Take the Provision

Radix Fidem is not exclusive.

It’s not necessary to walk in our teaching to serve God and harvest His shalom. We need to be careful to remember that there are a great many heart-led folks of faith out there who see no reason to search for something other than their current religious activity. There is no need to pull them in, but everyone is welcome who wants what we offer.

I’ve been giving a lot of prayer and contemplation to where I’m going in faith, and it naturally raises questions about where I hope to carry this thing we do here at Kiln of the Soul virtual parish. As I said every early in the game some years ago: There’s nothing to keep you from absorbing what we teach and taking it into any mainstream religious organization. You really should try to find God’s peace where He leads you, and I would never pretend to know what He wants for you.

What’s left is that we have here in our parish a handful of folks who simply don’t belong in that setting. We have no home in a regularly constituted church meeting because the Lord has called us to things they won’t do. And this is why I keep the religion — Radix Fidem — separate from the parish — Kiln of the Soul. You can steal all you like from Radix Fidem’s ideas. Those ideas aren’t unique to us; only the writing itself is copyrighted. But to be a part of the parish means you submit to my eldership; we simply cannot get things done without that.

I know from experience that the standard outreach to new prospects is completely out of place. The folks who respond to something like that aren’t a good fit. It must be limited to people whom the Lord leads here by His own inscrutable ways. And those who do join us are by no means restricted to what we do here. You’ll notice we don’t have prescribed rituals, for example. The whole question of membership rests on nothing more than humoring me and anyone else who has a claim to leadership (Jay DiNitto at this point). And when I’m gone, I can’t pretend to lay restrictions on how the new senior elder will run things. But obviously it’s restricted to what a virtual community is in the first place.

But in a much wider sense, I cannot see how we gain anything at all by putting up any barriers that don’t already exist by the nature of what we are doing. We are seeking a sense of peace with God that indicates His favor, as manifested by certain promises in the Bible. One of those promises is a fellowship and shared faith with others, because the whole thing presumes others will be drawn. Surely we can’t include those who would disrupt our discussions, but it’s really not exclusive beyond that. Disruptive people exclude themselves; we have no other interest in keeping folks in or out.

And by all means, take fellowship and share worship in this world whenever and wherever the Lord makes it possible.