Word: missions
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...purpose of the Confession "is to call the church to that unity in confession and mission which is required of disciples today." In 1958 a drafting committee had been appointed to prepare "Brief Contemporary Statement of Faith." The committee worked for six years. In 1965 it proposed to the General Assembly the Book of Confessions, The Confession of 1967, and the changes in the ordination vows that would be required if the first two proposals were adopted...
Since the purpose of the Confession was to call the church to its contemporary mission, it was not written as a system of doctrine. It doesn't include all the traditional topics of theology. The Confession will be a disappointment to those who are looking for restatements of old doctrines or for discussions of contemporary theological questions. It will disappoint any who would like to find either a theologically liberal or a socially conservative point of view. The Confession is orthodox, trinitarian, and biblical. Its social point of view is more inclined toward humane, political activism and advocacy than toward...
Form, order, institutions, and polity are treated in a section on "Forms and Order." The controlling concept is flexibility of institutional form for the sake of mission in the world. "The institutions of the people of God change and vary as their mission requires in different times and places...
...wonders how non-Christians feel--persons of other religions or of no religion--when they hear or read of the things that Christians are planning to do to them. Gathering and scattering, mission, reconciling, fighting, loving--one wonders if the non-Christian isn't wondering what some scattering Christian might try to do to him when he meets one out there in the world...
...same human level, incuding the Christian religion, and then distinguishes between them all and God's relevation of himself. It says "The Christian religion, as distinct from God's revelation of himself, has been shaped throughout its history by the cultural forms of its environment...The church in its mission encounters the religions of men and in that encounter becomes conscious of its own human character as a religion." The parallels the Christian finds between other religions and his own, it says, means that he "must approach all religions with openness and respect." And since the church understands the gift...