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M*W: I found this interesting article on the decline in Christianity on the website for Christianity for the Third Millenium (CTM).
http://www.intac.com
"Christianity in its traditional forms appears to many to be a dying religion. The signs of this death are seen in the declining membership of the mainline protestant traditions and in both the declining attendance and declining authority now seen in the Catholic and orthodox churches. For many people the Christian message as interpreted by the church no longer speaks to the spiritual yearnings that are deep within each of us, nor are the values and standards of the church necessarily operative any longer in the life of our society."
"Christianity for the Third Millennium, Inc., has been formed by Christians who declare that we will not abandon our times in order to be faithful to our Lord. We also believe that only a radical rethinking of the Christian symbols will enable our cherished faith tradition to survive."
"At the present moment no ecclesiastical structure seems capable of addressing this crisis. Poll after poll shows that people who experience a deep spiritual hunger no longer turn to the church to satisfy that yearning. The Roman Catholic hierarchy has responded to this crisis by removing or disciplining its most creative frontier theologians. Protestantism has turned sharply to an irrelevant fundamentalism that is not intellectually credible. Thinking people in both traditions have been reduced to a vague and powerless liberalism that stands for very little. Still other church bodies have withdrawn from the world to search amid pious practices for a unity where no divisive issues can be faced."
"As far as the public voices in the media are concerned people in search of God seem to have the choices of embracing a nineteenth-century protestant certainty that features the easy answers of the old-time evangelical religion or a frightened Catholicism that fights a losing rear guard battle on those issues affecting human sexuality -- abortion, birth control, the ordination of women, and the continued oppression of homosexual people. In defending Christianity, too often these groups set themselves against the knowledge revolution from Galileo to Darwin to Einstein that has eroded the confidence that once undergirded the traditional Christian understanding of life."
Comments, anyone?
M*W: I found this interesting article on the decline in Christianity on the website for Christianity for the Third Millenium (CTM).
http://www.intac.com
"Christianity in its traditional forms appears to many to be a dying religion. The signs of this death are seen in the declining membership of the mainline protestant traditions and in both the declining attendance and declining authority now seen in the Catholic and orthodox churches. For many people the Christian message as interpreted by the church no longer speaks to the spiritual yearnings that are deep within each of us, nor are the values and standards of the church necessarily operative any longer in the life of our society."
"Christianity for the Third Millennium, Inc., has been formed by Christians who declare that we will not abandon our times in order to be faithful to our Lord. We also believe that only a radical rethinking of the Christian symbols will enable our cherished faith tradition to survive."
"At the present moment no ecclesiastical structure seems capable of addressing this crisis. Poll after poll shows that people who experience a deep spiritual hunger no longer turn to the church to satisfy that yearning. The Roman Catholic hierarchy has responded to this crisis by removing or disciplining its most creative frontier theologians. Protestantism has turned sharply to an irrelevant fundamentalism that is not intellectually credible. Thinking people in both traditions have been reduced to a vague and powerless liberalism that stands for very little. Still other church bodies have withdrawn from the world to search amid pious practices for a unity where no divisive issues can be faced."
"As far as the public voices in the media are concerned people in search of God seem to have the choices of embracing a nineteenth-century protestant certainty that features the easy answers of the old-time evangelical religion or a frightened Catholicism that fights a losing rear guard battle on those issues affecting human sexuality -- abortion, birth control, the ordination of women, and the continued oppression of homosexual people. In defending Christianity, too often these groups set themselves against the knowledge revolution from Galileo to Darwin to Einstein that has eroded the confidence that once undergirded the traditional Christian understanding of life."
Comments, anyone?