Follower of Jesus part of a cult or a Christian

Posted on October 24, 2012. Filed under: Being Christian, following Jesus Christ, Bible Study and Bible Reading, Christendom and Christianity, Faith, History, Jehovah יהוה YHWH JHVH God Elohim Yahweh Jahweh, Jesus Christ Jeshua the Messiah Jahushua | Tags: Barack Obama, Billy Graham, Calvinists, Catholic Church, Charismatic Catholics, Christian, Christian Faith, Christian Truth, Confession, Cult, Denomination, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Disciple, Doctrine, Example, Followers of Christ, Following Christ, Franklin Graham, God Son, God the Father, God the Son, Good News, Heathen, Heretic, Holy Spirit, Jehovah Witnesses, Jesus, Jews, Judeo-Christian values, Justification by Works, Karl Barth, Kingdom of God, Lord of lords, Love for God, Lutherans, Marcel Lefebvre, Mitt Romney, Mormons, Nazi Regime, New Age, Non-Trinitarians, Opus Dei, Paul Tillich, Pray, Prayer, Proclaim, Proclaiming, Rabbi, Salvation, Son of God, Talmidim, Tea Party, Teacher, Teaching, The Way, Theologian, To be Saved, Tradition, Trinity, Truth, United States |

Often you hear people calling non-trinitarians heathen and heretics, members of a cult.

Becoming a member or Getting in and out

Normally you would consider a group as being a cult when it is easy to get in but very difficult to get out. Most of the non-trinitarian groups are not so easy to become a member of because they require full notice of their teachings, the Biblical teachings and a life which is acceptable in the eyes of Jesus and most important acceptable for God. Once allowed to become a member and to be baptised, with some, after a questionnaire to cheque if you fulfil the requirements, the person has to live a Christian life according to the ordinances of the Holy Scriptures. As soon as the person does something against the Law of God he or she is mostly requested to leave the association. No foul play or being unfaithful to a partner are accepted so slutty actions are penalised by being put out of the congregation. Fornication is a good reason not to be allowed in the group any more.
Therefore groups like the Jehovah Witnesses are very easy to get out. Even if you have done no whorehopping but tell them so, you may leave for ever. (By matter of speech.) As you can see not really according to the real definition of a cult.

In case you consider every minority group a cult, then yes you can see in the whole history that many groups which started small, like the followers of Jesus where called a cult (The Way), but as soon as they got more money and political power they became integrated in the normal system and where even taken as the normal standard. As such history has seen growing the Lutherans, Calvinists or recently the Mormons.

The Most profitable considered to be the Main

In the United States once again it is proven that people prefer to choose the groups which they think could bring most profit. The Tea Party which has its mouth full of Judeo-Christian Values would never want to go in the sea with Obama, but do not see the danger into giving hands to Mitt Romney. In earlier days they shouted that Mormons where of the devil and today they call everybody to go and vote for Mitt Romney so that he can save America. Once considered a cult to avoid and never to work with is now the hope of American evangelists and conservative Christians.

In the past we have seen when push came to shove (or prison, or death) also most Protestants supported like the Roman Catholic Church, the Nazi regime regardless of where they fell on the theological spectrum. And prominent liberal theologians like Paul Tillich were just as hostile to the Third Reich as were prominent conservative theologians and pastors like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And the tragic thing is that while Catholic Church and the Confessing Church rigorously opposed Nazi claims to totalitarian power over their churches and other church-related organizations, neither said much at all in the way of denouncing Nazi policy towards Jews, Jehovah Witnesses, or to the mentally-handicapped.

Lefebvrists SSPX Priest and altar server of the guild of St. Stephen.

When a group Catholics did not want to agree with the teachings of Pope John Giovanni XXIII and preferred to keep to the Latin rite they where considered heretics and the world was confronted with different Catholic Cults like the Lefebvrists or Marcel Lefebvre his Society of St. Pius X. Pope Benedict XVI had declared that, for doctrinal rather than disciplinary reasons, the SSPX had no canonical status in the Catholic Church and, because of that lack of canonical status, the ministries exercised by its ministers were not legitimate in the Catholic Church. Tensions between the society and the Holy See reached their height in 1988, when Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops against the orders of Pope John Paul II, resulting in a declaration of excommunication against the bishops who consecrated or were consecrated, an excommunication remitted for those still alive in January 2009 with a hope expressed that all members of the society would quickly return to full communion.
At the end of last century and beginning this century when everything was turned back to previous days they were taken up again in the Roman Catholic Church and are today not seen as a cult any more.

Some years ago people spoke about Catholic institutional cults like the Charismatic Catholics, Opus Dei, a.o.

Several people also used to speak out boldly against the Church of Rome and considered it from the devil or to be the Babylon of which the Bible spoke. Though it no longer seems to be in vogue to speak of the pope as “the antichrist” (Although the following people unhesitatingly did: Martin Luther, John Bunyan, John Huss, John Wycliffe, John Calvin, William Tyndale, John Knox, Thomas Bacon, John Wesley, Samuel Cooper, John Cotton, and Jonathan Edwards.) or the Catholic Church as the “whore of Babylon”. Now many Protestants unwittingly believe that “our differences are not so great”.

Alliances

Franklin Graham told the Indianapolis Star (6/3/99) that his father’s longstanding ecumenical alliance with the Catholic Church and all other denominations, “was one of the smartest things his father ever did.” The charismatic Charisma magazine in 10/95 contained a 7-page article on Franklin Graham. They quoted him as saying, “I thank God for the warmth I see within many of the charismatic churches — their love for the Lord and love for the scriptures. …” He also said, “Probably (Samaritan’s Purse) largest base of support comes from the charismatic community.” He has referred to “Mother” Teresa as an “example of the woman God uses” (4/1/99, Calvary Contender). {Billy Graham General Teachings/Activities}

New Age movements also at one time were considered cults but after a few years many protestants found solace in such groups. Norman Vincent Peale advocated New Age and/or occult teachings as visualization, pantheism, human potential, positive confession, positive thinking, etc. Once on the Phil Donahue Show, Peale, a 33rd degree Mason, said, “It’s not necessary to be born again. You have your way to God, I have mine. I found eternal peace in a Shinto shrine.” (Shintoism is an ancient Oriental religion that fuses ancestor worship with mysticism.) He also denied the necessity of believing in the virgin birth.

Trinity to follow or not

Others would say those who are not following the trinitarian teachings can not call themselves Christian and can not be any different than belonging to a cult.

They forget that being a Christian should mean that one is a follower of Christ. In such respect that person calling himself should be following the Master Teacher Jesus Christ (hence the name Christian).

In case people consider a cult any group which teaches doctrines or beliefs that deviate from the biblical message of the Christian faith, they should first confine that Christian Faith. In Christendom we see lots of denominations and in each denomination people shall be able to find many more opinions and deviations from their main confession. Some say that “cults often teach some Christian truth mixed with error, which may be difficult to detect.” But they do not give a proper definition of that Christian Truth, which would be, according to the words of the many denominations being something very different from one to the other denomination, so that every denomination could be categorised as a cult.

Features

According the fundamentalism’s leading spokesman evangelist Billy Graham there are some features common to most cults:

• “They do not adhere solely to the sixty-six books of the Bible as the inspired Word of God. They add their “special revelations” to the Bible and view them as equally authoritative.”
As such all the believers who accept the apocryphal books as worthy spiritual food, would be considered a cult. This also means the Roman Catholic Church is for those Americans a cult. Especially the Roman Catholics should then also be seen as a cult, because they also have several revelations by the saints they take for granted and of inspirational value. But in several protestant denominations we also do find groups which like to use several theological and devotional books by human writers which they consider to be inspired by God. According to Billy Graham they should also come under the denominator of being a cult.

English: The icon was painted by artist Nicholas Morosoff in 1935 at the request of Bishop Wedgwood for the St Francis Church in Tekels Park, Camberley, and hangs above its main altar. Courtesy Liberal Catholic Church of St Francis of Assisi. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

• “They do not accept that our relationship to Jesus Christ is a reality “by grace through faith” alone, but promote instead a salvation by works.”
By saying this they do not understand what those Christians get from the Bible, the infallible Word of God. For those, like Christadelphians, who agree that Christians should live up to their faith it is clear that it is not enough to be baptised to be saved, because faith without works is death. Strangely the others forget that they also dismember people from their congregation because they have done something which they consider to be bad. But that is in contradiction with what they say, because when that person would be saved for ever than he also should be accepted as Christian for ever. It is not right to think any murderer or wrongdoer shall go to heaven because there is the reality of Christ dying for all sinners. If they do not repent they shall not enter the small gate of the Kingdom of God (which also shall be on earth).

• For lots of Christians non-trinitarians “do not give Jesus Christ, the divine Son of God, full recognition as the second Person of the Trinity, composed of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.”
Yes they do not recognise him as a part of some trio. They recognise him in his full potential. They do not see a God who came onto the earth to fake his death. Jesus really died, while God, as a spirit, can not die and has ever been and shall have no end. Jesus had a beginning (being born) and an end (died at the stake).
Fully recognising the offer Jesus brought, makes his action much more important than trinitarians want to see Jesus. His humility and his preparedness to give his life for people he did not kno, has more value than a God who could straight ahead, in heaven when the first sin was committed, take action and bring everything to an end. In such instance not so many people had to suffer so much. This would make God also to a very cruel person. But God is a God of love, who wanted to give men a change to prove that they could rule the world better than Him. (Part of the question in the garden of Eden).
We had to wait such a long time because it was only with Jesus, that God did find it time to bring a solution with giving a God send man, who could be tempted (remember God can not be tempted) but did not let himself go. Jesus kept straight in line with God’s teachings. Jesus choose to follow his father and to keep totally to His commandments. He is the only one man who could prove to be able to follow God, out of love for God and not wanting anything in return for it. As such, though at first lower than the angels, Jehovah God gave him a higher position and made him unto a mediator between God and men. The ones who consider, like it is written in the Holy Scriptures that Jesus is the son of God and not god the son or God Son, give Jesus full honour for all the work he has done.

Listening and reacting to Scriptures

When Scripture is life-changing, as God’s Word is “living and active” (Hebrews 4:12) people who get to know the Bible to be infallible should under its inspiration come to insight and how more they come to get to know they should adjust their thinking and their way of living.

When we hear God’s Word, whether at a meeting, church service or in private reading, we should “devour” God’s words to us and allow them to become the joy and happiness of our heart (Jeremiah. 15:16).

After the Torah we got Prophesies and Writings to gut us under way to the Gospels to be able to recognise the God send man Jesus Christ of Nazareth (Jeshua) who was son of men and as son of God brought salvation unto many. His disciples and followers coming out of all sorts of layers of the population where preachers brought the Word of God and the Word of Christ “were persevering in the doctrine of the apostles” (Acts of the apostles 2:42; cf. 2 Timothy 1:14) long before the New Testament was written–and centuries before the New Testament canon was settled. Those who call themselves Christians should carefully to the life and beliefs of those first followers of Christ.

Doing the same

In case you want to call yourself Christian you should do the same as the first Christians who also believed that Jesus never took himself to be God himself or to be equal with Him.

“I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.” (John 13:15 NIV)

“To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.” (1 Peter 2:21 NIV)

“Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.” (1 John 2:6 NIV)

“5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature {Or in the form of} God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,” (Philippians 2:5-6 NIV)

They believed in Jesus, to be the long awaited saviour who as son of men and son of God brought God to us all to be our Father as well.

“I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one “like a son of man” {Daniel 7:13} with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand.” (Revelation 14:14 NIV)

“When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. I tell you the truth, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes.” (Matthew 10:23 NIV)

“And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”” (Matthew 3:17 NIV)

“”For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, {Or his only begotten Son} that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16 NIV)

For us it should be as for them that Jesus shall have to be the Master Teacher and the example for us to come to God and a better life. He, Jesus, should be our main teacher and not theologians or scholars who say they speak in the name of God. Christians should take Jesus as their Rabbi.

“”You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord’, and rightly so, for that is what I am.” (John 13:13 NIV)

“Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:2 NIV)

“”But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi’, for you have only one Master and you are all brothers.” (Matthew 23:8 NIV)

“Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.” (Colossians 4:1 NIV)

Christians do believe salvation belongs to God and is in Christ who came into existence only a few centuries ago, after 42 generations, when he was born (begotten) in a special way.

“Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ {Or Messiah. “The Christ” (Greek) and “the Messiah” (Hebrew) both mean “the Anointed One”; also in verse 26.} the Lord.” (Luke 2:11 NIV)

“But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.” (1 Corinthians 15:38 NIV)

“17 Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ. {Or Messiah. “The Christ” (Greek) and “the Messiah” (Hebrew) both mean “the Anointed One”.} 18 This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 1:17-18 NIV)

“26 In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you.” 29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. 31 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; his kingdom will never end.” 34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” 35 The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called {Or So the child to be born will be called holy,} the Son of God. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. 37 For nothing is impossible with God.” 38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be to me as you have said.” Then the angel left her.” (Luke 1:26-38 NIV)

“Then those who were in the boat worshipped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”” (Matthew 14:33 NIV)

“I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God.”” (John 1:34 NIV)

“But these are written that you may {Some manuscripts may continue to} believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31 NIV)

“and who through the Spirit {Or who as to his spirit} of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God, {Or was appointed to be the Son of God with power} by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 1:4 NIV)

“(and for this we labour and strive), that we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, and especially of those who believe.” (1 Timothy 4:10 NIV)

“And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world.” (1 John 4:14 NIV)

“And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”” (Revelation 7:10 NIV)

“30 The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. 31 God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Saviour that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel.” (Acts 5:30-31 NIV)

“For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thessalonians 5:9 NIV)

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in {Or through} Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23 NIV)

Jesus Christ, the Messiah, left his followers as a Church in case they listen to him Jesus, with divine authority to teach in his name.

“13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” 14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” 15 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” 16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, {Or Messiah; also in verse 20} the Son of the living God.” 17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter, {Peter means rock.} and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades {Or hell} will not overcome it. {Or not prove stronger than it} 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be {Or have been} bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be {Or have been} loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he warned his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ.” (Matthew 16:13-20 NIV)

“”I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will be {Or have been} bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be {Or have been} loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 18:18 NIV)

“”He who listens to you listens to me; he who rejects you rejects me; but he who rejects me rejects him who sent me.”” (Luke 10:16 NIV)

“And I tell you that you are Peter, {Peter means rock.} and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades {Or hell} will not overcome it. {Or not prove stronger than it}” (Matthew 16:18 NIV)

“19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in {Or into; see Acts 8:16; 19:5; Rom. 6:3; 1 Cor. 1:13; 10:2 and Gal. 3:27.} the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”” (Matthew 28:19-20 NIV)

“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor to be with you for ever—” (John 14:16 NIV)

Following Jesus his teachings

Christians are those who follow Jesus teachings and are also prepared to do what he asked them to do, to go out in the world and to let the name of God, to whom belongs all authority, be known all over the world.

