Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Megachurch
43,500 weekly attendance
Posted on 08/27/2013 11:53:37 AM PDT by NYer
Megachurch. Two young ladies. Both had left the Catholic Church. Both were now attending “megachurches.” We had a good chat together. I wanted to understand their reasons for why they left the Catholic Church for a megachurch.
Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Megachurch
43,500 weekly attendance
I was at the bank and somehow I got into a spiritual conversation with two Hispanic executives that worked there.
When I asked why they exchanged the Catholic Church for the megachurch, they gave me a number of reasons:
Although these two ladies didn’t articulate it explicitly to me, I could tell that they were very proud of their new churches. I could also discern in them a surprise that I am so “spiritual” and yet I am very excited about being Catholic. They assumed the “with it” people were leaving Catholicism for the bigger and better and deal.
I asked them what they miss about being Catholic. They replied with two answers:
I asked both about the Eucharist: “Don’t you miss the Eucharist?”
This question didn’t phase them one bit. “Oh we still have communion. They pass out little crackers and cups of juice. I like this better because I thought drinking from one big cup is icky. Spreads germs.”
“But in the Catholic Church,” I replied, “we believe that the Eucharist is the real Body and Blood of Jesus?”
I may as well have said, “Don’t you know that there are Martians in my back pocket.” She was unaware that the Catholic Church taught this. No idea.
This, my brothers and sisters, is the crux of the problem. These girls were raised as Catholics, but did not know about the Eucharist. They did not know that the Eucharist is God. They did not understand the Holy Eucharist is the center of the Catholic tradition.
So when they compare our ho-hum Catholic music and pedestrian sermons to snazzy well produced musical productions and highly polished bulleted sermons from handsome professional speakers…where are they going to go?
If they had believed that the Holy Eucharist is truly the Lord Jesus Christ, then they would have stayed. This is the task of the New Evangelization if there is going to be one. Can we communicate the mystery of Eucharist. If we fail in that, everyone is leaving the building.
Godspeed,
Taylor
PS: I don’t mean to suggest that having the Holy Eucharist is an excuse for bad music, bad vestments, bad architecture, and bad sermons. The Eucharist is like a precious diamond. It deserves a platinum setting…not a plastic setting. We can’t say, “Well, we have the Eucharist – so you’re forced to stay and have a miserable experience every Sunday.” We can’t keep the sacraments hostage to mediocracy.
PPS: With 1 billion strong, the Catholic Church is the real megachurch!
Pope Francis at Rio de Janeiro
3 million people
You can find out more about what really happened concerning the Bible and the Roman Catholic Church by reading http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/. Of interest, especially regarding why Rome persecuted and murdered those who would dare translate the Bible into the language of the common people is:
One of Wycliffe’s followers, John Hus, actively promoted Wycliffe’s ideas: that people should be permitted to read the Bible in their own language, and they should oppose the tyranny of the Roman church that threatened anyone possessing a non-Latin Bible with execution. Hus was burned at the stake in 1415, with Wycliffe’s manuscript Bibles used as kindling for the fire. The last words of John Hus were that, “in 100 years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed.” Almost exactly 100 years later, in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses of Contention (a list of 95 issues of heretical theology and crimes of the Roman Catholic Church) into the church door at Wittenberg. The prophecy of Hus had come true! Martin Luther went on to be the first person to translate and publish the Bible in the commonly-spoken dialect of the German people; a translation more appealing than previous German Biblical translations. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs records that in that same year, 1517, seven people were burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church for the crime of teaching their children to say the Lord’s Prayer in English rather than Latin.
In considering the experiences of Linacre and Colet, the great scholar Erasmus was so moved to correct the corrupt Latin Vulgate, that in 1516, with the help of printer John Froben, he published a Greek-Latin Parallel New Testament. The Latin part was not the corrupt Vulgate, but his own fresh rendering of the text from the more accurate and reliable Greek, which he had managed to collate from a half-dozen partial old Greek New Testament manuscripts he had acquired. This milestone was the first non-Latin Vulgate text of the scripture to be produced in a millennium… and the first ever to come off a printing press. The 1516 Greek-Latin New Testament of Erasmus further focused attention on just how corrupt and inaccurate the Latin Vulgate had become, and how important it was to go back and use the original Greek (New Testament) and original Hebrew (Old Testament) languages to maintain accuracy… and to translate them faithfully into the languages of the common people, whether that be English, German, or any other tongue. No sympathy for this “illegal activity” was to be found from Rome… even as the words of Pope Leo X's declaration that "the fable of Christ was quite profitable to him" continued through the years to infuriate the people of God.
