 Hello everybody welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Val Yoder You're from northern Minnesota and have been quite involved in a church up there I think it was a church plant back in the day We've also been involved with teaching people as far as you know missions and family and church and how these things work one of the things I'd like to discuss today is what is Our position on church as conservative Anabaptist like how do we in the Anabaptist world view? I guess you could say do church together. What does that look like? I think it goes back to our view of salvation to begin with we we see the necessity and the joy the blessing of our record in heaven being Cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ and so the forgiveness that he offers in our time of Repentance and becoming a believer as in salvation It's a wonderful reality to know that the record book of heaven is clean And and his forgiveness is so lavish that Paul Anticipated us saying well, we can sin freely then he forgives so freely Why don't we just sin freely and then he follows that by saying God forbid or how can we who? are no longer Sinners continue to sin. So that's that's a reality that I think most of the Christian church has a concept of and Enjoys and is blessed by that But I think that one of the things that's often missing is is the whole thing of of how we submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and that we we learn to To live out our Christian experience in the context of people We're not islands to ourselves and God designed that we would learn how to To love the unlovely to love the to work with those who are are a little more cranky or whatever and We do that in the context of people and in and I don't pick and choose who I'm going to Be kind to I have something within me because of Christ that reaches out to anyone I don't create my own church. I don't I'm not the author of the church God tells us in 1st Corinthians 12 that he places us in the church as he designed Us to be and he's Specifically places us there and so he's placed me along with other people and those people are going to be used by God to tweak my understanding of what it means to be a believer and To cleanse my soul of wrong responses toward people I see that as being part of Submitting to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and it's done in practical relationships with with other people around me and so God places those people in my church that Will bless me and sometimes they will be Frustrating to me and yet those different things are what helped develop my spiritual walk It's more than just something that happens in the record books of heaven It's something that happens within me the change that happens within me and the pressure for that change comes with relationships With his pride with the people of the church. So yeah, I feel like we have I have so much to learn in my Christian experience that I would not learn as an island Christian or as someone who is by themselves Choosing who they're going to relate to I need to learn how to relate to those that God has chosen in place beside me in the church that it's the idea of community I guess a group working together even when it's not like you said Super easy sometimes. Yes. Is that a good way of thinking about it? That's right. Yes. In fact, I think some of the The best development spiritually that we can experience is when we are in times of testing When everybody believes the same way I do I'm not necessary Or they're not necessary But yeah, it's when we're when we're struggling to see each other's perspectives and to love while we're speaking the truth to each other and continuing that tension of loving and speaking truth God doesn't want us to fall off on one side and just love everybody no matter what the truth You know how the truth is violated nor does he want us to fall off the other side where we're so strong on truth If you don't care about people. Yeah, it's a constant sense of tension that can happen as I learn how to love those who Will understand something a little bit differently I'm not talking about heresy as such. I'm thinking about their varieties of understandings of how to live out Certain Christian principle. Well, and that goes really well into the next question because I'm guessing people that watch this will think Oh, yeah, like Amish or conservative Mennonite those people that stand out distinctly in the way They apply things that there's like you were saying there is a fair amount of variety within that as well So how does our view of church? I guess you could say our world view of church as an abaptist Contribute to our distinctive culture a world view of an abaptism is a distinctive in that we would understand That our salvation is too pronged in a sense. It's our relationship with the Lord The the bridegroom and our relationship with the bride of which we are a part, but it we're not the only Part of the bride. There's that's a multifaceted Multicultural group of people that God has called out and so there's we we don't have our Christianity isn't only as it relates to the To the king, but it's also as it relates to the kingdom The people of the of the king it first of all it initiates it's initiated by our relationship with Jesus and Yet as personal and as wonderful and as distinctive as that is it doesn't stop there It's it's a relationship that also involves other people and that's why when Jesus was praying or