For Those Who Are Angry With the Church…

Michie said:

Fr. Longenecker​

For Those Who Are Angry With the Church…​

On social media I seem to get an increasing number of links to blog posts, X-Twitter posts, articles and memes that rant and rage about the failures of Christians and the failure of the church. It could be hatchet jobs on famous Christians showing how they were secret Nazis, anti-Semites, white supremacists, homo or trans phobes, secret homosexuals, masturbators, misogynists, cat haters, alcoholics, teetotalers, people who once cut down a tree or hated their mother or loved their mother too much, frigid, sex obsessed, emotionally frozen and sexual abusers…

You get the idea. Christians–and especially white Christian men–are blamed for being, well, human.

Now I get it. There are a large number of people who have been wounded by their experience of the church. They’ve been ostracized by narrow minded, hypocritical Christians. They’ve been scandalized by the ignorance, incompetence, hypocrisy and stupidity of clergy. They’ve been angry at what seems deliberate obscurantism, legalism and judgmental attitudes. They’ve been angry at the corruption, sexual abuse, cover up and injustice shown by church leaders. They’ve been hurt by the greedy, fraudulent, scamming preachers. They’ve been disappointed by the hardness of heart, lack of compassion for the poor and the self serving church people and leaders.

So they not only leave the church, they go on a long, weary tirade and campaign against the church and Christians in general. I get that too. If one is wounded deeply, then it hurts and when one hurts, one howls in pain. I get all that.

What I don’t get is how immature and blinkered this is. Are grown up people really so lacking in both self awareness and realism about human nature and the way of the world? I can remember at the age of twelve I overheard my fundamentalist pastor engaged in a rip roaring, screaming match with the music director. “This church isn’t big enough for the two of us!” etc. etc.

Continued below.

For Those Who Are Angry With the Church… | Fr. Dwight Longenecker

On social media I seem to get an increasing number of links to blog posts, X-Twitter posts, articles and memes that rant and rage about the failures of Christians and the failure of the church. It could be hatchet jobs on famous Christians showing how they were secret Nazis, anti-Semites, white...

dwightlongenecker.com

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Rev 2:4 But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.
Rev 2:5 Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.
Rev 2:6 Yet this you have, you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

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Rev 2:19 "'I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and that your latter works exceed the first.
Rev 2:20 But I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols.
Rev 2:21 I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her immorality.
Rev 2:22 Behold, I will throw her on a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her doings;
Rev 2:23 and I will strike her children dead.

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Wherefore the man who lives according
to God, and not according to man, ought to be a lover of good, and
therefore a hater of evil. And since no one is evil by nature, but
whoever is evil is evil by vice, he who lives according to God ought to
cherish towards evil men a perfect hatred, so that he shall neither
hate the man because of his vice, nor love the vice because of the man,
but hate the vice and love the man. For the vice being cursed, all
that ought to be loved, and nothing that ought to be hated, will
remain.

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