Churches Dying

[Joseph G]

That just proves my point about the weaponization of the Scriptures, and the lack of a Christ-like hermeneutic in many churches.

It's not loving to coddle sin. Jesus didn't. In fact, it's why He died for us.

 

[FireDragon76]

It's not loving to coddle sin.

There is a wide chasm between your religion and mine, if you think welcoming gay people into our congregational life is "coddling sin".

Jesus didn't. In fact, it's why He died for us.

Jesus didn't die to incite contempt of LGBT people.

I find this notion that we need to be lectured about what Jesus would and wouldn't do to absurd. Some in our churches have spent a great deal of time studying the person of Jesus. We have a very different understanding of Jesus teachings, perhaps, ones rooted in love and respect for the dignity of all people.

 

[bèlla]

Acting on homosexual desires is a sin and can't be debated on the site.

Christian behavior notwithstanding, we need to be honest with ourselves. Many people believe in God or want to relate with Him in some way but they want it on their terms.

Choosing to live in a homosexual relationship is an example of that. As is fornication and other things where permissiveness is acceptable. If you aren't trying to follow His precepts you aren't following Elohim. You're following a god you've constructed and saying otherwise.

Like it or not we have parameters. Just call yourself spiritual or eclectic or something along those lines. Don't lie to yourself.

~bella

 

[Joseph G]

Acting on homosexual desires is a sin and can't be debated on the site.

Christian behavior notwithstanding, we need to be honest with ourselves. Many people believe in God or want to relate with Him in some way but they want it on their terms.

Choosing to live in a homosexual relationship is an example of that. As is fornication and other things where permissiveness is acceptable. If you aren't trying to follow His precepts you aren't following Elohim. You're following a god you've constructed and saying otherwise.

Like it or not we have parameters. Just call yourself spiritual or eclectic or something along those lines. Don't lie to yourself.

~bella

That's right. When Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery, He didn't "affirm" her "lifestyle". He told her to "go and sin no more."

 

[FireDragon76]

Acting on homosexual desires is a sin and can't be debated on the site.

Christian behavior notwithstanding, we need to be honest with ourselves. Many people believe in God or want to relate with Him in some way but they want it on their terms.

Choosing to live in a homosexual relationship is an example of that. As is fornication and other things where permissiveness is acceptable. If you aren't trying to follow His precepts you aren't following Elohim. You're following a god you've constructed and saying otherwise.

Like it or not we have parameters. Just call yourself spiritual or eclectic or something along those lines. Don't lie to yourself.

~bella

If our churches policies offend you, by all means, don't attend them. However, our consciences are persuaded that we are doing what is right. We also don't need your approval to call ourselves Christians. By baptism this is what we are.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

It's not loving to coddle sin. Jesus didn't. In fact, it's why He died for us.

Sure, but Jesus also didn't put up with the legalese of the Pharisees......................whom, He said, didn't really lift a finger to truly help others.

Maybe--------------and this is just a thought I'm going to toss out here for folks to think about----------------maybe try helping and understanding the situations and pressures and traumas other people are actually going through BEFORE preaching at them about letting go of some sin in their lives.

From my own personal experience in various churches over the years, "preaching" is about the only thing other Christians provide on a regular basis, with much of that preaching not really even being filtered by good exegesis or hermeneutics or, even, as an outcome of their own pure living and avoidance of sin in their own lives. But I know........................it sure feels 'good' to preach to others about their shortcomings.

 

[bèlla]

I need no education on homosexuality. I've known my share and many of my friends were bisexual long ago. Nevertheless, thus saith the Lord. Their decisions don't eradicate the truth. The choice to abide or ignore is theirs to make but I'm not compromising and that's my choice.

~bella

 

[dzheremi]

Your Church is Going to Die​

Go on...

BY CLINT CLIFTON

Aw. Poor guy. I always feel bad for people with partially-reduplicated names like this, like my dad's best friend who named his son Tony even though his last name was very similar and very Italian already. The poor kid sounds like an entree at the Olive Garden.

