Time to return to primitive Christianity? by Frank Mcleny

James 3:1 (ASV)
1 Be not many of you teachers, my brethren, knowing that we shall receive heavier judgment.


There is a great pride that comes along with teaching. This is the reason for the above Scripture. Vanity and pride and ego have separated the Church since the Reformation. One corrupt Catholic church was replaced by thousands of corrupt Protestant churches. The time is at hand to return to primitive, Apostolic Christianity. Listen to what Jon Amos Comenius(1592-1670) wrote.............


The great number of teachers is the reason of the multitude of sects, for which we shall soon have no names left. Each church reckons itself as the true one, or at least the purest, truest part of it, while amongst themselves they persecute each other with the bitterest of hatred. No reconciliation is to be hoped for between them ; they meet enmity with irreconcilable enmity. Out of the Bible they forge their different creeds; these are their fortresses and bulwarks behind which they entrench themselves and resist all attacks. I will not say that these confessions of faith-for that they are so we can admit in most cases-are bad in themselves. They become so, however, in that they feed the fire of enmity;only by putting them away altogether would it be possible to set to work on healing the wounds of the Church.......To this labyrinth of sects and various confessions another belongs; the love of disputation.

What is attained by it" Has a single learned strife ever been settled? Never. Their number has only ever increased. Satan is the greatest sophist; he has never been overcome in a strife of words....In Divine service the words of men are usually heard more than the Word of God. Each one chatters as he pleases, or kills time by learned disquisitions and disproving the case of the others. Of the new birth and how a man must be changed into the likeness of Christ to become a partaker of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4) scarcely anything is said. Of the power of the keys of the Church has almost lost the power of binding, only the power of loosing remains.

In short, Christendom has become a labyrinth. The faith has been split into a thousand little parts and you are made a heretic if there is one of them you do not accept....What can help? Only the one thing needful; return to Christ, looking to Christ as the only Leader, and walking in His footsteps, setting aside all other ways until we reach that goal, and have come to the unity of the faith (Eph. 4:13). As the Heavenly Master built everything on the grounds of the Scriptures, so should we leave all particularities of our special confessions and be satisfied with the revealed Word of God which belongs to us all. With the Bible in our hand we should cry ; I believe what God has revealed in this Book ; I will obediently keep His commands ; I hope for that which He has promised . Christians, give ear! There is only one Life, but Death comes to us in a thousand forms. There is only one Truth, but Error has a thousand forms. There is only one Christ, but a thousand Anti-Christs.....So thou knowest, O Christendom, what is the one thing needful. Either thou turnest back to Christ or thou goest to destruction like the Anti-Christ. If thou art wise and wilt live, follow the Leader of Life. But you, Christians, rejoice in your being caught up...hear the Words of your Heavenly leader , "Come unto me,'.....Answer with one voice, " We come! (The Voice of the Morning , 1660)

"Jan Amos Comenius, known later the world over for his reform of education, is a heroic figure in this time of distress. He did not approve of the way in which the Brethren had engaged in politics and war. at the time of the great disaster, he had only been three years settled as minister of the congregation of brethren at Fulneck Moravia, and this place was sacked and destroyed by Spanish soldiers, compelling him to fly. He took refuge in the castle of Charles of Zerotin, where he became leader of the band of refugees that gathered there. While there, he wrote a book, "The Labyrinth of the World and the paradise of the Heart," in which, in allegorical form, he taught that peace is not to be found in the world, but in the indwelling of Christ in the heart. Driven from Zerotin, Comenius led the last band of fugitives from Moravia. He had lost everything. His wife and child died of privations on the way. As they said farewell to their native land, he encouraged their faith to believe that God would preserve there a "hidden seed," which would afterwards grow and bear fruit. (The Pilgrim Church, E.H Broadbent)