Yesterday I was on a long road trip with son one, who is very attuned to what is going on in the world and the politics of this day, and worries about the future. He worries about his plans for next year. To which I made two comments: he should worry about next year a bit because he is aiming to do a very challenging course, and if he does not have some anticipatory anxiety he is a fool: and that we will get through these situations. We always have: I reminded him of the resources he will inherit, together with his brother, because there are very few children of his generation in one family.
I have a birthday party to go to (not mine: that was last week) and was finding a gift. On the trip I went into the shop next to the howitzer and found that a craftsman had pressed wildflowers into pendants. There is now one of those waiting to be given in the house.
We see the beauty in flowers. We glory in nature. And we need not worry overmuch.
25“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you — you of little faith? 31Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
34“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
Now, in the blogosphere, we tend to worry about things a lot. We tend to criticize each other — at times with justification, for there are some very wrong. Karen Booth made some comments on SSM a day or so aga, and I went and looked up who she was and found that she had been the complainant, correctly, around wiccan practices within the church.
Connie Alt, a former Methodist cleric, is one of those concerned. Alt left her church partly because of what she perceived to be a lack of discernment in the matter of witchcraft by the church’s leadership.
When Alt read the Wellsprings article she telephoned Foundry Methodist to speak with Webb. Alt tells Insight that Webb informed her that she found Northern European practices of Wicca very helpful. She then recommended that Alt read a book called The Spiral Dance, by a Wiccan high priestess who calls herself Starhawk. [following this excerpt is a link to Starhawk’s website]
Disturbed that a professing Christian and Methodist minister would admit to any relationship with witchcraft, Alt called her friend Karen Booth, pastor at Long Neck United Methodist Church in Delaware. They had reason to believe that their bishop, Susan Morrison, herself had taken part in the croning ritual. When questioned, however, Booth tells Insight that Morrison said she could “neither confirm nor deny having taken part in the croning ritual, but that she had witnessed many croning rituals.”
. . . last fall [1998] . . . Booth, along with Long Neck’s lay leader, Elaine Wood, reluctantly filed charges against Webb and Kraus for practicing a spirituality contrary to the teaching of the Methodist church.
In the spring of this year [1999], Bishop Felton May of the Baltimore-Washington conference acknowledged the charges in accordance with the Methodist Book of Discipline and presided over two meetings between the women and appropriate witnesses. Booth and Wood tell Insight that Webb claimed that the croning ritual was just a birthday party but grounded in paganism and Wiccan belief and practice.
Of particular concern to Booth was a blessing mentioned by Webb at the end of the Wellsprings article which she noted bears a striking resemblance to a blessing mentioned in Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, except that Webb’s blessing omits a line about “the Goddess.” When May asked Webb why she left this line out, says Booth, Webb told him she had said the blessing from memory and she would have inserted the line about the goddess had she remembered it.
In the meetings Webb and Kraus maintained that the croning ritual had been a private party and therefore should not be subject to public scrutiny. Kraus told Booth and Wood that she should be free to choose which ritual activities are meaningful to her.
. . . Bishop May did not take disciplinary action . . . but instead recommended a mediator to assist the parties in reaching a settlement. Both Webb and Kraus remain at their jobs.
Much of the media attention about goddess worship in churches first focused on an event held in Minneapolis in 1993 called the Re-imagining Conference, but more-isolated incidents such as the “croning ritual” have not received a great deal of coverage. Most mainline denominations sponsored the Re-imagining Conference, at which a group of Methodist clergy, among others, encouraged participants to reject traditional notions of Christ’s death to atone for sin because “in light of women’s experience, such as slavery and female sexual abuse, understandings of sacrifice, atonement and martyrdom are being re-examined.”
According to a report by Methodist clergy who attended, as many as 2,200 conference participants shared in a communion of milk and honey and recited a feminist liturgy: “To our maker Sophia, we are women in your image, with nectar between our thighs we invite a lover, we birth a child, with our warm body fluids we remind the world of its pleasures and sensations.” Sophia was honored at the conference as “our creator Sophia.” “Sophia” is the Greek translation of the Old Testament word for wisdom. Some feminist philosophers claim that wisdom is portrayed as a woman in the book of Proverbs.
