Who Is to Blame for the State of the Western Church?

Stryker7200 · 2019-01-24T20:05:16+00:00

The blame has to also be put on the church members

Well, the western "church" is a group of people - so yeah.

We've put too much emphasis on the preachers.

So basically, we have church members who don’t want to lead. They want someone else to lead them. And then, we have power-hungry church leaders who want followers. The majority of church members are women so the leaders cater their messages to them.

Yup.

I basically agree with all your saying.

unless we put the blame on both the leaders and followers

Again, we are the church. We. The blame is on the church.

However to play devil's advocate - the church is set up like a membership program with the preacher doing his job, you send him money, they give you the amenities you want. Many have written books on church reform - Francis Chan recently, I think John MacArthur has one also - they make the same argument - more decentralization. The way the church / financial system is set up is for profit.

Look. This is about money. And sex. I had a comment that men had given up all authority for sex - RedCurious pointed out that also it was for more people in the pews - which is the money or fame motivation. It's both money, sex, notoriety, etc. Look at John Gray - a pastor who was working under Joel Osteen for years who got flack for buying his wife a $200,000 lambo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k9gOiu-uvo). These men know that women have the power to choose in our society - women have authority (they choose which churches get tithes).

As long as popularity and financial gain is attached to preaching and pedistal - enshrining women, as long as that occurs we will have a feminist church. Women have become excellent at getting and spending money. Look at Mrs. Bezos - she will get 70 billion dollars and become the richest woman on the planet. Would this have happened hundreds of years ago? LOL. No. Can you imagine a woman leaving King David or King Solomon and they suddenly got half of Solomon's wealth? What about in any other non-feminized country? Nope.

Our culture figured out how to feed the financial beast - it's with sex and money. Women used thier power to twist our culutre into serving them - but as somone said, "God will not be mocked." By making sex and women our primary goals our culture is degenerating - and the church also.

Many will call this misogyny but it is not. When I aim to be a slave to a perfect master, it is not wrong - it's submitting to Christ. In the same way, God designed a way for men and women to act - not in a demeaning way but in a way that glorifies the Father. All the girl power and independent women nonsense is anti-God.

Deep_Strength · 2019-01-24T19:41:54+00:00

Jesus told us in Revelation 2 and 3 that the Church would fall away in certain areas as we can see today. This should not be surprise to us.

The culture back in Jesus/disciples times was often worse in some cases than we had now. Pederasty and homosexuality was common in Rome. We're just now seeing the normalization of homosexuality and we're probably still a bit out from pedophilia becoming accepted. The Christians survived torture and persecution. We're not even close to Christians en mass suffering for the gospel, although some parts of the world are already such as China and countries in the 10/40 window.

It's going to get a whole lot worse, so be strong in the faith.

Red-Curious · 2019-01-25T02:55:43+00:00

Normally I'd object to blaming our problems or discussing blame at all, but because it was a reply and not the spontaneous product of internal brooding I'll let it slide.

More to the point of your post, I'm reminded of the best church I've been in - and I tell people what made it the best was that it was lay led. There was no head pastor. There were a team of elders with full time day jobs who fulfilled the pastoral role. It was also the closest to a red pilled church I've ever been to. They actually did a 7 week series on song of songs and taught about doing oral between spouses and how women should dress up for their husbands, and how men should bear the weight of leadership in the home and not defer to their wives all the time. That was the earliest point of my red pill awakening.

Interestingly, the guy who was the pastor before it became lay led retired to open a cigar shop in Arizona. He was the definition of kind hearted, yet raw masculinity.

unrealhhk500 · 2019-01-24T19:29:50+00:00

I’ll throw in my two cents, feel free to correct me. I’m Oriental Orthodox, but I grew up in an area where there was basically nothing related to the Orthodox Church, except a few things here and there that were far. So, my public school system wasn’t the best at that time. I was put through a Baptist school by my parents, since that was the closest Christian school. I was still raised Orthodox at home, but in school I was exposed to the Baptist Church. One thing I’ve realized is the Orthodox Church has rich traditions created by early church fathers and philosophers. The Baptist school I went to always encouraged exploring the Bible. Fine and good, I think the Orthodox Church suffers from being too reliant on tradition that they lose the ability to read deeper into the Bible, and enrich their faith and relationship with Christ. However, that tradition also protects the church from insane ideas that I was witness to at school. In my experience, I could be wrong, liberal Christianity was more prevalent in Protestant circles I was in. However, in my Orthodox Church much of our parishioners’ faith is dead unfortunately, while the Protestants at least had a lot of faith in comparison to my Orthodox circles. I think Protestants would have benefited from some tradition thrown in their (I believe in a middle ground), while I think orthodox being encouraged to read more into their Bibles and take more ownership over their faith would have benefited them.

However, there was the fact that most of the Protestant circles I was exposed to didn’t seem to be that authentic, the modern American culture seeped in. The orthodox churches in America didn’t have it institutionally, but many of the parishioners are dead in faith because of accepting the culture around them instead of Christ. They became more of the world. However, in our home country that I recently came back from, there was much more faith and ownership of that faith among regular people there. So, it could also be the culture seeping into the church in the US, while countries like my home country have a culture that respects faith more, and is horrified by the idea of not having one. Of course, in the US there is definitely a social re-engineering to eradicate faith or masculinity, as evidenced by the Gillette commercial.

In my experience in a Baptist school, it hurt my masculinity and ideas of it. With the lost ness, accompanied by a despising of traditions, combined with a feel good gratification culture, that is being socially re engineered to be faithless, with sell out leaders on their payroll, and encouraging radical feminism with good old Christian over guilt we have what we have now. Again, this is just from my experience. So, all my teachers up to a certain point were female Baptist, who were married, and it put this idea into our heads, that we’re working for their approval. And you can guess how that translates to a young man’s dating life, who genuinely wants to be a good Christian. It was all about the feelz, even our cringey high school retreats were just people crying and “reddedicating” their lives to God. More crying and it became a “Christian” rock concert. We were taught only one view of Revelations, and trying too hard to fit today’s events to Revelations or Ezekiel. Constantly hammering into our heads how we need to “respect” our Christian sisters, who treated us like crap. I was taught by that school that if a girl gets herself into sexual sin, she was led there by an evil immature boy, who were supposed to reprimand, and lead the girl back to Christ. Also, I kid you not, we were taught we have to be friends with a girl first before dating her, so we can show how good Christians we are to her. What a cringe fest.

Colerton · 2019-01-26T18:27:19+00:00

Has anyone read "Why men hate going to church"? it touches on what OP is talking about.

It talks on why strong biblical men are scarce in the church. It isnt so much feminism is bad but more masculinity is good and how do we attract the right men to the church.

Title	Who Is to Blame for the State of the Western Church?
Author	blaeseg
Upvotes	13
Comments	9
Date	January 24, 2019 5:54 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/RPChristians
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/RPChristians/comments/ajf14t/who_is_to_blame_for_the_state_of_the_western/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/RPChristians/who-is-to-blame-for-the-state-of-the-western.301463 https://theredarchive.com/post/301463