A Pilgrimage Of Faith, J.B. Toews, 1993

questioning the qualifications for participation in the Lord's Table. The church had disrupted the body life by fo- cusing on the gifts of the Spirit as a benefit to the individual member With the background of these serious disruptions in the life of the Corinthian church, the episde concluded with the triumph of victory in the resurrection chapter. Within the purposes of God the ultimate outcome was not in question. "All things shall be subdued unto him . . . that God may be all in all" (I Cor. 15:28). Parallels between the first century church and today's church make Paul's exhortation particularly relevant: "Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong. Let all your things be done with charity* (16:13-14). It is crucial for the current Mennonite Brethren Church to heed this apostolic exhortation. It is an urgent call for us not to drift on the waves of twentieth-century modernity. The church of Christ cannot tolerate relativism. It must rise to a 299 A PILGRIMAGE OF FAITH new commitment of discipleship that has no room for a gospel of "self-fulfillment* without the cross. In the history of the church no phenomenon is more ap- parent than the recurrence of renewal. In this the church is like its Savior and Lord, He died on Friday, but he rose again on the first day of the week. Periodically God visits his church in a special way. His Spirit brings conviction of sin and repentance. People who have been spiritually dead or indifferent are abruptly brought under conviction. James Burns, the scholar of revivalism observes that in these period- ic renewal movements people ttare arrested in the midst of their worldly occupations; they are suddenly seized by a ter- ror of wrong doing, and fear as of an impending doom haunts their minds."1 Swedish historian Westin Gunnar provided a remarkable chronicle of such revivals in the history of the church.2 Ernst Troeltsch, a German sociologist, described the renewal move- ments through history as periodic returns to new understand- ings of Scripture, movements that served as correctives to the life of the institutional church,3 These renewals, followed as they were by radically new lifestyles, always created tension with the larger society of their time. The true church will al- ways be a resident alien in the worldly cultural environment/ When it loses its alien status it also loses the ability to be salt and light in the world. In the midst of the current evangelical resurgence in North America-sixty-four percent of Americans claim to have accepted Christ-an une