Tyndale showed up on Luther's doorstep in Germany in 1525, and by year's end had translated the New Testament into English. Tyndale had been forced to flee England, because of the wide-spread rumor that his English New Testament project was underway, causing inquisitors and bounty hunters to be constantly on Tyndale's trail to arrest him and prevent his project. God foiled their plans, and in 1525-1526 the Tyndale New Testament became the first printed edition of the scripture in the English language. Subsequent printings of the Tyndale New Testament in the 1530's were often elaborately illustrated.
They were burned as soon as the Bishop could confiscate them, but copies trickled through and actually ended up in the bedroom of King Henry VIII. The more the King and Bishop resisted its distribution, the more fascinated the public at large became. The church declared it contained thousands of errors as they torched hundreds of New Testaments confiscated by the clergy, while in fact, they burned them because they could find no errors at all. One risked death by burning if caught in mere possession of Tyndale's forbidden books.
Having God's Word available to the public in the language of the common man, English, would have meant disaster to the church. No longer would they control access to the scriptures. If people were able to read the Bible in their own tongue, the church's income and power would crumble. They could not possibly continue to get away with selling indulgences (the forgiveness of sins) or selling the release of loved ones from a church-manufactured "Purgatory". People would begin to challenge the church's authority if the church were exposed as frauds and thieves. The contradictions between what God's Word said, and what the priests taught, would open the public's eyes and the truth would set them free from the grip of fear that the institutional church held. Salvation through faith, not works or donations, would be understood. The need for priests would vanish through the priesthood of all believers. The veneration of church-canonized Saints and Mary would be called into question. The availability of the scriptures in English was the biggest threat imaginable to the wicked church. Neither side would give up without a fight.
By the 1580's, the Roman Catholic Church saw that it had lost the battle to suppress the will of God: that His Holy Word be available in the English language. In 1582, the Church of Rome surrendered their fight for "Latin only" and decided that if the Bible was to be available in English, they would at least have an official Roman Catholic English translation. And so, using the corrupt and inaccurate Latin Vulgate as the only source text, they went on to publish an English Bible with all the distortions and corruptions that Erasmus had revealed and warned of 75 years earlier. Because it was translated at the Roman Catholic College in the city of Rheims, it was known as the Rheims New Testament (also spelled Rhemes). The Douay Old Testament was translated by the Church of Rome in 1609 at the College in the city of Douay (also spelled Doway & Douai). The combined product is commonly referred to as the "Doway/Rheims" Version. In 1589, Dr. William Fulke of Cambridge published the "Fulke's Refutation", in which he printed in parallel columns the Bishops Version along side the Rheims Version, attempting to show the error and distortion of the Roman Church's corrupt compromise of an English version of the Bible.
With the death of Queen Elizabeth I, Prince James VI of Scotland became King James I of England. The Protestant clergy approached the new King in 1604 and announced their desire for a new translation to replace the Bishop's Bible first printed in 1568. They knew that the Geneva Version had won the hearts of the people because of its excellent scholarship, accuracy, and exhaustive commentary. However, they did not want the controversial marginal notes (proclaiming the Pope an Anti-Christ, etc.) Essentially, the leaders of the church desired a Bible for the people, with scriptural references only for word clarification or cross-references.
This "translation to end all translations" (for a while at least) was the result of the combined effort of about fifty scholars. They took into consideration: The Tyndale New Testament, The Coverdale Bible, The Matthews Bible, The Great Bible, The Geneva Bible, and even the Rheims New Testament. The great revision of the Bishop's Bible had begun. From 1605 to 1606 the scholars engaged in private research. From 1607 to 1609 the work was assembled. In 1610 the work went to press, and in 1611 the first of the huge (16 inch tall) pulpit folios known today as "The 1611 King James Bible" came off the printing press. A typographical discrepancy in Ruth 3:15 rendered a pronoun "He" instead of "She" in that verse in some printings. This caused some of the 1611 First Editions to be known by collectors as "He" Bibles, and others as "She" Bibles. Starting just one year after the huge 1611 pulpit-size King James Bibles were printed and chained to every church pulpit in England; printing then began on the earliest normal-size printings of the King James Bible. These were produced so individuals could have their own personal copy of the Bible.
