This is an insightful news blog this morning on CNN. On the surface it's just about the challenges facing Pope Francis but if you read carefully, you'll realize that it's much more about the challenges facing Christianity as a whole. Lots to think about.
I hear you, Jeff. If the story hadn't been labeled as being about the Catholic church, it would have been easy to view it as a reference to the Protestant Church. The issues facing Protestantism are one in the same. We are as guilty as the Catholics at selectively ignoring much Biblical teaching. We too face the left-right divide which threatens the unity of our faith. Worse yet, we face becoming irrelevant. Thank you for the wake up call.
ReplyDeleteWell said, Bruce! I think one of the saddest things I see in the current evangelical conversations is that we are doing an amazing job of dealing with the theological & cultural issues and problems of the 1970's. Meaning that we're not doing a good job of addressing the culture where it's at today -- we're playing the standard church game of thinking retro is better. What we end up doing when we fall prey to that temptation is just what you say -- we miss out on a lot of the Bible's teaching that is extremely relevant to 2013. But since we read the Bible in terms of the already-settled questions of the 1950's, 60's and 70's, we don't have to take it seriously for today. And so we become irrelevant.
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