My church is losing ten people per day via the obituary column.
Yet my fellow Catholic FReepers seem to be consumed with combing through thousands of pages of Canon Law written in Latin, trying to find some sort of gotcha loophole that can be used to impeach Pope Francis.
They’re as delusional as the Jill Stein recount people (and frankly missing some much bigger points).
“Yet my fellow Catholic FReepers seem to be consumed with combing through thousands of pages of Canon Law written in Latin, trying to find some sort of gotcha loophole that can be used to impeach Pope Francis.”
If they’d ditch the whole pope thing, and follow the Bible that says there’s no mediator between God and men except Jesus, they wouldn’t have to waste their time looking for loopholes in men’s law. Putting more faith in men than in God can’t end well.
This is along the lines of what I saw in my Southern Gospel band. For over two years I played with them in a few dozen local churches, typically with attendance of 50 or less. What is painfully obvious is the lack of children and young adults.
In some of them, you are hard pressed to find a person under 50.
That being said, my wife and I finally gave up on the small churches as our church home because we had just had it with the dogmatism (I’m talking about the actual dictionary definition of the word here). We decided to try out the local “Christian” church, which is a very nice building and a pretty large congregation.
The first thing I noticed that was refreshing was that the pastor knows more than I do about the bible. This was sorely lacking in the other churches with lay pastors that would give me “deer in the headlights” looks when I asked probing questions.
The second thing I noticed was the plethora of children and young people, and the vitality of the youth programs.
But the most important thing was the quality of the message in the preaching as well as the sunday school classes. Well, that and the incredible friendliness (not just politeness) of the people there.
On a side note, they have the service dialed in. The music is wonderful without taking over the service. They take Psalm 33:3 very seriously.
I actually had a person, in justifying the preaching style of small church pastors, tell me that they are better because they don’t prepare and just let the Lord “give them utterance” when they preach. Dead serious.
If that is true, I want nothing to do with “their lord”, because he tends to ramble about irrelevant stuff a lot. And scream. And say, “can I get an amen” because everyone seems to be not following him. Which many of them are not.