I cannot believe that John Wesley would ever accept the idea that a human written set of rules would allow us to set aside our obedience to Holy Scripture.
Indeed, on this point we agree.
Our baptismal vows, which are also binding, say that we are to oppose evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves. If a provision of the Discipline leads to oppression or injustice, it also has to be opposed.
I agree but I do not agree that such a provision was created by the Traditional Plan.
At any rate, I really want us to discuss with other mainline and mainstream Christians how to save the mainline denominations. You indicated a willingness to let me tag you in that thread and quote you and I have vouchsafed to conduct the thread in accordance with strict parameters, including not directly discussing human sexuality but rather referring to controversial issues in order to avoid stirring up a hornets nest of interlopers who will flame both you and I for being liberal. I also proposed two potential safe space alternatives to Denomination Specific Theology if you preferred, namely the Moderate Christianity forum and especially Traditional Theology, which has a culture devoid of polemics and where people associated with the mainline churches tend to hang out.
I just desperately want to have a conversation, after we celebrate Pascha (Easter) on Sunday about how to save the mainline and traditional mainstream churches whose membership is either stagnant or shrinking, in some cases spectacularly, such as the especially tragic case of the Episcopal Church, for every major American, Canadian, Australian, British and Kiwi city typically has two great cathedrals, one Roman Catholic and one Anglican. I want to analyze attributes of churches whose membership is growing, including some continuing Anglican churches, some Orthodox churches (but not the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in North America, which is starting to lose members), the Assyrian Church of the East, and also the Traditional Latin Mass movement and the popularity of the highly liturgical monasteries of Elder Ephrem of Arizona (who I once met; he reposed in 2018), and I want your opinions and the opinions of representatives of other mainline and mainstream Protestant denominations, including Episcopalians and other mainline Anglicans, the ELCA, the PCUSA, the SBC, the LCMS, the UCC, the Christian Church/Disciples of Christ, the Reformed Church in America, and pretty much anyone else in this category, as well as representatives of Orthodox churches which are expanding and contracting and Roman Catholics who are contracting, but manage to get a full house at the Tridentine liturgy.
I believe, based on earlier remarks you and
@seeking.IAM made, that we might actually agree on a solution, one involving liturgical worship services and Wesleyan concepts that are applicable outside of Methodism, and I want to hear everyone’s ideas. The reason why I am into congregationalism now is because beautiful high church liturgical congregationalism is dying just as the UCC is dying; there is only one traditional Congregational church left in Boston, due to the UCC moving in other directions and the theft of our parishes and Harvard by the Unitarians in the late 18th and early 19th century (if only the Puritans had spent time thinking of ways to prevent a congregation from converting to a different religion from Christianity rather than executing innocent people on bogus accusations of witchcraft, and just after Puritanism became the more refined and less radical Congregationalist Christian Church and had its issues worked out by folks like Rev. Jonathan Edwards, who was a preacher perfectly suited for the 1700s but whose legendary sermon Sinners In The Hands of an Angry God would probably not have the desired effect today, we were hit with the Unitarian schism, and lost among other things the Old Ship Church in Providence, the oldest in the US. And the Unitarian Universalist Association and other heretical groups like the Mormons and the J/Ws, who are especially noxious because their religion, also called the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, practices Scientology—style shunning, has rigid discipline, bans blood transfusions based on an absurd reading of Acts 15, and publishes an intentionally corrupted Bible to defend their Arian belief system, in which John 1:1 and probably other verses have been tampered with, are taking members from our Christian churches. It is dreadful and we need through God’s help to turn the tide against them. Indeed of such groups, the only one mercifully dying off is Christian Science, probably due to publicity over their opposition to the medical profession leading to the death of several children ostensibly being cared for by “Christian Science Practitioners” who you pay to pray (which sounds like simony to me) and probably the aversion to doctors that cost the brilliant puppeteer Jim Henson his life. But are we doing all we can do to secure their buildimgs and make them proper churches, and to prevent their members from becoming unchurched? Christian Science for many decades had an undeserved veneer of respectability; I thought they were just another denomination for many years thanks to the Christian Science Monitor and the formerly uniquitous denizens of strip malls, the Christian Science Reading Room, until I learned what they were about.
But such a discussion would be valueless without your opinion as a progressive methodist, so that is why I seek your blessing to start such a discussion, a strictly non-polemical discussion, on Monday, I think in Traditional Theology (which is reserved for members of the historic denominations and liturgical churches like ours) on how to arrest the loss of members and resume growing the church. As I see it such a discussion is worth it even if we can agree on one common point and relay it to our denominational leadership.
i hope you have a blessed Good Friday and a joyous Easter.
