This is a day of good news, seminary president proclaims By Craig M. Kibler The Layman Online Thursday, October 31, 2002 INDIANAPOLIS – "This is a day of good news," Dr. Maxie D. Dunnam told nearly 700 people Oct. 24 during the historic Confessing The Faith Conference. "We're cheating the world and are being unfaithful to God if we keep it to ourselves." Dunnam, the keynote speaker at the first-ever gathering of renewing and confessing Christians in North America, is the president of Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. Using as his text II Kings 7:1-16, he repeated the story of how four lepers brought the good news to the king that the Syrian army had lifted its siege of the city and had fled. Dunnam contrasted that story from Scripture with today's troubles, saying that the action of the lepers is the proper stance for the church. "An incredible message has been entrusted to us," he said, "a powerfully compelling message of an earth-shattering, world-changing, person-transforming fact. At the heart of it is Jesus, His incarnation, life, teaching, death and resurrection. "Our gathering is a momentous one. Am I stretching it when I say the enemy is at our door? Unlike the Syrians, they have not retreated. Nor are we mysteriously one day going to move into the enemy camp and discover they've given up. Our Lord promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against the church, but He didn't give even the faintest hint that Satan and the powers of darkness would ever lessen their onslaught against us. The enemy is at our door; the church is under siege." Sharing the good news both inside and outside the church, Dunnam said, is the proper stance for Christians today. "People within and outside the church are starving spiritually," he said. "Within the church they ask for bread and are given stones. Witnesses abound. Persons in pain and sadness share stories of their long endurance in one of our mainline congregations, but they could take it no longer. Their pastors not only disregarded, they denigrated the authority of God's word. So the person sought another congregation where Scripture was honored and preached. Most of the time the witnesses beg us to understand why they had to leave our Methodist, or Presbyterian, or Episcopal church. They were starving for the Word. "People outside the church are starving as well. They are starving because the church has betrayed her first love, has become so ideologically bound that she is spiritually barren. Committed to theological pluralism and making diversity redemptive within itself, we are diverted from the core dynamic of the Christian faith: what Christ can do for persons and for society." Dunnam then sounded what he called a clarion call to proclamation and demonstration, saying that renewal, "the only ecumenism that has integrity, will move on this pivot: the authority of God's Word, which provides for us God's revelation of God's self in Jesus Christ, God's Son and the only Savior, the one who is to be our Lord." Proclamation, he said, is just that – proclaiming the Word and not keeping it to ourselves. "Redemptive, transforming power is in the Cross of Jesus – His sacrificial death for our sins. … The fire is there to burn up the filthiness, decadence and destructiveness of sin and unrighteousness. The energy and fire are there in the fact that God became incarnate, walked the earth, died, rose again and turned evil's seemingly supreme triumph in its most crushing, irrevocable defeat." In making such proclamations, Dunnam said, people run the risk of being pelted with accusations that they are fundamentalists, demagogues, literalists or conservatives. "We will not be defensive or intimated," he said, "because that's precisely who we are: Jesus-people, Christ-followers, who make the non-negotiable claim that He is indeed who He claims to be: 'the Way, the Truth and the Life.'" Alongside proclamation must be demonstration, Dunnam said. "The faith we proclaim is too often rendered impotent because our behavior contradicts our belief. I'm calling our beginning movement here to be vigilant in contending for the wholeness of the Christ-way: 'faith working in love' – demonstration." Demonstration takes three forms, he said – resistance, servant ministry and holy living. Dunnam said the church can be an "enclave of resistance" to, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's words, be "in clear opposition to those who would adapt rather than seek to change culture." He then listed a series of practices that should be resisted: pagan ritual and practice, radical feminism, sexual promiscuity, condoning homosexual practice and others. As other things to oppose, Dunnam also cited poverty, racial/ethnic predjudice, abortion and euthanasia. In terms of servant ministry, he said that resistance must be a "holiness of heart and life that is a joyous response to the grace of God. It is only as we recover the transforming dynamic of holiness that our proclamation will be heard." Dunnam linked that servant ministry to holiness. Expounding on Ezekiel 2:4-5, he said, "The world is not paying attention to the church today and will not pay attention to the church in the future until those of us who call ourselves 'God's own people' vindicate God's holiness 'before their eyes.'"

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