Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people.
Jude 1:3
Hold on to the pattern of sound teaching you have heard from me, with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you—guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.
2 Timothy 1:13-14
For I give you sound teaching; Do not abandon my instruction.
Proverbs 4:2
Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a Kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe . . .
Hebrews 12:28
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.
Hebrews 10:23
All Saints Church strives to be a Kingdom Church by the help and power of the Holy Spirit. A Kingdom Church is one that seeks to abide by the principles, teachings, values, holiness, and ways of the Kingdom of God and not those of the world surrounding us. A Kingdom Church seeks to avoid the swirling of cultural, political, and social ways with the higher and godly ways of our Lord. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9
For more than a decade now, our Parish Family has abided in harmony, unity, grace, and the love of Jesus. We attribute this to the power and protection of the Holy Spirit, who helps us to live out a true Kingdom relationship at All Saints – a place where people of every worldly persuasion can be transformed to be one in Christ. We seek to teach, preach, and live out the Holy Scriptures in a true biblical Gospel mission for our Lord. These years have been a spectacular and fruitful blessing to us all. Our devotion to provide true Bible teaching, preaching, and Kingdom life has not changed one bit and will not change. Be confident in that.
In these recent months, there has been both a medical and a spiritual pandemic. Our lives have been flooded with the ravages of a virus and racism simultaneously. These evils have been inflamed further by the invectives and pollution of some severely biased news reporting from opposing sides. People sit and absorb it all for hours on end. Many good-hearted folks are digesting more distorted propaganda than Holy Scripture each day and their thinking becomes twisted and panicked. Many of us have swirled our political and social allegiances with our Kingdom allegiances as if they are of equal validity. Politics has become religion for a lot of us. People are understandably emotional, nervous, and fearful. They feel threatened and lash out at others because their faith rests on shifting sand instead of the rock of Jesus’ Gospel. Wrapped up in the human competitions of it all, many have produced the bad fruit the Apostle Paul warned us against in Galatians 5 – fits of anger, rivalries, idolatry, enmity, divisions, and dissentions. Paul goes on to say that those who do such things cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.
A Kingdom Church represents the virtues and standards of God. God commands that His children love one another sacrificially, treat one another gently, and hold one another preciously. When the world is engulfed in the flames of racism, classism, oppression, or exploitation, the narrative is God’s to speak and is not to be co-opted by the jargon or vernacular of society’s factions. We as a Kingdom Church represent our King by speaking and acting to remedy these atrocities against Him. But note that this is a flash point for many. People snap right into the social and cultural mindsets at hand. Will we speak and act as liberals or conservatives? As Republicans or Democrats? And so forth. Those terms and concerns have no meaning or translation whatsoever in the Kingdom of Heaven. There is no right or left, but only God! We speak and act as citizens of the Kingdom and that absolutely unravels those who live by the prideful and destructive confluence of politics and true faith. Wrapped in the love and holiness of the Holy Spirit, we seek to produce the true fruit of the Spirit commended to us by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 5 – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
As a priest, I am called to pastorally understand the emotions of our people who live and work on both sides of the world’s divide. When I received many recent calls and emails of anger, bitterness, hurt, outrage, and disappointment over a parish event, announcement, or devotional writing, I needed to listen to each heart and to respect compassionately what was pointed at me or the church itself. However, I am not then to be passive in the entire exercise, but rather striving in the Holy Spirit to point everyone to the Cross, to the ways of the Kingdom, and to the beauty and heavenly delight of loving one another as Jesus loves us – sacrificially and preciously.
Hang in there beloved All Saints family. We are not changing our Kingdom identity at all, but rather living it out dynamically as disciples of Christ to help those who need His love.
In Christ,
Ed Kelaher, Rector
