Beach Day at Church

[Ilovebigcats]

I am sooooooooooo glad I'm free!!! All I got to say!

[Poimen]

For me, my choice would to seize the moment and baptize them however they came, clothing has nothing to do with the soul. Our next moment has no guarantee, do you risk that person dying before they can be baptized in "proper and modest attire?" I can't recall anytime that Jesus turned someone away because of what they were wearing. In fact the woman accused of adultery was probably wearing nothing more than a blanket off the bed on which she was caught in the act.

I'm not talking about turning someone away. Nor am I talking about if some should come to Christ on the beach clad-less (as it were) and desiring then to be baptized. I am talking about a planned observance of the ordinance permitting or (worse still) planning for a swimsuit donned baptism.

Chris, you know that I love you as a brother, but your views are archaic. They are the product of hundreds of years of puritanical teaching. And that's not a good thing. It is a very distorted, myopic view of God's creation based solely upon Adam's attempt to justify hiding from God. The old "I was naked and ashamed" ploy.

And I love you as a brother as well my friend. However views accepting of such as modest or appropriate are (IMO) the product of a progressive shift among American evangelicals, especially Holiness/Pentecostals towards worldly, fleshly, sensual behavior, attitude, attire, and conduct.

[Poimen]

I am sooooooooooo glad I'm free!!! All I got to say!

Sometimes bondage and entanglements with sin and the world come in the guise of liberty.

May the Lord help each of us to walk worthy and circumspectly, as we are called to do.

[Ilovebigcats]

I am sooooooooooo glad I'm free!!! All I got to say!

Sometimes bondage and entanglements with sin and the world come in the guise of liberty.

May the Lord help each of us to walk worthy and circumspectly, as we are called to do.

And sometimes legalistic brain washing causes a man not to be able to have a conversation with a woman without questionable thoughts.. I can only imagine what swim suits, skirt splits, v neck shirts, and a bare shoulder would do to a man in that bondage. (thinking- "landing strip" and "package" is a prime example!)

Like I said, I'm glad I'm free!

[Poimen]

And sometimes legalistic brain washing causes a man not to be able to have a conversation with a woman without questionable thoughts.. I can only imagine what swim suits, skirt splits, v neck shirts, and a bare shoulder would do to a man in that bondage.

Like I said, I'm glad I'm free!

Non-biblical extremes are extremes either way. The person has a responsibility for themselves -- not to be an offense or stumbling-block to others AND also not to permit, entertain, or yield to any impure thoughts or motives of our own.

We are to make no provision for the flesh -- both our's and other's (when it is in our power to do so).

[macgulley]

Non-biblical extremes are extremes either way.

That quote could come back to haunt you if the subject of drinking comes up again.

[Pastor Gary]

I will gladly bear such reproach for the cause of Christ.

Chris, unless you can point to the words of Christ addressing the issue of immodesty in baptism, you really shouldn't blame the reproach on His cause. It is YOUR cause, not His that you are defending.

I think the angels in heaven were throwing a celebration party over those baptized, whether in bikinis or burkhas.

And I rejoice with heaven over the redemption of those souls. However, I still see the error in letting a sacred ordinance be so irreverently performed. I rejoice and weep, I am here both hungry and full. I am not opposing any good accomplished, but I will not rejoice in the degradation of the holy either.

The Old Testament concept is that the sacred and secular are to be held separate. The New Testament is pretty clear that everything we do, work, play, eating... it is all sacred and is to be done to the glory of God.

You can hold to any personal standards of dress and conduct you want to, Chris, but you can't scripturally support that baptizing someone in a bathing suit is degradation.

I repeat my book suggestion here:
"How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth" by Gordon D. Fee & Douglas Stuart It really helps with the issues of understanding which scriptural principles are cultural, which are universal and which are occasional.

