Posted on 07/12/2007 5:40:34 AM PDT by Greg F
It was. I will grieve for the rest of my life over what happened to our community. Our family life revolved around the church. We went twice on Sunday, every Wednesday night for dinner, and often there were events on Saturday. No smoking, no drinking, no dancing, no gambling, no movies on Sundays. Those were the rules. Children went to Vacation Bible School in the summer, and the adults never had to worry that they would be indoctrinated into homosexual cultism. By the time my son was 14, our pastor was wearing black leather, endorsing the sleazy films "American Beauty" or "The English Patient" as works of art, and showing "The Rock" and similar violent movies at Methodist Youth Fellowship. He was closeted, but several of the other pastors in my last ten years in the UMC were openly gay or lesbian, wore the rainbow stole, et cetera. I had to get out for my son's sake, not to mention my own.
It's astonishing, isn't it? Being born white is racist. See my tagline.
Try attending a PCUSA service without running out with your hands over your ears...
The nuns used to call some people "cafeteria Catholics" (the cafeteria reference was to a kind of a la carte restaurant that no longer exists, but you get the idea) who would pick and chose which tenets of Catholic doctrine you wished to believe or which restrictions you would follow. Like Rudy on abortion.
Anyway, people like Hillary are pretty much "cafeteria Christians", they use Christianity to justify whatever postions they have chosen for altogether different reasons.
PCUSA, ECUSA, UMC, Lutherans -- they're all sliding down the chute. I'm now in a home church with six members. We meet in each others' homes to worship and phone each other every few days to talk, relate scripture to our life challenges, and pray together.
It must be terrible to have a church you love become a moral danger to your children. I hope that mine will resist the drift. The church I attend is a Presbyterian Church in America which was a schism because of the Presbyterian USA drift to unbiblical leadership and teaching. I really respect the Christians that are staying in the mainline denominations and fighting to keep them Christ centered, but I came to Christ late in my life so I didn’t have an emotional stake in an existing Church. Free to choose, so to speak.
Your “home” church sounds like an answer to what’s going on in the mainstream churches, just like in Ireland after the edict that everyone should be Anglican, the Irish had “hedge churches” up on a hill with a priest, and if they saw the police coming, they would all disperse.
In the Catholic Church, we have something like that going on, too. We call ourselves “The catacomb church” because we meet mostly in Catholic Church basements in the simplest of circumstances, where the Latin Mass is said. But now maybe we will have a little more freedom since we don’t have to get permission from the Bishop to have Latin Mass.
That is wonderful. I was unaware my Catholic brothers and sisters were doing this, except for the Saint Egidio community in Rome, which has grown enormously after starting out in a home church fashion in the 60s.
Thank you for all your posts on this thread. I have really enjoyed reading these comments from other believing FReepers.
I know we aren't the judge in the end, but I think we can judge at the ballot box.
I enjoyed this thread too. I took an online theology test and I laughed when it declared me a Methodist; sort of like those women’s magazine tests that tell a woman that she is most similar to a tiger out of all the animal kingdom, and a lot of fun. Your home church sounds like a wonderful fellowship.
NIV uses “sexual immorality” in Revelation . . . losing the connection to Leviticus. Have to learn Greek and Hebrew I guess . . .
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