Southside Oracle Archive

Vol. 50, No. 49               SOUTHSIDE ORACLE             February 15 2008

The Bulletin Board

The Wisconsin Christian Youth Camp Dinner and Auction will be this Saturday, February 16^th, at 6:00 p.m. Plan to attend this fund raising event for the camp. It annually raises several thousand dollars for the camp and also provides a time of fellowship for friends of the camp from many places.

We extend our condolences to the family of Deborah Thompson, wife of Steven Thompson, long-time minister of the Central Church of Christ, who died Tuesday of last week. The funeral will be this Friday at 10:30 a.m. at the Central Church, 1830 W. Monroe, with visitation on Thursday at the church beginning at 6:00 p.m.

Our annual Men's Breakfast will be at 8:45, on Saturday, February 23rd, not the 16th as previously reported. Tim Thompson of Elgin, IL, will be the speaker.

ATTENDANCE RECORD

(*) first service, 113, second service, 46

Our very small attendance last Sunday reflects the extreme weather over the weekend. Some could not attend because of the dangerous travel conditions.

The Sick - Maria Cruz Loera, mother of Amelia Melendez, is now at the Cameo Care Campus, ....Sarah Chukka is now home from the hospital.

The next Christian Workers' Meeting will be Tuesday, February 19th at 9:00 a.m.            

Summer Service Trip - Adults and young people interested in this year's service trip are invited to an information meeting at 4:30 p.m., Sunday.

The Bible Bowl last Sunday night on the last chapters of Luke was a great success. Four teams competed.. Our thanks to the tweens far sponsoring the program and to Harold and Kay Hruska for preparing the questions.

Calendar of Events

February 16 - Camp auction and dinner for W.C.Y.C., 6:00 p.m.

February 17 - Information meeting regarding summer service trip, 4:30 p.m.

 February 19 -- Christian Workers' Meeting, 9:00 a.m.

February 23 - Southside area-wide men's breakfast, 8:30 a.m. March 2 - 50t^h anniversary of the Southside Church

March 9 - Praise and Palate, 6:00 p.m.

March 28 - 30 - Southside youth rally

July 11, 12 - 50^th anniversary homecoming of Southside Church

Authentic Christianity (7)

At the beginning of this series we proposed to consider the various ways in which people seek to discover Authentic Christianity. Having done so, we now come to our proposal for recovering the genuine faith of Jesus Christ.

If one were to determine the legitimacy of a suspect twenty-dollar bill, the best way to discover if it were counterfeit would be to compare it to the real thing. The flaws, otherwise undetected, would become apparent when the two bills were laid side by side.  Ultimately this is what we must do with our religion.  All of us can agree that the faith given to the world by Jesus and implemented in the teaching of the apostles was genuine Christianity.

But how can we determine what the primitive faith actually was? The only source of our information is found in the 27 books we call the New Testament in which the life and teachings of Jesus, the establishment of the early church, and the application of the message in the first century are described. True, there are some traditions that have been repeated through the centuries that may give some illumination, but because they were orally transmitted, their value is limited.

Obviously, then, we must go to the Bible to recover the true faith of Jesus. This includes both Old and New Testaments. The former forms the basis on which the latter is to be studied. The New Testament records genuine Christianity in its inception. It also describes the problems the first disciples faced in implementing the faith.  Terms such as restoration and restitution are often used to describe the process for recovery of the early faith.  These terms imply that true Christianity is not found by reforming current religion, but rather by going back to the original.

The real problem in using the Bible as our guide to recover the early faith is in interpreting the written scriptures. That there are difficulties in doing so is beyond question.  One difficulty relates to the different cultural background of the first century when the New Testament books were written. Some seek to crystallize their understandings of these teachings by adopting creeds to define the apostolic writings. The problem is that these creeds bind human interpretation of the divine writ on succeeding generations. Like any writing, such as this series of articles, they are of human origin, and while they illuminate, they do not substitute for the scriptures.

In the last analysis, therefore, we must go back to the Bible if we are to recover AUTHENTIC CHRISTIANITY. We must wrestle with the Word to recover both the spirit and the forms of the primitive faith.  In the process we will learn how to apply these principles in our personal lives so that the world may truly know that we are the disciples of Jesus Christ.      

End of Series

Monroe E. Hawley

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