People rarely consider how churches begin and almost never consider how they end. Churches, just like people, have lifecycles. They are born and they die. Where is your church in its lifecycle?
Have you ever considered how close your church is to death?

*Looks around at the hundreds of churches and monasteries we have all over the world, noting that the vast majority of which that are outside of North Africa did not exist prior to 1960*

I mean, I think we're doing pretty good, all told.

In his book, “The Unstuck Church: Equipping Churches to Experience Sustained Health” Tony Morgan describes seven stages of a church’s life.

1. Launch
2. Momentum Growth
3. Strategic Growth
4. Sustained health
5. Maintenance
6. Preservation
7. Life Support

Where is your church in this lifecycle?

I'm not sure that this applies to churches outside of whatever type of church caused Mr. Clifton to come up with this idea. Are we on Life Support because Egypt is only about 10% Christian as opposed to nearly 100% as it was by the 5th century AD, or are we in Maintenance mode because that 10% figure hasn't appreciably changed in decades, or are we in one of the growth stages because (admittedly anti-Coptic Orthodox) English-language sources from outside of the Church that wrote about us in the first half of the 20th century (e.g., Attwater, 1945) put our numbers in the hundreds of thousands in Egypt, whereas today they range from about 5 million (government census figure; certainly an undercount) to around 12 million (Coptic NGO figure; certainly an overcount -- most contemporary non-sectarian non-Egyptian sources like the CIA World Factbook put us at around 8-10 million)? Or are we in... (You get the point.)

People rarely consider how churches begin and almost never consider how they end. Churches, just like people, have lifecycles. They are born and they die.

Parishes may die like this, but Churches? Maybe in the case of some specific post-Reformation denominations, but the Church is the body of Christ, and He will not undergo death twice.

They close their doors, they sell their buildings, they liquidate their assets, and they stop gathering.

Yes, we've purchased or been given many shuttered RC buildings and the like over the years. I've seen some amazing ones with my own eyes, when I was in the Diocese of NY and New England in upstate NY, a decade ago. I can only pray that those kindly and brotherly fellow Christians who saw fit to help our community in those circumstances can feel comforted that they will continue to be dedicated to the worship of the Triune God, as opposed to turning into a concert hall, a dance club, or something else like that. (A lot of former church buildings end up going that way because of the very impressive acoustics that are the result of traditional church architecture.)

If you don’t believe me, get on a plane to Jerusalem and look for the church first pastored by James.

Thank you for the invitation! I would love to visit the Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, as it would be a blessing to worship with the newly-elevated Abp. Anthimos and the other local Christians at that location in such a holy space, to say nothing of also visiting the local Armenian Patriarchate, the small holdings of the Coptic Orthodox and the Ethiopians (fight over Deir El Sultan notwithstanding), and even the Greeks, assuming that they would not attack me with a broom upon learning that I am not one of them. (Which I don't think they would; I've been hugged by enough random Chalcedonians at the local Glendi festival when I used to still go to there, so I think I must blend in quite nicely. Or maybe I just seem very huggable, for some reason.)

Then skip over to Turkey and see if you can find the church at Antioch still meeting.

You have a few choices in modern Antakya, depending on who think is keeping the original church there alive. There's the Greek Orthodox Church near the archeological museum of Hatay, at least two churches calling themselves "Antakya Mesihçiler Kilisesi" (which I'm pretty sure is just Turkish for "Antiochian Christian Church"), something called "Yeni Apostolik Havari Kilisesi", the very uncreatively-named "Antakya Protestan Kilisesi" (no prizes for guessing what that means), and so on. It doesn't seem like there'd be anything for me, but that's okay. My church's stronghold is in the southeast of the country (about 400 miles to the east of Antakya), in Midyat and especially at Tur Abdin (the "Hill of Worshippers"), in addition to the Armenian sites like the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Aghtamar Island in Lake Van, which is one of those places I hope I can visit at least once before I depart from this life.

Those churches are closed, disbanded and scattered.

