Church discipline is a biblical practice that is often neglected today in the wider evangelical movement. However, the practice of church discipline, especially its most extreme form of excommunication, has been exercised throughout history. Sometimes church discipline was done right but often it was done badly and many times it resulted in unexpected and large-scale consequences not only in a local church but in entire countries or even the world. A survey of the practice of church discipline can help us see not only how out of step our culture's indifference toward discipline is, but also see how church discipline has shaped the church and the world.

The following message is a presentation of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where we're proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture for church and family life. More information about the NCFIC is available at www.ncfic.org. Pliny was a commentator at the beginning of the second century, a man who persecuted Christians. He wrote a letter to the Emperor Trajan asking advice on whether he was doing it right. Of course the famous argument is, if they say they're a Christian, I punish them.

And the Emperor writes back and says, you do well to punish them for not worshipping our gods. But, What I was going to read, and I'll just paraphrase now, is the fact that Pliny said they were bound to each other. Not to observe our laws, but not to commit murder, not to commit adultery, not to do... In other words, they're bound by something greater than our laws, which I think is very appropriate, because I find the word binding in that these people these early Christians were bound they they put their word on how they would live and they were bound by that So this is of the same era. Most historians now are putting it into the late first century.

Some say second. But it goes into a lot on discipline. Chapter 4 addresses submission and discipline. It says, My child, remember night and day him who speaks the word of God to you, and honor him as you do the Lord, that is, the man who ministers to you. For wherever the lordly rule is uttered, there is the Lord.

Do not long for division, but rather bring those who contend to peace. Judge righteously. Do not respect persons in reproving for transgressions. You shall not be undecided whether or not it shall be. Do not in any way forsake the commandments of the Lord, but keep what you have received, neither adding, thereunto, nor taking away from them.

In the church you shall acknowledge your transgressions, and you shall not come near for your prayer with an evil conscience. This is the way of life. Chapter 6 addresses false teachers. See that no one causes you to err from this teaching, this way of the teaching, since apart from God, it teaches you. Chapter 11, concerning teachers and preachers.

Whosoever therefore comes and teaches you all these things that have been said before receive him but if the teacher himself turns and teaches in another doctrine to the destruction of this hear him not but if he teaches so as to increase righteousness and the knowledge that Lord receive him as in the Lord receiving Christians and talks about that I like this fact receive everyone who comes in the name of Lord and prove to know him afterward but if he wants to stay with you and as an artisan let him work to eat but if he has no trade according to your understanding see to it that as a Christian he shall not live with you idol but if he wills not to do so he is a Christ monger watch that you keep away from such These are very practical warnings in their application of discipline. Chapter 14 talks about the assembly of the Lord's day. Chapter 15, elders and deacons and Christian reproof. Appoint therefore for yourselves what they say bishops this is the translation I'm reading but it means elders and deacons worthy of the Lord men meek and not lovers of money and truthful improved for they as also render to you service of the prophets.

And what he means by prophet isn't a future teller, but someone that exposits scripture, foretells from scripture rather than tells the future. But they use the word prophet in the standard Christian sense of the word. Reprove one another, not in anger but in peace, as you have it in the gospel. Chapter 16, watchfulness, for the coming of the Lord, let your lamps not be quenched, your loins unloose, but be ready, et cetera, et cetera. So we can see that they did address church discipline in their practical writings, and We don't have a lot of what they said, but what we have is substantial and very sustaining.

Now let's fast forward up several hundred years to the 1400. We left Europe in a mess, in a bubbling brew, ready to explode, which it did. One of the greatest things, I think, in the history of the Christian church was a severe act of church discipline. That was the excommunication of Martin Luther, because it freed Martin Luther and it freed the church from being under that system in one sweeping blow and it was a great favor I think the Pope lived to regret that act nevertheless he was excommunicated and let me talk about excommunication We talked about how excommunication can be over reactive. Well in the Middle Ages excommunication not only meant that you're outside the ecclesia or the the magisterium of the church it meant you were bound for hell.