“”I have revealed you {Greek your name; also in verse 26} to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word.” (John 17:6 NIV)

“5 May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus, 6 so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Romans 15:5-6 NIV)

“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” (Romans 13:1 NIV)

“Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.” (2 Timothy 2:3 NIV)

“So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking.” (Ephesians 4:17 NIV)

“19 Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more. 20 You, however, did not come to know Christ that way. 21 Surely you heard of him and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. 22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:19-24 NIV)

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2 NIV)

“”You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me.” (Isaiah 43:10 NIV)

“I have revealed and saved and proclaimed—I, and not some foreign god among you. You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD {Jehovah}, “that I am God.” (Isaiah 43:12 NIV)

“1 Keep on loving each other as brothers. 2 Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it. … 4 Marriage should be honoured by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral. 5 Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” {Deut. 31:6} 6 So we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?” {Psalm 118:#6,7} 7 Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. 8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever. 9 Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings. It is good for our hearts to be strengthened by grace, not by ceremonial foods, which are of no value to those who eat them. … 13 Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. 14 For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. 15 Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name. 16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased. 17 Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you. … 20 May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, 21 equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. ….” (Hebrews 13:1-25 NIV)

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”” (Acts 1:8 NIV)

“Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ. {Or Messiah}” (Acts 5:42 NIV)

“I have declared to both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus.” (Acts 20:21 NIV)

“When Silas and Timothy came from Macedonia, Paul devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ. {Or Messiah; also in verse 28}” (Acts 18:5 NIV)

“Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring—those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.” (Revelation 12:17 NIV)

Praying Christian

Over the times people could get to read the Word of God. They could learn about Adam, Eve, Abraham, Isaac, David, Christ and God. The apostles could seen and we testified that the Father has sent His son, so did not come down Himself as deliverer of the world, but send a man who could feel how every other human being could feel. He really suffered and died in the hope that many would understand his words and come to the Father to whom he often prayed and learned everybody to pray. As Jesus kept his Father, Elohim Hashem Jehovah holy, he also wanted us to keep his Fathers Name holy and to make it be known all over the world until His Kingdom comes. In our prayers we can make our requests known to God by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving because it is God who chooses us and has commissioned us to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last; so that whatever we ask from the Father in Jesus his name God may give us. It shall be in the name of Jesus {Jeshua} that Jehovah God shall give his followers, trusting only His one mediator between Him and humanity, Jeshua the Messiah, himself human.

“”This, then, is how you should pray: “‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,” (Matthew 6:9 NIV)

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” (Philippians 4:6 NIV)

“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.” (John 15:16 NIV)

“In that day you will no longer ask me anything. I tell you the truth, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.” (John 16:23 NIV)

“For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,” (1 Timothy 2:5 NIV)

Preaching under Christ for God

The apostles knew that Jesus as son of men was very well aware how limited he was and how limited we are. Jesus left his disciples but promised to come back. If we love Jesus, we should be glad that he has gone to the Father; because the Father is greater than Jesus, who now sits at His right hand.

Jesus wanted us to understand that the head of every man is the Messiah, and the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of the Messiah is God. All Christians should accept that. But yes we do see that the majority does not and want to place Jesus as head of everything. It is true that for the moment the world is still in the hands of evil and that there will come a time that everything shall be subjected to the son. But then comes a time that Jesus himself will subject himself to the only One God, who subjected everything to him; so that God may be everything in everyone.

Recognising the humility of Christ, who who served, those who call themselves Christian should also let the greater among us become like the younger, and one who rules like one who serves. Whoever among us wants to be a leader must become servant of the others, and whoever wants to be first must be slave! For the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve – and to give his life as a ransom for many. As he also served his Father in heaven, he demanded us to help him and not for a single day, either in the temple court, synagogue, church, public square or in private homes, should followers of Jesus stop teaching and proclaiming the Good News that Jeshua is the Messiah. Declaring with utmost seriousness the same message to Jews and other people from all nations. Telling everywhere to: “turn from sin to God; and put your trust in our lord, Jeshua the Messiah.” Making even more people into talmidim, or pupils and disciples, immersing them into the reality of the Father, the son and the Ruach haKodesh or the Power of the Most High His Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that Jesus has commanded us.

All that call themselves Christian should acknowledge publicly with their mouth that Jeshua is lord, but God the Most High Lord of the lord of lords. Telling everybody that this Almighty God raised Jesus from the dead, so that we will be delivered.

For with the heart one goes on trusting and thus continues toward righteousness, while with the mouth one keeps on making public acknowledgement and thus continues toward deliverance. The one following Christ should not be afraid of the world and go into it proclaiming the Good News of the return of Jesus and the coming Kingdom of God. Like the apostle Paul every Christian should not boast merely because he proclaims the Good News — this they should all do from inner compulsion. Woe is them if they do not proclaim the Good News!

“”You heard me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.” (John 14:28 NIV)

“Now I want you to realise that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” (1 Corinthians 11:3 NIV)

“When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.” (1 Corinthians 15:28 NIV)

“26 But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. 27 For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.” (Luke 22:26-27 NIV)

“26 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— 28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”” (Matthew 20:26-28 NIV)

“Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ. {Or Messiah}” (Acts 5:42 NIV)

“I have declared to both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus.” (Acts 20:21 NIV)

“19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in {Or into; see Acts 8:16; 19:5; Rom. 6:3; 1 Cor. 1:13; 10:2 and Gal. 3:27.} the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”” (Matthew 28:19-20 NIV)

“9 That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” (Romans 10:9-10 NIV)

“Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you.’” (Luke 10:9 NIV)

“Yet when I preach the gospel, I cannot boast, for I am compelled to preach. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Corinthians 9:16 NIV)

“Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.” (1 Corinthians 11:1 NIV)

Willing to follow

Are you willing to follow Jesus, the son of God? Are you prepared to step out of the world and let all traditions for whatever they may be?

Are you willing to follow the example apostles of Jesus and dare trying to imitate them, even as Paul himself tried to imitate the Messiah? Do you want to become like Christ and become a Brother in Christ, sharing with others in the world the Good News and boasting about the works Christ has done for us all?

Do you think that those who really follow up the task Jesus has given his pupils would be a cult?

The Bible affirms that he Word of Adonai lasts forever and that this Word is the Good News which has been proclaimed to many. The things we have heard from Jesus and his disciples, which were supported by many witnesses, these things commit to faithful people, such as will be competent to teach others also. We should make use of it, to give us the spirit to get others to know God and his son Jesus Christ.

Therefore, brothers, stand firm; though some may consider us a cult we should not like them keep to the traditions of the world, but hold to the traditions we were taught by the men who God had chosen, the Prophets, Jesus and his disciples.

Christians should be those who keep to the Word of God, like Jesus did, and who remembered everything Jesus and his followers told and observe the traditions just the way the apostles passed them on to us.

“but the word of the Lord stands for ever.” {Isaiah 40:6-8} And this is the word that was preached to you.” (1 Peter 1:25 NIV)

“And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others.” (2 Timothy 2:2 NIV)

“So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the teachings {Or traditions} we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter.” (2 Thessalonians 2:15 NIV)

“I praise you for remembering me in everything and for holding to the teachings, {Or traditions} just as I passed them on to you.” (1 Corinthians 11:2 NIV)

Do you want to be a as “Follower of Jesus, part of a cult, or a Christian”?

Be a follower of the real Jesus of Nazareth who was known as the son of men and the son of God.

Christadelphians or Brothers in Christ, do follow Jesus and accept him for what he did and still does for us, as mediator between God and men.

Dutch version / Nederlandse versie: Volger van Jezus lid van een secte of een Christen

Please do read also:

+++

Cult or True Religion (wordsonsergebenhayon.wordpress.com)
“…if you believe in it, it is a religion or perhaps ‘the’ religion; and if you do not care one way or another about it, it is a sect; but if you fear and hate it, it is a cult.” Leo Pfeffer.
+
The Roman Catholic Church for example has been around ever since Constantine. He was a Roman emperor who used Christianity, which was a small cult at the time, as a means to impose his belief systems on the bishops; so he promulgated the council of Nicaea and thereby gained control of the populus. Now, over 1500 years later, people in Catholic churches today still recite the creed set down by Constantine.

Many people question the Catholic Church and other religions, seeing them as some of the biggest cults in the World today: they are viewed by many as man-made constructs which have the potential to lead millions of people astray. Religion in its current form has become divisive due to it’s many man-made and dualistic doctrines which continue to divide, separate and cause wars.
Billy Graham’s group removes Mormon cult reference from website after Romney meeting (religion.blogs.cnn.com)
Shortly after Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney enjoyed cookies and soft drinks with the Rev. Billy Graham and his son Franklin Graham on Thursday at the elder Graham’s mountaintop retreat, a reference to Mormonism as a cult was scrubbed from the website of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Billy Graham site removes Mormon ‘cult’ reference after Romney meeting

+
The removal of the post from the Graham group’s website was first noted by the New Civil Rights Movement website and then later by the Asheville Citizen-Times, which reported that the information on cults was accessed as recently as Thursday afternoon.
+
When asked about Graham’s beliefs about Mormonism, Graham spokesman A. Larry Ross said in a statement that “Through an inclusive evangelistic ministry spanning more than 60 years, Mr. Graham was called to preach the transformative message of the Gospel to the whole world, regardless of one’s religious background, affiliation or none. As such, he never proselytized, targeted or labeled specific people, groups, faiths or denominations.
Defining Christianity (reneland.wordpress.com)
Simply put a Christian is someone who believes in Jesus Christ.
The Whore of Babylon? (inpursuitofhappiness.wordpress.com)
Baal-vs-The “Catholic” God
Catholic Church Abuse Inquiry – Police Expose The Christian Child Abuse – Boy Scouts (truelogic.wordpress.com)
Even Mitt Romney’s Mormon cult religion has a history of molesting children. Wow, seems these holy books teach evil over moral behavior. Good thing we have several non-believers in this world or we wouldn’t have morals.
Billy Graham’s Truce with Mormonism; Scrubs Cult Reference (crooksandliars.com)
The Christian right has cried uncle and issued a truce on Mormons to try and help elect Mitt Romney.
+
During the Values Voter Summit in October, sponsored in part by the influential Family Research Council and the American Family Association, it caused quite a stir when Pastor Robert Jeffress, after introducing Rick Perry as a genuine Christian, called Mormonism a cult.
+
Christian political operatives are willing to throw away any trace of their contempt for Mormonism during the election cycle. This shows how much hatred they have for the left. They’d rather help elect a ‘cultist’ to the highest office in the land rather than stick to their alleged principles. Typically sickening.
+
To distinguish between a cult and a religion is to distinguish between influence and impotence. Both are, in fact, spawns of a smarmy fakery.
Why converting Muslims is taboo in the Catholic Church (catholicherald.co.uk)
What are they talking about at the Synod for Evangelisation? This article by Sandro Magister tells us that the Bishops have broached the taboo subject of conversions from Islam to Christianity. It makes interesting reading, despite the rather ponderous translation, (read the original here ) and I was particularly struck by this section of it, which I beg readers to consider carefully:

“The Muslims do not see the difference between Christians and Westerners, because they do not distinguish, themselves, between what is religious and what is political and social. What precedes the Westerners is perceived by the Muslims as preceding the Christians. Now, Western behaviour, especially on the cultural and political level and in a general way, harms the religious and national sensitivity of the Muslims, their values, their ethics and their culture. Consequentially, this forms an obstacle to their openness to Christianity and to their possible evangelisation.”
Billy Graham: Mormonism No Cult (orthodoxyandheterodoxy.org)
Sociologists of religion use cult to refer to a religious group that does not regard itself as exclusively true yet has negative relations with the surrounding society. Those two factors—exclusivity and societal relations—form the basis for sociological definition of religions into four kinds of groups: church (exclusive with good relations), denomination (inclusive with good relations), sect (exclusive with bad relations) and cult (inclusive with bad relations). Yet almost no one uses these terms in the way sociologists of religion use them.
+
I think what is really meant by cult in most modern Evangelical parlance is “bad/weird religious group.” And of course perhaps such a definition is right in its own way.
Grahams tighten Romney ties (newsobserver.com)
The election-year embrace of Mitt Romney by some evangelical Christians now borders on a bear hug, given a series of moves by Billy Graham and his family that appear to say it’s OK to vote for a Mormon.
Billy Graham website admits scrubbing ‘Mormons’ from ‘cult’ list after endorsing Romney (rawstory.com)
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association confirmed on Tuesday that it had removed all references to Mormonism as a “cult” from its website after their founder announced his support of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 4 so far )

Feeling-good, search for hapiness and the church

Posted on September 3, 2012. Filed under: Being Christian, following Jesus Christ, Christendom en Christenheid, Faith, Family, Life and Death, Manners and Association, Religion | Tags: Baptism, Belgium, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Choice, Christian, confidence, Flanders, Interfaithmarriage, Kirchensteuer, Love, Making choices, Pope, Relativism, Roman Catholics, Security |

In Flanders many Roman Catholics did not feel good with the happenings in their Catholic church and asked to be written out of the community. though there is something strange with the ciphers the Church and the state are giving, which are not in accordance with certain organisations who also send request to the church to have the christening of them made unfinished.

In 2011, 1.827 Flemish requested to put a line to their registration.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Clearly they are not feeling happy. But do they have an idea what they really would like to have concerning their faith and concerning influences on their way of living?

Many people look for meaning in their lives and struggle to find it, whereas religion offers an answer to the purpose of life and a hope that things will get better. But the last few years in Belgium many people became very disappointed with their faith and with the church to which they belonged, mostly because they were baptised in it. As a so called Catholic country it was common use to have the children baptised at birth. Not many Flemish people are interested in God and the baptism is often just a formality, making part of the tradition, having the feasts marriage, baptism, first communion, second communion and confirmation.

In 2010, there where still 60% of the newborns in Belgium baptized. This number was 40 years ago still above 90%. The rate is strongly dependent on the region in which one lives. The baptism figure is significantly lower in central cities (41.8%) and significantly higher in rural municipalities or urbanized rural municipalities (81.6%). In central cities this figure is also influenced by the relatively high birth rate of the non-indigenous population. But in 2010, only 7% of the Belgian population still went to Mass every week, even though there are figures that speak of only 3%.

Not many go to church and and not many to feel affection for the Pope, which normally as Catholics they should follow. The problem often is that many do not see the difference between Christians and Catholics and between The Church, a church and a church community. To be a Christian is to “consider the others, show respect for other beliefs, religions, etc., to help people in need, …” Catholicism is often equal to violate certain religious rules (which nobody really succeeds).

Though not many follow that so-called infallible Pope, they still remain Catholic and think there is still very little for to make their Catholic infant baptism undone. Many are also afraid that they would loud chances to be happy when they brake with tradition or by not keeping to those known ‘safety bringers’ as a cross on the wall, a Christoffle in the car, etc.

While it is important to focus on the “good” in our lives, they have ideas of the goodness they can receive from burning candles or doing pilgrimage. Family, relationships, career, sexuality and spiritual psychology are matters where they are afraid of to bring something in out of tradition, because it could become deregulated by it.

Often the people are not so interested in the faith and do think it does not matter. But when there is an interfaith marriage often problems do arise because a lot of things where not thought off before. They are not sensitive to and considerate of their spouse’s feelings and belief. Because they are unable to accommodate to differences between themselves, the marriage will suffer. And this certainly includes differences in religious or spiritual beliefs.

Of course, how critical these differences will be depends upon the religious conviction each of the spouses holds. If the major decisions you make in your marriage have little to do with your religious beliefs, than your marriage won’t be very much affected.

If one or both of them has strong beliefs, however, than these beliefs play a large role in the decisions the couple and their family make in their life, in their values and practices, and how they live their life. Often they did not seriously looked into the matter how they made to live their life befor, their values, their morals.

More than once they are both “lukewarm” in their religious practices, but once married and children coming on the way they become under pressure of the family, to adjust to certain practices of tradition. In such case it could bring a solution if one of them want to consider converting to the religion of the other. Discussing it logically, rationally, and see if one of the two can convince the other of the benefits of conversion, could bring a solution. If this option makes sense, than the child-rearing concern is taken care of.

If both are attached to their particular faiths, they will need to negotiate. Beginning with an attitude of openness, acceptance and love is than very important. Talking and making no swift decisions are important than. Each of them should take turns making suggestions on how they would like to raise their children, how they would like to expose them to their respective religions. But both also consider to check their own religion and to make a balance of their faith-life. It could be interesting considering to note a turning-point in life where both choose to take another route. Both finding a new religion which should be closer to the beliefs and practices of both.

At such a point in your life it is important to look at you faith. Consider how you were introduced to your religion by your family. Was it effective? Did you embrace the choice or was it forced upon you? Did you rebel? How did you eventually decide upon your own spiritual beliefs and how strongly did you integrate them into your life?

