Every church in America needs armed security

BPPLEE said:

I bet some of the people that are appalled at having weapons in the Church would think nothing of having same sex couples in the service

Click to expand...

That's a red herring, the two don't have anything to do with each other. The prohibitions on weapons predates controversies about homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

RileyG said:

Not only Churches, but schools, places of business. No one is safe from violence anymore. Should there be armed guards there as well?

What’s the solution?

I really, really wish I knew.

Sigh

Click to expand...

A grandfather once witnessed a murder in a hardware store. I don’t recall the particulars that led up to the fight, only that one of the men grabbed a scythe and ripped open the abdomen of the other. The victim literally gathered himself up, grabbed another tool of a kind I can’t recall, and killed the other man. This was in the days before even sulfa drugs, and all the local doctor could do was to clean the would the best he could, stitch him up, and send him via railroad to a specialist in a major city. The outcome was not good.

In another instance, a man around the latter quarter of the 19th Century stepped out of church, paused to light a cigar or pipe, and was shot dead. Fifty years or so before that, a schoolmaster teaching in a church building looked out, saw a raiding party of a certain tribe, went out to give his students time to escape, and the raiders slit his throat.

Yes, this is all unpleasant, and we seldom think of violence as something close, and while it is blessedly rare, it’s not known. And there’s unintentional violence we seldom think about, and that’s the chance of being a traffic fatality whenever we get into a vehicle.

FireDragon76 said:

What I am saying is well known to anybody in an historic Christian church, like Episcopalians, Anglicans, Catholics, Orthodox.

Anthropic Claude gave this brief synopsis:



Claude is largely correct but doesn't go into the fact that the early church was even harsher on its regard for those who bore arms in violence, and the idea of bringing a weapon into a sacred space would have been unthinkable. Anybody that had shed blood was forbidden to be ordained as a presbyter, and Christians were expected to live peripatetically in expectation of the consumation of the Kingdom. Their ethics were far closer to Amish than to modern day American white Evangelicals. Churches were regarded as sanctuaries, embassies of another Kingdom not dominated by violence, but by love.

Many Roman soldiers who converted to Christianity left the military, such as Martin, bishop of Tours. It was only with Augustine's shift in theology that some concessions were made to Christians participating in warfare, as long as the cause and methods were just, but this wasn't seen as making war or violence in itself holy, and didn't change the attitude towards weapons in churches, which continued to be forbidden.

Click to expand...

It’s not necessarily a denominational thing, but an American one, and even there perhaps more rural than urban. I had to look it up to find prohibitions on weapons in churches dating back to the 5th Century, but during the American Revolution, there was a Loyalist Anglican minister who thought it prudent to have a loaded pistol handy in the lectern.

FireDragon76 said:

Claude is largely correct but doesn't go into the fact that the early church was even harsher on its regard for those who bore arms in violence, and the idea of bringing a weapon into a sacred space would have been unthinkable. Anybody that had shed blood was forbidden to be ordained as a presbyter, and Christians were expected to live peripatetically in expectation of the consumation of the Kingdom.

Click to expand...

In American history . . . I have been told . . . church culture people were involved in hanging a Quaker woman. And it seems there were no genuinely Christian people with power of *effective* leadership to stop that. And yet . . . were those murderers making rules against guns in a church building????

Plus, for some time, a number of Bible claiming people were invading the sovereign lands of people of the land who were there before certain European people came along. They actually killed mothers and children and fathers and community leaders, in order to invade and take their lands. However, there was no *effective* Christian church or government leadership functioning to stop that coveting of the land that belonged to a neighbor and to stop the murdering of the people living in those coveted lands. And yet, at the same time > were ineffective church leaders banning weapons from church buildings . . . right while Bible claiming people were coveting other people's land and using weapons to murder ones who already lived there????

"Don't bring guns to church > use them to kill people so you can take their land."

So . . . in case there have been killers who have made rules against guns in a building . . . while their own bodies have been temples of their murdering and coveting . . . I don't think what they have done has anything to do with what we now need to do.

It seems, too, how various groups claiming Christianity have had members who even publicly murdered others who were not of their own groups. I am told ones even have murdered at least one man who made a Bible translation; and those murderers were members of at least one major denomination or something like that. And there was no *effective* leadership which kept such murdering from happening.

So, I would not consider the rules of such ones to be relevant to if we should or may have guns for protection in a church.

My opinion is > Jesus says, the one who draws the sword will die by the sword; so be prayerfully careful about what and whom you are depending on for your well-being. Among other things, our Father is able to control what really is going to happen to each of us. So, if we depend on Him and ***obey how He takes care of us*** . . . we will be well taken care of.

And have we all not seen how things can go when we take things into our own hands??