Posted on 08/12/2013 5:32:45 PM PDT by luvie
Unintended Consequences: How the “relevant” church and segregating youth is killing Christianity.
I recently spent six-months doing a rotation as a hospital chaplain. One day I received a page (Yes, hospitals actually still use pagers). Chaplains are generally called to the rooms of people who look ill: People gray with kidney disease, or yellow with liver failure, discouraged amputees, nervous cancer patients. In this room, however, was a strikingly attractive 23 year-old young lady sitting up cheerfully in the hospital bed, holding her infant daughter and chatting with family and friends.
Confused, I stepped outside and asked her nurse, “Why did I get paged to her room?”
“Oh, she looks fabulous. She also feels great and is asking to go home,” the nurse said.
“…And you are calling me because?” I asked in confusion.
The nurse looked me directly in the eye and said: “Because we will be disconnecting her from life support in three days and you will be doing her funeral in four.”
The young lady had taken too much Tylenol. She looked and acted fine. She even felt fine, but she was in full-blown liver failure. She was dying and couldn’t bring herself to accept the diagnosis.
Today I have the sense that we are at the same place in the church. The church may look healthy on the outside, but it has swallowed the fatal pills. The evidence is stacking up: the church is dying and, for the most part, we are refusing the diagnosis.
(Excerpt) Read more at thegospelside.com ...
Self-esteem is what 2013 considers spiritual feeding.
Yes, words that tickle their ears but do not feed them with God’s truth! Sad.....
Quite an article, though of course not a popular idea in today’s ‘McChurch’.
Once you get past the too-loud guitars, ‘worship team’ members dressed in cutoff shorts and flip-flops leading worship and marketing exercises disguised as worship, you get a good look at some of today’s churches.
My church, which is considered fairly conservative, would do anything to attract a college student including running roughshod over the standards and values of worship of existing longtime members. A lot of times the people the service is designed to attract wind up leaving anyway.
“Sinners In The Hands of an Angry God” is one of my favorite sermons. We need that printed for free.
It’s disturbing and sad that the ones they are targeting will never really learn the truth from such “worshiptainment”.
I hope your church will someday see the light, and return to their first Love.
Surrender your will to God. Really let go and let God. We are constantly tempted by evil to become God ourself. We need to be ever vigilant, and return right back when we find we have strayed. Of course Jesus is the only savior. No one can find God except through him. In my opinion we are grafted back into the same vine He is.
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You don’t replace God with symbols. You cannot pray to the symbols.
What’s wrong with cowboy or truck stop churches? They serve those in careers that might make it difficult for them to attend conventional churches. Along the same line, the Church of Land and Sea in New York City and the Mariners’ Church in Detroit served sailors during the previous two centuries.
No, but the right signs dispose us to pray to the right god, just as the right kind of music does. We are sensible beings, not angels.and sound is not our only sense.
....or to cymbals! :)
edh, God is good, All the time!
14 extra strength tylenol tablets in a day are enough to cause an overdose.
I remember the beginnings of cowboy churches, made sense then and still does. People that rodeo for a living travel constantly and seldom are at home.
Many rodeo people are Christian and want to attend church but it was difficult for them to find out necessary information- time, location, etc. to attend church in a town they may only be in for a few hours or a day. Add to that mix that most are driving trucks, pulling horse trailers and don’t want to wander about town too much. Due to clothing and cultural issues they also did not feel welcome at many churches if they did manage to hunt one up.
Cowboy church solved those issues, the church service is held right at the rodeo grounds so not hard to find, others there dress and act as you do and in fact are your friends that you rodeo with so it is like a community church wherever you may be.
Cowboy church has grown to include many other people; mostly rural people who again may not feel welcome at the church in the nearest town/city. I am not sure why you are against Cowboy Church, it is much like the small town church of our past. I think judgmental people like you are the reason Cowboy Churches exist.
tylenol overdose? They can be nasty, and fatal, but there is an antidote for that... and nowadays if the liver degenerates, they will try to do a transplant.
Must be an old story.
GL would be the first to insist upon using the Scriptures in worship, but will not acknowledge that words themselves are symbols.
It is okay to write "cross" but not to draw a cross, according to this muddled line of thinking.
There is a point where it becomes a totem or idolatry.
If the symbol is a REQUIREMENT for your worship, then you are doing it wrong.
I never said it was wrong to draw a cross.
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