The head of the South Seas Evangelical Church (SSEC) has warned his followers to be on guard against heresy and cult movements.
Bishop Mathias Lima was speaking at the church’s 50th golden jubilee anniversary at Ambu near Auki, Malaita, yesterday.
“The SSEC has come through some tests in recent times,” Lima said.
“The heresies of Israelism and cargo-cultism of the kingdom movement are such tests,” he added.
“These tests have distracted the church from keeping its focus on the crucified, resurrected and glorified Christ to make disciples of all nations.
“It turned the attention of the church inward on itself and robed the church of the energy to fulfil its mission to the world around it.
“These distractions must be left behind and discouraged”.
He said SSEC has grown mature and so its followers must also be mature in their belief.
The bishop also warned of the challenges ahead.
“The world today was influenced by many things that would drift us away from the church.
“The impacts of technology, development, family and social break-down have been on the rise, and lack of commitment to the church.
“These are to name a few of the many challenges the church is going to face”.
He added human rights issues being advocated by rights groups are also a major challenge many churches are facing today.
However, he said the only right was in the word of God, not man made laws.
“We church leaders have a greater responsibility to stand up, meet and overcome these many challenges.
“We must have no fear to face the future of the church because ‘Our God is help in ages past and hope for years to come’.”
Lima said today in the nation, we see many changes happening and some of them are not good.
“The increasing social break down, loss of respect for elders and leaders, and even the church; rise in divorce and family breakdown, staggering and increasing rate of domestic violence, violence against women and children, the manufacture, consumption and abuse of alcohol, economic marginalisation where lots of unemployed, illiterate people have been kept in a cycle of poverty.
“Few people are becoming wealthy out of public resources at the expense of the majority; the crises of leadership where bad leadership begets bad governance as a result of high level of corrupt dealing in the country.”
Lima said SSEC was a self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating church in the Solomon Islands.
He called on members to live up to the church’s mission statement.
“That is to grow mature and to touch the world.
“We must not back-down from what our pioneers have planted in our soils.
“The challenge I wish to put across is that; how worth remembering was our time with the church as we did today that our next generation will commemorate?
“What significant changes must we have to do to the church that worth remembering in the next 50 years?”
After its establishment in 1964, SSEC becomes the third largest denomination in the Solomon Islands today.
The celebrations, which started Thursday, will end today.
By CHARLEY PIRINGI
in Auki
