Designed for Holiness: God's Plan to Shape & Use You for His Kingdom

by Peter E. Gillquist

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 089283286X
• ISBN13: 9780892832866
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Servant Publications
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Designed for Holiness

A uniquely American form of Orthodoxy, the Evangelical Orthodox Church of America, was formed a few years ago by some veterans of Campus Crusade for Christ who sought a more traditional structure for ministry and ended up joining Orthodoxy. One of the leaders of that movement, Peter E. Gillquist, wrote Designed for Holiness: God's Plan to Shape and Use You for His Kingdom (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, c. 1986). (He first published the book in 1982, entitling it Why We Haven't Changed the World). The revised edition reflects Gillquist's embrace of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Gillquist tells his own story as the book opens. Joining Campus Crusade as a college senior, he aggressively evangelized university campuses for a decade. "My passion was to see the world changed for the good--for God" (p. 5). While individual "decisions" routinely occurred, while hundreds "accepted" the Lord after assenting to questions posed by the "four spiritual laws," the "world" seemed largely unaffected. Gillquist increasingly sensed that the world needed to see "holiness and righteousness" (p. 9) in churches which instead seemed to delight in celebrating the fact that their adherents are "not perfect, just forgiven." Sitting next to a Christian psychologist on a plane, he recorded his observation: "'Ten or twelve years ago, most Christians I knew were so bound up and legalistic, I found myself talking to them almost exclusively about freedom in Christ. Today, just a decade or so later, evangelicals are so licentious and self-seeking, I find myself giving them boundaries from God's Word. I have concluded that we must never divorce the righteousness of he Law from the freedom of the gospel--and we have done it. either one by itself is meaningless and will lead to error'" (p. 29). Preaching, believing, living what Bonhoeffer accurately labeled "cheap grace" has produced a parody of Christianity--a lukewarm, lackluster religion which allegedly worships a "holy God" with less than holy resolve. So Gillquist launched a search for holiness. In his judgment, holiness is "a forgotten theme" in many evangelical circles, some of which prefer to portray the Way of Christ as a "party" or "dance," discounting the spiritual disciplines while claiming the gratuitous gift of an "abundant life" (p. 66). His search necessarily took him "beyond 'positional truth'"--the pervasive Protestant message of sola gratia which tends to require nothing of believers but a moment of assent to such diluted definitions of faith as Tillich's "accepting the fact that you are accepted." To those who believe we are "holy" by virtue of our "position" in Christ, Gillquist argues: only those who are truly transformed, only those who are regenerated as well as justified, deserve the label "Christian." Being "born again" is fine, for the Christian life must in fact begin at some point. But the really important question is where we end up! More important than beginning i