The Cathedral at Aghtamar has in recent years been the site of historic baptisms after being shuttered for about a century following the genocides committed against the Armenians and others by the Ottomans in the early 20th century, which resulted in the deliberate destruction many sacred sites (in the case of the Aghtamar Cathedral in particular, it had stood for 1,000 years by the time it was destroyed and then forcibly closed by the Ottoman government in 1916).

American churches are closing too, and not just one or two at a time – they are closing by the thousands. This Sunday morning when you go to church, about 135 fewer American churches will be gathering than gathered the same time last week. That’s 600 churches disbanding every month – and 7,000 churches vanishing every year.

Well, when you largely offer nothing to people that they can't get elsewhere without the added hassle of having to gather in a particular building on one of their few days off to hear shallow platitudes with people that they probably don't even like, can you really be surprised? Sorry if that's harsh, but it's not difficult to see why this is happening. Secularism has a strong pull by itself, but when you consider what is being offered as an alternative, it's almost entirely predictable that things would be going this way.

Western Europe experienced drastic changes over the course of the 20th century. During the 1960s, it experienced terminal decline of virtually all its large, organized churches and the pervasive Christian culture, which influenced Western Europe for centuries, virtually disappeared. Today the streets of major cities throughout Western Europe are peppered with church buildings that lasted longer than the congregations that erected them. Hundreds of church buildings are now being used as restaurants, nightclubs, concert venues, cafés, modern condominiums, museums and mosques. They stand as stark proof that western culture is spitting Christianity out of its mouth.

I would think "has spat" is more apt, but yeah. That sounds largely accurate.

The change is not really that shocking if you think about it. Churches are made up of sinners, and sin kills everything it touches. If sinners are going to church, churches will be dying. If churches are dying, new churches are necessary.

Here's where Mr. Clifton loses me: "If sinners are going to church, churches will be dying" -- as opposed to what, exactly? Where is this mythical church where everyone who goes there is already free from sin? Is it right next to the doctor's office where somehow only healthy people go? Will I burst into flames if I accidentally set foot in it? As the saying goes, the Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints. (And that's not because we don't have plenty of the latter category.)

Every year in America about 4,000 evangelical churches begin. Of those started, 35% close before their 5th anniversary, leaving about 2,600 new churches planted annually.

How many of these are essentially like vaguely Jesus-themed shopping malls or arena-style concert venues, I wonder?

How is the American church responding to the crisis?

By writing think pieces designed to scare everyone?

Please keep in mind that the mission of the church was to scatter, not to gather.

So then what was all the stuff earlier about how the churches in Turkey et al. are scattered now? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It seems like Mr. Clifton wants to have it both ways here.

Churches have a life cycle and eventually die, and one day yours will too.

I don't think it will, though. I mean, maybe the Church of St. Bishoy in Albuquerque, NM into which I was baptized a dozen years ago will eventually (though all signs point to the opposite happening, as they've received more converts since I moved away in 2015), but again, the whole Church itself? I would think that if that were to happen it would've surely happened at some point much earlier in history -- say, when the mad caliph Al-Muizz ordered that the tongues of any caught speaking the Coptic language be cut out, or when the Christian community narrowly averted annihilation on the order of the same caliph, through the miracle of the moving of Mt. Mokattam by the prayers of St. Simon the Tanner and HH St. Abraham the Syrian.

My prayer is that you would plant a church vigorously committed to planting other new churches. I pray you will stretch the faith of your people, not so they can have a larger building to worship in, but that Christ may have a larger kingdom of worshipers.

These are good things to pray for. May God grant them, according to His good will.

I know it's just a building,

Is it? I don't mean to pick on you (as I'm sure many people think the same), but I can't help but think that the idea that churches are "just buildings" may hasten their dissolution. If it's "just a building", then why not convert it into a Starbucks or whatever.

but it's sad. I've seen my former church torn down, or sold and become something else. It makes you wonder what became of the real church that congregated in that building: the body of Christ, as something that old probably did have memebres of the body of Christ in attendance. Today, there are lot's of churches where it's another body and another Spirit, but I'm not talking about that.

