Circulation of ‘A Covenant to Promote Biblical Renewal’
Many pastors and congregations in the LCA have recently received an unsolicited email with the subject, “A Covenant to Promote Biblical Renewal”. The Covenant and its cover-letter would have arrived as a personal message under the signature of Dr Greg Lockwood.
There is much fine material in the text of the Covenant to which I am sure we can all agree. Reaffirming the Scriptural and Confessional stance we have agreed to as the Lutheran Church of Australia is a good thing. Some will congratulate the authors on that basis alone.
There are also sections of the Covenant where many will disagree, regarding it as going further than either the Lutheran Confessions or the Theses of Agreement. A large number will object to it on that basis, regarding it as unnecessary and divisive since our existing documents already state these things so well.
To allow you to make that decision for yourself, the bishops had agreed to publish the document on the Ordination We’re Listening website. Before they could do so, however, they found it had already been distributed from the email address of an individual pastor. If you didn’t receive it that way, you can find it on the OWL website, http://owl.lca.org.au/, or you can find it by going in through the LCA website, http://lca.org.au.
The LCA continues to seek a God-pleasing, faithful, and defensible outcome at our Convention. We are committed to studying Scripture with honesty and integrity, remaining faithful to our Lutheran Confessions. We are, after all, one body in our Saviour Jesus Christ, and according to the admonition of the Apostle, we are to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in us, enabling us both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:12,13)
On behalf of the church, the College of Bishops, and the General Church Council, continue to work toward this end.
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