Faith with out works is dead! James.
The gay activists and adult club owners occasionally protest my church.
Our pastor takes cold bottles of water out to them. They don’t come as much anymore.
“Non-denominational”+Megachurch= watered down Christianity afraid to offend the Godless.
My niece told me that the house next to the church the husband died and the pastor went over to express his condolences.
The widow said you never once came over when he was sick and in need, so get the hell out of my house.
She said it was the most moving sermon she had ever heard, the man was broken by his lack of “getting to know his neighbors”.
She said he decided that every house with in a square mile from the church would be visited personally by him, because that widow was right and he had failed her and her husband.
Anyway, I not sure it is the mega church is the problem but people can lose themselves in the crowd and they escape personal involvement. They can go to church, be a regular, give a dollar or two and think ‘that’s all they need to do’.
More is asked of us.
I am not saying it applies here but...
There was a woman and she was living in a women’s shelter here in the states with her three young boys. She was from Africa and had been married to a fairly wealthy German, she was fleeing an abusive husband in Germany. That’s how she ended up in the USA. So the story goes...
While in the women’s shelter, she met another woman who was staying at the women’s shelter who was also from Africa but had become a nurse and a citizen of the USA. When the abusive boyfriend was cleared from the citizen woman’s home, she left the shelter and returned home, taking the other woman and her 3 kids with her.
This African/German woman and her three kids made the other lady happy, as she has no children and she thought they could all be like a little family. She could help them as the African/German lady went to school and the children could be in a good school and stable environment.
This that and the other happened and the African/German lady started complaining to a church she had started attending. She said the other lady was cruel, crazy...you name it (it was quite a story). Of course the church was worried for this woman, so they helped her move out of that house and found a church member who was able to house the lady and her children.
Once at the church members house, she didn’t want to care for her children, became demanding about being taken here there and yonder, wanted to drive the vehicles even though she had no license. Wanted internet hooked up to the garage apartment, instead of using the library computers. Had a strange man come to the house late at night. You get the picture.
Turns out the school overlooked needed paperwork for the children, to ensure they could be in school and because they wanted to help, just like the church. A US man had paid this woman’s way and shipped her stuff here to the USA. She had done this before— it was France that she had run off to before. The German father was looking for his children. She had kidnapped them (parent abduction).
She had other stuff going on with the courts here, too. She had somehow married the man who paid her way here but she had said he was abusive, too and she was trying to get that annulled or he was...it was all just crazy. Oh, and it turns out that the stuff the church helped the lady move out of the home of the other woman, well some of it belonged to the other woman. So the church helped this lady with theft.
Were the men abusive to her? I don’t know. I do know that this was abusive to others that she came into contact with, that were just trying to be Christian and helpful. She took advantage of everyone and wanted more. She was neglectful to her children. She was a scam artist.
They endangered a older, single woman church member in doing this. The church changed their policy on how they help. Churches do need to be careful as well as helpful.
Christian maternity home and program founded by Christians in Ocean County, NJ to provide a place for women like this:
http://www.graceinitiatives.org
She prayed. And God sent her you.
My church has 3 or 4 requests per week from people who say they are stranded or in some emergency but when they are asked for some reference say from their home church they are unable to provide one name or number. The truth is there are many, many scam artists who go from church to church asking for money....We are not hard hearted but have grown wise....
These women who are pregnant and homeless need to come to a Catholic Church. Most cities have shelters for pregnant women so they can keep their babies.
Depending on the age of the mother, the mother and baby may stay there until she gets her feet back on the ground. My church often donates food to the three shelters in our city.
We understand the salvation formula as:
DEEDS => LOVE => FAITH => SALVATION
Salvation is at the end of the path, not at Baptism.
Been there, done that regarding local missions, at small and big churches.
As others have noted, scam artists appear quite often. Some of my friends caught TB from street missions. We offered to help with several pregnancies, and a local doctor offered rooms in a private clinic, not the county hospital.
Very few took us up on our help. Our strings - no drug use, no alcohol and take vitamins every day. Meals provided if they would show up.
We also tried family intervention ministries - with cops who attended our church. Turned out that one of our detectives recognized several of the people we were trying to help as gang bangers, professional thieves and serious druggies.
Heather, before you criticize the church, talk to them. Perhaps no one thought to talk to the “lady” as you did, or maybe they did not see her - it took you several single minded attempts to discover her story.
The only “ SINS “ that the works based, hellfire and brimstone, preach against “ SIN “ preachers don’t preach against is his or her own.
"What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and be filled," and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself."
NO cheers, unfortunately.
When a mother wants to kill her baby, apathy is not the cause. No one wants to take responsibility for their own sin; always trying to shift it to someone or something else.