That had a sentence of hell and damnation upon you if you received that. That's what the church thought they were giving to Luther. In fact, this is the 800th year of the Magna Carta. A couple years before King John signed Magna Carta, he capitulated to the Pope. The issue in London was the London clergy wanted to appoint the archbishop and John consented and the Pope, I don't know if he excommunicated him, I know he threatened to but I think he did, and he sent a papal ligate which is a representative of the papal seat to the civil government basically threatening that he was going to not only go to hell, but no one will respect him in the community of princes of Europe or nor will his Catholic subjects respect him at all.

So This is a very damning thing to threaten excommunication. It's punitive, it's authoritative, and when the Pope, later Pope, excommunicated Luther, now we're free because far from being damned, the church can thrive. But that begs the question, what does the church look like now? It's not under that system. What do we do?

Well, the best, of course, rule of thumb is to go back to God's word and it becomes a struggle to do that. It's not something that's evident to everyone exactly what the church should look like. So we have a lot of systems. We had, prior to Luther, a centralized universal church, Catholic capital C. Everyone was Catholic.

That is Catholic in the Western Empire. There was an Eastern Church as well that still exists, but if you lived in the West you were either a member of the church or you were going to hell. But we devolve from that. The first understanding of what a church is, is the idea of a regional or, if you will, a national church. So they don't boil it down to congregations or groups of congregations.

Basically the tensions of the day are solved by the idea of where you reside in the religion of your prince or the rulers of your country, that will be your religion. And that was pretty much the settlement in Lutheran Germanese, because there are many Germanese. But if your prince was Protestant, you were to be Protestant. If your prince was Catholic, you were to be Catholic. If your prince in England is Roman Catholic, as was the case at the time of Luther, very adamantly so, you were to be Catholic.

And if he shifts, you're to shift with the wind and become a Protestant. And that was the idea of a national church. And that was the view that carried through and still had its sinews during the war for independence, where you would have an established church in some of the colonies. But at the time of Henry VIII, so if you can go traverse back to the 1500s, we find the title page. This is a later printing from the plate of that the great Bible this was the first Bible authorized by Henry the eighth and we have Jesus he's at the top but a little bit smaller than the king, who's sitting here enthroned, receiving the word and disseminating it.

And we haven't disseminated it among the people of England. But notice who's front and center, the king in his realm. And all the people downstairs, from prisoners, to clerics, the people sitting and discussing things, to a minister here are all saying, God saved the king. Because it was clearly, in Henry's eyes, a national church. This is a plate from Fox's Book of Martyrs that shows the description of Windsor Castle at the time of Henry VIII.

And what we find out here is some Catholics, because by this time the king had become Protestant, so he is persecuting some Catholics by making them ride backwards on a horse while people mock them. But the fires in the middle, before Windsor Castle, are for the Protestants, because the doctrine of Henry VIII was Roman Catholicism. So he burnt heretics that were Protestant who supposedly believed the same religion he did while he persecuted the Catholics. So this is this is a tyrant but as with all tyrants they're tools for God because God had planted that same Bible under Henry the eighth and once the Bible is planted it's not going to unseed itself that is s-e-e-d It's going to take seed and take root. With that comes men such as Hugh Latimer who published sermons.

This is a really, download Hugh Latimer's sermon. He preached before a convocation in 1547. A convocation where the bishops, the privileged bishops of England who would meet once a year at a little get-together and it would be a party time there would be prostitutes and drinking and whatnot this party time will he Latimer dress them down and no one certain terms and you are ashamed he's shaming them openly in the sermon and thank God for men such as this He also preaches before the new King Edward. This was a man of uncompromising faith in the Word of God. Why?

