Posted on 11/30/2016 2:41:47 PM PST by SeekAndFind
A Canadian study has found that Mainline Protestant churches that have both modern worship services and teach a literal interpretation of the Bible grow faster.
(Photo: Reuters/John Gress)A parishioner cries as he signs a song of worship in the 7,000-seat Willow Creek Community church during a Sunday service in South Barrington, Illinois, November 20, 2005. Institutions like Willow Creek and Houston's Lakewood Church, each drawing 20,000 or more on a weekend, offer not just a vast, shared attraction but a path that tries to link individuals on a faith-sustaining one-to-one level beyond the crowd, observers and worshipers say.
The Canadian researchers who authored the study, "Theology Matters: Comparing the Traits of Growing and Declining Mainline Protestant Church Attendees and Clergy," surveyed 2,225 churchgoers in Ontario, Canada, and interviewed 29 clergy and 195 congregants. The study will be published in next month's issue of the Review of Religious Research.
"This study was important because it quantified empirically something that evangelical renewalists have been saying for decades — theology matters," said the Rev. Tom Lambrecht, vice president and general manager of Good News Magazine, a United Methodist publication, in an interview with The Christian Post.
Lambrecht, who served for 29 years as a United Methodist minister in Wisconsin, told CP that people who are interested in the things of God "want spiritual substance, not just a feel-good message or the opportunity to engage in community service." The Church, he said, has to to be distinct from and offer more than local civic associations and charities.
A solidly Orthodox Gospel that motivates churches to adapt their worship life and ministries to engage the next generation more effectively will be one where the message remains the same, but the means of delivery look different.
The study also showed that services at growing "churches featured contemporary worship with drums and guitars, while declining churches favoured traditional styles of worship with organ and choir."
"The use of contemporary Christian worship music is an example of that adaptation," Lambrecht said. "It has been around for over 40 years, yet some churches still resist making that adaptation." He added, however, that he's seen examples of churches that have more traditional styles of worship that are also yielding growth.
Pastor John Daffern who leads a Southern Baptist congregation in Columbus, Mississippi, calls himself "an apologist for the modern church."
(Photo: Chris Ellis Photograhpy)Josh Daffern, pastor of MTV Church in Columbus, Mississippi.
"I pastor a church that fits that mold," said Daffern, who leads MTV Church, in a recent interview with CP after he read some of the study's findings.
"We are theologically conservative, according to that study, and yet we are unashamedly modern and we are in a sustained period of growth in our church, and that is in direct contrast to many of the Mainline churches and even some evangelical churches.
"And I think the wisdom of that study is the two parts. There does need to be a modern sense of an expression of the faith while at the same time a conservative, Orthodox view of Christianity," he added.
Daffern said he believes that what church growth comes down to is how man-made controls are applied and both liberals and conservatives do that in their own way.
"For those who would say that we want to liberalize the tenets of Christianity and pick and choose which parts we are comfortable with and which parts we aren't, that's man exerting control over the theology," Daffern said.
"In the same way, a conservative theology yet a traditional approach is still trying to exert man-made control over religion, but it's not over the theology but over the cultural expression," which amounts to an approach which he describes as leaders saying, "Hey, we're going to stick to the Bible but we're going to pretend that it is the 1950s or the 1960s."
Those man-made controls rob the supernatural aspect out of Christian faith, he asserted.
Lead researcher of the study, David Haskell, said in an interview with The Guardian earlier this month that Christians who rely on a fairly literal interpretation of the Bible, "are profoundly convinced of [the] life-saving, life-altering benefits that only their faith can provide, [and] they are motivated by emotions of compassion and concern to recruit family, friends and acquaintances into their faith and into their church."
The study also found that only half of the clergy interviewed who are presiding over declining churches agreed that it was "very important to encourage non-Christians to become Christians," whereas every member of the clergy in a growing church felt that way.
A whopping 93 percent of clergy and 83 percent of worshipers from growing churches believed in the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, compared to 67 percent of worshipers and 56 percent of clergy from declining churches. One hundred percent of clergy and 90 percent of worshipers from growing churches believe God does miracles in response to prayer, whereas only 44 percent of clergy and 80 percent of worshipers from declining churches say so.
"One of the reasons that people are drawn to modern churches is because people don't want to be part of a monument." Daffern asserted. "They want to be part of a movement. One of the greatest beauties of Christianity is that it is living and active."
"In my world, as a Southern Baptist pastor, I tend to deal with churches that have a conservative view of the Bible yet a very traditional mindset, often times it is monument to a bygone era of what they imagine to be the golden age' of Christianity in America."
Such churches are perfectly poised to come back were the 1950s ever to return, he mused.
However, the problem with some more modern churches, he added, is that people sometimes make the modern expression itself an idol of sorts.
"But the key is to be modern enough while not being a mere imitation of everything else around in culture."
(I mean, don’t let any man steal away your hope in it.)
In the Upper Room on the night before His crucifixion, did Jesus feed hunks of his flesh and a pint of His blood to the present disciples? No, and He even made the point to identify what He gave them to drink in Remembrance of what He was about to accomplish for us. Of course, with the hallmark of catholiciism, Magic Thinking, the Catholic twisted mind will give some magical explanation rather than acknowledge the TRUTH of what Jesus establish on that night before going to the Cross. Why don’t you give us an illustration of how Catholic Magic Thinking explains away the TRUTH of that first expressing of the Remembrance. Surely you can muster that one to support your heretical assertions!