Sometimes we need to understand what isn’t working, so that we might transcend it and move forward in our lives. We should try to put the previous traditions aside and search for what we really want and search for what is really important, either to follow people, traditions and organisations, or better to follow God, the creator of heaven and earth.

Remember, despite what you want for your children, they will eventually need to make their own choices in the world, and find their own path. This is especially true about the role of religion and spirituality in their lives. Determine ahead of time how you would like your children to be exposed to your respective religions (or even other religions as well). Eventually, they will choose what path is best for them. Give them that space!

As parents, we can point our children in the direction we would like them to go, we can expose them to many different options. Ultimately, it is how we live our lives, how we treat our family members, our friends, strangers, and ourselves, which will guide our children!Our lives are their models, not our words.

We should learn to “make things happen” and to make choice which can alternate our lives. Knowing how important it is to look at the world and the things which happen and to transpose them to our life. Never stopping questioning. Being interested and curious about yourself and about others. Don’t assume that’s “just the way it is”. Look for the choices behind your results. And to be able to find luck, you have to be able to relativate and to be interested and curious about yourself and about others. Don’t assume that’s “just the way it is”. Look for the choices behind your results. Never stopping to learn. The brain is a muscle just like any other, and it will stagnate if you let it. Make it your rule to learn something new every day. Then use what you learn to make your life better. Nurture what you want to grow. Many many people are (figuratively) wondering where the roses are in their life, yet they spend all their time planting and nourishing weeds. You reap what you sow. That’s just the way it is. there we do have to make the choice which shall bring us more goodness in life.

Very important is not to lie to yourself. Telling lies to yourself is the most harmful form of disrespect. Write out ways in which you are untruthful to yourself, and how to correct it. Never give up on life. Be interested and curious about yourself and about others. Don’t assume that’s “just the way it is”. Look for the choices behind your results.

Don’t waste your time complaining about what you can’t control (weather, other people, economy). Concentrate on what you can control, like who you hug, what you read, how much you laugh, where you go, what you do, what you think about.

And to be able to be in control you have to start with controlling yourself, and knowing which way you want to go, what you want to believe and where you want to go for.

Do you want to live your life just for the now and then are do you want to live your life because you are expecting a reward?

We think you are on the wrong track if your goal is only recognition and a reward at the end of the track.

You only live once, and it is now you have to make it. But you should be aware there could be more. There is an important promise of which you should take account and which could change your life and your future.

It is something which can enable you to “Stand like a Rock” and be sure of your life.

Instead of thinking what other people think start getting to know that it is more important to think what the Creator would think.

A feel-good factor isn’t enough for the long haul through life. You better go and look into yourself and look for the relation you want to have with everything around you and with the maker of that all.

It is first in this world we do have to find the beauty, the love and the genuine kindness. It is here that we do have to work relations. and to make our relationships work we first of all do have to build up the right relationship with the most important person in the universe. And that is the Maker of that universe Himself, who we have to get to know and to love. Without proper love to Him it shall not be so easy to have the proper love to others.

Recognising that Someone is in control is a great help to being content with your situation, whatever it is.

Many people look for meaning in their lives and struggle to find it, whereas religion offers an answer to the purpose of life and a hope that things will get better. Do not wait until tomorrow. Tackle it today. From now on make work of making choice and taking the right decisions.

This is the Burton Christadelphians new logo for their website, specially designed to show the importance we attach to reading the Bible for ourselves, individually and collectively.

Dare to question your ‘current faith’, the denomination to which you belong. Look at your church and compare it with what they do and teach with the Book they are so called following. Have a look at the doctrines at the bottom of this page of the Burton Christadelphians. There you shall the words on which Christ himself based his beliefs and of what he himself told others to belief. You should question what you want to follow if you want to be called a Christian.

On the mentioned page you shall be able to find Bible quotes. Do not just take them for guaranteed, but dare to look them up in your Bible and compare the printed words with the concordance of your Bible. As our our aim is to follow as closely as possible the teaching and example of Jesus, as recorded in the Bible, we do listen to these words written down in the Book of Books, the Bible. Can you see the importance of having Scripture to back up our beliefs?

Please do read more about it:

also of interest to read:

available until December 2012 on our Multiply sites (and afterwards to look for on our WordPress sites:

+++

The Struggle With Religion (ptl2010.com)
There is a struggle with religion in today’s church, although this struggle has been going on ever since there have been different denominations in the church. What exactly is religion anyway? What would you say religion means?
+
There are many religions out there that claim the label “Christianity”, but are not true to the definition of that label. Some don’t even understand the basic premise of true Christianity, namely the death and resurrection of Christ and that this one act purchased our freedom and eternal life.
+
Following Christ means exactly that, follow Christ…not a man. If my Pastor leaves, I am not going with him because Jesus is right where I am already. Follow Christ, not a denomination. We all have a preference in a church and their particular style of worship and so on, and that is fine. However, are you worshiping Jesus or are you worshiping or following the denomination’s particular way of worship and or ceremony?
Suffer the little children to come unto me (guardian.co.uk)
When might it be in the best interests of a Jewish 10-year-old to be baptised as a Christian? That was the question Judge Platt had to decide at Romford county court in Essex earlier this year. His judgment, released for publication at the end of last week, makes fascinating reading.It involves a couple who were divorced in 2010 after 14 years of marriage. They had two children: a girl who is now nearly 11 and a boy who is nearly six. Both parents are Jewish, as are all four grandparents.
+
What made things more complicated was that the father had decided to become a Christian. After the marriage had come to an end but while the couple were still living under the same roof, the father experienced what he described as a meeting with God. “He started attending church each Sunday which naturally excited the interest of his children,” the judge said. “They asked if they could come with him and, with the agreement of the mother, they have been attending church regularly ever since.”
+

But what was the judge to do now? By law, his “paramount consideration” must be the “child’s welfare”. The court has no power to order the girl to baptised. What the judge had to do was to decide whether he should stop the father from taking steps leading towards the child’s baptism, as the mother had asked.

In the end, the judge was satisfied that the child’s “welfare interests are best served by allowing her to be enrolled in a baptism class and to present herself for baptism into the Christian church as soon as she is ready”. However, the judge ruled that her confirmation into the church should not take place before she is 16, unless the mother agrees.
200 Years Behind the Times (from the BBC website) (sandystrachan.wordpress.com)
Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini has described the Roman Catholic Church as being “200 years behind” the times.
+
Catholics lacked confidence in the Church, he said in the interview. “Our culture has grown old, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our religious rites and the vestments we wear are pompous.”Unless the Church adopted a more generous attitude towards divorced persons, it will lose the allegiance of future generations, the cardinal added. The question, he said, is not whether divorced couples can receive holy communion, but how the Church can help complex family situations.

And the advice he leaves behind to conquer the tiredness of the Church was a “radical transformation, beginning with the Pope and his bishops”.

“The child sex scandals oblige us to undertake a journey of transformation,” Cardinal Martini says, referring to the child sex abuse that has rocked the Catholic Church in the past few years.

He was not afraid, our correspondent adds, to speak his mind on matters that the Vatican sometimes considered taboo, including the use of condoms to fight Aids and the role of women in the Church.
How Protestantism Lost Its Mind (theamericanconservative.com)
The Todd Akin flap, in which the suburban St. Louis congressman revealed a less than adequate grasp of human reproduction, could hardly have been timed better to dramatize the implications an Aug. 7 referendum giving Missouri schoolchildren the right to opt out of science classes on religious grounds. Parents should be free to keep their children out of the public school system entirely, but an a la carte approach to classwork entirely defeats the point of general education.
+
Teaching is an exercise of what the Romans, and the Roman Catholic Church, have called magisterium, a kind of authority. It always carries moral overtones, and it’s an explicitly hierarchical concept. Why the more extreme Protestant instinctively rebels against this sort of authority should be obvious enough. And when, as in the case of science education, reflexive anti-clericalism combines with doctrinal objections, the reaction is powerful.
+
Protestantism is a matter of degrees, however: between an infallible papacy and the self-ordained soapbox preacher there are many levels. But the intermediary layers that once counteracted America’s more radically Protestant tendencies have lately collapsed. Episcopalians and other old-line, more traditionally “authoritarian” churches no longer provide a common culture for the country. What has changed is not just a question of numbers but also of status. Liturgical Christians once wielded prestige out of proportion to their percentage of the population, even when that percentage was much greater. Protestant radicalization is not only a consequence of evangelicalism’s postwar growth but also an effect of cultural leveling and rebellion against privilege (at least, old sorts of class privilege) throughout the 20th century. A mass-market commercial mentality and left-wing concerns for equality have undercut the status of the old Protestant elites from a secular direction, leaving the purer Protestantism with a greater sense of self-confidence.
+
What’s more, the distinction between popular politics and the religious congregation breaks down under the influence of radical Protestantism.
Is spirituality the antithesis of religion? (joelmlay.com)
It is not uncommon – actually it is fashionable these days – to hear people express anti-religion sentiment, saying, “I am spiritual but not religious”, especially when talking to strangers or new acquaintances. (There are some good examples in Match.com). The impetus is the desire to distance oneself from formalities.
Why Can’t This Atheist Accept Her Husband’s Loss of Faith? (patheos.com)
He had “been a Christian” because his family was, too, but when he actually thought about it, he realized it was all just ridiculous.
+
Then there’s the birth of their son and the inevitable question of whether they should take him to church (correct answer: No) just so he has a “spiritual base,” even though both parents reject it.
Switzerland: Kirchensteuer Probably Deadly Wounded. (mundabor.wordpress.com)
It is a mystery to me how a person might think he is not a Catholic anymore because he refuses to pay a mafia-like monetary contribution (truly redolent of the Sicilian pizzo) to the local Church. Still, I do not come from the German-speaking world, where people tend, erm, to be a bit more rigid.Now a Swiss citizen (a true Catholic, but fed up with the local mafia) decided to stop paying the Kirchensteuer and – obviously - remain a Catholic. Unsurprisingly, the local hierarchy was not persuaded baptism and orthodoxy are enough: if you don’t pay the pizzo to us, they said to her, you aren’t Catholic anymore. Kapiert?
+
the membership to the Catholic Church is now formally separated from the support to the administrative apparatus through the Kirchensteuer. Therefore, every Swiss Catholic can refuse to pay the pizzo (the same way you and I don’t pay it) in the full knowledge of remaining as much a member of the Church as you and I are.
Christian/Catholic Priests Are The Victim Of Those They Molest (truelogic.wordpress.com)
The Catholic Church, unbelievably, continues to receive money from ~~dumb sheep~~ Christian followers. These followers apparently think that when they stand before their God on judgement day that he will not ask them; “Why did you continue to support an establishment that had done such great harm to my children?” Giving money to the Catholic Church is to support child molesters/pedophiles by assisting in the payment of their salary, assisting in defending the priest through money paid to lawyers, money to move these guilty priest from church to church to avoid punishment, paying off victims and others to avoid justice.
When Other Christians Become Catholic (doohan.id.au)
Each year, many adults who have never been baptized become Catholic. In the United States, these adults are outnumbered by baptized Christians of other denominations who seek to enter into the full communion of the Catholic Church. In the minds of many Catholics – indeed, in many parish preparation programs – there is little difference between the two groups. Baptized and catechized Christians are often placed in programs with those who have not been baptized.
+
The appropriate rite is that of Reception of Baptised Catholics into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church and not the more commonly utilised Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. Although the former might be considered a ‘sub-rite’ of the latter, if only because they are found in the same ritual book, the two rites refer to two distinctive pastoral situations. The confusion of the two, and thus the use of the RCIA for those baptised Christians who are seeking to become Catholic, creates a confusion about their proper status, and thus a confusion within the person seeking to become Catholic. The other contributing factor is a belief that the same preparation process – of weekly meetings, and other activities – can cover the different ‘categories’ of those who are seeking to become Catholic.
Living ‘in the middle’, in between and keeping the peace. (1catholicsalmon.com)
England is a secular country, boasting secular values and ways of life. Living here has brought Faith issues to the fore and continues to do so on a daily basis. Because of this I ‘ve had to make a conscious decision about how I am to live as a Catholic Christian. There’s no room to manoeuvre half-heartedly through the secular mazes I’m confronted with from day-to-day. I’ve had to make my position as a Christian quite clear, and for me there’s no going back on this. It’s too important.

Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )

Icons and crucifixes

Posted on August 20, 2012. Filed under: Being Christian, following Jesus Christ, Jehovah יהוה YHWH JHVH God Elohim Yahweh Jahweh, Jesus Christ Jeshua the Messiah Jahushua | Tags: Blasphemy, Catholic Church, Cross, Crucifix, God the Father, Holy Mass, Icon, Idol, Idolatry, Mass (liturgy), Offer, Roman Catholic Church, Tradition, Worship |

In Belgium the “Roman Catholic Church” has dominated for years and brought in a lot of tradition, though many based on the old Celtic traditions. To be able to win more souls Catholic Church has always been very handy to adopt many of the local traditions and insert them in their local liturgy. Because of that you can notice lots of differences between a Holy Mass done in Western Europa, Africa or Asia.

In many Belgian houses it has been the tradition to put onto the walls a cross, to keep away the demons out of the house. According to the choice or taste of the person it could be a very old fashion cross or a modern one, an empty piece of wood or metal, or a cross with a figure on it. The Mosaic Law prohibits any pictures of God and warns Gods people not to pray to any figurines, statues or any pictures of gods. The Catholics and many Christians do say Christ Jesus is God and use painting and statues of this god to pray to. This being agains the Law of God, written in the Holy Scriptures.

Jesus Christ Crucifix (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Enter the Church that preaches “Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23). For Catholics, the crucifix (the cross that is not empty, but has the figure of the crucified saviour upon it) is everywhere – it’s around many believers necks, hanging in their living, kitchen, bedroom, in their schools and even in some offices. Often it is central in their churches, but most importantly, for Catholics it should be emblazoned upon their hearts.

Some priests or pastors would like to recommend gazing upon the crucifix from time to time – because according to them it is a reminder of the love of God for us, but even more importantly, it re-centers the soul upon him whom it should be focused on as much as possible. They do forget that our first focus should be on the Creator of all things, God our heavenly Father and the Father of Jesus Christ.

Putting up a crucifix on the wall is like putting a picture of the most beloved son car-wreck in which he died. When you would have a beloved who died in car-crash or on a ship, would you put photos of the wrecked ship/car everywhere in the house? Would you put a picture on the walls of the human wreck? Several Christians do like to remember Christ Jesus that way, as an awful person full of agony, hanging lost, to die. Instead of heaving pictures of his resurrection they do prefer to present all the suffering. For them those pictures seem to be the only way how they can remember the offering Jesus has given the world. The cruelty and brutality has to be pictured to be taken up in the mind of the believers and to be accepted as something cruel which had to happen to save the world.

For many the crucifix can cause even the most hardened soul to contemplate things it may not wish to contemplate. It is like otherwise they are not able to see their Saviour upon the stake, dying for all the world out of love. It seems that otherwise they would not be able to see in it their redemption and his limitless love for us. They want to take it as the only true symbol that can ground them, and remind them of what their central focus should be.

Many people do light a candle before one’s crucifix, and kneel in prayer before it. They speak to Christ upon the cross in prayer, contemplate his wounds that he suffered for them, and come to the realization of how very much indeed he loves them. It is a pity that they can not come to the understanding of the big offer Jesus brought for them, without such a visual heathen picture and heathen actions.

They should remember that concerning things sacrificed to idols, pictures or statues Christians should know that they should have enough knowledge to know better. They have learned that offerings to statues does not bring anything better or worse to them or others.
Christians should also know that no idol is [anything] in the world, and that there is no God but one. For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth; as there are gods many, and lords many; yet to them there should be only one God, the Father, of whom are all things are. Also we should be of this Father as we should be in Christ like Christ was in God, we unto Jeshua the Messiah whom we have as our master; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him.