View attachment 345997

That looks still useable to me. I mean, compared to some parts of the Middle East like present-day Iraq and Syria where Christians pray in bombed-out, ransacked husks of buildings, or at the site of long-decayed foundations of monasteries that were liquidated centuries ago under this or that dominant power, the building in that photo looks downright nice. Just get out the mower or get on your hands and knees and dig out the overgrowth with some friends, get someone who knows how to reinforce whatever internal parts of the building may need it, have a few people brave getting up high to paint the building, and just like that, you've got your church building. Heck, I'd use it. It's probably more fitting to be a dedicated church than the one corner/room of a multi-office building in an office park, which is all we could afford back in Albuquerque even after 15+ years of saving. (Not to diminish that; it is holy ground just the same, but my point is that I don't know that people who have always had dedicated church buildings to go to necessarily recognize how fortunate they have been.)

 

[FireDragon76]

Sure, but Jesus also didn't put up with the legalese of the Pharisees......................whom, He said, didn't really lift a finger to truly help others.

Not only that, but he said they were white-washed tombs. Clean on the outside, but filthy on the inside.

I came to my own understanding through the better part of half of a decade of seeing my own sins before me, and realizing I was not in the place to decide who enters the house of the Lord. God desires mercy, not sacrifice.

 

[Kokavkrystallos]

Nobody chooses to be gay. It is an intrinsic part of a person. Trying to pretend this isn't the case is just intellectually dishonest.



I belong to one of those churches. We don't think we are twisting the Scriptures. We believe we are being faithful by rejecting harmful, discriminatory or prejudicial attitudes about gay people, and we reject weaponizing certain passages in the Bible against minorities, even though this was done in the past against other groups of people.

Well, it's been scientifically shown now there is no "gay gene" so people are not born that way. That's simply an excuse, and a bad one.
The practice is an environmental one mostly, and a learned behavior. And let's face it: the flesh loves to experiment with sin, especially sexual sin. Sexuality was designed by the Creator to be between male and female.
I know the arguments, that certain scriptures only refer to male prostitutes, Sodom's sin was pride, not sodomy, and sodomites means prostitutes, etc. Well, male with male homosexuality is expressly forbidden by Lev. 18:22, and reiterated in Romans 1:26-27 where woman with woman homosexuality is also mentioned. Romans is very clear and leaves no wiggle room for excuse.
In 1 Corinthians 6 it says to the Christians, "And such WERE some of you, but YE ARE washed, sanctified & justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God." Where it says "abusers of themselves with mankind (arsenokoites) means men going to bed with men - it does not mean only a male prostitute, though that would be included. Scripture is clear a truly born again believer WAS those things in the past, but is no longer, and has been delivered by Christ and God's power.

I pray the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ lead you into all truth.

Here is a testimony:

"My name is David, I am 44 years old, and this is the testimony of how Jesus Christ saved me from twenty-seven years of homosexuality. I speak these things in love, not out of hatred. I speak these things out of somebody who has been there, who knows what it is like, who knows what it’s like to live in that (homosexuality), who knows how hopeless it is. Sure you may enjoy your life, you may enjoy aspects of your life, you may enjoy the sexual aspects of it, the alcohol, what have you, but there’s really no permanent joy in it. Eventually it goes away and you have to do more, seek more.
So, I ask you to look for the real love, the real joy, the real contentment that can only be found in being made right with God through Christ, through Christ’s work on the Cross. So, I speak these things from love, not from hate. I speak these things not in judgment. I am not judging somebody, I am just telling you what the Word of God says. The Word of God is what’s going to judge us. In fact, the Word of God is what says all these things are wrong, I am only telling people what the Word of God says. Like somebody should have told me.
My friend who did try to tell me, he tried to tell me in the nicest way, in a Christian way, that I was living a lifestyle that was contrary to what God wanted, not just in my sexual orientation but in every other aspect. He (my friend) knew I was not really a Christian. So I speak these things in love and I pray for your soul, and I pray that you will receive these things, and that you will cry out to the Lord to save you, and to make you a new creature because He is mighty to save and He will save you. "
Jesus Christ Saved Me from 27 Years of Homosexuality
Here's another
https://decisionmagazine.com/delivered-from-homosexuality/

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Not only that, but he said they were white-washed tombs. Clean on the outside, but filthy on the inside.