[Poimen]

The Old Testament concept is that the sacred and secular are to be held separate. The New Testament is pretty clear that everything we do, work, play, eating... it is all sacred and is to be done to the glory of God.

You can hold to any personal standards of dress and conduct you want to, Chris, but you can't scripturally support that baptizing someone in a bathing suit is degradation.

That pesky old Pharisee, Paul, was wrong, huh? To require sacredness in the ordinances -- How archaic and unenlightened, aye?

1 Corinthians 12:27
Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.

Perhaps a few definitions would be helpful.

Sacrilege:
1. a technical and not necessarily intrinsically outrageous violation (as improper reception of a sacrament) of what is sacred because consecrated to God
2. gross irreverence toward a hallowed person, place, or thing

Degradation:
1. the act or process of degrading
2. (a) - decline to a low, destitute, or demoralized state (b) - moral or intellectual decadence : degeneration.

When the sacred nature of an ordinance's observance is so degraded that we accept as normal, even praise worthy, irreverence and immodesty then I think both terms equally apply, and with AMPLE Scriptural footing.

[Pastor Gary]

When the sacred nature of an ordinance's observance is so degraded that we accept as normal, even praise worthy, irreverence and immodesty then I think both terms equally apply, and with AMPLE Scriptural footing.

The fact that you extrapolate from that reference what you did just amazes me, Chris.

[free]

Maybe Poimen should move here:


THE strict observance of Sunday worship has resulted in men on a Bua island not being allowed to wear pants on Sunday.

The Sunday ban also forbids travel and the hanging of clothes on lines.

Galoa Village headman Josefa Baleinasiga said the ban was enforced so that the islanders could learn to respect the significance of Sunday as a holy day.

Mr Baleinasiga said the Methodist Church and the vanua also decided to impose the ban as a means of bringing good fortune to the people.

"The ban is meant to bring good luck to the island as we respect the day of the Lord," he said.

"You can see that often misfortune befalls us because we don't respect His commandments that there be no work performed on Sunday except worship.

"Before our islanders used to go diving on Sunday, and there was a lot of travelling and it was difficult to separate the days all the days were the same.

"Now on Saturdays the clothes line in the village is full as the villagers know they can't hang anything out on Sunday."

As a mark of respect, men can only wear a sulu or sulu vakataga on the day; travelling by outboard from the island is forbidden.

"But we make exceptions during emergencies for the sick so it's not a ban that hasn't been well thought out."

A villager who requested anonymity said the ban was too restrictive because it limited movement.

"We can't understand how wearing a sulu vakataga on Sunday will help us forge closer relations with the divine," he said. "At times too for the school children who come home for the weekend, the best time to return to their hostel in Labasa or Savusavu is on Sunday - so that is getting in the way."

Mr Baleinasiga said anybody who breached the ban would be chastised by the vanua.

[dolfan]

And, so we build more fences around ourselves for the sake of having a really fency fence. I respect the need to observe propriety anywhere. There is an assumption that these believing swimsuit-wearers, assembled together for the purpose of public worship and confession of their need for and acceptance of Christ and for the public display of obedience to Him in being baptized, are nothing other than put-ons. Why? Because what they are doing is not sufficiently guarded from the possibility of lust, enticement, lasciviousness, etc., or, in some opinion is actually affirmatively promoting all those things.

You know, we seem to have a lot more in common with the Muslims than we are ready to admit. I have a friend, a client, who was raised in Jerusalem, a Muslim. I've mentioned him here before. We had a really interesting discussion once about women and their attire. Although he's married to an American woman, he loves that Islam covers up women for two reasons: women don't need to show themselves to anyone but their husband, whose business it is alone to see his wife in the privacy of home; women being covered keeps men from societally chasing women, he says. IF what Poimen and Oletimer suggest is really the Christian way ---- and, hey, I'll bite and say that it could be for the sake of argument, here ---- then we've got a totally false religion that is closer to the truth on the nature of lust and how to deal with it than even Christianity. Nowhere does the NT tell us to take such extreme measures as Islam does, yet they seem to be more fully attuned to how we really are and should be than even you guys are.

