Posted on 05/20/2005 4:02:04 AM PDT by Cornpone
Frankly, I never had much use for the attitude of American evangelicals who thought they were going to send some "old time religion" to a Christian church that was founded by a Babylonian Jew who went to Jerusalem for Passover and stayed for Pentecost where he heard Peter preach about Jesus the Nazarene.
Tell that to the 60% of the people who voted.
Man, what obediance to the great commission! What a light on the hill the Chaldean Church is!
Your suspicions may actually have some validity, but it sounds like this church needs SOMETHING. Life, hope, competition, a refresher course from some people that actually have the gall to take the Bible seriously, even if it means martyrdom. I'm not sure what has been lacking
Why they have'nt been witnessing in the first place. Are they afraid of death? That's silly -- that church sounds like it already dead to me if htey can criticize people that are preaching the Gospel.
Sometimes the age of a church just records how long it has been a fossil.
Maybe you don't but others do and there is a BIG difference between Catholicism and being a Protestant. Apparently Catholics feel threatened by the Protestants as well as exaggerating their antagonism towards Protestants by suggesting they are trying to buy them - LOL!
I doubt they're really trying to convert the Chaldeans all that hard, although they are Catholic, so I'm sure some of the Evangelicals will try to convert them just the same. It doesn't really matter that the resident Christians have given up proselytizing. If you look at religion as a commodity, having only 3% of the market means a lot of room for growth.
It's more a case of sour grapes on behalf of Catholics seeing Protestants making progress in conversion with Muslims. Catholics may also not want to upset the apple cart.
It's amazing how much you can save when you don't blow yourself up all the time.
I've noticed, though, that the Moslem/Christian conflicts in Iraq have taken the form of puritanical Shi'ites burning down liquor stores and movie theatres.
Could be Protestantism, which has elements with an even more puritanical streak, might fit in better with fundamental Iraqi attitudes. Besides, ecclesiastically speaking, Protestantism is much more in tune with Moslem forms of worship than is Catholicism. Odds favor the development of a native Iraqi syncratic Islamoprotestant movement.
Do you know any Chaldean Catholics?
I do. I know how many of them lost family members, homes and churches for their beliefs.
My daughter's friend in Kindergarten was born in Iraq. She taught me how to say, I'm cute in Iraqi.
When you spoke to her mother about life there, she couldn't even make it through a few sentances. Her mother was raped in front of her. Her brothers were missing.
The Chaldean Catholics have taken it on the chin for YEARS. The Protestants may be making progress with Muslims but the Catholic there have been beat on for years.
This happened when the Turks expelled Arabic speaking populations from South Eastern Anatolia. (NOTE: Armenians weren't the only guys who had problems with the Turks in that period).
For the most part these people are thoroughly assimilated now, but I grew up knowing about them as neighbors.
"It's more a case of sour grapes on behalf of Catholics seeing Protestants making progress in conversion with Muslims. Catholics may also not want to upset the apple cart."
>>Four US Baptist missionaries were killed in Iraq in March 2004 and seven South Korean Presbyterians were briefly kidnapped the following month.
That June, an armed group beheaded a South Korean truck driver who was an evangelical Christian.<<
Or perhaps Catholics are trying to warn the Protestants of something, because they've been there?
It's about time we quit recognizing this "religion" as such, until practices such as that are loudly denounced and repudiated by practitioners and clergy.
Are there any other significant religions operating like this? I don't believe so.
They are very nice people and the Mass at these churches are beautiful.
They are the reason why I get upset when someone generalizes that all Middle Easterners are our enemies.
They are my brothers.
Yeah. You can create a lot of discord by being ignorant of existing traditions.
Actually, the Catholic Church has traditionally been involved in missionary work far longer than the Protestant Churches, even after the Reformation.
The Jesuits, for example, were founded as a missionary organization. Catholics were first to missionize the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Francis Xavier was in Japan long before Protestants were even thinking about traveling the world spreading their faith. This is in part why there are more than twice as many Catholics in the world than members of all the Protestant denominations combined. These missionary efforts were very strong even into the 20th century.
Unfortunately, recently (and by that I mean within the last forty years) there has been an insurgence of modernist attitudes within the Church that have downplayed the importance of the call to missionary work throughout the world. This is not a matter of a change in official teaching, but rather of certain attitudes that have arisen that are not completely orthodox nor square with Holy Scripture. It is quite erroneous, however, to hold that these recent attitudes (which certainly are not espoused by all Catholics - there is still true missionary work going on within the Catholic Church today) are reflective of Catholic history as a whole.
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