This is only an excerpt from the link, so please read the whole article as much more information about how we got the Scriptures we have.
think about it, do you think that kids in the year 500 got up at 7:00 a.m. and went off to school to learn to read and write......their parents couldn't teach them to do so because they, themselves were unable to do it.....it was, as time went by, the Catholic church which pushed forward the idea of community educational facilities...schools, universities, whatever....it was ONLY through Catholic institutions that these things became popular....check it out
Who were the real “heretics” since Christ never authorized Bible burning or suppression of so-called heresies by means of the sword.
No one called Roman Catholic the Whore...Catholics will tell you that their 'Church' is an institution...Beyond any mere human who might wander into it or represent it...It is 'that' institution that is referenced in the book of Revelation, the Whore...
Well, still count me skeptical... I think some aspects of the institution may presage the Whore as Barack Obama presages the Antichrist. But it’s unlikely to be that actual Revelation’s Whore any more than Barack Obama is the Revelation’s Antichrist. That Whore will be VERY badly behaved, VERY sold out to evil; whatever the character of the Roman institution it at least still has a very stellar take on life issues, better even than that of a lot of evangelicals. It has served admirably as the world’s conscience in that area, of course the glory being the Lord’s not its. And the Whore also appears post rapture and after the Holy Spirit is “taken out of the way.” I can’t buy that the RC institution is the Revelation Whore. Even though I believe they’re wrong in their institutional stance. It is not evil enough.
And incidentally... the events of the Protestant Reformation have ended up largely forcing the Roman Catholic institution out of the secular government business, one of the more troubling “whorish” things into which institutions of Christendom have gotten if one has to use such crude language. It’s actually in a LESS bad position now than it had been.
Let’s get some perspective here. I think the institution does in troubling ways block the grace of Christ by making too much of its own role, but Christ still works around it to its people. Christ did not stop being a Conqueror because Christian men presumed to repeat the errors of the Pharisees.
In reading some of the lives/legends of Saints in the “Dark” ages and through the 15th century and beyond, I gradually came to appreciate the chaos of Europe and the whole Mediterranean after the break up of Rome. Penguin publishes a terrific historical atlas presenting clearly the constant bloody ebb and flow.
So, while I think the loss of the Papal States was one of the best things that ever happened, I can understand, if I squinch up my eyes, how a Pope would have thought some kind of civil rule was necessary.
I suggest you refer to a less biased source, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica which is certainly no friend of the Catholic Church, or even Wikipedia.
Core belief of the Cathars:The idea of two Gods or principles, one being good the other evil, was central to Cathar beliefs. The good God was the God of the New Testament and the creator of the spiritual realm as opposed to the bad God who many Cathars identified as Satan creator of the physical world of the Old Testament. All visible matter was created by Satan, it was therefore tainted with sin, this even included the human body. Human souls were thought to be the genderless souls of Angels trapped within the physical creation of Satan cursed to be reincarnated until the Cathar faithful achieved salvation through a ritual called the Consolamentum.[5]
I don't think any current protestant church would agree with these beliefs.
Who were the real “heretics” since Christ never authorized Bible burning or suppression of so-called heresies by means of the sword.
I think we need to be very careful when we judge the actions of groups or individuals in the past based on mores of our time.
The Catholic Church has maintained that we hold the fullness of faith and that inherent in that is a duty to protect others from falling into heresy.
Further the Catholic Church has also always viewed itself as the "Body of Christ" and Christ did instruct His followers to take up the sword to defend themselves: Lukle 22:35 He said to them, “When I sent you forth without a money bag or a sack or sandals, were you in need of anything?” “No, nothing,” they replied.
36 He said to them,* “But now one who has a money bag should take it, and likewise a sack, and one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one.
37 For I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me, namely, ‘He was counted among the wicked’; and indeed what is written about me is coming to fulfillment.”
38 Then they said, “Lord, look, there are two swords here.” But he replied, “It is enough!”*
At the time these heresies were viewed as direct assaults on the Church, the Body of Christ.
Scripture also calls her the mother of "God."
To paraphrase you: Words mean things "Mother of my Lord" is the same as saying "Mother of God"
And thus would have the right to kill those holding such beliefs?
It's mot matter of judging actions of long ago by today's standards. Stephen was murdered for his beliefs stated before the Sanhedrin. They too might argue they had a duty to stop this heresy but then as now these men were murderers and those who, like Saul, approved were just as guilty.
