Claremont School of Theology (a United Methodist Church seminary) has recently announced it’s University Project. I have several good friends in the UMC, and I was a youth pastor in a United Methodist Church for four years, so I struggle with how to adequately respond to this. Look at this statement from their announcement:
We aim to instill our students with a strong sense of their own religious identities and the integrity of the religious traditions that they represent, while simultaneously teaching them to recognize the legitimacy and integrity of the other religious traditions which they will encounter at Claremont and the world beyond. (emphasis mine)
So a United Methodist seminary – or let’s even scope that out a little – a Christian seminary is now training religious leaders for the Muslim faith, the Jewish faith, the Hindu faith, and the Buddhist faith. Something’s wrong with this picture.
While I served at a UMC church, the slogan for the denomination was “Open Minds, Open Hearts, Open Doors.” I’m afraid they (at the very least “they” meaning the Board of Trustees at Claremont – though it is still a UMC approved institution) left their mind so open that their brain has completely fallen out.
The Muslim faith does not recognize Jesus as the Christ. Nor does the Jewish faith, the Hindu faith, or the Buddhist faith. Does that make them unloveable? No. Does it lesson their value as people? No. But it absolutely places them on a different team.
In a culture when common thought believes that any and all faiths point to the same God, this stupid move on the part of a “Christian Institution” backed and supported by a major denomination continues to minimize the Savior King Jesus in the name of diversity.
Come quickly Lord Jesus. Your children have a knack for being morons.
/rant off
My Step- father in law is a Methodist minister. He doesn’t believe in the “I am the way, the truth and the life, NO ONE comes to the Father but through me”. He is more of a good vs bad, work out your own salvation kind of guy. Which saddens me because he is a crisis counselor in an ER – some place where hope is badly needed and often the last place it is avaialable. His own children are in prison and he says it’s too late to make up for the bad they’ve done. I think it’s awful that Christian institutions do not teach Christ being it.
I am very disappointed to hear this and also saddened by the 1st comment to this, but I am not terribly surprised. The more we as the church change ourselves to meet the world’s standards the more we get away from there being one way to the Father and that being Jesus Christ. I am all in favor of us as the body of Christ keeping the message fresh with new ways to present it but when the message itself gets changed, something is wrong. Just think how this breaks the heart of God way more than it gets to us.