Thursday, January 17, 2019

Can We Reverse the Great Evangelical Disaster?

Lately I've been thinking of my various blogs as all tending to a single message:   the reason the culture is deteriorating so rapidly is first of all due to the Church's deterioration over the last few decades.  I've collected some topics here that I'd argue are part of the deterioration, and the reason we aren't having revival and won't have revival until we have a reformation and correct these and other problems.

In researching these things I've run across such a wide and deep area of similar problems, as seen by various Church leaders, any hope of reformation appears beyond the possible.  The proliferation of false teachers who have a following even in what seem otherwise to be good churches, is depressing.  I'm thinking of the Word of Faith teachers like Joyce Meyer and Beth Moore, who are popular with members of many different denominations and congregations.  This seems to be tolerated by the leadership of these churches in spite of doctrinal conflicts.   And there are many other heresies that have taken hold in churches these days, some even foundational to gigantic megachurches.

All these things should be spelled out in great detail at some point, but at the moment I'm asking myself the question if there is really no way out of this, as first seems to be the case.  Where do we start?   I would ask first why the leaders of the churches mentioned above aren't soundly denouncing the alien teachings followed by some of their members, and disciplining those members if they won't give them up?  Wouldn't that be one place to start?  In other words, individual church bodies need to start by purifying themselves.

But what about the whole church bodies given over to false teachings?  There are voices raised in protest here and there, and ministries devoted to warning Christians about them, but shouldn't there be some kind of official doctrinal statement that definitively separates the sheep from these goats?

There have been books written on the sad state of the Church over the last few decades, mostly identifying areas of compromise with the world, or "accommodation" as Francis Schaeffer put it in the book he wrote in the eighties, The Great Evangelical Disaster.   Why have such exposes failed to make the impact on the Church they should have?  Why are they being ignored?

This is just a sketch of some thoughts on this subject that I'm mulling in my mind these days.

Dissing the People's Will

Wow. I've again been trying to give up my addiction to EvC Forum, and can only wait and see if I'm succeeding this time. Meanwhile a post appeared on the thread about the Brexit problems in the UK, in which it is being suggested that the vote of the people should just be overridden in favor of the obviously superior opinion of the ruling elites.

Well, that's been happening here too, though it's done by a court that calls the people's will "unconstitutional" based of course on their Leftist revisionist definitions of what's constitutional.  So much for "Of the people, by the people, for the people...."    And down down down we go.
Isn't the margin in favor of Remain 8-10% lately? Aren't the devastating downsides of Brexit that have gradually become apparent over the past couple years a call to Parliament to carry out their leadership responsibilities and do what is best for the country, regardless of how the electorate voted in 2016?

It is this blind adherence to the 2016 referendum, including some dunderheaded idea that an issue can only be voted on once, that is a big part of the problem. The members of Parliament know a Brexit vote today would be far more informed than the one in 2016, and they should make sure it happens.

In all representative governments it is reasonable to ask, "If the electorate voted for the country to jump off a bridge, should the government do it?" In my opinion we elect our public officials not to blindly do our bidding but to represent our best interests, even when we have a misguided understanding of what those best interests are. Unfortunately most representatives today care most about getting reelected. Rather than leading they slavishly mold their behavior to public opinion in their district. Love of country must take precedence over love of holding office, even when it means you'll lose that office. Integrity demands this kind of behavior, but little of it exists today.
----- Percy at https://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&m=847068#m847068