>>while it was too much to expect of these Christians in the church for decades, with all sorts of support systems in the church starting from the pastor on down, that they have their “comfort zones” disturbed.
And that is the basic issue here. They didn’t support you the way you wanted.
Back when I attended the liberal UMC and had an ultra-Progressive pastor, he would often preach to us about the need to meet people where they were. He’d warn us time and again to always put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and try to understand what they are thinking.
But he would not tolerate any of us disagreeing on any of his SJ platforms.
One day I asked why he never meets us where we are instead of just judging us all the time. It did not go well for me.
“And that is the basic issue here. They didn’t support you the way you wanted.”
Not at all. Respectfully, it looks like how you want to cast the situation for your argument, even taking just *part* of one of my sentences while doing so.
You don’t consider a lot of what I also said and took time and effort to go over and what I pointed to in what I wrote.
I also went to a very respected Sunday School teacher of 80 years of age. She was offended by my merely questioning the goodness of the movie, despite the fact she’d talked about how as a Baptist church, the congregation used to almost entirely stay away from movies.
I’d already learned from having the internet, before I went to any church, that there was no consistency of standards among Christians in these days, including in churches. One elder and his wife who led Awana, both retirees and longtime members, spoke of how even non-Christians had some openness to the church because the culture was more Christian-influenced and taught morality. Then she gave me a ride one day and when she turned on the car, Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” was on the radio. She never gave an explanation for why she listened to this station. Yet someone else you might speak to about this music as evil. People who entered the church decades ago did so when there was more agreement and one could imagine where people stood, just as this Baptist church was unified back then on not seeing movies.
Again, the issue is worldliness and the church being expected to resist it. As I said, I know part of what was behind what the elder says was that he was responding to the attitude shown by the female Sunday School teacher (and many others, both male and female). As I also said, much of the worldliness comes from the world not resisting it and accepting the world’s ideas on leisure.