So true.

I came to my own understanding through the better part of half of a decade of seeing my own sins before me, and realizing I was not in the place to decide who enters the house of the Lord. God desires mercy, not sacrifice.

Yep. I have a similar understanding about myself, FD. But apparently some folks think it's their job to renovate America.

 

[FireDragon76]

Well, it's been scientifically shown now there is no "gay gene" so people are not born that way. That's simply an excuse, and a bad one.

That's a pointless argument, since there doesn't have to be a single gene for a given phenotype. There is such a thing as epigenetics, after all.

The practice is an environmental one mostly, and a learned behavior.

No it isn't. If Christians are to be credible, they have to start being more intellectually honest than that.

 

[FireDragon76]

So true.

Yep. I have a similar understanding about myself, FD. But apparently some folks think it's their job to renovate America.

I think it comes from a fear-based worldview that misunderstands, or perhaps misrepresents, God's character for the purposes of manipulating people to obtain power and control. Not unlike the Pharisees.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Well, it's been scientifically shown now there is no "gay gene" so people are not born that way. That's simply an excuse, and a bad one.
The practice is an environmental one mostly, and a learned behavior. And let's face it: the flesh loves to experiment with sin, especially sexual sin. Sexuality was designed by the Creator to be between male and female.
I know the arguments, that certain scriptures only refer to male prostitutes, Sodom's sin was pride, not sodomy, and sodomites means prostitutes, etc. Well, male with male homosexuality is expressly forbidden by Lev. 18:22, and reiterated in Romans 1:26-27 where woman with woman homosexuality is also mentioned. Romans is very clear and leaves no wiggle room for excuse.
In 1 Corinthians 6 it says to the Christians, "And such WERE some of you, but YE ARE washed, sanctified & justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God." Where it says "abusers of themselves with mankind (arsenokoites) means men going to bed with men - it does not mean only a male prostitute, though that would be included. Scripture is clear a truly born again believer WAS those things in the past, but is no longer, and has been delivered by Christ and God's power.

I pray the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ lead you into all truth.

Here is a testimony:

"My name is David, I am 44 years old, and this is the testimony of how Jesus Christ saved me from twenty-seven years of homosexuality. I speak these things in love, not out of hatred. I speak these things out of somebody who has been there, who knows what it is like, who knows what it’s like to live in that (homosexuality), who knows how hopeless it is. Sure you may enjoy your life, you may enjoy aspects of your life, you may enjoy the sexual aspects of it, the alcohol, what have you, but there’s really no permanent joy in it. Eventually it goes away and you have to do more, seek more.
So, I ask you to look for the real love, the real joy, the real contentment that can only be found in being made right with God through Christ, through Christ’s work on the Cross. So, I speak these things from love, not from hate. I speak these things not in judgment. I am not judging somebody, I am just telling you what the Word of God says. The Word of God is what’s going to judge us. In fact, the Word of God is what says all these things are wrong, I am only telling people what the Word of God says. Like somebody should have told me.
My friend who did try to tell me, he tried to tell me in the nicest way, in a Christian way, that I was living a lifestyle that was contrary to what God wanted, not just in my sexual orientation but in every other aspect. He (my friend) knew I was not really a Christian. So I speak these things in love and I pray for your soul, and I pray that you will receive these things, and that you will cry out to the Lord to save you, and to make you a new creature because He is mighty to save and He will save you. "
Jesus Christ Saved Me from 27 Years of Homosexuality
Here's another
https://decisionmagazine.com/delivered-from-homosexuality/

Personally, I'd concentrate on helping straight folks who make up the majority of the population clean up their corporately influenced sexual corruptions way before attempting to address anything else we think may reside on the Deviance List.