“1 now about food sacrificed to idols: we know that, as you say, “we all have knowledge.” yes, that is so, but “knowledge” puffs a person up with pride; whereas love builds up. 2 the person who thinks he “knows” something doesn’t yet know in the way he ought to know. 3 however, if someone loves god, god knows him. 4 so, as for eating food sacrificed to idols, we “know” that, as you say, “an idol has no real existence in the world, and there is only one god.” 5 for even if there are so-called “gods,” either in heaven or on earth—as in fact there are “gods” and “lords” galore— 6 yet for us there is one god, the father, from whom all things come and for whom we exist; and one lord, Yeshua the Messiah, through whom were created all things and through whom we have our being. 7 but not everyone has this knowledge. moreover, some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat food which has been sacrificed to them, they think of it as really affected by the idol; and their consciences, being weak, are thus defiled.” (1 Corinthians 8:1-7 CJB)

Like the people in the time before Christ were not allowed to make unto them a graven image, nor the likeness of any form that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth, we should not use any image to pray for or to use in our worship. We only should worship the Only One God, not having to have any picture or statue to remind of Him or His son. The memory of the son and the memory of the Most High should be engraved in our heart.

“you are not to make for yourselves a carved image or any kind of representation of anything in heaven above, on the earth beneath or in the water below the shoreline.” (Exodus 20:4 CJB)

In case Jesus would be God then surely those Christians who believe that, should put away all images of Christ Jesus away and not burn candles in front of it or kneel down in front of it, because that would be blasphemy in the eyes of the Lord.

Long ago, images and icons were beaten to pieces. There were people who rightly assumed that no effigies could be there to worship. The destruction of the property of others was wrong. But if we ourselves have such pictures or images in the house, we must be careful that we do not pray or use them to worship. there should be a clear separation of the icon as art or as a religious object.

Do you have a crucifix hanging on the wall? How to proceed there? What do you do with it?

Dutch version: Kruisen en Iconen stukslaan

+++

The Greatest Moment in History (iseekhim.com)
“The crucifix is a sign that Jesus’ greatest moment in the world was when people thought He was defeated. The crucifix points to the greatest moment in history.”
Why One Should Gaze Upon the Crucifix Often… | Ascending Mount Carmel (amhec.wordpress.com)
Growing up as a Seventh-Day Adventist, the crucifix was an entirely Catholic thing – over there somewhere, buried amongst the many evils and frightening aspects of the Babylonian aggressor that was viewed as the “Roman Catholic Church”.
Communist authorities force Catholics to replace crucifix with picture of Ho Chi Minh… (ucanews.com)
Government authorities from a district in the Central Highlands last week compelled ethnic villagers to remove Catholic pictures and items from their chapel and replaced them with images of Ho Chi Minh last weekend.
Jon Kay: Dear Ms. Marois, does my chai pendant count as a banned ‘religious sign’? (fullcomment.nationalpost.com)
As Graeme Hamilton reported this week, PQ leader Pauline Marois is promising Quebecers a “Charter of Secularism” that would prevent public-sector workers from brandishing “conspicuous religious signs.” But she is employing a rather selective definition of “conspicuous” here. Crosses and crucifixes — like the big one that hangs in Quebec’s National Assembly — would be exempt; while Muslim headscarfs, Jewish yarmulkes and Sikh kirpans would be verboten.

If you ask me, the law would be a lot more clear if the word “conspicuous” were simply replaced with “ethnic.” Ms. Marois is just fine with religion per se. It’s the kind that comes with an accent and a suntan she doesn’t like.
+
here’s the devilish part: Even the cross and the crucifix — the non-ethnic religious symbols that Ms. Marois likes because they’ve “allowed the Quebec people to survive on American soil” — can be problematic.

That’s because, as this web pageshows us, the familiar Christian symbol comes in a bewildering number of variations. And some, I hate to inform Ms. Marois, are brandished primarily by immigrants.

Christ Crucified(samuelatgilgal.wordpress.com)J. C. Rylereminds us that the church cannot be the Church unless the doctrine of the cross is central in its teaching:+Whenever a Church keeps back Christ crucified, or puts anything whatever in that foremost place which Christ crucified should always have, from that moment a Church ceases to be useful. Without Christ crucified in her pulpits, a church is little better than a cumberer of the ground, a dead carcass, a well without water, a barren fig tree, a sleeping watchman, a silent trumpet, a speechless witness, an ambassador without terms of peace, a messenger without tidings, a lighthouse without fire, a stumbling-block to weak believers, a comfort to infidels, a hot-bed for formalism, a joy to the devil, and an offence to God. (“The Cross of Christ”)
Quebec election: Crucifix stays, but hijabs go under Parti Quebecois government, party leader says (calgaryherald.com)
Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois shakes hands with a supporter outside a former sawmill during a campaign stop in Trois Rivières on Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2012.
Canada’s Own Little Racist Secret (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)
Attention public servants: turbans, kippahs and hijabs will not be allowed in the workplace under a Parti Québecois government, but by all means, sport that crucifix, as long as it’s not too ostentatious. The party hoping to form the next government Sept. 4 tried to expand on its contradictory plan to protect Quebec values during a campaign stop Tuesday in Trois Rivières.“We don’t have to apologize for who we are,” said PQ leader Pauline Marois, while saying the so-called charter of secularism would be adopted as soon as they come to power. “We are one of the most tolerant and open people on the planet, but we want our values, such as equality between the sexes, respected by everyone.”

Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )

Manifests for believers #4 Eucharist

Posted on February 11, 2012. Filed under: Breaking of the Bread, Christendom and Christianity, Feesten, Jesus Christ Jeshua the Messiah Jahushua, News and Politics | Tags: Body of Christ, bread and wine, Catholic, Catholic Church, Celibacy, Christ, Council of Trent, Desecration of the host, Eucharist, God Son, holy communion, Jesus, Lord's Supper, Manifest, Pope Innocent III, Roman Catholic Church, Sacramentarians, Transubstantiation, Women in Church |

In the previous article Manifests for believers #3 Catholic versus Protestant we pointed already at the idea of the opponents of the Manifest for believers Manifest Gelovigen nemen het woord (Religiuously or Believers take the word)who do find that a lay men can not bring a sermon and also should not be allowed to say the sacred words of the consecration, nor hand out the bread and wine at the Holy Communion!” The conservative Catholics say. Also the “gegraai” or the groping in the tabernacle (the goblet), that we see now always more, is a real plague! “Women must remain with their hands from the tabernacle!” Asking that women should be able to become priests is something they do not believe the writers of the manifest are really asking. Though in the manifest Gelovigen nemen het woord is written: “We plead in favour that within the shortest time as well married men as women shall be permitted the priest office. We, religious, need them now very badly.

A delegation of the study Group Kerkenwerk (Churchwork) on Thursday 9 February, in Malines (Mechelen) handed over the Manifesto “Religiously take the word” to the Flemish bishops and has given them the list of the names of the signatories.

The Manifesto, that is a call at the Flemish bishops to break through the impasse, in which the Churches in Flanders is been found, through reformation, is endorsed by 8235 religiously, mainly via the internet, some also written.

Emmanuel Van Lierde has the impression that petitions, it appears to be well a new trend in the Flemish church. A first observed petition was that ‘for a credible and liberating church’. Ends 2010 signed 6,800 religiously that signal to encouragement in full peadofilicrisis. More recent there were petitions ‘against the secular dictatorship’ with about 3,000 signatures, against the abstraction of the service of the Brussels Saint-Kathelijnekerk with more than 6,100 signatories and on the manifesto Religious take the word followed the counter action Religious accept the word with a 200 signatories.

According to the study Group Kerkenwerk the plea to let married men and women come into the priest office, has to be seen in the frame to make it possible to have the Church grow in these difficult times in which we do need more diversification in which creatively should be sought to new roads round the multiplicity of talents and to utilize better the engagement of many religious people.

Dr. Gregory S. Neal, UM Elder, presides at the...

That some of the signing members of the manifest also do not believe in transubstantiation, meaning that the piece of bread given to the believers, is really the body of Christ, is pure heresy and apostasy according the opponents. For the conservatives it is clear that men as Dekimpe praise no longer the transubstantiation! They do forget that Pope Innocent III had recognized (1215) the doctrine of transubstantiation, which resulted in the public and general worship of the consecrated host. The doctrine, first elaborated by theologians in the 13th century, was incorporated into documents of the Council of Trent. In the mid-20th century, some Roman Catholic theologians interpreted it as referring to a change of meaning rather than a change of substance, but in 1965 Paul VI called for the retention of the original dogma. According to the conservative Catholics the writers of the manifest ignore the fact of the Real Presence, which is, indeed, the central dogma every Catholic should hold on.

Although the manna, a type of the Eucharist, was indeed eaten with the mouth, it could not, being a transitory food, ward off death. The second food, that offered by the Heavenly Father, is the bread of heaven, which He dispenses hic et nunc to the Jews for their spiritual nourishment, inasmuch as by reason of the Incarnation He holds up His Son to them as the object of their faith. If, however, the third kind of food, which Christ Himself promises to give only at a future time, is a new refection, differing from the last-named food of faith, it can be none other than His true Flesh and Blood, to be really eaten and drunk in Holy Communion. This is why Christ was so ready to use the realistic expression “to chew” (John 6:54, 56, 58: trogein) when speaking of this, His Bread of Life, in addition to the phrase, “to eat” (John 6:51, 53: phagein).*

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live for ever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live for ever.”” (John 6:51-58 NIV)

Idolatry of the Blessed Sacrament or a Holy Host as the Body of Christ

Catholics do believe that Jesus is God who gives his blood and body daily to those members of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the highest form of civilization, who come to His table. Only believers liberated from their sins by the confession are allowed to take this manlike god in their mouth but may not chew on him, because mastication of God would be a big sin. Here we can see again an other pagan idolatry and Christian image-worship. The host has lost the symbol of the bread being a representation of the ‘Bread of Life’. The Catholics take it to be really the Holy sacred body of God, and in many churches you can find relic-worship of this consecrated host being put in golden receptacles, called the monstrance. In lots of Roman Catholic Churches it is exposed for the adoration of the people.

In older times we did find already reactions against this adoration of a piece of bread.

As late as 1820 a great jubilee was celebrated at Brabant in commemoration of the desecration of the host at Enghien in 1370. This festival lasted eight days, during which sixteen hosts studded with diamonds were borne in solemn procession through the streets. Fifty years later (1870), while a committee and the clergy of Brussels were making preparations for this ancient festival, an article appeared in the “Revue Belgique,” entitled “Le Jubilé d’un Faux Miracle,” etc., which proved by the original sources that, although three Jews had been burned in 1370 on the charge of having stolen a host, “pro sacramentis punice et furtive captis,” the original document had been changed sixty-five years later to read “pro sacramento puncto et furtive accepto,” in order to fabricate an accusation of desecration of the host. Other falsifications being discovered in the document, Pope Pius IX felt obliged to stop the festival. In the Church of Sainte-Gudule, Brussels, are several Gobelin tapestries containing representations of the supposed desecration of the host in 1370.**

The refutation of the so-called Sacramentarians, a name given by Luther to those who opposed the Real Presence, evinces as clearly the impossibility of a figurative meaning. Once the manifest literal sense is abandoned, occasion is given to interminable controversies about the meaning of an enigma which Christ supposedly offered His followers for solution. *

Only ordained people who abstain from sex can bless the bread of the Lord’s Supper and say “This is my body” after which they may hand out the body of Christ, god the son, the conservative Catholics say. Asking to allow women to be able to say this is degrading the Holy Sacrament and blasphemy.(***)

The writers of the Manifest not speaking of the wine miraculously becoming the blood of Christ and the bread miraculously becoming the body of Christ seem to offend many.

But Jesus does speak of the symbology of our taking the wine and the bread as representing our unity with one another and with us being involved with the sacrifice of Christ. As Jesus said in Matthew 10:38 “whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” and Paul in Romans 6:5-13

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (6) We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. (7) For one who has died has been set free from sin. (8) Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. (9) We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. (10) For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. (11) So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (12) Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. (13) Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.

*Proof from Scripture – The real presence as a fact > The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist

**Defiling the host or sacred wafer of the mass: desecration of host

(***) God can not die, but Jesus, being a man could die but only once. A “re-sacrifice” of Jesus Christ for our sins, or a “re-offering / re-presentation” of His sacrifice is not necessary. Scripture says, that Jesus died “once for all” and does not need to be sacrificed again (Hebrews 10:10; 1 Peter 3:18). Hebrews 7:27 declares, “Unlike the other high priests, He (Jesus) does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when He offered Himself.” The bread and the wine are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus, but are not a representation of God nor His body or his blood (Because God is a ghost and has no body or blood as human beings.) The bread Jesus was breaking represented what he was going to do. The same for the wine he gave them – his blood hadn’t yet been shed, but the wine represented the blood that would be shed. These words were not meant to be taken in a literal sense then, nor are they now.

Preceding article: Manifests for believers #3 Catholic versus Protestant

To be continued: Manifests for believers #5 Christian Union

Please do find to read:

Is Jesus Christ actually present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist/communion?
The Lord’s supper is done both to help Christians remember what Jesus has done, and also to proclaim what Jesus has done (‘For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’: 1 Cor. 11:26).

What is Holy Communion? Why is it necessary to a Christian’s life?Children ate the OT passover so why not NT bread and wine?Are the bread and wine just symbols, or are they really Jesus flesh and blood?Why did Jesus say he wouldn’t drink wine again until the kingdom when he ate and drank other things? (Mark 14:25)Why wasn’t the lying prophet killed? (1 Kings 13)

What is transubstantiation?

Who Can Receive Communion? according Catholics

+++

Manifests for believers #1 Sex abuse setting fire to the powder (christadelphians.wordpress.com)
Manifests for believers #2 Changing celibacy requirement (christadelphians.wordpress.com)
Manifests for believers #3 Catholic versus Protestant (christadelphians.wordpress.com)
Een Manifest voor Gelovigen (marcusampe.wordpress.com)
Manifest tot protestantse kerk | Marcus’ s Space (marcusampe.wordpress.com)
Manifestanten Protestant of Katholiek | Marcus’ s Space (marcusampe.wordpress.com)
Touch Jesus and be healed through faith (cinhosa.wordpress.com)
During The Eucharist, The Church teaches that the host and wine are consecrated by the priest. After the consecration, they become the body and blood of Jesus Christ through transubstantiation. So that Catholics (and other Christian denominations) believe that upon receipt the Blessed Sacrament, we touch Jesus – literally.
+
For additional reading, the Real presence of Christ in the Eucharist contains an overview of various Christian denominations and their belief (or not) in transubstantiation. The Catholic Encyclopedia has a reference article for additional information.
Audio for Eucharist (lettersonorthodoxy.wordpress.com)
Here’s some additional audio resources regarding the Eucharist
Eucharist : Communion or Discrimination?? (catholicakauniversal.wordpress.com)
Eucharist has been a controversial topic, specially in a multicultural and multi-religious continent like Asia.
+
In the Hindu temple they offer the devotees Prasad a food offering made to a god and then shared among the people, to both Hindus and non-Hindus.
+
we can Evangelize better if we understood the real concept of the Eucharist that Christ explained to us. This is something that has to be considered instead of arguing whether we should receive communion directly on hand or tongue. It would be more meaningful if we call everyone for a fellowship, a real communion without discriminating others with the sentence announced during the mass “Non-Christians are not allowed to receive Communion!” And I hope that they will dawn someday Till then, Eucharist is only for the Baptized Christians!
The Holy Eucharist – The Bread of Life (catholicsview.wordpress.com)
The mysticism of the Christian faith has been eaten away by society. Despite miracles being recorded throughout history, as people of God we have lost faith in them. The mystery of transubstantiation (bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Jesus) is one of these miracles that occur at each Mass across the world. Non-catholic churches that used to believe in the Eucharist have gone from believing in transubstantiation to, “If you think it’s real for you, then it is real” and “it is only a symbol” in order to conform to societies’ ideals and beliefs.
Contraception, Spilling One’s “Seed” and the Obama Health Care Ruling (woodgatesview.com)
Ahh Catholicism. What fond memories I have about my first Communion, Confirmation, serving my first Mass as an alter boy and best of all, my awareness of sin. Without sin in our lives there is chaos. There can be no understanding for our purpose on earth and what lies in store for us afterwards without a sense of our sinful life.
Catechistic Introduction (boyd41.wordpress.com)
Catechistic Notes includes posts on Christian Faith and Worship. These posts comprise paraphases, quotes, references, and personal impressions from several catechistic documents.
A Bunch of Ignorance and a Mammoth of Delusion (esoriano.wordpress.com)
If what is in the cup is the real blood of Jesus, how can the mass be an unbloody sacrifice? If what is in the cup is only symbolic blood, it is also symbolically bloody, doesn’t it follow?
+
Praying and praising His name is symbolic of the incense which is pure sacrifice that will reach the throne of the Almighty! It is not something material, for then, not everyone would have access to it. It is not something readily found in those who prefer to delude themselves by way of ascribing spiritual presence to bread and wine that they call Christ’s body and blood – which they offer again and again.

Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 4 so far )

Manifests for believers #2 Changing celibacy requirement

Posted on February 5, 2012. Filed under: Christendom and Christianity, Churchplanning, News and Politics, Religion | Tags: Belgium, Catholic Church, Celibacy, Child Sexual Abuse, Christianity, Clergy, Clerical celibacy, Ethics, Eucharist, Evil, FutureChurch, Jozef De Kesel, Manifest, Marriage, meeting, Ordination, Parish, Roman Catholic Church, Sexual Abuse, Women in Church |

In the previous article Manifests for believers #1 Sex abuse setting fire to the powder we saw that the role of the priest in the child and adult abuse has included cover-ups, neglect, and arrogance. In documents of the church, letters between victims and church, and in the media we could find enough proof the Church has contributed to the spirit of permissiveness. First there were not many attempts to bring everything in good order and to show guilt and reconciliation attempts have resulted in compromises that allowed for the deviancy to continue.

For decades, the problem of paedophilia has been badly managed within the church and now that everything comes out of the cesspool this brought the church in discredit and got even more people leaving their church and their faith. Some wonder if you can you blame Catholics for leaving the faith when these types of attitudes run rampant in the church? The problem becomes bigger when they do take it that “the Church” is bad and that they should not go to any church or return to the Catholic Church because they get the impression that nothing is being done to prevent abuse from happening. It certainly doesn’t seem that the Catholic church has a screening process that will eliminate paedophiles and child molesters.

Steven van der Hoeven talks about his book in which he describes how the sexual abuse he suffered as a child changed his life - Photo Vera de Kok

The atheist Child & Family Therapist Katie from British Columbia, Canada, works professionally with children who have experienced sexual abuse and she is by no means claiming that most sexual abuse happens within the confines of religion, because it doesn’t. “However, religion has the tendency to override rationality and good judgment.” according to her. * “Parents need to acknowledge that religion does not make you any more moral than others and that bad people will do bad things… so teach your children to recognize those people.” And that is what we do agree with; everywhere you can find extreme cases and people who do the wrong things. It has nothing to do with God, except that you would call Him guilty of giving men free spirit and allowed him to do whatever he wanted.

Also the problem of priests not being able to marry made that many who wanted to do some churchwork did not come forward to offer their life for the Church.

°°°

The very planet revolves around actions, thoughts, and words that are fueled by ethics. By the years people and situations change.

With all the tribulations and sex scandals many have lost their faith. Many do claim God for what happens in the world, but then they forget that at the beginning of the world-existence God had given men liberty to go his own way. The first humans had doubted the good meaning of the Creator. They challenged Him and wanted to know the Good and the Evil. They wanted to know as much as God and wanted to direct their own thoughts and life. God did not want to play a dictator to whom everybody had to listen other-while he would vanish. But now that humankind wanted to go its own way it had to bear the consequences of its deeds itself and can not blame God because other humans do something wrong.

If a person lives a holy life and believes in God, he would be better off weather there was a god or not, because his life would be much happier and honourable. The same goes for ethics. If someone lives an ethical life, he or she is destined to be much happier than people who do not follow ethics.

But those ethics have to be fed.

In all religions there exists a connection between religious doctrine and social ethics. In Christianity one of the goals is the establishment of a holy, organized society, ideally based on eternal principles of righteousness and fair dealing, cleanliness and sobriety, honesty and helpfulness. Ethics have an impact on an individual, and they should come out of the Word of God for those who want to spread the Word of God. In such an instance they should work on their character and should try to live according to the Laws of God. The laws governing human conduct in the Bible define both social and economic justice, and the pursuit of a good life in society. Born out of the Judaic system with Hebrew code, the Christianic code of social ethics sets also forth spiritual guidelines regarding lawful and unlawful actions, and rewards for the virtuous and threats of punishment for the wicked.

A community should have people who take care to look at ways of living and to talk about them. There should be people in the world who would not mind helping others to find a good way of living, and to protect those who are not able to come up for them selves. In the previous centuries churches have taken most of that role on to them. But now the church has come in discredit.

Therefore, though the storm is not yet at its height, it can well be that the Roman Catholic Church has shot his bolt.

St. Mary's Maternity Roman Catholic Church in Trzebiatów, Poland - Photo JDavid

The Roman Catholic Church has always proclaimed that it is the only Church which offers “special” access to salvation, by way of truly God’s servants. But those bulletproof servants have received a real good roasting the last few months.

Today several Belgian believers, priests and even bishops do find that since the requirement for celibacy is not a doctrinal issue or dogma, but more of a disciplinary rule, there is no reason why this requirement cannot be amended to reflect the changing times. The majority of parishioners, including many members in the hierarchy of the Church, believe that changing the celibacy requirement may prevent abuse from happening in the first place (National Catholic Reporter, 1998). Because of the decline in those entering the priesthood, there are fewer priests to serve their communities.

The discipline by which some, or all members of the clergy in certain religions, are required to be unmarried is not any more for this time. Considering deliberate sexual thoughts, feelings, and behaviour outside of marriage to be sinful, clerical celibacy also requires abstention from these, and as history has shown that does not seem to work on a lot of ‘spiritual men’. That the Roman Catholic Church demands sacred ministers celibacy because than they would be more able to adhere more easily to Christ with an undivided heart and dedicate themselves more freely to the service of God and humanity, is a superseded idea.

It is long our of date that people would not be able to do their job properly when they are married. As for a worldly job, the spiritual job can even make more use of the inside information a married person can get from the family members and his situation in a common form of living together.

In some Christian churches, such as the Latin Rite Catholic Church and some Eastern Catholic Churches, priests and bishops must as a rule remain unmarried, while in others, such as the Eastern Orthodox Church, the churches of Oriental Orthodoxy and some of the Eastern Catholic Churches, married men may be ordained as deacons or priests, but may not remarry if their wife dies. Since celibacy is seen as a consequence of the obligation of continence, it implies abstinence from sexual relationships. The Catholic Code of Canon Law prescribes: “Clerics are to behave with due prudence towards persons whose company can endanger their obligation to observe continence or give rise to scandal among the faithful.”

People should know that the rule of clerical celibacy is a law of the Church (the human institution) itself, not a doctrine and can not be found as a Biblical obligation. According to the Roman Catholic Church, a very few times exceptions can be made, and it can, in principle, be changed at any time by the Pope. Nonetheless, both the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and his predecessor, under pressure to change it, spoke clearly of their understanding that the traditional practice is unlikely to change.

Warsaw - Metropolitan orthodox church of St.Mary Magdalene - Photo Rafal Klisowski

Clerical celibacy and monastic vows, made in Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox Churches, deprived the church of the services of many men who might have become shining stars. On the other hand, it has been calculated by Justus Möser in 1750, that within two centuries after the Reformationfrom ten to fifteen millions of human beings in all lands owe their existence to the abolition of clerical celibacy. {Ranke states this fact.} More important than this numerical increase is the fact that an unusual proportion of eminent scholars and useful men in church and state were descended from clerical families. Among distinguished sons of clergymen may be named Linné, the botanist; Berzelius, the chemist; Pufendorf, the lawyer; Schelling, the philosopher; Buxtorff, the Orientalist; Euler, the mathematician; Agassiz, the scientist; Edward and Ottfried Müller, the classical philologists; John von Müller, Spittler, Heeren, Mommsen, Bancroft, among historians; Henry Clay, Senator Evarts, and two Presidents of the United States, Arthur and Cleveland, among statesmen; Charles Wesley, Gellert, Wieland, Lessing, the brothers Schlegel, Jean Paul, Emanuel Geibel, Emerson (also the female writers Meta Heusser, Elizabeth Prentiss, Mrs. Stowe), among poets; John Wesley, Monod, Krummacher, Spurgeon, H. W. Beecher, R. S. Storrs, among preachers; Jonathan Edwards, Schleiermacher, Hengstenberg, Nitzsch, Julius Müller, Dorner, Dean Stanley, among divines; Swedenborg, the seer; with a large number of prominent and useful clergymen, lawyers, and physicians, in all Protestant countries.*

Many dioceses engage in the morally questionable practice of importing priests from the developing world despite even more severe priest shortages in those countries.

In recent years Pope Benedict XVI has made allowances for married Anglican ministers to transfer to the Catholic church after a number made the move in protest at controversial Anglican issues including the ordination of women priests, and acceptance of ministers in same-sex relationships. In 1980 married Anglican/Episcopal pastors were ordained as catholic priests in the U.S.; also in Canada and England in 1994, while simultaneously dismissing Catholic priests who marry and failing to recognize the vocations of Catholic married men. Some bishops are changing priests’ retirement age from 70 to 75. Many are embracing several of these strategies simultaneously yet none will arrest the steep declines looming ahead.

The stubborn Belgian knows the ropes and the celibate is something which is already sticking in his throat to long. They are at their wits’end what to do with it and with the scandals the church had to encounter. The clergy men became upset by the conservative and silent attitude of the Church leaders in Rome. According to many it is a myth that the vocation shortage is due to materialism and lack of faith. Research (1985 Lilly endowment) showed that “there is no evidence to support loss of faith for less vocations…youth volunteer and campus ministry is rising.”

Flemish bishop of Bruges Jozef De Kesel

The Bishop of Bruges, Jozef De Kesel, has questioned celibacy for priests and called for an open discussion on the position of women in the Church. The bishop of Hasselt, Patrick Hoogmartens and Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp have also said that married men should not automatically be excluded from the priesthood. (Reuters,9/22/10)

In several countries there is a “Call To Action and FutureChurch” from Catholic lay people as well as priests and nuns, who respect the Catholic tradition and are working respectfully to effect change in the Church because they love it and want to make it better. Those ‘FutureChurch‘ members consider themselves parish-based because the resolutions which founded that church came from individual parishes and because so many of their members consider the parish their primary place of worship.

Priestly Ordination at the abbey of Fontgombault (France)

Jesus did not ordain anyone. Ordination was a practice that started to occur decades later in church history. Jesus had both male and female disciples and those who helped to spread the faith were men and women, who often had regular jobs and children. It were people who gathered around Jesus and went back to their own places to tell about this special man. Others became so much interested in the teachings of this master teacher from Nazareth that they loved to spread his teachings. Men and women continued to teach what they had learned from either Jesus or from his disciples. It were common people who continued the tradition of spreading the Word of God by coming together in each others houses or in synagogues. (So at first there where not even special build places to meet and to have the worship services.) Later when they were not welcome any more in the synagogues and their private houses became to small they came together in public places or they build meeting houses or ecclesiae to congregate , gather or meet.

The Flemish priests who were not afraid to let the Roman Catholic world hear their voice believe as many other priests in the world, that priests should be allowed to marry and that women have an equal right to have their call to ordination tested along with male candidates. Some of them believe also that celibacy is a gift of the Spirit, as is the call to marriage and the single life. Gifts cannot be mandated, so it is from a deep respect for the gift of celibacy that they request that it be made optional and not forced upon those who do not feel called in this way.

At the end of 2011 more Belgian priests urged Catholics and compatriots to start talking about what the priest shortage means to them and their parishes. Some ideas were written down in ‘A Manifest for Believers‘ so that the subject would become more known and that the public debate could bes started. By the manifest they want to encourage the formation of dialogue groups in parishes and small faith communities.

According to a survey taken between December, 2010 and January, 2011, seven out of ten Flemish priests are against celibacy for priests, are for the access of women to the priesthood, (La Croix, 2/19/2011)

The Belgian Manifesto urges the bishops to find solutions to the priest shortage and open discussion about ending mandatory celibacy as a requirement for the diocesan priesthood.

It may be a surprise that still so many people want to go for that institute which has received so much damage from people who were in charge of it. Strange also that they keep clinging at this institute which has betrayed so many people. The manifesto can be an expression of a liberation movement. In civic culture we have seen the emancipation movement, and now perhaps time has come that we get such an emancipation movement in church as well.

But can this corroded pre-eminently paternalistic institute take off its ‘old garments ‘ and transform itself in a contemporary, modern belief community, characterized by a basic democracy.

In this 21st century the Roman Catholic Church still seems to be a nearly dictatorial institution which by requiring at least some of its clerics and its religious not to marry, the Catholic Church falls under Paul’s condemnation in 1 Timothy 4:3 against apostates who “forbid marriage.”

The Catholic Bible writes: “the spirit expressly states that in the \@acharit-hayamim\@ some people will apostatize from the faith by paying attention to deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. such teachings come from the hypocrisy of liars whose own consciences have been burned, as if with a red-hot branding iron. they forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods which god created to be eaten with thanksgiving by those who have come to trust and to know the truth. for everything created by god is good, and nothing received with thanksgiving needs to be rejected, because the word of god and prayer make it holy.” (1 Timothy 4:1-5 CJB)
or in a Protestant translation:
“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.” (1 Timothy 4:1-5 NIV)

God has created man and woman, told them to live with each other, to marry and have children. So why is it forbidden to those men and women to choose somebody of the other sex, marry, live with each other and have children from each other?

In the old times most Catholics married, but today most live together without having had a marriage, tough all Catholics are taught to venerate marriage as a holy institution—a sacrament, an action of God upon their souls; one of the holiest things we encounter in this life. A lot of Belgian Catholics also quite often switch partner. But the servants of God should know the Laws of God and should be the first ones to keep to them. According to the Laws of God the man or the woman who does not keep to the Laws of God and has not an ethic acceptable good honest life, should not be allowed to do some church work. In the New Testament are several writings were we can find women and man teaching the Good News of the coming Kingdom of God, and also writings from the apostles how they have to comply to the Law and how they have to comply with certain expectations. So, in the early church also women had their tasks and helped the church grow.

Even the old Father Edward Daly, who was the Bishop of Derry for 20 years during the Troubles, has become the first senior Irish Catholic cleric to call for an end to celibacy in the church. His intervention in the debate over whether priests should be allowed to marry is highly significant because he is still one of the most respected figures in the Irish Catholic church at a time when faith in the institution has been shattered by the paedophile scandals involving clergy. Challenging centuries of Catholic theocracy, Daly has said that allowing the clergy to marry would solve some of the church’s problems. “There will always be a place in the church for a celibate priesthood, but there should also be a place for a married priesthood in the church,” Daly writes in his book A Troubled See, Memoirs of a Derry Bishop, published in September 2011.

While Daly accepts he might be out of step with current Vatican thinking he points out that he is “not engaged in a popularity contest”. He says that during his time as a bishop he found it “heartbreaking” that so many priests or prospective priests were forced to resign or were unable to get ordained because of the celibacy issue.