Now, I fully expect you would say, "You know better than that. I'm not saying that we need to cover women in burqas, but to be reasonable and modest." And, that's where the obedience and conscience really come into play. Words and ideas like modesty and reasonableness are not going to be uniformly conceived. People of equally obedient hearts and modest thought and intent can arrive at the same baptism in a burqa or a two-piece swimsuit or a pair of trunks.

It would be a really cool experiment to see men of the ideas you express, Poimen and Oletimer, unknowingly thrust into such a scene, and whether they would gravitate toward the burqa-wearing believer or the swimsuit-wearing ones there for the same purpose, or worse, neither of them. What you are doing is defining a set of acceptable boundaries (i.e., acceptable baptismal attire) that you really don't have the biblical authority to impose or the biblical right to expect should be observed, and then leveling some measure of critique or praise depending on how close or far away from that boundary people arrive.

The real boundary is, though, obedience and modesty. The operation, or what that boundary looks like to God, is not something you're going to be able to determine from the otherwise proper, respectful, Christian interactions of people as they do that in swimsuits at a baptism. You're either going to form a boundary in your head that has a significant chance of being incorrect, or you're going to find a way to live with the discomfort it creates in yourself unless and until behavior is done and accepted that clearly crosses any boundary of reasonable propriety. In other words, instead of judging this you may just have to live with it.

But, I'd think, the bigger question to ask yourself is which one of these is really closer to "the mark", God's mark: your boundary or your living with the tension between these two ideas?

To answer that, some self-examination has to happen, honestly. And, I'll be honest again, I think that a big factor --- although not a necessary one in either of your cases, brothers, and I'm not accusing you of this, just throwing this out as a discussion point --- in these snap, reflexive fences comes from within. Men, in particular on these kinds of judgments, have deep issues that we just rather not acknowledge. Am I critical because I don't want to be tempted or I can't be sufficiently protected from being tempted and enticed by a woman in a two-piece swimsuit and I'm supposed to be able to come here and worship the Lord? Now, whose problem is it now? Well, I'd say mine. It isn't theirs.

The flip side of that is not true, either. We do have to use caution. The devil is clever. We're wicked if unaided or unguarded. As easy as it was for Corinth to turn something like the Lord's Supper into a throwdown, or there to turn baptism into a cause division, it would be easy enough to turn a baptism into an orgy. Swimsuits aren't the point on which that hinges, though. The problems start way before that. Burqas can come off, too. The fence to build is around my heart. Your heart. Let us, without any evidence to the contrary, rejoice together that Rahab's church has done a great job in discipling people to do just exactly and precisely that. Let's not assume anything pernicious, worldly or sensual about it when there is no reasonable indicator that it was anything approaching what you fear to be possible.

[Martha]

Install a baptism font in your church and sprinkle. No need for concern about attire. What's worn to church is good. If the practice of baptism is symbolic, then it seems to me sprinkling would be just as good as dunking since it's all about the condition of the heart.

OK, fire away!

[macgulley]

Would it be OK to be baptized in a burqini or are all swimsuits verboten?

[RamboPreacher]

I believe as the Didache teaches that living water and immersion is preferable. then a pool and immersion if necessary, and sprinkling is permissible if the above isn't available. since we don't live in a desert...

[macgulley]

Install a baptism font in your church and sprinkle. No need for concern about attire. What's worn to church is good. If the practice of baptism is symbolic, then it seems to me sprinkling would be just as good as dunking since it's all about the condition of the heart.

OK, fire away!

One could carry that logic on to the natural conclusion that water is not even necessary. The candidate and minister could just stand on stage and pantomime baptism (sprinkling or dunking as preferred) and preserve the symbolism without all the preparation and clean-up that baptism in water requires. (just kidding )