>>But what if I go to a mass, it’s all in some foreign language and I can’t understand what is being taught? Why would I stay?<<
At the time of the traditional Latin Mass, Latin was taught in high schools. Most people understood some words, Catholics understood them all.
This was the part of the general dumbing down of society.
“At the time of the traditional Latin Mass, Latin was taught in high schools. Most people understood some words, Catholics understood them all.”
But we have passed those times by. To pretend that high schools still teach latin and live your life in that fantasy seems ridiculous. It reminds me of a debate going on in my family right now. My wife of almost 3 months was raised in the Church of the Nazarene as was her mother and so forth. I was saved in 2005 and Baptized at a Pentacostal/Charismatic church. I’ve changed churches three or four times due to moving but always kind of stuck with the charismatic (fun, non-boring) churches. I’ve been to my wife’s church and it seems stuck in the 1950’s. The message is wonderful but the worship music is hymnals and 90% of the people there are 65 and older. They worry that younger people no longer come to services there. The place is dying. The words that come to mind are “old, slow, boring and sad.”
I believe the message should never change but perhaps the delivery, environment...atmosphere.....in America today if you bore “me” I’m out. Holding on to the past in terms of delivery, environment and atmosphere might be important to some but is it more important to watch one’s church die or to swallow some pride and modernize everything EXCEPT the message?
The church I currently attend is three years old next week. We have 500 at fellowship every Sunday. It is anything BUT old, sad, boring and slow but the message is straight out of the Bible, nothing watered down and nothing left out so as to not “offend.”
My wife wants us to go to her church and see if there is something that we can do to save it. Unfortunately the blue hairs that currently inhabit the place are so entrenched in the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality that I think they would rather die as a church than change enough to bring new and younger people in.
I started out by saying “But we have passed those times by. To pretend that high schools still teach latin and live your life in that fantasy seems ridiculous” I think that in some dying protestant churches, they don’t see that the times have passed the hymn books by. I believe that we can get so stuck in our little box that we cannot think outside of it.