Many young men who once considered joining the priesthood turned away because of the rule, the 74-year-old cleric argues. From most people who were interested to become a priest, but did not follow their vocation, the rule of celibacy was the main reason not to go for it. Because of that we do have to face the catastrophic shortage of priests and see a serious neglect of the Eucharist, and a widespread breakdown of pastoral care.

Merging parishes into “pastoral units” did offer less services to the believers who became less interested in worshipping in a far away church, ministered to by badly overworked priests who did seem to have lost the zeal and interest as well.

And this is something we can hear in many countries.

Though parishioners not receiving enough opportunities to go to mass or take part of the sacraments is against other writings in the Catholic Faith.

“Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that full, conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy, and to which the Christian people, ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people,’ have a right and an obligation by reason of their Baptism.” (Sacrosanctum Concilium)

“The laity have the right, as do all Christians, to receive in abundance from their sacred pastors the spiritual goods of the Church, especially the assistance of the Word of God and the sacraments.” (Lumen Gentium, 37).

“Christ’s faithful are at liberty to make known their needs, especially their spiritual needs, and their wishes to the Pastors of the Church.”(Canon Law 212.2 )

“They have the right, indeed at times the duty, in keeping with their knowledge, competence and position, to manifest to the sacred Pastors their views on matters which concern the good of the Church.” (Canon Law 212.3 )

Today that Church is not willing to provide the means to take care of their believers. In many villages there are no regular church services any more. At the village were our office is there is only once a month a service with Eucharist. It is for such bad situations the priest ring the Alarm and want that the Roman Catholic Church does everything to let the parishes to stay open and the Eucharist to remain the centre of Catholic worship.

Internationally there is already a ” Save our Parish Community project” that has helped parishioners hold their bishops accountable by appealing mistaken decisions to close their vital, solvent parishes because of the priest shortage.

The Flemish priests and several important political and civilian figures plead in favour of having as well married men as women being permitted as priest in the Church office. They do hope the permission shall be given very soon, because there is an acute shortage of priests and those who want to do some religious work are now so much-needed.

*of Intro: Child Sexual Abuse within the Dutch Catholic Church

* Reflections on Clerical Family Life

To be continued: Manifests for believers #3 Catholic versus Protestant

Preceding article: Manifests for believers #1 Sex abuse setting fire to the powder

Manifests for believers #1 Sex abuse setting fire to the powder

Posted on February 3, 2012. Filed under: Christendom and Christianity, Endtimes | Tags: Belgium, Catechism class, Catholic Church, Celibacy, Child Sexual Abuse, Child-molestation, Clergy, Council of Agde, Council of Elvira, Council of Orléans, Council of Trent, Crimen Sollicitationis, Gerald Fitzgerald, John Calvin, Manifest, Papacy, Philip Melanchthon, Pope Benedict XVI, Roman Catholic Church, Sexual Abuse, Women in Church |

In the 50s and 60s of the previous century many acolytes and young boys became confronted with not such a nice site of human nature and his urge to have physical contact. Growing older and not having been able to cope with the old trauma some got up from their quit seat and started to tell tales out of school.

Telling their secret the Roman Catholic Church became once more confronted with the problem of celibacy and sexuality.

These people left disillusioned those churches in which they had faith at first, but those whom they trusted misused their power. They went out from the closed community where their parents at that time had no ears for their unbelievable stories. Though they had already to fight their shame to talk about it with somebody else they did not find an ear at that time to be sympathetic. Many of them a lack of self esteem and also got mental disorders, or after many years having it put away it came up when they got older and started to bother them more. Some dramatic and well-publicized cases involving allegations of childhood sexual abuse have raised very controversial issues, such as the right of children’s testimony and recovered memories of sexual abuse.

As in many other countries it looked as if the church used remote villages to dump their child-molesting priests. Several youngsters took at that time or later in life their own life. In several countries the abusers were specifically sent to certain isolated places “to get them off the grid, where they could do the least amount of damage” to the church’s public image, but in Belgium they still received high places and even got to do important work with youngsters.

At the time of the many boarding schools boys found themselves in the “internaat” its boys dormitory an easy prey, but several were also raped during their private catechism class. Larry Wright Cartoon for 06/12/2002

The history of child molestation in the Catholic Church goes back centuries. The first official decree on the subject was written at the Council of Elvira, held around A.D. 305 near Granada, Spain. The precise history is complicated, but the council is traditionally believed to have set down 81 rules for behaviour, the 71st of which is: “Those who sexually abuse boys may not commune even when death approaches.” It was the harshest one-strike policy: If you’re caught abusing a child, you are not only laicized, but permanently excommunicated—damned for all time.*

The problem with sex in the church can be seen by many pops in history who got many wives or many mistresses, until the church found it high time to put some order in the pigsty.

In the history of clerical celibacy conciliar legislation marks the second period during which the law took definite shape both in the East and in the West. The earliest enactment on the subject is that of the Spanish Council of Elvira (between 295 and 302) in canon xxxiii. It imposes celibacy upon the three higher orders of the clergy, bishops, priests, and deacons. If they continue to live with their wives and beget children after their ordination they are to be deposed. This would seem to have been the beginning of the divergence in this matter between East and West.

“As a rule”, remarks Bishop Wordsworth from his anti-celibate standpoint, “the great writers of the fourth and fifth century pressed celibacy as the more excellent way with an unfair and misleading emphasis which led to the gravest and moral mischief and loss of power in the Church.” (The Ministry of Grace, 1902, p. 223).

The Council of Agde in Gaul, in 506, forbade subdeacons to marry, and such synods as those of Orléans in 538 and Tours in 567 prohibited even those already married from continuing to live with their wives.

The synods of the sixth and seventh centuries, while fully recognizing the position of these former wives and according them even the formal designation of female bishops, priestess, deaconess, and subdeaconess (episcopissa, presbytera, diaconissa, subdiaconissa), laid down some very strict rules to guide their relations with their former husbands. The bishopess, as a rule, did not live in the same house with the bishop (see the Council of Tours in 567, can. xiv). For the lower grades actual separation does not seem to have been required, although the Council of Orléans in 541, can. xvii, ordained: “ut sacerdotes sive diacom cum conjugibus suis non habeant commune lectum et cellulam”; while curious regulations were enforced requiring the presence of subordinate clergy in the sleeping apartment of the bishop, archpriest, etc., to prevent all suspicion of scandal (see, e.g., the Council of Tours, in 567), canons xiii and xx).

St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury from 960 to 988, a period during which the papacy was subjected to oppression and disorder of the worst kind, more than any other character in early English history can be identified with the cause of a celibate clergy . But the seventeenth century, seemingly was not inconsistent with at least ordinary fidelity to their vows of continence.

Before the middle ages it was allowable for Catholic priests to have multiple wives and mistresses (concubines). During the Middle Ages clergy were known to solicit sexual favours from their female penitents and some priests kept concubines. It was also known that Pope Alexander VI had several illegitimate children and that the nuns of Godstow were the ones who spread syphilis to the husbands of the families who lived around their convent (Durant, 1980; Mee, 1972). This type of abuse has continued down through the centuries.

But with concerns for protecting Church property from inheritance Pope Pelagius I made new priests agree offspring could not inherit Church property. Pope Gregory then declared all sons of priests illegitimate (only sons since lowly daughters could not inherit anyway in society).

>> Is this a joke or serious? > “Webster’s dictionary defines catamite as “the youthful lover of an older man derived from the Latin name Catamus.” Catamus was the first Catholic priest, who didn’t even wait until the rock of Lord Jesus‘ tomb was rolled back to get a young boy spread eagle on a altar (a practice that resulted in the early church adopting the name “altar boy.”) The first Pope was so impressed with Catamus’ ability to bugger young altar boys while never losing his place in scripture during service, that he coined the name for the new church “Catholic,” using Catamus’ name and the activity for which Catamus had become notorious. The traditions establish by Catamus have become sacred rites of passage for all Catholic priests, often taking 40-50 years to perfect and master. What once was ostensibly a Christian Church has become little more than a excuse for grown men to wear dresses and bugger young boys – with the so-called “church” offering the vocational perk to its priests of often relocating pedophiles to new parishes so that they may “sample some new flavors.” “(The Landover Baptist Catamite Hotline) <

The other major condemnation of clerical sex abuse was The Book of Gomorrah, completed by radical church reformer Father Peter Damian (a Benedictine monk, as it happens, who became a cardinal) in 1051. He appealed directly to the pope about the abuse of children, as well as consensual sex among clergy—in howling language: “O unheard of crime! O outrage to be mourned with a whole fountain of tears!… What fruitfulness can still be found in the flocks when the shepherd is so deeply sunk in the belly of the devil!”*

In the 15th century there are still 50% of priests married, but at the 1545-63-Council of Trent it was stated that celibacy and virginity are superior to marriage.

Philip Melanchthon - c. 1535 by Hans Holbein the Younger

The Reformation has changed the moral ideal, and elevated domestic and social life. Philipp Schwartzerdt Melanchthon, collaborator with Martin Luther, the first systematic theologian of the Protestant Reformation, intellectual leader of the Lutheran Reformation, and an influential designer of educational systems, was the first among the Reformers who entered the state of matrimony; but being a layman, he violated no priestly or monastic vow. He married, at the urgent request of his friends, Katharina Krapp, the daughter of the burgomaster of Wittenberg, in November, 1520, and lived with his plain, pious, faithful, and benevolent wife, till her death in 1557. He was seen at times rocking the cradle while reading a book. {C. Schmidt, Philipp Melanchthon, pp. 47 sqq., 617, 710 sqq.}

Jean Calvin or John Calvin, the influential French theologian and pastor, was likewise free from the obligation of vows, but the severest and most abstemious among the Reformers. He had the air of being so hostile to celibacy but his first engagement did not turn into a marriage. He knew a good reason why it would not be bad to marry: “If I take a wife it will be because, being better freed from numerous worries, I can devote myself to the Lord.”

He married Idelette de Bure, a widow who had two children from her first marriage of an Anabaptist minister John Storder from Liège. whom he had converted to the Paedobaptist faith or Anabaptism. Calvin’s fellow labourer Martin Bucer had known Idelette and recommended her to Calvin in confidence that she would be the woman who was “chaste, obliging, not fastidious, economical, patient, and careful for (his) health”. Idelette busied herself attending to Calvin in his many illnesses, faithfully visiting the sick and afflicted, and making her home a refuge for those who fled for their lives and their faith. Though she survived the plague when it ravaged Geneva, Idelette died after a lengthy illness in 1549. Calvin had lived with her for nearly nine years, had three children who died in infancy, and remained a widower after her death.

In the 1930s, a priest-psychiatrist—and also a Benedictine—named Reverend Thomas Verner Moore researched the higher-than-usual rates of insanity and alcoholism among Catholic clergy. He suggested the church build an asylum for priests. The U.S. Catholic Bishops turned down his request in 1936. Father Moore became a Carthusian hermit.*

In 1947, Father Gerald Fitzgerald founded the Servants of the Paraclete in Jemez, New Mexico—the same institution Father Poole was to visit almost 50 years later.*

In a 1957 letter to the Bishop of Manchester, Father Fitzgerald wrote that predatory priests (who he euphemistically refers to as “schizophrenic”) cannot be effectively treated and should not be allowed to continue in the ministry:

Their repentance and amendment is superficial and, if not formally at least subconsciously, is motivated by a desire to be again in a position where they can continue their wonted activity. A new diocese means only green pastures… We are amazed to find how often a man who would be behind bars if he were not a priest is entrusted with the cura animarum [the cure, or care, of souls].*

By the early 1960s, Father Fitzgerald had seen enough chronic paedophiles that he did not want to treat them and have them re-released into the ministry, but, as he proposed in a letter to Archbishop Davis, to build an “island retreat… but even an island is too good for these vipers.”*

Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment

Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001 issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church’s interests ahead of child safety. The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated. Crimen Sollicitationis was enforced for 20 years by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI. It imposes an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing with the allegation and any witnesses.
Breaking that oath means excommunication from the Catholic Church.

This culture of secrecy and fear of scandal that led bishops to place the interests of the Catholic Church ahead of the safety of children was a time bomb ticking and last year in Belgium the alarm shook Belgium awake. The Adriaenssens commission published a 200-page report on 10 September 2010. According to the report, the commission heard testimony from 488 complainants, concerning incidents that took place between 1950 and 1990. The report contained testimony from 124 people. Two-thirds of the complainants were men, now aged in their 50s and 60s. {Caroline Caldier, “Belgique : un rapport analyse les conséquences de la pédophilie dans l’Eglise”, France Info, 10 September 2010.+ Radio Canada, “Rapport accablant de l’Église belge”, 10 September 2010, accessed 22 September 2010.}
In 1998 it was reported that a catechism textbook for Belgian children called Roeach 3, edited by Prof. Jef Bulckens of the Catholic University of Leuven and Prof. Frans Lefevre of the Seminary of Bruges, showed comic-book-style pictures of toddlers asking sexual questions and engaging in sexual play, for example: a drawing which showed a naked baby girl saying: “Stroking my pussy makes me feel groovy,” “I like to take my knickers off with friends,” “I want to be in the room when mum and dad have sex.” The drawing also shows a naked little boy and girl that are “playing doctor” and the little boy says: “Look, my willy is big.”

"I like it to fondle my little chink" or "I like to caress my little pussy"

The drawing also showed three pairs of parents. Those with the “correct” attitude reply: “Yes, feeling and stroking those little places is good fun.” In Belgium religion is a compulsory subject and this “catechism textbook” was used in the catechism lessons in the catholic schools, until one day the Irish-Belgian Alexandra Colen, member of Parliament for the Flemish-secessionist party Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang), discovered it among the schoolbooks of her eldest daughter, then 13 years old. On 3 September 1997 she wrote a letter to Cardinal Danneels, saying: “When I see this drawing and its message, I get the distinct impression that this catechism textbook is designed intentionally to make 13 and 14 year olds believe that toddlers enjoy genital stimulation. In this way one breeds pedophiles that sincerely believe that children actually think that what they are doing to them is ‘groovy’, while the opposite is the case.”

After the wife of Paul Belien, the editor of the conservative-libertarian blog The Brussels Journal, started her campaign against the Roeach textbook, many parents contacted her to voice their concerns. Stories of other practices in the Catholic education system poured in. There were schools where children were taught to put condoms over artificial penises and where they had to watch videos showing techniques of masturbation and copulation.

The Belgian Catholic hierarchy stated that the textbook was intended for adolescents, and that the pictures were meant to convey the idea that young children experience lust, a prevalent theory in contemporary psychology. Nevertheless the textbook was withdrawn after public protests by Catholics, which elicited media coverage as well as support from Church officials around the world.

Flemish are considered to be as Lions (The Flemish Combat Flag) - Vlaamse (stijd)vlag, 13de Eeuw

Over the last decade Belgian society has become increasingly aware of the problem of abuse and neglect of children. Several court cases, and the ensuing media coverage, has brought the discussion to the public forum.

In 2010 Peter Adriaenssens said cases of abuse, mostly involving minors, had been found in nearly every diocese, and 13 alleged victims had committed suicide.

The child psychiatrist, who has worked with trauma victims for 23 years, said nothing had prepared him for the stories of abuse, which multiplied as former abusers gave testimony.

“We saw how priests, called up by the commission and asked to help seek the truth, were willing to set up the list of 10, 15, 20 victims they abused during boarding school while the commission knew only of one,” he said.

Many alleged victims came forward to testify to the commission after the Bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, resigned in 2010, admitting to having sexually abused a boy before and after becoming a bishop.

The commission also stressed that sexual abuse happened within all religions and organisations, but sufficient evidence is provided to suggest that crimes have been consistently covered up. Repeated denial by the church is hardly credible in the face of evidence provided by independent investigations.

Ostrich policy

Unfortunately, however, the Roman Catholic Church tried to minimise the happenings deny all charges at first but when more and more documents could proof the charges they came up with all different stories to defend their clergymen.

