hyped as the ‘New Black Death’.
We were told by ‘important-looking people’ that millions will die, the entire planet is in danger, a global response is required and everyone must get in line with the program whilst “heroes” and “experts” take charge of this new global war to keep us safe.
Illogical catchphrases designed to hypnotize the public into a malleable mental state were repeated over and over in every media outlet, across virtually every social institution, and plastered throughout all walks of the public sphere.
“Flatten the Curve”, “The New Normal”, “Social Distancing” and “Follow the Science“ became the nation’s Covid shibboleths. Media bullhorns relentlessly blasted the doublespeak into the public psyche. Oxymorons and euphemisms dominated the contours of any and all “Covid-related” discourse.
Such linguistic manipulations were readily absorbed and seamlessly adopted by much of the public and became the Doublethink phraseology of the Covid Era.
Mantras of the Covid Era were followed by a fleet of psychologically disorienting and arbitrary ‘regulations’, ‘advice‘, and ‘guidelines’ which were quickly put in place, selectively enforced and subsequently changed.
No one was spared.
Children came under sustained psychological attacks, branded ‘super spreaders’, and were told to keep away from the grandparents lest they “kill granny.”
Operating in a fog of psychological trauma, everyone moved through a world devoid of smiles and laughter where faces were hidden by masks and smothered in cloth.
This barrage of brutalizing manipulations was designed to condition us to accept the tyrannical impositions of “The New Normal.”
Read More

In 10 topical chapters, Chang considers various facets of Spurgeon’s ministry at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, ranging from church leadership and congregationalism to the ordinances and membership. He invites us to study Spurgeon as one who thought deeply about the local church and who therefore “remains a valuable conversation partner for pastors today.”

Everyone is a theologian, R. C. Sproul rightly observed. Anyone with ideas or beliefs about God is doing theology. It may be poorly considered, but it’s theology nonetheless.
By the same token, it might be said that everyone has an ecclesiology, a doctrine of the church. We all have beliefs or assumptions about what the church is, why it exists, and how it ought to function. Rarely do we pause, though, to think deeply about these things. Even among pastors, the incessant demands of ministry often pull us toward fixing urgent problems while neglecting larger questions. What does healthy pastoral ministry look like? What matters most in the life of my church? Am I shepherding God’s flock in a way that pleases him?
In Spurgeon the Pastor: Recovering a Biblical and Theological Vision for Ministry, Geoffrey Chang shows why the 19th-century Baptist expositor should be regarded as more than “the Prince of Preachers”—he should be studied as an example of a faithful pastor. Chang—assistant professor of church history and historical theology and curator of the Spurgeon Library at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary—contends there’s “no better model of faithful pastoral ministry and commitment to the local church” than Spurgeon (2).

In 10 topical chapters, Chang considers various facets of Spurgeon’s ministry at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, ranging from church leadership and congregationalism to the ordinances and membership. He invites us to study Spurgeon as one who thought deeply about the local church and who therefore “remains a valuable conversation partner for pastors today” (5).
First Things First
We have a fascinating propensity to overcomplicate things. Just as Naaman couldn’t fathom that his leprosy would be healed by bathing in the appointed waters (2 Kings 5), we can have a lurking suspicion there must be more to church than a covenant community preaching the gospel and practicing the ordinances.
When we doubt the sufficiency of God’s appointed means for ordering his church, we begin to seek out every manner of man-made scheme to make up for what’s lacking. The result is churches who will try everything except the relatively few things most essential to a biblically healthy church. Is it possible that our never-ending church innovations and strategic ministry “breakthroughs” reveal a lack of faith in God’s own design for his church?
Spurgeon never tired of the simplest strategies, because he believed they were biblically warranted: corporate prayer, congregational singing, and the reading and preaching of God’s Word. He was convinced that people’s primary need is to hear the gospel—and that preaching is the primary means by which it happens.
Shepherding the Masses
None of this means a stripped-down, simplified approach is always best. Sunday-morning attendance at the Metropolitan Tabernacle numbered in the thousands, and weekly church life was remarkably busy. By his 50th birthday, Spurgeon’s congregation supported some 66 entities. The busyness wasn’t in spite of Spurgeon’s straightforward ecclesiology but a natural byproduct of it.
Read More

Related Posts: