OPINION: BURKHART: Don't mess with success

Janie Slaven, The Sentinel Echo, London, Ky.
·2 min read

Sep. 10—Knowing what's wrong we can make it right — our health, our car, our eternal life. Truth never changes as in 2+2 or two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen.

To celebrate our August 3rd anniversary, Milly and I spent an overnight in Gatlinburg, Tenn. It has been 17 years since she and I were there. We ate at two different restaurants, both at which we had dined many years ago — The "Old Mill Restaurant" in Pigeon Forge and "The Pancake Pantry" in Gatlinburg.

We found both restaurants with waiting lines and greater popularity than ever. What impressed us the most was that neither establishment had changed an iota — the exact same menu and not the slightest change in their building nor their seating arrangement. This is in great contrast to the popular fast-food chains, typically advertising a new menu item in their venues monthly.

Logically if anyone is running a restaurant with a full house and a waiting line, what sense would it be to revamp — adding or subtracting anything, messing with their success? The truth and validity of their businesses are authenticated by a full house at everything seating.

Occasionally during my ministry, I have been confronted with the complaint that church-theology-religion needs a "face-lift." Church worship is boring, stalemated by the same old, same old.

There is a constant effort to improve worship wording, to create variation in emphasis and in length of services. The immutable core of Christian belief — even from one denomination to another, is and has been safeguarded through the centuries.

From my personal and unique (after retirement), 13-year experience of worshipping in most Christian denominations, I witnessed entire congregations reciting together the same ancient creed — Apostle or Nicene.

Christianity is the largest confessed religious creed in the world for over 20 centuries (Christianity) along with the startling miraculous life of Jesus Christ its founder, promoting a variant creed would appear to be "messing with success".

Such stalwart commitment to the "Gospel Truth" does not exclude a constant effort to make this ancient theology viable, comprehensible, and applicable to the mind and vicissitudes of the day.

Since every spoken language changes (experiences corruption) — with a constant need to update dictionaries, bibles and worship wording will ever be critiqued for clarity. There is an identical effort to preserve all truth of all things. "The truth will set you free." [John 8:32]

The vocabulary of every science in the world is ever critiqued for validity and accuracy of meaning. The wording of the Bible and worship liturgy is not exempt from this scrutiny.

God, His truth, and His church never change. We dare not "mess with truth" nor success.