Leaving Independent Bible Church

So, way back when, I produced some posts about Independent Bible Church, which were generally of a positive nature.  And I still like and appreciate a lot about that church.  However, last summer our family made the decision to pursue other options.  To be honest this was pretty much on my initiative, but so far I think we have made the best choice for our family and things are working out well.

What got the ball rolling, so to speak, was the problem of how to baptize our new baby, since my wife and I both believe infant baptism ought to be practiced, but IBC does not facilitate that.  They might say we can go get our baby baptized elsewhere then come back, but any Bible-believing church that would do that for us would want to know we were members at IBC, which we were not.  (I had been hesitant to join for a long time, and I think my reasons for hesitation were well grounded, as you will see if you keep reading.)  Going to some "liberal" church that would baptize our kid without caring if we were members of anywhere was not a viable option in my view.

Then there was the question asked by certain friends, "If your church won't baptize your baby, then why don't you go to a church that agrees with your convictions?"  I didn't really have a great answer for that one.  Why don't we go to a church that agrees with our convictions?

This issue of infant baptism by itself is not, I think, huge enough to be worth leaving a church over in general.  In this case, however, we were not really members to start with, so don't feel as bad for leaving.  Also, some other concerns about IBC tipped me over the edge.

Last summer a meeting was held to address concerns of members who had issues with a Global Leadership Conference the church was hosting.  To IBC's credit, I'm glad they had this meeting--great idea.  Not to their credit, the outcome of the meeting didn't seem to make much difference.  Some concerns raised I did not really share.  But a really good one was, why are we inviting non-Christians to teach in our church at this conference?  Would Jesus do something like this?  The answer from our pastor was something like, "Well, I haven't heard these folks preach anything that is against Christianity, so this is all just fine."

I call BS on that.  A pretense of neutrality simply does not have its basis in scripture.  Our Lord Jesus Christ, a person of some significance to the Christian faith, is perfectly clear when he says "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters."  He also has some choice words for people who are "lukewarm" in Revelation 3.  Jesus would not select anyone who is against God to teach in a church in any capacity.  I really can't even take that idea seriously.  All the apostles he chose had in common an important thing called faith, except for one whose life ended in destruction.

And anyway, why is having this conference such a dire need in the first place?  Did we run out of Christians who are able to teach in the context of the necessary work of the church?  I doubt it.

As an aside, we might add that this false pretense of neutrality clouds IBC's view of Christian vs. public education.  IBC has the main Christian school in the community as one of its ministries and gives it significant financial assistance, yet is totally lame about supporting Christian education in what is actually taught.  I'll have to address that in a future post.

Certain things then became crystal clear to me at that point.  Why does the music at IBC continue in the particular direction of modernizing and keeping up with what's cool?  Why is it always out with the old, in with the new?  Well it's the same reason as why they "need" to have a Global Leadership Conference.  The current driving force among the leadership at IBC is the need to keep up with what's popular in modern evangelicalism.  As far as I can tell this seems to be clouding the judgement of the elders.  I'm not sure what else to conclude.  Too much modern evangelicalism, and not enough purposeful acting on what scripture prescribes.

Another recent example is the "children's church" ministry.  They had one, but it wasn't cool enough as it was, so it has now been re-vamped, because the first time it was vamped wasn't good enough.  If someone wants to convince me that scripture sets a precedent for children being absent from their families during the worship service then perhaps I'll consider getting excited about it.  I think one finds the opposite to be true in books like Exodus, Deuteronomy and elsewhere.

It sounds like I'm completely bashing IBC.  That isn't my intent, believe it or not.  There are still many things I appreciate about it, and it could be far worse for what it is.  There are many people at IBC who I consider much stronger Christians than I am and have a lot of respect for.

In a future post I'll describe our process of church selection and reveal where we have ended up!