Simply because he saw the Word of God as infinitely authoritative and the best of men, not being opposed to him like we would think these two guys in a battle but God's up here infinitely big and these guys down here are corrupt and way low God can remove them if men will just stand up so we can learn much about the the tenacity of these early preachers and what they did for the faith. This is an essay on church government. Again, the question is what is the nature of church government? And whether you believe in a national church or a Presbyterian church or even a congregational church the appeal is always to John what did John Calvin think and of course the Episcopal's point out the fact that Edward the sixth the king who seceded his father it King Henry the eighth was in correspondence saying establish the Protestant Church in England so they would say as this pamphlet says that he was for a national church the Presbyterians on their other hand would say that's not the form of government that Calvin had he was more presbyterial and the independents would say yes but with when the English church was a refuge in Geneva under Calvin, he didn't make them join the Geneva church, he allowed them to meet independently.

So there you have the conundrum of all the positions of Calvin. But it's a question, and that just shows how revered John Calvin was. Now we have the return to the kings and queens of England. This is Mary I. We know her now in retrospect as Bloody Mary.

She was Roman Catholic, and she saw it as her job not to go back to the Church of England as it existed before the Reformation or before her father, Henry VIII, changed it to Protestantism, but to revert it back to Protestantism with and under the authority of the regal throne. So now we have two potentates. You have the Roman pontiff and you have the supreme king or in this case Queen of England. These are the Acts of Parliament, two of them from 1553, the year she comes to the throne, the first year of her reign. One of them undoes all the reforms, that is the Protestant reforms of her brother, Edward VI, and the, holding the wrong side, and the other is a litany of things that are new enforcements.

You cannot, two Protestants cannot, or two of anybody can't be seen in public with firearms. You can't have a meeting of people of over eight people. If you had been married, that is if you were a Catholic clergy that was married, or if you're now going to serve in the Church of England, you can't be married. So these are the Counter-Reformation. That's what we call it.

And she was key among them. And by the way, you know who her husband was? Philip II of Spain, the great inquisitor. That point should not be lost. This was the document I held up.

This is the decree by Philip, by the Pope, to conquer America in the name of the church it's got Philip's seal down here it's got the Pope decree with his triune crown and the Protestants made it made a big deal because his logo included a dragon on it, which they thought was quite appropriate. This was the husband, and he was called the king of England at the time. And oh, by the way, a copy of this was found on the Ramada that sailed in 1588. This was clearly the divine right to conquer not only America but England. This is a great rarity if you understand the history of Bloody Mary and the persecution of the church.

This is an actual decree to have a Protestant punitively punished under the crown of England because of the offenses sorry sit down under the offenses done to her that is the church by these Protestants so this was corporal punishment This is what caused many to flee to Geneva, Stroudsburg, and elsewhere during Bloody Mary's reign. And of course the principle at work is always when persecution comes it purifies the church. The product of the refugees during Bloody Mary's reign is the Geneva Bible, which again is a book of authority. This is a Geneva Bible that I meant to mention in the first presentation. But it's got some tables at the end, so I suggest anyone that wants to get an original get an original because it's got tables which served as the first dictionary in people's houses that explains things.

The footnotes are wonderful. For instance in Exodus 18 where Moses is advised to have his people choose those rulers of hundreds, et cetera. The Geneva Football note says this. Godly counsel ought to be obeyed. There's that authority again.

For to such God oftentimes giveth wisdom to humble them that are too exalted and debate that one member hath need to another." Those words caused a near war between Parliament and the King, Charles I, in the early 1600s because a member of Parliament stood up and said the King does not serve, that is, Charles I in this case, does not serve this nation by divine right. All laws are not decreed by the way we put today, executive order. They come through people's representatives. When he cited this passage in this footnote, the king summons them to Whitehall Palace, and they had it out, because the king indeed believed that executive order should rule in England and Parliament. Dually elected representatives thought otherwise.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. During the reign of Elizabeth, so if I can back up to the 1500s, the last surviving child of Henry the VIII, she took the throne And with her, again we're discussing national church, England now shifted from Roman Catholicism to Protestant. And she was more reformed. Many of the people who had been refugees in Geneva and Strasbourg, etcetera, moved back and they initiated reforms. They tended to push reforms because they had been influenced by men such as Calvin, who were much more reformed than Elizabeth or any of the council and the nobility.