If Christ offered the payment for our sin...all of the payment...then there is nothing we can do to earn our salvation.
Pax tibi, HT RN.
Thanks for the clarification, HT RN.
"If"???
It’s not an easy issue to deal with. This view of the communion, or something close to it, was common in the 2nd century church, or so I’ve heard averred.
It’s not even so much a “Catholic” problem as a “fallen people” problem. As the Jewish quotient of the church fell away so did any Jewish perspective which would have warned against doing that.
Christ was in the pillar of cloud at the emancipation of the Hebrews from Egypt, and they drank into it spiritually. Concentrating on doing this again at the communion would have been obvious to the Jewish Christians. Gentiles had to regard this ex nihilo. Lutherans managed an incomplete separation from the idea... to them the body and the blood is “in, on, and under” the bread and the wine but still not the bread and the wine. Other evangelical followings regarded the body and blood as being consumed in the soul, without physical relationship to the bread and the wine. Whichever one, someone taking it with the thought that “I now accept the body and the blood” would be right, but not for the reason they might envision.
How desperate does a Catholic have to be, to use Luther as a source?
Because.
An evangelical CATHOLIC!
Well I certainly believe the body and blood of Christ are really present to me at taking the communion — and that they are also really present to me at other times too, whenever needed. But the communion is a “no excuses” occasion. I’m making a purposeful declaration now.
Some manage to think outside the box. I don’t think we should be treating them as though they were thinking only inside the box.
Just because.
Wasn't there a song called "Just Because"--I don't recall but it sounds familiar.
The good Lord please bless Mike Pence to a mission of blessing, as You have blessed Donald Trump to a mission of blessing.
If => Because of
semel in anno licet insanire
Some folks take it too darned often.
Using it to counter your point. If Christ paid for our sins there is nothing we can do to pay for our sins.
IF and BECAUSE => conjunctions
Luther is a hero or a goat.
Depending on what Catholics are trying to prove.
So you continue in your sophistry, imagining that statements taken in isolation is what Scriptures teaches as the plain meaning, and that you even believe the plain literal meaning of the words of Christ?
Nowhere is the bread and wine said to be changed into the body and blood of Christ, and the plain literal meaning of the words of Christ would mean that since the Lord's body and blood that are to as be consumed are said to be that which would be broken/crucified (1Co. 11:24) and poured out, then to be plainly literal this has to be the manifestly incarnated body and blood of Christ, not something that looks, tastes, and would scientifically test as bread and wine.
What kind of Christ is that? For as John teaches (in contrast to the Christ of certain Gnostics), that "Christ is come in the flesh" is true in the light of His manifest physicality, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life," (1 John 1:1) "This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth." (1 John 5:6)
A false Christ is one that did not manifestly come in the flesh. While within Gnosticism you had the belief that what Christ looked like, as manifestly being incarnated with a body of flesh and blood, was not real (Christ being a sort of phantom but looking human), in Catholicism you have the belief that (in transubstantiation) what looks, feels, tastes and would test as (bread and wine), is not reality (Christ corporeal body and blood only looking like bread and wine). In fact, the bread and wine that you see after consecration no longer actually exists according to transubstantiation.
Thus to be plainly literally, is can only be assumed the apostles consumed the actual bloody flesh and liquid blood of Christ, for this is what the Lord referred to at the last supper and Jn. 6, and said nothing at all about some unique miracle of transubstantiation so that Christ appeared to be bread and wine, which is contrary to His incarnation and the evidence of the real Christ.
But faced with reality, Catholicism had to come up with fancy some Aristotelian metaphysics, which is certainly not the plain literal meaning of the words at the last supper or Jn. 6, if they are to be taken literally.
Moreover, if the words at issue of of the last supper are to be taken literally, then so must others, such as David plainly called water the sacrificial blood of men, and therefore pouring it out unto the Lord.
And the three mighty men brake through the host of the Philistines, and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the gate, and took it, and brought it to David: nevertheless he would not drink thereof, but poured it out unto the Lord. And he said, Be it far from me, O Lord, that I should do this: is not this the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives? therefore he would not drink it. (2 Samuel 23:16-17)
Why not be consistent and take this literally, and explain it as transubstantiation?
And there are multitude more , but just as the "living water" that gives eternal life and many other metaphors are explained as we read more of Scripture, so also are the words as issue here.
Both the plainly literal and the novel pseudoliteral meaning of the words at issue contrived by Catholicism are not supported by the rest of Scripture, and insisting on such manifests ignorance or worse, while these words easily conflate with the metaphorical meaning. As much explained by the grace of God.
Even Luther was appalled by those who denied the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
A Catholic source actually found that the term "Real Presence" was originally an Anglican term, used in distinction from Catholicism.
Meanwhile, Luther carried a lot of baggage with him when he left Rome, some of which he progressively shed, and his views on the Eucharist saw some change, but the idea that we hold Luther as an infallible pope or even one of our most faithful teachers is a typical Cath. fallacy.
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