I’m a bit worried for Brother Donald. He’s trying to be faithful in the UMC, when the church is going heretical really quickly. Dalrock did call him out for tolerating female led leadership within his church.
On this, Donald has but one choice: leave the UMC. For they are rigorous in their enforcement of church discipline when it suits them. I can understand his problems: he’s in a denomination that historically is faithful, evangelical (though not reformed enough for my tastes) and he loves his people and his congregation. As he ought, as is his duty.
Even though his denomination is following the path of the liberals. The reformed abandoned the mainline Presbyterians in the 1930s when they began to tolerate liberal theology and excommunicated those who protested too much, and without attending to the rigor that close adherence to scripture brings, the church is dissolving into the Kiwanis with candles, and thus falling over.
The PCUSA is shrinking over 5% per year and will cease to exist, if present trends continue, in my lifetime. Meanwhile, its leadership quoth:
“The PC(USA) is a church made up of vibrant congregations doing their best to live out the gospel of Jesus Christ in their communities and in the world,” an apparently unfazed Gradye Parsons, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the PCUSA, soothed. “Membership declines continue, but on a whole the denomination is settling into the new thing God is creating.”
We should cheer this decline, but at the same time exhort young men to get out of apostate church institutions and seek fellowship with men who want to follow the scriptures. (Don’t worry – the women always follow.)
This is a difficult thing for some. Not as much for money. But for love. I’m quite aware the PCANZ — the Kiwi Presbyterians — went right to the brink of liberal suicide, and then stepped back. There is still a liberal wing there. Yet… I worship with them. Because I love my congregation, and to leave them would require a marked deviation from the faithfulness to what we have been taught, which the Presbyterians here still have. There are more reformed congregations locally — one that meets at a time which allows this person who is morning challenged to wake up first — and if my church goes apostate, out of it I will go. But not yet.
Besides, schism is bad.
At this point the conversation at Dalrocks deteriorated into a standard argument: that feminism was a consequence of the Prots. And the answer to that is no, and yes. The No is that the doctrine of the church clung to the teaching of Paul.
The yes is that the abolitionists and feminists were the same people, and many late Victorians fell into the holiness error, including avoiding what is legal (alcohol) while denying the plain teaching in scripture about the place of women.
“First-wave feminism was basically invented by mainline Protestantism.”
No, it was invented by Communist infiltrators sponsored by the Soviet Union. Read the Venona decrypts. See how the Commies consolidated power in Russia; it’s the same pattern as American feminism. Mainline Protestantism fell first because Commies prefer corrupting large institutions to convincing people (especially Cold War Americans) that their beliefs are valid and beneficial.
The Protestants’ problems today are not the result of Protestantism. Observe how Protestant principles like sola scriptura and priesthood of the believer are rejected wholesale by these blasphemers. They refuse to teach what the Bible says, refuse to hear the voices of the men in their congregations and refuse to serve as the conscience of America.
“If men in leadership had been brave enough 100 years ago to stand against it, we wouldn’t be dealing with it now.”
Protestants fell first because we were attacked first. The Communists have spared your sect because your isolationism and pacifism make you a low-priority target. You are no threat to Evil. Do not be proud of that.
Cthulhu will eat you last.
John, who is a Mennonite, and knows that church history, gives a correction: the Bolsheviks killed the Russian Mennonites, as with the Old (Orthodox) Beleivers, in job lots, for their way of live is not compatible with the Soviet.
And the Soviet is now one with Sodom and Tyre.
That’s why I said “mainline Protestant”, not Protestantism itself. I’m Protestant. I am at the point where I consider mainline Protestant a heretical sect – given that most of them don’t believe in the divinity of Christ or that Jesus it the only way to salvation, I think all of us can be in agreement there.
Protestants fell first because we were attacked first. The Communists have spared your sect because your isolationism and pacifism make you a low-priority target.
Russian Mennonites flourished in the 19th century after Catherine the Great’s invitation to them. The Bolshevists then slaughtered them en masse in the 20th century. The lucky ones managed to escape to the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and various places in Central and South America.
Most of them died.
A few of them abandoned their long-held position of nonresistance and tried to fight back. They lost. They all died. The Bolshevists were too strong.
“When they persecute you in one city, flee to the next.”
You are no threat to Evil. Do not be proud of that.
I think a community of faithful followers of Jesus is a huge threat to evil. Isn’t that what Jesus basically told us to do?
Cthulhu will eat you last.
My Bible reads “The gates of hell will not prevail against the church”. I am confident that those of us who continue to obey the scriptures faithfully, even unto death, will survive as a remnant in the world until our Lord’s return.
John is correct. God is active. God intervenes. Chuluthu may always swim left, but he is not the last enemy: death is. And God will swallow up both in his final victory.
So have faith. The nations may rage, but they do so for they know they have but a short season of influence. Look at the eternal.
The mainlines suck, and long have.
The evanjellyfish suck a little less, but only insofar as they resist churchianity; those who embrace it in toto are no better than the mainlines; in fact, worse, like a fig tree with leaves but no fruit.
Only hardline chauvinist Team Rome (or Team Constantinople) types blame all of Protestantism, without differentiation.
Screw ’em. I have no time for such twits.
Will, you forgot the Mennonites… who blame it all on the confessing churches.
I think the Romans are going quite jellyfishy at present with the exceptions — such as the SPPX and traditionalists like Mundabor.
The Orthodox and the hard core reformed will endure. I know where to jump locally, and it ain’t into the bapticostals.
The 19th Century European Religion. I don’t have a better name, at the moment, for it. “Humanism”, maybe? It was the long work of about 200 years of Enlightenment Philosophy, attempting to make convince itself that Humans are “good”.
Part of the problem in our neck of the internet is that it can get a little too focused on Feminism, as it’s simply the only part that can stand up to any Logic. And that’s wholly due to the vanity of Women. Reason doesn’t work on vain fools.
The entire collection of 19th, 20th and 21st Century depravities can be traced to the new religion that swept Europe. Darwinism, Totalitarianism, Anarchist Movement (19th Century version), Socialism, National Socialism, Fascism, Marxism, the Progressive Movement (which did stem from the Western Churches) and its most lasting variety: Feminism. All of them come from the same root thought: “I am good.” Which always proceeds to “I am my own god!” And when you reject God, your only choice is an idol of your own creation: The Nation State.
3000 years and we still keep making idols of Gold to worship. Funny, those that think Humans are “evolving”. Adapting to our environments, sure: changing our nature? Never on this Earth.
My reference to Cthulhu was pointing out the illogic of the Mennonites’ position (as represented by John). In Lovecraftian mythology, men became cultists of the insane, unstoppable god Cthulhu not because they wanted to, but so they would be consumed last. In other words, they aided and abetted Evil hoping all the time that either somebody more powerful would stop Evil or they personally would escape Evil’s attention long enough for a happy life.
That’s what John is doing. He repeatedly praises his group for not struggling with feminism but doesn’t realize his group’s isolationism and pacifism only make them, as I said, a low-priority target… not immune. Instead of assisting or at least appreciating our efforts, he recommends we give up, check out of society and wait for other people or God to solve the problem.