One of them, Thomas Cartwright and others, and he wrote it, add an addition to parliament. Again, why would a man in the church write an add an addition or an appeal to parliament? Because simply, you have an established national church, and that is who addresses your grievances. But this proposes a presbyterial system. It proposes throwing out bishops as being unbiblical, that is ruling bishops.

What I mean by that is bishops that are assigned from top down and the thrust of the scriptures that is the people that read the Geneva Bible see elders coming up from the bodies of the people to rule their congregation so we find a worldview difference now in the crown versus what we find in the Bible. And these people are simply appealing to the rightful representatives as they are known for the time because it was a national church to reform the Church of England. So it was not in their mindset to have anything close to what we think of as the First Amendment. That was far from anyone's thinking. In fact, it would have been far from John Knox's thinking when they took the National Covenant.

This is a copy from 1638 of the National Covenant, as was subscribed by the Parliament of Scotland. Again, when you talked about the Presbyterianism in John Knox or Samuel Rutherford's mind, they weren't talking about Presbyterianism as we think of it today, they were thinking of a national presbytery. That was their understanding because they were still in that national mindset. But it was in the Providence of God, again because Reformation is never complete, it was an important step. So I don't decry those things, they were in the providence of God, something that needed to take place to wean us from the idea of a universal church to a much smaller church.

And by the end of Elizabeth's reign, we find people appealing to that. The greatest product of the idea of the National Church, and I'm looking for it, is the Book of Common Prayer, which I have here. And it's basically, here it is, it's the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. So these are the prayers. You had set holidays that were decreed from on high you had certain things that were to be said on those days everything was decreed by the bishops and of course that violated the idea of a presbyterial or elder led congregation.

This are leaves from the first edition of the King James Bible 1611. Beautiful frontispiece for the book of Psalms, which is I think one of the most beautiful things ever printed, but it also came with a calendar. And I have the calendar turned to to August not only did the Puritans complain about the the quote holy days such as Christmas etc but in August they had the the dog days They had the beginning of the dog days and the end of the dog days, which are clearly a pagan holiday that goes all the way back to Egypt and Greece and Rome, where you worship the God for the rise of Cyrus in the spring. That was part of the liturgical calendar of the Church of England. So they would celebrate, they have a holy day of the dog days.

Well you can imagine that those who read the Bible thought that was atrocious. So they were petitioning. I've got the first speech of King James. King James came to the throne in 1603 and he addresses his Parliament and he says some audacious things about the the Puritans if I can find the page. Well I'll paraphrase.

Basically he says we find a contagion in this my kingdom or our kingdom, because they talked in plural. And it's the Puritans and the novelists. What he means by novelists is people that make a novelty of religion. And what he meant by that was we're the separatists who were around at that time. He says, I don't necessarily disagree with them in points of religion, that is doctrines, but in their parity and polity, who are suffered to be under any kind of government, and therefore, unsuffrable in any kind of well-governed commonwealth.

His point is flat out in his first statement from the throne is he is in charge of the church and people need to get in line with that because God has decreed that the king himself is head of the church. You have others such as Henry Barrow and I've messed up my stack here. Here it is. This is a true description of the Word of God. This was actually smuggled out of the Tower of London.

Henry Barrow was the forerunner of congregationalist in England. Anybody heard of Brownists? The Brownists? They weren't the forerunner of congregationalists because they were very liturgical. They believed in local elder rule, but they believed that you should get in line with the Anglican rights and whatnot.

And then Barrow went back, or not Barrow, Brown went back on it. But Henry Barrow was thrown in the Tower of London and publishes this. It's basically setting forth the polity and discipline of a church under a congregational system. And this was smuggled out, by the way, by his wife, who at that time was paying conjugal visits with her husband and that would have been considered cruel and unusual punishment not to allow your wife to visit you in prison. And of course she used her petticoat to smuggle out his documents and he was hung for sedition, Not for religion, but for printing seditious materials against the bishops.

He had appealed, that is Henry Barrow appealed to Elizabeth, but the bishops were very quick to execute him before the appeal reached the queen. He was a martyr for congregationalism. This highly affected Brewster. In fact, they wrote that they weren't Brownists, but they were this. In fact, one of the members of the church, Johnson, went to Holland and established a church that when the pilgrims, what we know as the pilgrims fled England, they worshiped in that congregation for a while before they established their own church in Leiden.

