Well, dearly beloved future Evangelical Minister, have you grasped the basic, fundamental truth of all who are in schism? The Great Protestant Commandment can’t be repeated too often. “The most important thing we can do is believe in Jesus and The Bible.”
We don’t want people believing “all” The Bible. For instance, you can go on and on about anything in The Sermon on the Mount. It’s all safe. No one can do it all, especially that bit about “looking with lust” being the same as the sin, itself. The impossibility of such perfection makes all of it a handy club with which to scare people at the beginning of a sermon that ends with the automatic salvation provided by your particular schism’s ladder to heaven.
There are some “Catholic Passages” in The Bible. When we hear some fool of a Catholic telling us that we should receive Catholic Communion because Jesus said in John 6:53 “If you do not eat My Body and drink My Blood you do not have life in you.” we reply ringingly with The Great Commandment, “A lot of uneducated people may think those things are important. To us, ‘The most important thing we can do is believe in Jesus and the Bible.'”
See how The Great Commandment separates faith from obedience and makes it seem more important? Learn to do that. Be prepared for some Catholic asking why you ignore Jesus’ injunction “If you do not eat My Body and drink My Blood you do not have life in you.” If you can’t respond, people will say, “Pastor Bob didn’t have a reply to that Catholic who told him he should obey Jesus and receive Catholic Communion because Jesus said ‘If you don’t eat My Body and drink My Blood you do not have life in you.'”
Memorize and rehearse The Great Commandment so well that people remember, “When that Catholic told Pastor Bob that we should receive Catholic Communion because Jesus said if we didn’t, we would not ‘have life’ in us, Pastor Bob shot back with “The most important thing we can do is believe in Jesus and The Bible.”
Don’t worry about people leaving your schism for The Church. They are in our 40,000 schisms because they don’t want to be bothered being Catholic. “Too much work!” Others like their schism because it makes other things easier. “If I were Catholic, I’d have to get an annulment. That costs a lot! Some like being important. “Pastor Bob asked me to serve on The Long Range Planning Committee!” Such committees are a great way to get people out of your hair.
Be an enthusiastic soldier in Faith’s ongoing war against Obedience. Get everyone thinking and saying “The most important thing we can do is believe in Jesus and The Bible.” Donors, deposits, and denominations depend on making Faith more important than Obedience!
That pesky John 6:53 passage “If you do not eat My Body and drink My Blood you do not have life in you.” isn’t the only one of the “Catholic Passages”. Some of those Catholics will remind us that Jesus said “Thou art Peter and on this rock I build My Church. . .” You know what else? Some of them are so rude and impolite they turn it around, and tell you, “Jesus did not say ‘Thou art Pastor Bob and on this rock I build My Church. . .'”
Ignore the Catholic Passages in The Bible! Make them seem irrelevant. In your whole career, only a tiny handful of people are able to think, “Pastor Bob, shouldn’t we worry because Jesus said “If you obey My commands you are My friends.’? Can we be His friends if we ignore Confession and Communion in the only Church He founded?”
Those are the kind of people to whom you say, “You may need to be in a church that doesn’t respect belief and education as much as we do.” Remind them that you have a PhD in “Comparative Theology”, or whatever it is. Don’t have one? Schism Seminary provides them in less than six months to qualified Doctoral Students at very reasonable costs. Frankly, you can’t afford not to have one, if only to let people know that you, Pastor Bob, are passing up the opportunity to be known as Reverend Doctor Robert Swigert, preferring the comfortable, ‘old shoe’ approach that, if Jesus were to reappear, He would use.
The peskiest people say, “Pastor Bob, doesn’t it help the culture of death to divide the Pro-Life people among 40,000 competing denomination, all claiming to be ‘Christian’? Couldn’t we stop abortion if all Pro-Life people were Catholic? Aren’t all of us in schism responsible, in some degree, for the ongoing slaughter of the unborn?”
Theologians at Schism Seminary are working on answers to that, even as we speak.