“Further the Catholic Church has also always viewed itself as the “Body of Christ” and Christ did instruct His followers to take up the sword to defend themselves”
Not so. When the disciples showed up with two swords Jesus said “that's enough”, and rebuked Peter for using a sword on the High Priests’ slave since Jesus could call on legions of angels for protection.
Where were swords defending James or Stephen, Peter, Paul?
“The Catholic Church has maintained that we hold the fullness of faith and that inherent in that is a duty to protect others from falling into heresy.”
The Pharisees had the same view and were willing to murder anyone who disagreed, even the resurrected Lazarus, lest the Romans come and take away their positions and nation.
The "private message" should have been posted openly on the other thread. That would have been more proper.
This is what I did say;
The "do penance" aspect, is not limited to self-flagellation, for I was characterizing the "do penance" (in comparison or contrast to simply repent) as a whipping one's self type of thing and did not state that it was taught as a doctrine of the church --- which you put in quotation marks, as if to be quoting myself as having said or used that exact phrase. Now I did say that that approach was doctrines of demons. Are you confessing the church (unofficially, kind-of one the side as it were) DOES teach the doctrines of demons? If not, then how to explain putting that phrase within quotation marks?
Perhaps here a simple acknowledgement on your part that you either misunderstood what I said, or mistakenly misconstrued the same could be called for. It would lead us both back and away from further troubles...
Papist pap.
Prove it.
You made the claim. YOU back it up.
And do you REALLY think that the pattern of education in our failed government schools is what everyone had for education?
Do you actually have any idea how little time it takes to teach a child to read and write by yourself?
I homeschooled for 12 years and I can guarantee you that teaching children to read and write is not nearly as time consuming or difficult as the government behemoth makes it.
Then prove it. Show us the errors.
Don't just make unsubstantiated claims, treat them as facts, and expect others to take it as truth.
So you're saying God the Father had a mother, eh?
verga: I think we need to be very careful when we judge the actions of groups or individuals in the past based on mores of our time.
The Catholic Church has maintained that we hold the fullness of faith and that inherent in that is a duty to protect others from falling into heresy.
Further the Catholic Church has also always viewed itself as the "Body of Christ" and Christ did instruct His followers to take up the sword to defend themselves: Lukle 22:35 He said to them, “When I sent you forth without a money bag or a sack or sandals, were you in need of anything?” “No, nothing,” they replied.
36 He said to them,* “But now one who has a money bag should take it, and likewise a sack, and one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one.
37 For I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me, namely, ‘He was counted among the wicked’; and indeed what is written about me is coming to fulfillment.”
38 Then they said, “Lord, look, there are two swords here.” But he replied, “It is enough!”*
At the time these heresies were viewed as direct assaults on the Church, the Body of Christ.
Well, you have to read it to believe it. Catholics STILL defending and excusing the use of the sword, (IOW, murder and torture and imprisonment aka - the INquistion) against those who the Catholic church considers heretics, guilty of the *crime* of heresy against the church.
In other words, unsaved people were indwelt with demons...Is that so far fetched??? No doubt the Catholic religion has distorted and embellished it's history of the Cathars and other denominations who opposed the Catholic religion which the Cathars did vehemently...
It was the most significant ceremony in Cathar theology, marking the transition from ordinary believer (auditore or credente) to a Parfait, one of the elect. During the ceremony the Holy Spirit was believed to descend from heaven, and inhabit the Parfait's corporal body. It was largely because of this indwelling of the Holy Spirit that Parfaits were expected and willing to lead such ascetic lives, and why ordinary believers were prepared to "adore" them.
The ceremony was striking in its simplicity. It required no material elements such as water or anointing oil, and seems to have preserved a ceremony of the very earliest Christian Church. Cathars claimed that the the rite had been appointed by Christ, and had been handed down from generation to generation by the boni homines. For Catholics of the time, the rite was rather a mystery and their best explanation was that the Cathar rite was a distorted imitation of various Catholic rituals.
There were numerous Christian groups thru out church history who practices were far closer to the scriptures than anything Catholic...They all had one thing in common...They refused to bow down to the Catholic religion and it's popes...Thus; they were branded as heretics by the Catholic religion...Their bibles were burned and they and their families were tortured and murdered if they refused to 'convert'...
These and other 'heretics' are the REAL Christians of church history...
I think any institution that controls so many people and teaches them contrary to the scriptures that only the leaders can and will be indwelt with the Holy Spirit, that the God of creation shares his sovereignty with someone outside of the trinity, and that good works is required for salvation is intrinsically evil...
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