So again the Providence of God is on the march because once his word is planted and people are taking it seriously, that is authoritatively taking it seriously, it's going to change the culture and that's what happens in spite of the two tensions so we have two tensions in the 1600s a top-down regime with the king at the top as if you will the vicar of Christ you could almost say and you have people that want to own their responsibilities. That's the way I put it. Do you wanna own your responsibilities? Or do you wanna jettison them to someone else? Let me tell you, if you're willing to give up the responsibilities that God has put on your plate that he's gonna hold you accountable to, you're gonna be held accountable to him to do it and that that goes for anything any hat you wear if you're the head of your family and you're responsible providing certain things for your family because of the duties of the head of the home but you say Dan Ford could do it better than I could you're accountable to God for giving up that duty that's the way they saw that's that's the seriousness and so when you have elders at church they're saying not only do we disagree with the idea of a Bishop ruling over us for us to allow that we're giving up our responsibility to God and we can't afford to do it see that's where the rubber meets the road with accountability and that's the way they saw it that's why they were willing to fight for these things not just ideological differences are reaching a peace but are you going to own the responsibilities that God puts upon your shoulders, or are you going to give them to someone else, and then you're accountable to God for not meeting your responsibilities?

You can see where the Puritans went with that. Civil War breaks out in the mid-1600s and many of the people that fought against the crown were fighting for the right of what I call presbyterial. I like to use that word because it encompasses both the congregational polity as well as Presbyterianism. And Parliament, not the same Parliament, but a later Parliament, the same institution that the original appeal to Parliament was written to, took on those reforms against King Charles I. And a civil war ensued.

And during the time of the civil war, when men such as Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax are in the field fighting for the liberties of the Englishmen in a civil war against their king, they are appointing an assembly of divines to overturn the English church. They come out with seminal documents. This is a directory of public worship. This was published under the auspices of the assembly. The assemblies of divines were theologians, the greatest theologians in Scotland as well as England at the time.

And they put out a directory of public worship. The difference between that and the Book of Common Prayer, which by the way was outlawed by them as well because the Reformation is marching on is this is not dictating holidays certainly not it's not dictating what will be read but it's recommended it's appealing to churches to do certain things in other words it recognized doesn't grant but it recognizes the autonomy of various assemblies whether they are associated with others in a presbytery or whether they are congregational. Another replacement for the Book of Common Prayer is the Westminster Confession of Faith which is written by the way to heads of households as well as men of every capacity. That's who it's written for, so that you have an understanding of what you're doing, because you should understand these things. The understanding isn't to free you from responsibility.

It's to inform you of what your responsibilities are to God so that you can be more accountable to Him. That's a dangerous thing when they publish things like that to the common man. It doesn't free them. It doesn't say, wag their finger, that King we showed him. It adds responsibilities to everyone's duties because it's their responsibility to inculcate these things in their churches and their families and that's the nature of responsibility.

A couple documents here and I don't see them on top but I'll describe them. There's two that I have that establishes presbyterial church government in England again concurrent with these other Westminster standards and what they try first in 1645 is that the London congregations will form classes so this is Presbyterianism where they will have churches that are bound in small classes, like say 12 I think was the typical standard of churches, that are accountable to one another. They tried in London and then they extended to the whole realm of England the next year in 1646. But they do allow for congregational representation because it's not enforced. Notice it's advisory.

What they do enforce is they put people in charge of evaluating, that is other divines, the morals of pastors who are throughout England and they're throwing many of them out because they're immoral people many of them don't know Christ at all many of them couldn't preach a sermon if they had to Maybe they could fake their way through it, but they're unfit for the ministry. So they put a board in charge, if you will, or a committee in charge of throwing characters out. One of those characters, by the way, in the providence of God, is John Washington, an ancestor of George Washington, who was thrown out of his ministry for being a drunk in 1650, so he joins the Navians up over in America and the rest is history now. To also add to the Reformation, we know that the English Parliament defeated the king. The kingdom was outlawed for a short period of time, a decade from 1649 to 1660.

