There is only one Church. God sets the "creed" for that. We can create "churches" - the building at the end of the street with the steeple or the home where people meet together or the coffee shop where poetry is read. But in the end, isn’t the job of the Church to add to the Kingdom. Christ’s parting shot from earth was "go and make disciples". To make disciples, there must be SOMETHING to follow.

Can we do good things in the world in conjunction with people of other faiths or no faith at all? Sure. But that’s not Church. Personally, I’d like to see the Church become more involved in social causes and not be scared of those who don’t share our own personal beliefs exactly.

But to be the Church, we must prescribe to what the Head of the Church - Christ Jesus - teaches. This is the minimum. We may say as a congregation that we want to be as inclusive as possible. To be a true vine, we can only be as inclusive as Jesus was. We can only remain in Him as He remains in the Father. Go outside of His teachings and make our own rules - or ignore his rules - and we’re no longer the Church. You’re only a joke and pretenders.

The question of creed is not so important in an individual sense. But God does not intend the Christian life to be lived individually. We need community. If I don’t know what a community believes in - at least to some extent - how can my interaction with it be anything more than superficial? To truly share life, we must share some values.

I’m not saying define pre- post- mid- trib or whatever. But tenet #1 should probably be something like "Jesus is the Christ - the only begotten of the Father - and the way to forgiveness of sins and eternal life". This should be a tenet because it’s what Christ taught. I’m not saying get all caught up in defining every little thing. But we need something or else we’ll just become a bunch of coffee-drinking do-gooders that everybody likes and wants to be around. Not everyone will like our tenets. Not everyone will believe them. But that doesn’t mean we should throw them out. It’s what our Lord teaches us. How can we deliver a different message?

By the way, I’m not knocking the name of the site or even the idea. I’m obviously attracted enough to it that I’m posting here. But just for the record, Open Source software isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It had advantages, but in the long run, there are plenty of dead ends. It seems to depend on the intelligence and skill of the programmers and there are plenty of BAD programmers out there. Is this really what we want with theology? Isn’t it written that we’re to depend our God’s strength and not our own? To beware the philosophies of men and the rudiments of this world? It’s one thing to build relationships with everyone, but you have to know good code from bad code or the whole thing will tumble like a house of cards.