RAF

I'm Dr. Dave Barnett and I'm starting this blog to help the many, many people who are either thinking about leaving or have already left the Episcopal Church in the United States (TEC) because it has abandoned their Godly heritage in favor of a pluralistic miasma of clap-trap humanism that not only denies the Scripture, but denies the Lordship of Christ. Unfortunately the alternatives for those who are evangelical and Reformed in their purpose and theology are extremely few, especially in North Texas. I know many have fled the TEC in the Diocese of Dallas by making pilgrimage to the Diocese of Fort Worth (as I did a year ago) only to discover that the Ikerites are neither evangelical or Reformed and in fact adhere to the myth of what they vainly call the three-legged stool; that is, that Scripture is but one authority along with church tradition and human reason. The outcome of this is that the Diocese of Fort Worth in its worship and practice is much closer to Roman Catholicism than it is to the Reformation Anglicanism as it is practiced around the world.

This blog carries Reformed in the title because many of us adhere to the 39 Articles of the Anglican communion, still the rule of faith and practice for Anglicans everywhere but in the US, it seems. Anglicans are Reformed because we believe the Scriptures are the only rule of faith and practice (what the Reformers called Sola Scriptura). Think about it: if you can't be saved by going to Church; and if you can't be saved by your own human reason, but you can in fact be saved by trusting in the the enduring and infallible Word of God, why would so-called Anglo-Catholics adhere to the bankruptcy of Roman teaching that tradition is equal to Scripture? The upshot of this in my own congregation is that we were taught in a recent Sunday School class that not only should we pray to saints, but that saints are omniscient. This would be laughable if it didn't call into question how people are saved and the whole nature of our resurrection hope.

Laying anything alongside Scripture as the church's authority has never lead anyone to orthodoxy but ultimately to superstition, heterodoxy and denial of the very things on which the Anglican Church was founded.

We are praying about starting a Bible-study group in the DFW metroplex to re-discover the truth of God's Holy Word of God in the context of historical Protestant Anglicanism and how believers may APPLY the truth of that Word to our living, worshiping, and the Kingdom mission.

I will be posting resources for study here on the RAF blog and keeping you informed of "what seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us."

Dr. Dave