And they had, Parliament tried to run England for a while, but they didn't have a chief executive, so Oliver Cromwell took up the title of Lord protector. So Oliver Cromwell is the first non-royal chief executive of England. These are two of his speeches preached in 1645 and as an American and as a Christian I find them fascinating. He says in a speech to his parliament, is not liberty of conscience a fundamental? Every sect sayeth, oh give me liberty, but give it to him, to his power, will he not yield it to anybody else?

I might say it to you and I can say it, all the money of this nation would not have tempted men to fight upon such an account as they have engaged if they had not had hopes for liberty." What he's saying is we don't want any establishment of a certain form of religion in England because many of the people that fought under him that he saw bleed for their country were fighting for their own liberty. His argument is we don't want an establishment. He was congregational, but he thought Presbyterians should be allowed. If someone wants to appoint a bishop, that's up to them. They just won't have authority over anyone else.

But listen to what he says here is, we Americans, we have our people driven into the wilderness as they were when those poor afflicted people that forsook their estates and inheritances here that is in England, where they live plentifully and comfortably for the enjoyment of their liberty and were necessitated go into the vast howling wilderness of New England where they have for liberty's sake stripped themselves of all their comfort and the full enjoyment they had embracing rather loss of friends and want than to be ensnared and in bondage." That's a wonderful statement from a chief executive of England, sympathizing with people that have fled to America to enjoy the liberty that, not that he grants, but that God grants and it's their job to recognize. That is not a toleration of any religion, that's a recognition of Christian liberty that's granted by the King of Kings. That's the way they saw it. Now things didn't end there, and how am I on time? Good.

Well we have the restoration of the monarchy and the restoration of the Anglican church. And they are very punitive. They actually dig up Cromwell's body and post his head on a pike and set it up for all people to see what a rebel looks like. This is head rots for decades in London. But the whole idea swings from Puritanism to licentiousness in the church and that goes for morals.

I've got letters that you wouldn't believe out of that era It was in fact, I collected those those letters when he had a certain president in the late 1990s who was very unfaithful in all his ways. It reminds me of Charles II, who didn't take anything seriously. His marriage vows, much less his nation. But what he saw was this middle ground that the Anglicans can have their church. And he was a professed Anglican until on his deathbed he declared his Catholicism in 1685.

But he thought that he could satisfy the dissenters and there were many. There were Presbyterians, in fact, I've got... Sorry, I can't lay my hands on their Baxter Baxter and others protested the reestablishment of the Church of England because again these people had enjoyed their freedoms they didn't want to give them up because they were planted in the souls of their congregants. So Parliament passed under Charles II the Five Mile Act that removed pastors who were of a Puritan or Presbyterian persuasion and they couldn't come near the town that they had to pastor it. So Richard Baxter, for instance, moved to London now and began a writing career.

So persecution there gives us great literature over here that we can enjoy today. But others protested. You had Milton write Paradise Lost, which is a metaphor for the loss of their freedom. Again, because it was sedition to write against the king, so they would put things metaphorically. So you find metaphorical literatures, including Bunyan and elves coming out of that, which we enjoy today.

But the king had this idea, Charles II, and this is 1660s to 1685, of granting indulgences. Now this is not liberty that's recognized, but this is an indulgent from the king to allow you to worship the way you want. Well, people such as Baxter and the Baptists, etc., didn't like that model of religious liberty because it's basically an order, an executive order of liberty. Now, I don't know what you guys think about your First Amendment, but it doesn't secure everything, but it's better than Barack Obama giving us an indulgence to worship, because if it's up to him what Barack Obama giveth, Barack Obama can taketh away. Blessed be the name of Barack Obama then.

