Vaccine Mandates – A Small Business Perspective

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The Sojournal asked, following Scott Kennedy’s post, if anyone else had their own experience to share, so I thought I may offer a few cents.

I must start by saying that I have a confession to make.

For quite a number of months now I have been struggling with the question of when it is time to take a stand. Without getting bogged down in the detail, I love freedom, and I believe we have God-given freedoms as image-bearers of God, that to some degree are covered by our Bill of Rights. But I also know that God is the ultimate authority that installs Governments and does so for our good. There are sometimes circumstances that require the government to use extreme measures and I do want to think well of the intention of my government, even where I disagree. There is a balance with these things, but with a balance, there is also a tipping point, or as Scott put it in his post, a “line in the sand”, where you no longer can sit back hoping for the best but have to start putting yourself into uncomfortable positions.

While thinking and struggling with this I was often reminded of the well-known quote by German Pastor Martin Niemoller:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

My confession is that I think I left it too late.

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Lessons from the Gulags – Part 1

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Introduction

Apart from books on theology and Christianity, no book has had a bigger impact on me than The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The author was a decorated soldier in the Russian army who was later sentenced to eight years of hard labour in the Russian gulags. His great life’s work, The Gulag Archipelago, documents the atrocities of Communist doctrine applied to the people of Russia. His three-volume work brought the Soviet Union to its knees and made the label communist a slur among all reasonable people.

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The Resistance – Unholy Dualism – Part 3D – Conclusion

Statement 7: On the Authority of the Church

We have all grown up in times where it is assumed that the church has authority in the spiritual realm and the state in the physical realm. This is a misunderstanding. Yes, the church’s authority is a spiritual authority, but we misunderstand spiritual if we presume it means non-physical. The church’s spiritual authority has effects in the physical world. When an adulterer is excommunicated he is excluded from the Lord’s table and from the fellowship of believers until such time as he repents.

This misunderstanding of ‘spiritual’ has caused an unhealthy spiritual/physical divide. The church now has abdicated its authority in the material world to such a degree that when the state government orders it to close for months because of a virus, it complies. Without even a whimper. There seems to have been no widespread outrage at the state presuming it has the authority prevent Christ’s church from gathering.

Now part of this of course is fear. Anyone in New Zealand who is even half aware of what’s going on will realise that we have not been led by particularly courageous men in these times. (I do not write this because I am courageous. I’m not and would be no better if I were a leader in the church.) We know there would be public outrage against us if we decided to flout these man-made rules. So there has been barely a whisper on the closure of the churches. So let’s not berate our leaders too much. Most of us laity too have been cowed in these times. We need to assist them and help them develop courage. They need to know we the laity are behind them. We need to encourage them. So encourage your pastor, minister or priest. Ask them about standing up to this seemingly endless shutdown of the gathering. We are, after all, the ecclesia, the church or the gathered. It’s somewhat ironic that we aren’t gathering.

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The Resistance – Unholy Dualism – Part 3C – In the Church

It’s been a week since we began our third part in The Resistance series. We are focusing on how Christians and the church have been captured by dualism. Today we are looking at statements 5 & 6 from the original article. I’ll post them here again to refresh your memories before we take a machete to them.

Statement 5: The pinnacle of service to God is full time paid Christian ministry because saving souls is the most important business on this earth. Our job in this world is to seek to see people saved from hell – worrying about society is like polishing the brass on a sinking Titanic. We are heaven bound. Earth is important but doesn’t matter as much

Statement 6: For those who are laity, their most important service of God is found in personal evangelism and doing things for the local church institution. This is what the works of service spoken about by Ephesians 4:12 is talking about – welcoming visitors to the Sunday service, playing in the music team, making cups of teas and running the AV desk.

In evangelical circles, dualism has spread to such an extent that the pinnacle of service to God is seen as full time paid Christian ministry. While many pastors and church leaders would perhaps not express the concept in such a stark manner, the implication is there in much of the church’s current practice.

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Are you Affected by the Vaccine Mandates?

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As a result of our recent guest post, My Line in the Sand, we have been inundated with views and comments.

To follow up on this, we at The Sojournal, are trying to collect and publish stories from people who are affected by the COVID vaccine mandate. We are keen to publish respectful articles or videos that address your personal situation. If you wish to remain anonymous, that is fine too.

If you would like to be involved, please use the contact form and we will get back to you. If you know of someone affected, please alert them to our plans.

Let’s show our overlords that we are free and principled people.

The Resistance – Unholy Dualism – Part 3B – Economics

Statement 4: On Economics

What about Economics? How is our dualism seen here? Again many Christians do not think the Bible has much to say about Economics, when in fact, it is a central topic of Scripture. This is going to be a longer section because to the degree this topic has been neglected or dealt with superficially we ought to correct common unbiblical assumptions on wealth.

God created mankind for dominion over the earth. We were designed to rule over it and develop it and build a God-honouring culture. Wealth is an integral part of this. As early as Genesis 2 we see that God has placed gold nearby ready for his vice-regents to find. Although ultimately owning everything, God plainly approves of private property and disapproves of the confiscation of this property. We see this implicit in the Ten Commandments numbers 6 through 10. It is wrong to steal a man’s life, his wife, his property, his reputation or even to enviously covet what he has.

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The Resistance – Unholy Dualism – Part 3A

In the initial article in this series, we highlighted the perilous times we live in and outlined what we believe to be the approach Christian resistance ought to take. We began with repentance both individual and corporate. Last week we investigated how crucial the Word, the Spirit and prayer are to our efforts and I outlined some of my experiences as I have grown in this area of family life. Today we focus on one of the biggest issues the Church in the West faces, that of dualism.

We must confront the Church’s unholy dualism and learn once more to apply the lordship of Christ to all things.

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Sign this Petition for Freedom

For all lovers of freedom out there. The government has signalled that there will be a decision around mandatory vaccinations for teachers on Monday. Many of us have a religious objection to this vaccination. For some, they object that fetal cell lines were used in the testing of the vaccine. For others, they do not believe the government has a legitimate right to force the choice of a vaccine on people while threatening them with the loss of their livelihood. Even if you think we are religious nutters or crazy anti-vaxxers (I’m not!), for the love of your fellow citizens and the freedom we once had in New Zealand, you should support the right of others to refuse this vaccine as a matter of conscience. We ought not to lose our livelihoods over a matter of conscience.

Please sign and pass this on to everyone you know.

Techno Gnostics

…there will always be natural limits to the humanity and size of our churches. The optimum size of human communities that are bonded by face-to-face relationships, we are told, is around the magic number of 150 to 200. So as soon as any human community goes above that number, whether in the direction of a megachurch, with its tens of thousands, or a megacity with its tens of millions, it requires coordinating in ways that are other than face to face and fully human – whether lightly through the interconnections of the social media or more heavy-handedly through authoritarian political control. The nature and impact of that form of coordination then become critical.

For better or worse, these different ways of bringing and holding people together have their own identifiable dynamics that in the end will always determine the quality of the larger community. Modern megacities have reached a size that creates intrinsic problems of their own, and there can be grandiose hi-tech forms of the church that have similar problems. They will appeal to the techno-gnostics who lionize the brilliance of disembodied video images and abstractions and disparage what St. Francis humbly called “Brother Ass.” But they will never prove to be the wave of the future. The neighbourhood parish church is not just the church of the past but the church of the future. Scorned and overshadowed though it may be at times, it will never be outmoded while humans are humans and have bodies.

Os Guiness in Impossible People