We are moving!!!

This was my first attempt at blogging and my last post here.

I know, about 10 years late!  Anyhow, I am moving this site to my blog on our Holy Trinity Anglican Church website: www.holytrinitysa.org (look in the lower right hand corner).

Please check out Holy Trinity's site (under construction) and if you click "like" you will cause the google gods to giggle and smile.

Thanks for your support!
Chuck Collins

Church planting and root-beer jellybeans

Dear Holy Trinity folks,

We're 5 month old. Babies! We gathered at the Josephine Theater just 5 months ago and now is a good time to revisit what it means to be on our launch team.  It can only help us to be crystal clear what is expected of those who are called to help launch Holy Trinity Anglican Church.  Not everyone is called or committed to be a launch team member.  In fact, at this point, it's better to have 35 who are "sold out" for Holy Trinity's vision than 200 who want a chaplaincy ministry - even if the 200 are a pleasant lot!  We are still in the phase of forming the DNA for Holy Trinity and these are important days.  I'm sure the first year of Christ Church firmly established its DNA for the next 100 years!

Here's what launch team members look like...

They are exuberantly positive - the first to arrive and the last to leave; ready to jump in to help before they're asked.

Their hearts are broken for those who don't yet know the love of God.  They invite unchurched neighbors and friends and coworkers.

They are agile and flexible, willing to change anything - ANYTHING - to better reach San Antonio for Christ.

They attend worship every week unless a giant dead rodent has blocked the road, and are fully engaged with one another in Christian love (Alpha and home groups)

They generously and sacrificially give because they 100% believe in HT as a ministry that will make a difference for the Kingdom of God.

They are nice and like root-beer jellybeans.

Thanks for prayerfully considering being on our launch team.  God has amazing things planned for our future, but not everyone is called to be on the ground floor of this ministry.  Is this your calling?

Chuck

Will "revival" come to Holy Trinity?

Holy Trinity has been up and running for less than 5 months - that's all, 5 months! - and we have every reason to be thankful.  Our worship is amazing and Spirit-filled, and many of us are coming to know Christ better and reaching out to others with the good news of the Gospel. We've followed the Lord, I believe, the best we know how, and a powerful vision for our future.

So what's missing?  Could it be the concerted, whole-hearted prayer that accompanies every "revival" that I read about in Christian history?  It's not that we don't pray - most of us are praying every day for Holy Trinity Church.  But there's a difference between praying for our church and throwing ourselves at the feet of our sovereign, powerful God beseeching Him - begging Him - for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on us and on our city.

Close your eyes for a minute and envision the Holy Spirit moving in and among us, the families and individuals that compose Holy Trinity.  Can you see him healing hurts, convicting us of our pride and bitterness, and molding and shaping our hearts after His heart for our city?  Can you see dry, lifeless bones coming together with flesh, and God breathing into us (Ezekiel 37)?

God, please deepen in us our dependence on You and You alone!

PRAYER FOR HOLY TRINITY ANGLICAN CHURCH

O God our joy and our confidence,

You are the humblest and yet strongest; unchanging and yet the author of all change.

Pour upon Holy Trinity Church the power of your Holy Spirit;

Fill us full to overflowing,

So that we will be strongly humble and humbly strong;

Change our hearts and be our refuge and strength;

When we meet, be pleased and rejoice over us with gladness and singing.

This we ask through Your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen 

Are infants saved in baptism?

Great question from the Men's Bible Study today, Gal. 2:11-14.

HECK NO!  Welcomed into the community of faith, yes.  Given all they will need for the abundant life in Christ, yes.  Spiffed up to look like little angels for family and friends, yes.  But unless each child at some point in their life personally accepts the gift of God's grace by faith, they remain unregenerate (unsaved).  "They that receive Baptism rightly..." Article XXVII, BCP 873, NOT, "they who have had water poured on them three times."

How sad the Episcopal Church has recently bought hook-line-and-sinker into the idea that all you need is baptism (without even a passing nod to personal faith). It's a pernicious heresy not found in Scripture. Not that baptism is just a sign/symbol; it's far more than that.  In baptism God gives us His grace in full (as we pray for).  But unless we receive it and "live into" our baptisms, be remain in spiritual darkness (dead in our trespasses and sins).

Roman Catholic: Justification is the process by which a person is supposedly "made" righteous. A baptized person is cleansed from all sins (original and actual) and is simultaneously infused with new/supernatural righteousness; so that God looks at the inherent righteousness and declares them forgiven and saved because they ARE righteous (at least for the moment). They are in and out of righteousness throughout their lives depending on their adherence to the sacraments, but have no "assurance" of salvation - they hope they will be in a state of righteous when they die, but who knows...


Anglican: Justification is a legal pronouncement, not a moral change.  We are saved, yet sinners, based on God's complete work of salvation on the cross.  The gradual life-long process where a person is actually made to be righteous is called “sanctification.” Our sins are forgiven and we are accepted and accounted righteous because of what our Savior has done; based not on what Christ already sees in us or what He does in us, but solely on the basis of His imputed righteousness.  Therefore we can have full assurance of salvation because it's based on God's faithfulness, not ours.
  