But the idea is that government is to recognize liberties and that's what the dissenters insisted upon rather than succumbing to that. Now, there are pietists who thought that was good. You've probably heard of William Penn. William Penn thought an indulgence, as long as it comes from on high, it's good, because he believed in private piety, as the Quakers did. They didn't think through a lot of issues to their core, but as long as the king is granting an indulgence it's fine with me and his friend James the second who took the throne in 1685 played him for a fool because he granted an indulgence under the request of William Penn.

William Penn embraced it but James II used that indulgence because he was Roman Catholic to purge the universities of Protestants and put his cronies in. So what looked good to William Penn did not work out constitutionally for England at all. So those who held out won the day and the glorious revolution took place in 1689. Anybody that's a Baptist should kind of recognize that year because this confession wasn't printed then. It was recognized by the Crown of England as something that would not be infringed upon.

And Presbyterians such as Baxter, and to some extent, the Scots in Scotland, their Christian liberties were recognized. Again, not granted, as John Adams later would say, and the Americans would later say, your freedoms don't come from any grant from a king and let it be known to you that's not where your liberties come from they come from the king of kings and it's civil government's job to succumb or canonize if you will that statement that has put themselves under that statement as being true because the authority is the king of kings not any king So we have constitutional principles in our government that, as Dan said, are not the ultimate statement in anything, but at least they're recognitions of a higher authority. That is, as they are originally intended. This is the, what also came with the the recognition, this is a cool document from 1689, it's the address of the non-conforming ministers in and about the City of London to his highness the Prince of Orange. This is a letter written to the who would become the next king of England during the Glorious Revolution saying we want our faith in Jesus Christ to be respected by you and this was the London Baptist as well as the London Presbyterians who issued this and it's answered and this is why it was published in America as well it was answered by the king saying yes I'm not he was William of Orange so he wasn't English at all he says yes I'm Protestant so I'm going to recognize The fact that Protestants should be able to worship.

So that's where you get not a national church, that is in the English tradition, in the American tradition, but a variety of churches that hold doctrine. That was pounded out in the war for independence. Much literature came out of that. This is a little known document. It's an appeal to the public on behalf of the Church of England, the original nature of the Episcopal government and reasons for sending bishops to America.

This is 1767. This is the proposal for the first time to send bishops to America. Not that people cared whether there was a bishop over certain people. This is an authoritative bishop. This is a bishop who would have a vote in parliament.

So the Americans were very weary of this kind of establishment. Even the Episcopalians in the south and the middle colonies were very wary of this. Why? Because they had their own aristocracy. They didn't want an aristocracy over the top of them.

You had this struggle in the war for independence against the idea of religious liberty or I'd rather call it Christian liberty, not in the abstract. And that's something we need to distinguish as Christians. This idea of religious liberty or Christian liberty isn't these abstract terms that we speak of today. It has very specific meaning and very specific points that we should know so that we can hold our elected officials to our liberties because we are to declare our liberties not that we can change their mind. A lot of literature came out of Philadelphia at the time of the Constitution.

This is a draft or overture by the Presbyterians promulgating the doctrines of the Westminster Confession. So this was put out for the benefit of the Presbyterians in America. I have others that were put out by the Baptists. This is an interesting couple documents from the Anglicans at Christ Church. This is the the first ordination of a bishop and no one complained about the ordination of bishops because he was non-authoritarian.

He was a bishop over his own church. If you want to have an Episcopal system where you have your own bishops, have at it because that's your church. Do it if you want to. And oh, by the way, the way they chose their Bishop was through eldership elections. I find that fascinating that we find that turnaround.

So when we think of our Christian liberties, we don't think of a national church. We think of people in their conscience reading scripture and living out the decrees of scripture in ways that honor God according to our accountability to him and so I'm just going to close on the fact that we are accountable to God We're accountable to God and our families, our Christian homes. All of these things we need to have ownership of because all of these things God is going to hold us accountable for. Not sit back and shame on the government look all these things the government is doing what we need to ask ourselves is what responsibilities has God given us that we're giving up to them the shame should be on us for not owning our responsibilities. That's what Christian liberties about thank you for listening to this presentation the National Center for Family Integrated Churches we invite you to visit our website at www.ncfia.org That's what Christian Liberty is about.

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