Are You A Christian?

 

GEORGE L. FAULL

Jane and Bill had been talking awhile about the sports, the weather, taxes and other things about which no one can do anything.

Finally, Bill says to Jane:

Bill:     Are you a Christian?

Jane:   Oh yes, I’ve been a Christian for years.

Bill:     What kind of a Christian?

Jane:   Oh, just simply a Christian.

Bill:    Well, there are all sorts of Christians.  I mean, what brand of a Christian?

Jane:   No brand.  We’re just simply Christians.  We’re not hyphenated Christians, we’re Christians only.

Bill:    Well, I’m content for you to be a Christian or a Disciple of Christ or Believer but you have to profess some name 

           brand.  There are many kinds of milk; there’s Sealtest, Kroger’s or Dean’s.  You’ve got to be some kind of a   

           Christian - Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Episcopalian, or Pentecostal.

Jane:   No, we just follow the Bible; “No book but the Bible, no name but the Divine, no creed but Christ.”

Bill:     Well that’s just arrogance on your part.

Jane:   Why is it arrogance?  We just think the Bible only makes Christians only.  Creeds do not unite, they separate.  

            Paul says denominating yourself into names is carnal.  (See both I Corinthians 1 and 3.)  I see no arrogance in 

            that.  Milk is milk when it comes out of the cow.  Sealtest or Dean’s don’t make it milk, they process it to be 

            their kind of milk.  We don’t want to be hyphenated Christians.  We see no need to be pasteurized, 

            homogenized and vitamin D enriched.  We’re just milk.  It takes creeds, synods, conventions, and rules of 

            discipline and ecclesiastical authorities to make one a certain brand of Christian.  No, we delight in our freedom 

            in Christ to believe what Jesus and His Apostles have taught us in God’s Word.  When the Bible is believed and 

            obeyed, you have a simple Christian.

Bill:     You’re thinking is warped, prejudice, and conceited. You have to belong to a church of some sort.

Jane:   I do.  I am in Christ’s Church.

Bill:     That infers the rest of us are not!

Jane:   Only in your mind.  The believers who repented and were baptized on Pentecost were saved and added to the 

           Church.  

            What brand of Church was it?  Surely none of the churches you mentioned, for we know the beginnings of 

             each of those churches and they were started centuries later than Pentecost.

Bill:     You’re naïve.  You have to have a name to identify yourself.

Jane:   I’m content just to suffer as a Christian.  It is in that name that we glorify Christ and not a name after a mere man 

           or a doctrine or a form of church government.  I’m sorry you want to glory in some other name.

Bill:     You’ve not even asked me what sect I belong to.

Jane:   It doesn’t matter.  I’d rather not know.  I’d like for you simply to see that sectarianism takes away from the unity 

          of all believers and that in all things Christ should receive the pre-eminence.  To call His Church that He bought 

          with His own precious blood or His Bride by another name seems to me to be, what was the word you used of 

          me, arrogant?

Bill:     I’m out of here!