Other situations where clerics have sexually acted out with adult women and men, nuns and seminarians, have not been looked at; nor the effect on any offspring they may have sired in the process. For that matter, the personal cost to victims and their families remains uncounted. How many lives destroyed through alcohol, drugs, unsafe sex or violence have there been? How much abuse has been repeated by its victims? How many suicides and ruined families? How can the total cost ever be calculated?

In any case the Roman Catholic Church lost all her credibility with the many scandals and her trying to cover it up.

The whole story made it that the already very empty churches became even more empty, but also started the debate about celibacy. More voices, even from priests and bishops called to have the possibility for a priest to get married and to have a ‘normal sexual life’.

With the call to end celibacy also came the call to give married people, lay men and women.

Child-molestation kept silent by Vatican. - Oh nooo, you are joking! Terrible! The income of the church is dropping by 2%

Statistically 75% of Belgians are called inscribed by the Roman Catholic Church, because the people let their child be baptised. By doing so they are taken into account to have their clergymen being paid by the Belgian government. As elsewhere in Europe, secularization has hit hard in Belgium and the scandals did not help to stop the decline. Sunday church attendance has dropped well below 5% .

In the year 2010, the number ‘ontdopingen’ or the ‘ending of baptism in the Roman Catholic Church’ (a ‘disposal of the baptism’) became multiplied nearly 10 times in Flanders compared to 2009; the total number was in 2010 , 5115 (2009: ca. 626), but that could be even more1because the dioceses Ghent and Mechelen/Malines-Brussels did not yet have all figures. For sure that went up even more in 2011 were people got every day some more surprising facts on radio and television and people openly declaring they were leaving the catholic Church. The most important reason they gave up, was that they could not find themselves no longer in the Catholic Church through the abuse scandals or in the manner on which the church leadership went around with these ‘paedophile crisis’ .

But, the declining number of new priests was the only thing the cardinal and bishops were concerned of. As of 2010, there are about 1,900 priests in the archdiocese of Malines-Brussels, but most of them are either retired or on the verge of retirement. Only two were ordained in 2007. {Robert Mickens, “Where have all the thinkers gone?” (interview), in The Tablet, May 31, 2008: 6-7.}

Though sexual abuse is the most shaming of all abuse and a misuse of power the church had seemed it to happen and thumbed her nose about it. As long as it happened with priests at odd moments and not publicly it did not seem to matter and the world would not have to know about it.

But honestly believing priest who had the urge to have a sex live but did not want to do wrong against Gods Will got no answers to their questions to find a solution and to break with the celibacy. Now that many priest are put in the corner and others became to old to serve properly, the Catholic Church has a real problem in shortage of priests.

Celibacy for the clergy of the Catholic Church is “the renunciation of marriage implicitly or explicitly made, for the more perfect observance of chastity, by all those who receive the Sacrament of Orders in any of the higher grades”. The character of this renunciation is differently understood in the Eastern and in the Western Church.

This law of celibacy often has repeatedly been made the object of attack, but now it got to the apogee. Those preferring that they could marry found now enough reasons to bring it forth. For them denouncing this unscriptural rule would also take away a lot of prejudices thus created. according the Catholic Church the conviction that virginity possesses a higher sanctity and clearer spiritual intuitions, seems to be an instinct planted deep in the heart of man. But common sense breaks with that. “The more holy and exalted we represent the state of marriage to be, the more we justify the married priest in giving the first place in his thoughts to his wife and family and only the second to his work” according to the New Advent Catholic Encyclopaedia.

BREAKING: MEER DAN HONDERD MELDINGEN SEKSUEEL MISBRUIK KINDEREN JEUGDZORG With Pope St. Leo IX, St. Gregory VII (Hildebrand), and their successors, a determined and successful stand was made against the further spread of corruption, but today we can see that a hidden form of corruption came into existence which was more delicate, more dangerous, and more damaging.

According to Hans Küng the time has come to challenge that celibacy requirement. Celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes of child abuse but it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions that caused a lot of harm. He writes: “Although there is no question that abuse also occurs in families, schools, and youth organizations, as well as in churches that do not have the rule of celibacy, why are there such an extraordinary number of cases specifically in the Catholic church, whose leaders are celibate?

The rule of celibacy is the main reason for the catastrophic shortage of priests, the serious neglect of the Eucharist, and the widespread breakdown of pastoral care—a problem that has been papered over by merging parishes into “pastoral units” ministered to by badly overworked priests.

In previous times the problem for the church was mainly the financial matter. The clergymen or monks in sacred orders who went through the marriage ceremony with any woman, or in which children were born after his ordination claimed to inherit his property upon his death. The church wanted not only a dowry when the person came to be a servant in the church. After the ‘marriage portion’ everything earned while serving had to come back to the church. Having heirs would bring the treasury of the church in danger as well as the position of certain persons, because before the celibacy people inherited also the degree of their father (bishop, cardinal, etc.)

In 1970, the decline in priesthood vocations persuaded nine leading theologians to sign a memorandum declaring that the Catholic leadership “quite simply has a responsibility to take up certain modifications” to the celibacy rule. Extracts from the document were reprinted in January 2011. Not least because one of the signatories was the then Joseph Ratzinger, now pope Benedict.

With modernization and having to be more open, the time has come that the Roman Catholic Church goes back to the first Christians and to what is written in the Holy Scriptures do find also many Belgian catholic priests and even some bishops.

For them the opposition to the law of celibacy, which frequently took the form of open agitation, both in the earlier Middle Ages and again at the Reformation period, not only calls for notice in modern times of such movements, today time is ripe to turn back to first years of Christianity and to accept priest and people who work in the church-community for the congregation, to be married.

Official report on Child abse in the Roman Catholic Church - Eindrapport van de commissie-Deetman

For the Belgian priests in charge today it is clear that ethic is driven by a moral, an idea of what is right and wrong, what should and shouldn’t be, no matter believer or non believer. but for them and for us it is clear that those who want to work for God and proclaim the Good News of the Coming Kingdom, they should even take more care to live according to the Laws of God. In those laws it is not forbidden for men of God to marry, most of the apostles and disciples who worked in the community were married. But it is totally wrong to indulge in sexual acts which or against the normal human condition and which or against the Will of God. Sexual plays with children or people of the own sex or disgusted by the Most High god of gods, who also does not like sluttish attitude.

For the priests the men are normal human beings with their needs. That the Belgian Catholic Church will ask trainee priests to take psychological tests, as it moves to tackle scandals over clerical child abuse, shall not help much.

Het rapport Adriaenssens bracht onlangs de grote omvang van het aantal gevallen van seksueel kindermisbruik onomstotelijk en op pijnlijke wijze aan het licht.

Belgian commission for treatment of the complaints about sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church - Rapport Adriaenssens

The church may have here internal laws but they should adapt to the times. Today people have a total different attitude then some centuries ago when there had to be called a halt to the sordid sexual life clergy had. Ethic rules are different today, as well as the attitude about relationships. though on that point we notice the ordinary people gone wild and not so much sticking to healthy regimen. The pattern of living of a lot of young people is not exactly a nice pattern of living to be an example.

But the Belgian clergy do have their point to call for change.

To be continued: Manifests for believers #2 Changing celibacy requirement

The Ecclesia in the churchsystem

Posted on November 5, 2010. Filed under: Christendom and Christianity, Churchplanning, Ecclesia, Housechurch, Religion, Witnessing | Tags: Bible, Breaking of the Bread, Catholic Church, Christ, Christadelphians, Christendom and Christianity, Christian, Church community, God, housechurch, Jesus, mission, New Covenant, Parish, prophecy, Service, sharing, Worshipping |

Structure of an ecclesia and connected expenses

If one wants to form an ecclesia or church community we are dependent on several juridical and worldly matters and are not able to avoid particular expenses.

Today the time is ripe that we should let people come in contact with God’s Word and show them what is really written in the Bible.

We have come to a turning point in Christianity, because of the many scandals today in the Roman Catholic Church. Care has to be taken that those who leave that church do not lose their fate in God. They now ought to see that the moment has come to turn the tide. For those Catholics who leave their church it is not easy to leave their familiar surroundings to walk and in a quite new world of religion perception of a lot of smaller denominations in Christianity. Those who flee their own Roman Catholic Church, we should offer a springboard to a fresh warm church community in which they can feel themselves at home. We should show them that all Christians ought to form one unity under the wings of Christ Jesus. We as Christians ought to be part of the limbs of Christ which form the Church. We should let them see that all of God’s people make up the church. We are the church together. ‘Church’ is people. That is the view the earliest Christians had of themselves. ‘Church’ is loaded with so many connotations. Let we therefore get them to see that the basic unit of the church in the first three centuries was the ‘household’ or ‘oikos’ (Greek). Oikos refers to the ‘household’ rather than just the building. Households, in New Testament times, included wider family, slaves, servants, clients and in fact one’s ‘sphere of influence’. We as brothers and sisters in Christ should feel bounded together and should not feel that there are any differences between us in rank, colour, and age. Everybody in the community should have the same value. Our binding element should be Christ Jesus, who died for us all. Important is that as his followers we should be like being his brother or sister and should share the love with others as he showed his love for all those around him, and others should be able to notice and to feel that. Jesus went into different houses and showed in them how people could come to his Father. In one upper room he also showed the apostles how they should continue his work and have a meal together with other believers. Around the table he asked them to do in remembrance of him a breaking of the bread and a sharing of the cup of the New Covenant. Jesus did not do that in the temple, but in a hired room in a normal house. We also can either hire a room, use an open or public space or better still, use a living or other room in some ones house. Jesus was reared in a home in a family and as a family man he loved also the atmosphere and fulfilled his ministry often in homes. The house was, as today, the place where the basic unit of society lives – the family. Note the many times we read of Jesus eating with His disciples and with others – in homes.
Disciples were sent out on a door-to-door mission and Jesus also told them to continue their way in case they were not welcome at a certain place. After Pentecost, Christians met in houses. In Romans 16:3-5 and in several other places in the New Testament, reference is made to the church that meets in a home. Work and ministry in homes was part of Paul’s mission journeys. So people of today should get away from that picture of that gothic church building with a church tower, they should see that there are other forms of churches.

We should warm up people to study the Bible. And now when the big buildings, cathedrals and tower churches are left empty for most of the time we should try to bring the people together again to study God’s Word and to worship our Father in heaven. Today the time has come to show who we want to honour. We should take steps and follow in the footsteps of Jesus and his apostles. We have to go out and spread the Good News, but we also have to meet with each other and give honour to the One and Only God, Jehovah/Yahweh. A house church will offer more the occasion to feel part of a group than a big institutional church building or cathedral. There one is more quickly concerned by the event. Being church can more easily become experienced because everybody is concerned more closely.

Soufrière Catholic Church - Image by waywuwei via Flickr

In Jesus name, we can ask God to be able to build up a church community. He will give us support and also bring us in contact with the right men. But He let us also feel how we still are a part of the world. The worldly worries, concerns and troubles will remain circling the municipality. We always are hanging or fixed at the worldly standards and expectations. Where one stands or goes must one pay something. Stay load, gas and electricity, expenses for materials, moves and so more.

To start off in a village it’s possible to do that just with two or three friends – have a meal together, and share your vision. Plan to encourage one another, share you lives, pray together to seek God’s way forward to be and to do what He wants for you as a gathering and for the community around you.
In our small community it is important to be open to new comers. But we always do have to be aware that we all come from many different experiences in our Christian journey. The ecclesia does not have to have many people; it is more important that those who are present are people who want to share the Good News and want to serve God. However small it is important that they are willing to encourage one another, share life, pray together, read the Bible together, seek, find the truth ans stick to it, and enjoy God and one another.

We must let newcomers know that it is not necessary to have a set ritual or Mass with a missal. We do not need a book containing all the prayers and responses necessary for worshipping God throughout the year. Perhaps a certain order can be seen in the timing of a service. Like having first a welcoming moment, an opening, next a centre part with lots of time to be taken for the Word of God with Bible reading and exhortation, the Breaking of the Bread and then a closure. But there should be no strict format you have to follow or for everyone to agree on minor matters of doctrine for this to happen. It just can be inspiring to have every time a different service. Also we should avoid any regular uttering of preformed repeating texts. For newcomers it can be strange that we should not have to be afraid to create prayers or moments of meditation on the spur of the moment. Having such inspirational moments can bring perhaps some texts that would not be brought fluently enough when it is not a set text, but members should look over that and hear the message. Members of the community should be sympathetic to anybody who dares to open his or her mouth. Understanding has to go out to all those who bring something into the service. To speak out or to sing should be welcome for everybody. Sharing ideas, praying and singing together can make the fire burning in the persons present. And it shall construct of the way of feeling and being part of the church. A worship service has to be one of action and everybody in the ecclesia should be part of that action. All, young or old can contribute.

We must have consideration for the fact that many from the institutional churches often felt at ease because they were not noticed in the mass. In a certain way it is easier to be somewhere in the shade in a big church or behind the pillar in a big building. Sometimes people do not want to be active and we certainly may not force any activity on a newcomer but let him see slowly that as real pupils of the Messiah we should know that we have to follow the master’s example. Though if they do not have the desire to put oneself under the power of a “king” or an institution they should want to belong to the body of Christ, which is the ‘Church’. But we should let them see that the Church of Jesus is not one of keepers of tradition and not one of holders of the worldly thoughts and Hellenistic ideas. The desire to hold faith in a way that allows greater celebration of one’s real life is what should keep together those who form and come to an ecclesia. A hunger for whole-life spirituality. (A wonderful Puritan value.) A hunger for expressions of Christian spirituality and ways of operating that should engage the particular strengths of all those who want to have the feeling to be part of the same body of Christ.
We all should have the desire to explore more deeply aspects of our faith-heritage beyond the particular basis-of-association of a particular church, and to draw upon other traditions and ways. The desire not to be sucked into patterns of displacement activity in the face of a clearly focused “Great Commission”.

The experience of the Risen Lord was an ever-present vibrant reality within the individual and amongst the followers of Christ as they encouraged, blessed, taught and enabled one another, and as they joyously spread the Good News of the Gospel from household to household. Today is should not be different. We all should spread the word and that beautiful message of the Good News the New Covenant and the coming of the Kingdom of God.
By coming together in one place or other we can give each other a moment of blessed time. For us it can create an opportunity to build one another from the teaching we received from the time we could have free to read in the Bible. We should be aware that not everybody has the same chances to spend the same amount on reading the Word of God. Also not everybody has the same gifts to read and understand easily. So we all should help each other to see the light. We should give each other the possibility to bring forward some questions on all sorts of matters. All the questions brought forward can then be answered in the light of God’s Word. By bringing forwards different interpretations everybody can see and hear how others think and understand certain phrases in the Bible. Everybody can also share the experience of the ways of God in each person. Teaching and admonishing one another, all can look at and share prophecy, tongues and other gifts.

Christadelphian Ecclesia

All those different gifts of the many different characters in the community should be carried by faith that is rooted in the obedience to the teachings of Christ without parenthesizing whole tracts of Christ’s commands and abdicating their obedience to the professionals! All members of the Christian Community are members of the church and are the Church. So all present should have, in their right the same say. Except that there has to be made a certain order to have the service, or other activities, created in good order and to avoid chaos.
Giving way or opening up an ecclesia is a way of faith that recovers the priesthood of all believers and the church-hood of the believing family.

We should not be afraid that every worshipping service is different. What happens arises from the experience of God that each member has. Growth happens as the encouraging and enabling one to another takes us further on the journey as individuals and as a group. In the ecclesia we should enable and encourage the gifts of one another for the building of the Body. And this is easier to do in a smaller community, so it may not bother us that we are such a few.

To come to the growth of an ecclesia it not to bad to have a policy plan. Together conferring which way one want to go is there the big concern. We must hold in to account the general un-churching and the disinterest for God, but it may not discourage us. Greying and secularization are individual characters of our environment which we must hold in mind. To have eyes for the current situation of this world is essential for the surroundings. But we may never wish to sacrifice the individual character of our belief to come towards the time bound position of men in the neighbourhood.