gave us the The Lord's Prayer he talks about his kingdom is that kingdom come that will be done on earth And so it's a group of people. It's not just one individual and I think much of our Christianity In the West has focused on personal individual experience Which is important, but that's always integrated into a kingdom. It's integrated into and Where we use would be the church and the New Testament uses both of those Kingdom and Paul talked more about the church to use talked about kingdom. I think that's the same Group of people that it's talking about and so we're learning to relate to The kingdom as we relate to the king. So I see that as being somewhat distinctive. There's more people today Within the broader Christian church who are beginning to talk about that and I'm glad to hear that I think there's there's a growing awareness that our Walk with the Lord is Involving other people as well. We don't live this thing solo. So that's a good movement But I think the Anabaptists were the ones who caught that Primarily back in Martin Luther's Day he did a tremendous job of kind of breaking this Works religion that had been developing for about 1200 years, but the the weak side of what he Brought was that he He's had this idea of faith only and then it only relates to to Christ Rather than the the body of believers He admitted in his own Anguished toward the end of his life that those who were under grace Were less principled than those who run the papacy and So he was seeing something was going wrong here. Something wasn't fitting the way it should be I think that's where the the Anabaptist movement attempted to bring that a proper understanding of how Christ is going to transform us and we're going to relate to people differently than Then just having this thing with with the Lord we're gonna also relate to people so much so that Some of the neighbors to the Anabaptists would Say oh this guy's becoming an Baptist because he's no longer beating his wife You know that had to be the sign that this guy was was an Anabaptist because it changed the way he Related to the people around him. I think that's that's the root of salvation That it it's changes the way we relate to the Lord and it changes the way we relate to those around us Yeah, well and that fits really well with where I want to go next and that is how is Anabaptism distinctly different from Western Protestant thought or the Catholic system as well I think historians have called it that kind of the third option of the reformation because he had the Protestants Catholics the Mennonites or the Anabaptists were Different from both Explain that a little the the Catholic Church had a fairly strong authoritative line from God to the Pope to the Monseguors and on down through the priest the archbishops the bishops and the local priests and so the Layman kind of at the bottom of this hierarchy if he wanted to get Word from God it kind of went up through the the structure to get there They would come for Mass on Saturday or Sunday then the week and they would ask forgiveness of the priest and the priest and would Resolve their their their problem so that was the structure. Well along came the reformers And they said that there's something wrong with this system, especially as they began selling indulgences and You could sin if you paid for it ahead of time and you know there's all kinds of Problems with that so they said this is wrong and they built a different structure They had got up on in the heavens, but then the Pope the priest the layman and all these guys were kind of equal And it was faith only each one had their own avenue of faith personally individually so my relationship with you as Another believer really Didn't have any connection this way it was directly to God and so I would affirm you or you know, maybe don't get along with you But it didn't matter how I related to you because I had this relationship my relationship with you didn't really count Because I had this this nebulous faith in me that you can't critique You can't really tell whether I've got it or not You might see some things but faith is too personal for anything else to critique So that was kind of what came out of the faith only Belief system well what the Anabaptist I think attempted to do and we've we've had our struggles as you know All through history, but what the attempted to do was to say that our relationship is more like a triangle God is is over us and he relates to you he relates to me But he is also this relationship with each other that is is is foundational to the structure of what salvation is It's not me independent of you, but it's me interdependent and relating to you They they put a lot of emphasis on the local church being together speaking working on issues as a brotherhood and Rather me independently making my decision as to how I'm going to live my life I I made those decisions in context with you and so it became a trying over This relationship never Supercedes our relationship with the Lord, but it's never missing either. It's never absent So I think that's what they brought in their theology a good book that has been a blessing to me is a Book by Harold Lutel. He wrote this as a I think it was a graduation thesis or something from Union Theological Seminary in New York. It's the the Anabaptist view of The church is the name of it. It's an excellent book and he does a good job of helping understand the difference of those three different views of salvation