Victory Outreach, founded in Los Angeles and now headquartered in San Dimas, is a Pentecostal denomination known for bringing addicts to Christ and helping them stay clean and sober. The West Covina church signed a lease with Immanuel First to move onto the school campus from its former location in El Monte, where the local neighborhood is predominantly Spanish-speaking and there was little room for growth. As VO held its first service here, several members, including the youth, expressed excitement that the church was now located closer to their home than back in El Monte.
The move is a win-win situation for both our churches. VO has room to expand and grow in larger facilities and serve the Lord in the multi-ethnic city that West Covina now is, and Immanuel First gets additional income from renting out the school campus, which has been vacant since the school shut down in 2009 due to shrinking enrollment. Pastor Okubo has expressed an interest in having VO's congregation participate in joint services and activities as we do with Grace Alliance and our Vietnamese fellowship on Thanksgiving.
Like with Grace Alliance, there are some differences in doctrine and worship between IFL and Victory Outreach. As a Pentecostal church, VO believes in and practices the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit, including speaking in tongues, words of knowledge, and laying on of hands for physical healing of the sick. But unfortunately, some Pentecostal preachers have perverted or distorted those gifts by deliberately taking Scripture out of context, seeking their own glory instead of God's, or both, and as a result all Pentecostals have been unfairly stereotyped and ridiculed by other Christians and the secular media.
VO's worship services are lively and exuberant, and the contemporary praise music literally rocks the house, speaking to the heart language of people who come from the streets or live in urban settings. Lifelong Lutherans who swear by the liturgy of the Divine Service II, Second Setting (never the First Setting!) from the blue Lutheran Hymnal (the new, burgundy Lutheran Service Book is too contemporary) may find VO's worship a little too much for them. In the same vain, perhaps some VO members used to lively worship may find Lutheran liturgy slow, cold, stuffy and full of tradition, reminding them too much of the out-of-touch judgmental church that showed them no grace in their time of need.
I grew up Roman Catholic as a grade schooler and in the Church of the Nazarene as a teenager, then went through the very liberal Disciples of Christ church, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Calvary Chapel, an independent storefront church and finally back to the LCMS where I've been for the past ten years. I've worshiped in historic cathedrals, megachurch auditoriums, rented senior citizen centers, and outdoors in a park. I've sang traditional hymns, modern praise and worship songs (translation: rock music), and Pentecostal anthems with melodies inspired by Jewish kletzmer music and rabbinical chants. And no, I'm not a theological psychopath or schizophrenic as a result. While some churches I attended were disturbingly off-center (and found me running out the door after only a few weeks), the majority of them have been sound and biblical regardless of the setting. Let me explain.
The body of Christ is not a monolith. It doesn't subscribe to only one set-in-stone method of worship or preaching, as much as some of us wish it would. That is in part because we are a world of many cultures, languages, ethnic groups and traditions. We are also from the country, the big city, suburbia, the beach, the mountains, the desert, and wherever people live. As a result, the one-size-fits-all approach to worship and evangelism doesn't work and must adapt to the people we are trying to win to Jesus. As Pastor Okubo has often said, the church must share the Good News in the heart language of the people, otherwise it will fall on deaf ears.
And to that end, within the LCMS there are churches in Hawaii that have graceful hula dancing to worship songs as part of their services, others in The OC that incorporate modern worship songs and rocked-out arrangements of classic hymns, still others on Native American reservations that praise God through drum chants and circle dances, and yet others that have all-German liturgy to serve a congregation that wishes to stay connected to the heritage and language of the old country. These are Lutheran churches, folks! And they are growing!
As for theological differences such as speaking in tongues, divine healing, eschatology and so forth, they are secondary issues that fellow Christians can disagree and debate over, and vigorously, but we must never divide, judge, or ridicule each other over them. I used to believe in a pre-tribulational rapture and a literal millennial reign by Christ on earth afterward, but after the Y2K prophecy madness and reading the Old Testament for myself, I am now an amillennialist (like most Lutherans) and believe most of the OT prophecies actually refer to the Jewish exile to Babylon, their return to the Holy Land, and their redemption through Jesus Christ. I do not judge or condemn people who are still rapturists like I once was.
But there is a line in the sand that I will never cross, and that is one that denies or compromises the core doctrines of the historic Christian faith, the beliefs that the early church fathers fought and gave their lives to defend:
- The existence of God
- The Holy Trinity (God in three co-eternal and co-existent Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit)
- God's justice and His perfect law
- The depravity of man, his sinful nature, and inability to make himself right with God
- Our need for a savior or redeemer outside ourselves to make us right with a perfect and holy God
- The inerrancy of the Holy Bible as God's revealed word to us
- The virgin birth of Jesus Christ
- Christ's dual nature of God and man (theanthropos in Greek)
- Christ's sinless life, death and resurrection
- The death of Christ as a sacrifice for our sins
- Christ's second coming
- Eternal life in heaven for those who accept and have faith in Christ and eternal damnation in hell for those who reject it
All of the above are encapsulated in the historic creeds of the church--the Apostles' Creed, the Athanasian Creed and the Nicene Creed. Any church or congregation that fudges, compromises or rejects these barebones essentials cannot rightly call itself a Christian church and often is off the wall theologically in everything else.
Victory Outreach of West Covina upholds and defends all of the above essentials, and as such I welcome them to our campus as fellow laborers in Christ. Despite our outward differences in worship and preaching, we can stand shoulder to shoulder and arm in arm in getting out there and rescuing the lost. So let's serve God together and see what happens.
No comments:
Post a Comment