In first authority a neutral meeting place is indicated best, but furthermore house meetings are ideal. The house church is the mostly close-fitting with the Christian tradition. Meetings of formation and equipment must become foreseen. Provided that the members who come to our beliefs community mostly did grow up in this believe, we must see the difficulty to bring them round from their community in which they grew up, so far to get it that they also want to visit our ecclesia once in a while. For this purpose it becomes important that they feel themselves welcome and that they also become aware that we are a community of men of this time.

Unworldly things must in every respect be avoided. And those things that at first sight look strange, especially with the eye on the accepted affairs, must be clarified on the first view with the Word of God. The Biblical explanation must lie on the foreground. Visitors have to be aware that for us the Word of God stand on the first place and is our most important guide. For some men can that well appear peculiar that always is referred to Bible verses, but that those Bible quotations are considerably important to bring the understanding of God’s Word.

The church has to show others that it is part of this world and that they themselves already are anchored in a particular culture. The church or ecclesia can show that they stand open for contemporary influences and trends. In some affairs, the community can go along but it may not disavow with it its own individual character. In the Church it must be possible as in the society having cultures live together and lead churches together. That variety can only feed the church community, when everybody holds them self to Gods Laws and follows the teachings of Christ Jesus.

If the church will wring itself into different positions to grow then the church becomes in danger. We can see this in the institutional churches who twisted them self in all sorts of curves to bring about that growth. And that can have unwanted effects. The attention for ‘outsiders’ can swallow so much attention that the care for the members of the municipality with it shatters. One can go so far in adapting the ecclesia to what one thinks that outsiders expect or wish that members of the municipality become hit and get a feeling of alienation. Many institutional churches became crooked and many churches become empty. One has given too much attention to serve the others to their wish so that the individual character of that church went up and down as a yoyo on and changed as hygienic men change of underpants. This was however not the manner to hold the Church clean. Purity in the belief community can be there only as it holds clear belief points and keeps to them.

Each Church community her future stands or falls with the extent in which the church there will succeed in the future in come closer to the spiritual needs of the younger generation without that the older generation gets estranged. Therefore it can be important to bring the discussions or subjects considerably in line to points of interest for both parties.

We however may not forget that it always is considerably important that we let our neighbours see that we are inspired are through the story that God is committed with men and has for them a solution in store. The Plan of God lies affirmed with us on the furrow plan and in the bringing to existence of the ransom or peace offering of Jesus Christ in which we got the hope of the New Covenant. That Story goes for thousand years, and still each day million men are inspired by it. It tells us of a loving God that gives security to men in this seeking world. It tells us also of Jesus Christ, who brings reconciliation in a world fully wounded and hurt men. It tells us of the Holy Spirit, the Power of God, that our men – and this world – can renew. This Story is the origin of the church in her many figures, the ground under her feet, her largest joy and fixed hope for the future. We must at the outside world let see that we believe in this and also find the power to share together and to go forward together to go in this world full discomforts making it so more bearable for everybody.

The Holy Scriptures, the texts from the Old and New Testament give us courage and summon us to seek what connects us actually in the meeting with God and with each other. From the hope that we can get from the Bible we must get the power to bring others to God, from love for them. This love for them must we let them feel them also. If they are conscious of our, without wrong intentions, openness and love, and our honest inspiration we can perhaps convince them. Through our words and acts, we must be an example and worthy to be called Brother of Christ. Not only vocal must we let it come to expression, but the onlookers must be able to find it also in our meetings and celebrations, in which we want Gods errand to be known. From the inspiration of the Story, we experience a pressing need in this time visibly to out ourselves and to be of meaning. As a community, we must direct therefore to the outside and have to be hospitable.

Our activities must be easily accessible but have really to try to involve everybody by the service, there that is one of our individual characters that we together make service and that everybody is equal. Therefore we should try to involve everybody to read together the Word of God and to discuss it. We must let feel everybody that how small their contribution would be that this would be a valuable one and be welcome by the whole community.

In each meeting or celebration must be preserved a time to have an active participation for all members, and time for reflection and silence. At the participation of municipality members all those members should be open to any other member, accidental visitors or invited ones. Everybody must be made sensitively to seek renewed and to have an eye for the interpretation form men outside the church. All must want to learn to come forward for our belief to become so an animated and recruiting community. In which we want to be careful as a community, self concerned round destitute people, nearby or far away, and prepared to stand up to them and to help them.

As believers who want to go together on the way it is important that we want to share the Good News with each other and want to show others that we make all part of it. That means that we want to know each other, not only recognize. Hereby is it necessarily that we work at our self, to form a right character and to get the right attitude. So we do also have to work on our respect for the whole belief community, show respect for other opinions and show that we want to listen to each other. Through showing to others that our brotherly love is not feigned but from sincere concern or sympathy, can we them brotherly take up in our community that we want to put open as a spot of reflection were men can discover who they truly are and what God of them asks.

It comes there on to build at a feeling of unity. Let us hope that everybody that holds a warm heart to the belief shall be able to work together. Each can and should contribute a stone, and that can be on all sorts of manners. They that can find no time to invest actively can perhaps feel happier by contributing financially. And how one turns it, we cannot do it in this society without pennies. Money is now a time a necessary wrong.

One of the problems which the municipality encounters is her invisibility. For many is the church no interesting and contemporary conversation partner. If the community want to do her missionary task, it must seek to start this conversation herself. Not only through getting her own activities better be known by these groups, but also through associating with other activities of the municipality or village. To operate well in the field, equipment is necessary: the municipality must well keep for eyes that the conversation with men, of little Christian belief, begins with a reflection on what belief itself has to offer in their life.

Men see today the church more as a provider of services than as a community of which one shares and take part of. Though it is important that we convince that giving love to one another and realizing that we all want to belong to Jesus is our main focus to the way to god and His coming Kingdom. We should try to get everybody involved to become devoted to one another in brotherly love, to edify each other and to build one another. (Romans 14:19; 15:2) Now the time has come to make every effort to be at one and at peace with one another (Ephesians 4:3; Colossians 3:14, 15). Jesus has given us the task to teach one another (Colossians 3:16) and to admonish one another with wisdom (Colossians 3:16). In such a meeting when we take time to study the Word of God we can do that. It is also an excellent occasion to do the same things as the first Christians did at their study and gathering together moments. Singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God one with another brings life in the house and let each other feel that they can be united. (Colossians 3:16)

The municipality shall have to receive the outsiders with hospitability without to disavow the own character of belief community. We must therefore examine in which extent we can accommodate. Being aware that identity gives security we should try to cloth our community with a clear identity. Every ecclesia has the freedom to choose its own form or identity, but it has to keep to the Biblical teachings in all ways. We cannot avoid that men in this post-modern time is more directed on relations. Churches have to form a community. The dividing of the meal is just as important as the listening to a sermon. But for us Christadelphians the Word of God is the most important and the Word part or reading of chapters from the Bible should take the most time of the service and be the central focus. All the texts in the meeting can be centred on the Bible chapters that are read for that day.
Men of this time have difficulties to be quite or to listen for a long time. Therefore it is most advised that each member of the community also is actively involved with the service, a.o. by reading each some verses from the daily reading. They are no longer been directed on the listening to a long sermon through one person, but the reader of the exhortation could try to have it enlivened with examples and changes in his voice. It can also help that when an exhortation from somebody is taken that all the members read successively. Men can sometimes learn more in a service through to participating more active and more creative.

To Plan for and to realize an ecclesia in a village or town a good communication is necessary between all the concerned, and for the belief community it is best as the entire community would become involved by all the projects. Together we must make it happen. There may not be ‘solo-tripping’, collaboration in teamwork and close cooperation can give possibilities to reach the goal.

Working together

Concerning the expense plate it should come to it that everybody can have a ready view on the worldly worries of an organization. Everybody should have a good eye for the worldly obligations to organize a church community. All have to look at the accompanying obligations in the right perspective. Tasks can be divided and those that are skilfully in a certain task can take that up. Every member can offer his professional guidance.
There is so much to do in an ecclesia. One can contribute to furnish it; taking care of the flowers, hall decoration, keeping clean the common meeting rooms, foreseen of the delicacies for after the service, etc . It are all, even sometimes likely small tasks which would become too much for one person to do, that must be done in the community, and where one mainly must count on voluntary co-workers.
Any occupation practice, that can be subservient for the church community can be shared with that ecclesia. Expenses can be saved in that way, through putting yourself to disposition for the community. So it will be ideal when someone that has a large space where he or she can receive men would put this to disposition for the expansion of the belief by giving it to be used by the believers on particular days to have their Bible study or to hold a house church service.

In particular churches there one counts on it that the members of the church community from their own conviction voluntarily give up a tenth (tithe) of their wage or earnings at the church community, as contribution to the expenses of the church community so that the costs of the congregation can be covered. By some churches, this (tithing) is seen even as something obviously and then we no longer can speak of a voluntary contribution but of a tax collection on the income. This collection or ‘Tenth’ becomes then used to pay the priests, pastors, ministers or preachers and to support the religious establishment. But we should persons, coming to our services and asking for our services, let them know that we receive freely from our God and that we also should give freely. Nobody in our Christadelphian community is paid like in the institutional churches. Because we are doing the work for our Lord we may not obligate people to give a financial contribution. But because we cannot do without the money to cover the costs we can leave the free choice to people to give some financial support as they wish.
For us the mostly suitable form for financial contribution is a collecting-box or basket behind or on an inconspicuous spot were anybody that wishes, can discreetly give a voluntary financial present. Or to make it possible to the members to present a gift by money transfer or by direct debit.

Only also through gifts within the church community, the ecclesia or parish can on her turn then again contribute to the commune, the town or environment. Churches have shown a long tradition in showing them in the middle-class commune. In the Anglo-Saxon countries we can find the custom that churches offer (offered) all sorts of people’s activities through the year. In our regions we do not have such a tradition, except when you take into account the renting out by the Catholic church of the parish house where then all sorts of eat festivities and other affairs are offered and local people meet.
But there have always been churches who try to be to the disposition for the needy and try to offer help where it can. For that lasting presence, also called ecclesiastic presence, according to some men professionals are ‘indispensable’. For them it is too much asked of the volunteers to have to do all that work in the districts alone. And actually is that well so, only one person cannot do this all, but in mutual cooperation of the church members that will well possible to have a roll of duties. Together all members can, under a particular leadership, spend attention at the problems in districts. Any respecting ecclesia should try to do the full task Jesus has given us. Helping others outside the believers group is also one and the role that the belief municipalities can play to improvement of those problems of its surroundings is an important contribution it has to play.

Were former parishioners quite narrow concerned on the ecclesiastic life, now it has become difficult to be find volunteers. Many people can find no time to invest with activities in the church community. For them, the financial contribution appears the easiest manner to support the church community.

When you are interested however in belief, you cannot escape to fix your relation unto the developments in the church community. Everybody on this earth must come till self research. Asking yourself: in what do I (want to) belief, what do I want to do with my belief, for what do I need the church community and which contribution can I furnish that church community? Because belief and church are not obviously anymore, it is also difficult to receive answers to these questions. We as Christadelphians should try to reach out our hand and be prepared to try to give sufficient answers and to give people a place where they can come together and feel at peace.

God needs men. He needed Jesus of Nazareth. But also does He need us to give ourselves to the world, giving the love hands and feet. In our actions should it be able that God’s Light can break through has been expected. This besides is what is expected of Jesus his supporters, that they spread and carry out the gospel further but also that indispensable love. Each other giving life… that can we! That we do by walking away from our own world and by giving each other attention, to take each other serious and listening to them, to their stories, their requirements. By letting each other feel our commitment: I am sympathetic towards you.

By coming together on several places every believer can carry out his or her belief and be support and crutch for others. The social contact that can be given in that community of that belief group then becomes of very large interest, a contribution not to be neglected.

For small belief communities, especially those who are not under institutional churches, it is more difficult to stay upright, to remain and to be able to cover the expenses. Because they already have lesser means to live on they are limited by what they can do. The mutual solidarity between men in the small belief community can certainly remain – how small in number the community also is, if this is been built on true belief. It there then becomes important for those small groups that they can remain enthusiast and that they remain searching to forms which suits their making church together.

As local believers we only can hope that by more men more understanding will come that the different part activities to service stand for the structure of one community and her mission. That more people would become more concerned and actively involved by the structure and the maintenance of the church community and may realize that a ‘large’ number of small branches are necessarily to bring everything to fulfilment. Everybody in the beliefs community must be self conscious that the church community must fulfil a positive striking and at the same time recognizable role in the towns community and that activities and projects of the church community can give a larger acquaintance at the belief community through which on her turn the community also again will be able to grow and so on her turn will get a good return.

Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 5 so far )

	Trusting, Faith, Cal… on Salvation, trust and action in…
	Trusting, Faith, Cal… on Breathing to teach
	Trusting, Faith, Cal… on Trusting, Faith, calling and A…
	Trusting, Faith, Cal… on Songs of Moses and the servant…
	Trusting, Faith, Cal… on Song of Praise for the Elohim…
	Trusting, Faith, Cal… on Vertrouwen, Geloof, Roepen en…
	Trusting, Faith, Cal… on Trusting, Faith, Calling and A…
	Trusting, Faith, Cal… on Trusting, Faith, Calling and A…
	Trusting, Faith, Cal… on Praise and give thanks to God…
	Trusting, Faith, Cal… on Proclaiming shalom, bringing g…
	Migrants to the West… on Trusting, Faith, Calling and A…
	Hebraic Roots Bible… on Our hope
	Hebraic Roots Bible… on Manifests for believers #5 Chr…
	Hebraic Roots Bible… on A Great Gift commemorated
	Creator and Blogger… on Fear of God reason to return t…

Follower of Jesus part of a cult or a Christian

Becoming a member or Getting in and out

The Most profitable considered to be the Main

Alliances

Trinity to follow or not

Features

Listening and reacting to Scriptures

Doing the same

Following Jesus his teachings

Praying Christian

Preaching under Christ for God

Willing to follow

Feeling-good, search for hapiness and the church

Icons and crucifixes

Manifests for believers #4 Eucharist

Manifests for believers #2 Changing celibacy requirement

Manifests for believers #1 Sex abuse setting fire to the powder

Doorzoek deze site – Search this Website

Populairste Koppelingen - Top Clicks

Archives

Email Subscription

Christadelphia

Uitgekozen artikelen – Posts I Like

Recent Comments

Gemeenschap – Community

Categoriën – Categories

Trefwoorden – Tags

Recentste Berichten – Most Recent Articles

Top Posts

Top Rated

Bijbelonderzoekers - Biblestudents

Blogroll

Christadelphian

Worth visiting - Een Bezoekje waard

Follow “Christadelphians : Belgian Ecclesia Brussel - Leuven”

Becoming a member or Getting in and out

The Most profitable considered to be the Main

Alliances

Trinity to follow or not

Features

Listening and reacting to Scriptures

Doing the same

Following Jesus his teachings

Praying Christian

Preaching under Christ for God

Willing to follow

Related articles

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Related articles

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Related articles

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Related articles

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Related articles

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Related articles

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Structure of an ecclesia and connected expenses

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Doorzoek deze site – Search this Website

Categoriewolk - Categories

Populairste Koppelingen - Top Clicks

Archives

Email Subscription

Uitgekozen artikelen – Posts I Like

Recent Comments

Gemeenschap – Community

Categoriën – Categories

Trefwoorden – Tags

Recentste Berichten – Most Recent Articles

Top Posts

Top Rated

Bijbelonderzoekers - Biblestudents

Blogroll

Christadelphian

Worth visiting - Een Bezoekje waard

Follow “Christadelphians : Belgian Ecclesia Brussel - Leuven”