All with One Accord (Donald Gee) - Deal Pentecostal Church

lessings and feelings and gifts and therefore fails in its
supreme calling to purely objective worship of the
Living God.
It is, I suppose, Mr. Newbigin's meaning when he equates the
"Catholic" type of Christianity with "order" thus to
distinguish those who predominately stress ritual and liturgical
forms of religious service. Their deadly danger all the time is
formalism. The truly beautiful orders of service which they
evolve end by becoming mechanical and almost meaningless
and powerless for the majority of their devotees. One of the
strange twists of Church history was that this was the end of
the Irvingite (a "Pentecostal") movement when it became the
Catholic Apostolic Church.
The "Protestant" type in the analysis before us lays stress on
"faith." This is the confessional church; the believers for
whom what they believe, their doctrines, their creeds, their
statements of fundamental dogmas to which all must
subscribe for salvation are everything. Let us recognize the
importance of sound doctrine. Moreover, an intellectual
formulation of belief is essential. The first centuries of the
Christian Era were spent in mental travail and, unhappily,
bitter controversies, as believers struggled to express in
terminology satisfactory to the intellect, their tremendous
experience of Christ. We who have inherited their noble
creeds owe them an incalculable debt. The danger in the
"Protestant" type of Christianity is that faith enshrined in a
creed can become as spiritually sterile as order embalmed in
ritual. Succeeding generations cling to a form of words that
means nothing experimentally. It is easy to be impeccably
orthodox in faith and know next to nothing of the abundant
life that comes by experiencing Jesus Christ as a Living
Saviour.
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