The other day I thought I was going to be able to stop writing about Terry Morin’s postings about Christ Church (and about me). But this turns out, in the event, not to be the case. Here is at least one more.
The reason for this post is that I need to correct one error of fact in my last post, because the times they are a’changing. I wrote my last post under the impression that Terry was a deacon at a near-by Evangelical Free Church (where he had served for some years), but it now seems that he is in the process of resigning, and is moving his membership to another area church.
This is important because Terry has configured things on his web site to make it look like there is a state of ecclesiastical war between Christ Church and the Evangelical Free Church of Pullman, which is not accurate. Terry put it this way: “Indeed, the elders of that church have warned their congregation more than once concerning Doug’s doctrines and conduct, with particular care for those families involved in Logos School. They have also made terms of reconciliation with Christ Church very clear to Doug Wilson . . .”
But in fact, in sharp contrast to this picture, just yesterday Logos School had our monthy board meeting. The board has seven active board members, representing four area churches. Two of those churches are the EFree church and Christ Church, and this meeting was smooth and cordial and not exceptional.
This is not to say that our striving for unity together has always been easy, or that there are not significant differences between us. There are and have been — in both directions. But it is to say that as of yesterday all the Logos board members were working together on the problems and tasks facing the school with no apparent need for reconciliation. The board meeting yesterday was entirely gracious and amicable (as was the one before, and the one before that . . .), and the meeting concluded with all us spending time in prayer together for various people in our school community. If Terry’s description on his web site was supposed to be an accurate description of the atmospherics, it appears that some people didn’t get the memo.
The letter of Terry’s that I was responding to in my last post was a letter written to his elders last May, and it was a letter which they had asked him not to post to his web site. This request of theirs was one that he apparently honored until just recently. Whether this was the reason Terry decided to move his church home or not, moving to another church does give him the room to make things public that his former elders had asked him not to make public. In contrast to Terry’s behavior, I can say that the elders of the EFree church are laboring for unity in a way that Terry has consistently refused to do, and I am pleased and honored to be working together with them. Terry’s approach in this appears to be “let’s you and him fight,” and thus far the gracious actions of his elders loudly refute Terry’s claims about the intent of their words.
One other thing, which I shall probably not stop mentioning as long as Terry keeps his personal fiasco going. On his web site, Terry refers to what he considers my “less-than-honest communications.” Remember that this is from a man who ponders long and interprets deeply. When confronted with an interpretive conundrum (to wit, the following short paragraph that three CEF elders had written to our congregation in 1993), he was entirely up to the challenge. Here (once again) was the grass before Terry’s scythe.
“This is our proposal. We need your opinions on all of what we have written in the enclosed document. We will not initiate anything without that counsel. We need your input.”
Again, the bold, underlining and italics were all in the original. Applying the medieval quadriga, some old creative writing classes, and apparently some mushrooms, Terry said that this was written in order to soften the clear message that he and the other elders were actually sending that what they had written was “not a proposal at all, they needed no opinions on anything of substance they had written in the enclosed document, that all the essential things were already initiated, and there was no need for any input at all.” Given this approach to texts, I am not really surprised any more that I was unable to persuade Terry that the New Testament calls for infant baptism.
But there is a bright side to this. Applying this hermeneutic to Terry’s (apparent) critique of my honesty above, I am gratified to conclude that Terry actually believes that I am as honest as it gets. Because we all know that when the interpretive grid of Terryworld is superimposed, “less-than-honest” has to mean something like “more-than-honest.”