I worry for the souls of those poor people who are under the teaching ot the UMC, which seems to be dissolving into error. I think that God runs the church, we do not, and that God corrects things, Provided that we attend to him. On that thread I had two posts, which seem to contradict themselves. The first is relating to the average foolishness of the church.
I’m not a fan on dividing churches, because I think the problem of liberalism is basically going away anyway. Now, this may vary in the USA, but where I live there is absolutely no benefit — socially — in being a Christian. It will not get you into any power group — you would (seriously) be better off joining a golf club or Sunday morning cycle ride.
The people who attend church generally believe. And this has become a problem for the clergy. For those who believe — are not all female, tend to be stroppier if there are mistakes in doctrine, and frequently have spent as much or more time in the word or on their knees. The congregation tends to be fairly well educated, and moving away from scripture into pop sociology and psychology simply does not work.
Particularly in university towns — where half your congregation have graduate degrees. People will accept leadership from men of God who preach the word and care for the congregation. But women, the political… they are in the dying liberal churches, that are half empty. The functional churches were taken over a generation ago.
In the mainstream here, the liberals, with their high church and beautiful choirs, are dying (and they are the only people shown on TV or by the media). The evangelicals, with their less beautiful songs, their more conservative teaching, and their pragmatic use of buildings (a neighbouring congregation uses a school hall because they outgrew their building years ago: my church has a traditional congregation and a branch one that deliberately meets in an old town hall so it is not “churchy”) are growing.
The consequences are that only those groups with an evangelical (or biblical) wing are growing. That includes the reformed churches, the baptists, the anglicans, and the pentecostals (and the catholics). But the Methodists and the congregationalists, who swallowed the liberal koolaid, are joining the Unitarians in some zomboid fossilized existence.
And the second was addressed to Karen Booth, after I had found a series of comments relating to the practices in her church. And my plea is that she, and all beleivers, leave, for they are now yoked with the witches.
She’s had to call out witchcraft in her church, and has at times stood up for the truth — see http://www.ucmpage.org/news/wicca_story6.html
I think she is fighting the good fight, but in a church that is dying. I hate to say it, Karen (if you are still reading) but today’s reading was about the destruction of Israel by Assyria and the charges against Israel read like the charges against the UMC.
Three years ago, Pastor Woodall and his flock seceded from the United Methodist Church, lost their building, and had to transfer their worship services to a small, struggling Baptist church nearby. The UMC dismissed Woodall from its ministry, and he soon dropped out of a legal battle over possession of the church building.
Why did Woodall and his people leave the UMC?
Because, he said, the denomination was rife with paganism and anti-Biblical practices — “same-sex unions, homosexual ordination, Sophia worship, goddess worship, Wicca worship, pagan practices, anti-trinitarianism, opposition to the virgin birth and the deity of Christ,” as reported on the UMC’s own website
And why did he make that accusation?
“Because I saw it with my own eyes,” he told Chalcedon. “As a pastor, I encountered these things. So did members of this congregation. It was going on in a UMC church right down the road from us.
“We went there one night and saw what was supposed to be a ‘Christian healing service’ — with Tibetan prayer bells, a Baha’i prayer, and a chant. The chant went, ‘Come, Lord Jesus … Ommmm.’” [ “Om” is a Buddhist incantation.]
“We researched the matter and found a great deal of information on the Internet. We were shocked to find out this was going on in most of the mainline denominations today; and it was really bad in the UMC.
“So we left the UMC. That was the stand we took. And today our church [the Gove Community Bible Church] is exploding with new members.”
Karen, I understand you have prestige and power in that church, but that church is not worshipping at the right temple. Your soul is in danger. I plead with you to repudiate these practices, leave and find a church that seeks righteousness.
Yes, none of us are righteous. But embracing evil is not a path to truth.
Thinking about this overnight, It may be that it is better to say, yes we should not worry. Instead we should repent. I’ve used a very obvious example here, but the errors within the church are rife: and if we do not abide or live in Christ, the branch of faith we are on will fossilize and disappear.
So to all in the UMC — The doctrine was confronted and there was no correction. Get a ban on this in the book of order (which is exactly what the Presbyterians and Methodists did with the masons – we should be equal opportunity reformers).
IF the hierarchy will not listen. Then resign.
Shake the dust off your feet, and join your brothers and sisters in Christ in worship. For there are true fellowships everywhere, and Christ is preached in all nations.