In other words, let's primarily address the gargantuan social and psychological spillage of general hedonism left behind from what we might call the "Hefnerian Legacy," and then worry about other things ... and in the process actually love other human beings as human beings and see their significance regardless of their common sins.

 

[FireDragon76]

Personally, I'd concentrate on helping straight folks who make up the majority of the population clean up their corporately influenced sexual corruptions way before attempting to address anything else we think may reside on the Deviance List.

In other words, let's primarily address the gargantuan social and psychological spillage of general hedonism left behind from what we might call the "Hefnerian Legacy," and then worry about other things ... and in the process actually love other human beings as human beings and see their significance regardless of their common sins.

That's what I try to tell people in the past. Gay people didn't invent the sexual revolution or push for no-fault divorce. In fact no-fault divorce was enthusiastically passed into law by a Republican governor in California (who would later go on to be president, Ronald Reagan), and went on to sweep the nation without much ado at the time.

If you want to see how deeply the sexual revolution has affected the wider culture, even among conservatives, you can go to a place like the Villages, not too far from where I live. It's a town dedicated to retirees, and is deeply red politically, and almost exclusively white. But it has some of the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases in the whole state.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

I think it comes from a fear-based worldview that misunderstands, or perhaps misrepresents, God's character for the purposes of manipulating people to obtain power and control. Not unlike the Pharisees.

That's true too. But I think we both know that there is something perceived to be at stake by those who are more staunchly conservative in their Christian identity, and that is the misconceived notion that the U.S. has been, is and should be made to remain, a "Christian nation."

And as you already know, the problem with this notion is that it is a delusive one since the U.S. was only moderately influenced politically by Christians rather than actually being made and defined by them as a constitutionally Christian entity. But they think it is a "Christian entity" and that all competing notions of democracy in that idealization are counterfeit.

So, the main driver in this is that they think they're preventing the loss of the spiritual status of the nation ............................... kind of like how the Pharisees and the Zealots in Jesus' Israel thought they were working against losing their nation to the Romans.

 

[RileyG]

2 Timothy 3:16-17 NIV​

"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work."

Romans 1:26-27 NIV​

"Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error."

Isaiah 5:20 NIV​

"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter."

Matthew 24:35 NIV​

"Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away."

There’s differences between attraction and action. Attraction isn’t a choice, but sexual behavior is always a choice.

 

[RileyG]

Being autistic is not sin. If by "gay" you mean the original meaning of the word, no, but if meaning homosexual, then that is sin. The Scriptures are very clear on it, despite the twisting of scripture done by some churches that accept it, endorse it, and practice it. It is something people should repent of if practicing, just as one would repent of their adultery or fornication - and I learned the lesson the hard way with those two!

I do agree many don't practice the "love thy neighbor as thyself" as should be, and as far as politics - worldly politics has become an idol in some churches.

Simple. All sins must be repented of. No one is special or different.

(No, I am NOT saying autism is a sin.)

 

[2PhiloVoid]

That's what I try to tell people in the past. Gay people didn't invent the sexual revolution or push for no-fault divorce. In fact no-fault divorce was enthusiastically passed into law by a Republican governor in California (who would later go on to be president, Ronald Reagan), and went on to sweep the nation without much ado at the time.

If you want to see how deeply the sexual revolution has affected the wider culture, even among conservatives, you can go to a place like the Villages, not too far from where I live. It's a town dedicated to retirees, and is deeply red politically, and almost exclusively white. But it has some of the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases in the whole state.

Yes, I've heard about the spread of STI's among today's elderly. I'd like to say that I'm surprised but knowing the history of thought in our country, I'm not really surprised.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

I think it comes from a fear-based worldview that misunderstands, or perhaps misrepresents, God's character for the purposes of manipulating people to obtain power and control. Not unlike the Pharisees.

... to add to this thought you've cited, I'm afraid that the U.S. passed the point of Church renewal of any form. I think it's all going to continue to decline no matter what flavor of church or church policy is adopted.