Infants are cute as peaches, but, in terms of eternity, they will need to learn that faithful appropriation of the grace given to them in baptism is the beginning of life in God. That's where parents and godparents need to be clear about what salvation is and how it relates to baptism so that they can help lead their children to Christ, based on His full and complete work on the cross for our sins.


"We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies..."


Recommended reading: Michael Green's Baptism 

Running into a Grizzly Bear

THE SMELL OF PINE

the smell of pine is in every breath I take,

the rain releases it as if it is a thousand butterflies

cupped in large hands and then uncupped

to fill the corners of a garden.

walking a steep trail established by centuries of animals

searching for better food and water;

bending down as often as I need to, making sure

an unturned rock with fossilized ancient life doesn’t remain hidden.

passing other hikers, more serious hikers with bear spray

attached to their belts like Western six-shooters

who tell us that peeing around your tent at night

will keep the bears away.

the image of us dancing around our tent

doing our best to guarantee a peaceful bear-free night

threatens to interrupt the perfect beauty of a walk 

through the sweet pine trees after a morning rain,

but the picture of running into a grizzly bear,

surprising him into attacking us and taking our bloody limbs into his mouth

was enough to cause us to turn around

and follow the bear-speakers out of harm’s way.

The next day we stopped by the road side with a hundred other tourists

to observe a bear in the far distance scratching his back in a berry bush;

he seemed harmless enough

and peeing around a tent seemed even more ridiculous than the day before.

Holy Trinity Anglican, San Antonio

Dear Holy Trinity friends, 

God is blessing us in so many ways at Holy Trinity!  Yea God!!  Most of all we are growing in Him, and He is growing us closer and closer to one another. I am very thankful.

In the history of Christian revivals, one of the factors that is almost universal (along with persecution) is Christians struggling to depend on

Rev. Canon Chuck Collins

God for daily bread.  Just look at the first Christians who struggled in these ways because they believed in Jesus.  I think of the countless stories of orphanages and hospitals that were within hours of shutting down were it not for a gift of radical generosity that kept them afloat and, more importantly, kept them prayerful. And I think of missionaries, like Rich and Kourtney Street who literally do not know where the next donation will come from (but believe that God will do it!). 

In 30 years as a priest I've experienced church financial challenges, but, in all honesty, nothing like the week-to-week dependence God is teaching us at Holy Trinity.  That we do not have any endowments, reserves, money (big, old, new or much) is ACTUALLY a tremendous blessing.  I really believe it.  God thinks enough of us to teach us to depend on Him week-by-week!  I hope He continues to teach us until we learn the incredible lesson of radical generosity -- so that when we have more, we will still live on the edge of needing Him.  Randy Alcorn is right, I think, when he says, "The more holdings we have on earth, the more likely we are to forget that we're citizens of another world."

Below are the principles that I believe. And, I believe they can transform our community. They will teach us to pray. They will help us live on the edge of trusting God.  They will help us to believe great things of God that are beyond our wildest dreams.  I know you are giving what you can and many of you are giving sacrificially and generously.  Please pray that God will continue to teach us about radical generosity, so that when we have more  .  .  .

Gratefully yours,

  

Chuck

Holy Trinity Anglican Church, San Antonio

We Promise . . .

 . . . We will give God the credit as "the giver" of all that we have, spiritually and materially.

 . . . We will be a safe place for people to hear the good news about stewardship, free from pressure or manipulation of any sort.

 . . . We ask our parishioners to give what they can give freely and joyfully, in response to the love of Jesus Christ.

. . . We will use the resources entrusted to us exactly as directed by the giver, and we will do so with the absolute integrity and utmost transparency.

. . . We will believe God for greater things than we can accomplish in our own abilities, so that God will get the credit when it is accomplished.

 . . . We will make detailed financial statements (and annual audits) available to any parishioner who asks.

. . . We will model generosity and "First-fruits Giving" in the way that we support missions and outreach. 

Fitz Allison's new book

I've just reread Trust in an Age of Arrogance and am extremely grateful that someone in the U.S. Anglican tradition still believes in the sinfulness of sin and the greatness of grace, the bondage of the will in the sense of Article X. God gets all the credit for our salvation!

Bishop Allison catches the essence of the gospel with unforgettable phrases:

"This spiritual asthma [of religious self-righteousness] chokes our civilization and counterfeits the Christian faith"

"We have arrogated to ourselves the attributes of deity and given to God the responsibility to justify himself, repent, change, or disappear as irrelevant."

"Some theologians in England now applaud the sucking sound of this long departing faith."

"The amputation of purpose from the mystery of human identity is fatal."

"The Sermon on the Mount is the necessary, rigorous, and devastating purging of Pharisee yeast.  It's chemotherapy for the Pharisee cancer."

"The idiocy of our times that has emptied God of his awesomeness leaves us with no laxative for our arrogant constipation."

"Within Anglicanism, Jeremy Taylor placed the banana peel of Pelagianism on the cliff of Unitarianism."

"The decrees of the Council of Trent about sin and justification are to Pharisaism as cigarettes are to cancer."

"We come into this world unfree."

This book and his earlier, The Rise of Moralism, should absolutely be required reading for every seminarian, and for anyone who wishes to know the answer to: If the foundation of the English Reformation was so good (Cranmer, Hooker, Jewel, Andrews), how did it end up so bad?