Runaway Slave

HT: Grouchy Old Cripple

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church

As the Idiocracy running the city of New York debates whether to throw a party or not over the building of a monument to the religious beliefs of those who killed so many on 9/11, what about the little Christian Church that was destroyed on that day? Has any Imam or politician anywhere spoken up to question the delay in rebuilding this Church? Nine years for permission to rebuild seems to me to be slow even for the money-grubbing, thoughtless bureaucrats in New York and New Jersey. But, hey, that's just my Midwestern opinion: I'm not sophisticated like those elites.

[Photo Courtesy of New York Times]

The plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center complex include building a new St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church quite close to the original location.^[1] The church will again house a worshipping congregation. A museum will also be built for the projected large influx of visitors that will come to the site.

On July 23, 2008, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey reached a deal with the leaders of the church for the Port Authority to acquire the 1,200-square-foot (110 m²) lot that the church had occupied for $20 million. $10 million is coming from the Port Authority and $10 million is coming from JPMorgan Chase & Co. (Wikipedia)

[note: JP Morgan was given $25 billion in bailout money].

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is a tax supported government agency. So in essence the taxpayers of New York and New Jersey will pony up $10 million for the replacement of this Church and the taxpayers in the rest of the nation will pony up the other $10 million. Don't forget, JP Morgan Chase took billions in bail out tax money not long ago. And if reports are true they haven't spent any of it on rebuilding this Church.

What I would like to know is who has stopped the Saudi Government from rebuilding this Church? Oh! "There is no Saudi money for this honorable task," you say. I didn't know that. I just assumed since it was Saudi nationals who destroyed it the so-called civilized Muslims in Arabia would have the decency to chip in to rebuild it. Shows you what I know.

I need to get out more often.

Cultures Collide

In the late 19th century Sunday schools were formed in churches as a means to teach the children in the emerging industrialized world to read so as to be able to access the Christian Bible. From that humble beginning we now find ourselves locked - it seems - in a culture oriented totally around the needs, wants and desires of our young. Fathers are becoming more and more to be viewed as nothing more than superfluous and according to most TV commercials and sit-coms as idiots.

[...] developments began to coalesce to form a new understanding of the "place" of young people in leading industrial societies after the mid-nineteenth century. A period of public education was made mandatory for young people in many parts of Europe and the United States; increasingly, schooling became an expected and routine part of the life course. At roughly the same time, the field of medicine and the emerging discipline of psychology began to differentiate the stages of the human life course more precisely, determining a "normal" standard for biological and social development based on chronological age.[...] (1)

So as the world surrounding the Christian World, a World that is called to be in but not like its surroundings (1 Jhn 2:15,16), the Christian World has slowly remodeled itself on the order of its surroundings. Now the church is almost indistinguishable in its makeup from the rest of society. Far from the Biblical model of Father, Mother, children, all led in unity by Elders as members of the Kingdom of God, we too have now segregated ourselves by age believing we are doing God's work led by the Holy Spirit - as one Deacon recently told me.

The ease with which Satan has been able to bring about this transition is astonishing. There are few, if any, voices raised in protest as the church changes into just another expression of our surrounding culture.

[...]The driving force, the engine, behind youth culture is greed. It is the creation of an entertainment industry lusting after money. From the beginning, the elite controlling the media recognized that sin is profitable—that they could boost sales by creating products which chipped away at moral restraints and standards of decency. So, with purely mercenary motives, they deliberately made their products more and more offensive. The music became noisier, the speech became more insolent and vulgar, and the clothing of teen idols became more and more disreputable. Soon, the media were filled with sex, violence, and rebellion. Through its campaign against morality, the entertainment industry succeeded in opening up a gap between parents and children, the so-called generation gap. Children embraced a way of life that scorned the traditional values of the older generation. Over the years, youth culture has sunk into worse and worse decadence and has enlarged its constituency to include many adults as well as many children. (2)

A critical question facing the child of a Christian home is whether he will identify with his parents or turn against them and join youth culture.[...]

Sad to say my own church has been caught in this trap. Everything we do is now oriented toward "peer" or age group activities. Even in worship service the youth sit apart from parents or are in a segregated "children's church."

The top down family concept so prevalent throughout most of the history of Western Civilization, sustained by the model of God's Kingdom being built on earth, has been destroyed.

But, when the Church believes orienting everything around the secular model is the only way to survive it is time someone actually began thinking about what we are doing. God's Church will survive, but a particular church may not if the leadership is blind to trap it has gotten caught in. 

There is nothing I can do about this on a personal level other than what I'm doing here in pointing out that this model is unbiblical, and I believe sinful. Oh! There is one other thing I do and that is sit with my wife, our son and his wife and their children on Sunday mornings in worship service. We take up almost a whole row in the pews.

Who knows maybe our sitting together will be viewed as defying authority and our little rebellion against "peer" group segregation will catch on.

Stuff I’ve Heard

Not long ago I was listening to a sermon and the man giving it said,”I can’t give you meat, all you can handle is the milk of the word.” This was said to a congregation I presume has been churched for many years. I don’t know their individual spiritual condition but I assume the man speaking does or he would not have said what he did.

My mind immediately questioned why he would say such a thing. I thought if he has been the leader for very long something is drastically wrong somewhere. As the spiritual leader it is his job to make sure his “sheep” can handle the meat of the word. Logically, if they cannot, it is his fault and not theirs. Yet, his remarks were pointedly condemning of his audience for their lack of – what?

Mike Ratliff has posted about this in a spiritual gifts article here:

There is little doubt that there are some in leadership positions in the visible church that are there because of their natural abilities rather than the fact that God has gifted them to lead His people. If the latter were the case, they would not be leading their followers into apostasy as the passage I placed at the top of this post clearly states. Those gifted by God to be true leaders in His Church have the role and responsibility to do what? They are to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of Got, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Why?

 

I teach a class on the gifts in my church and one of the things I stress is for the class to always insure that what they think they have as a gift is not just natural ability. It is one thing to be able to have the natural ability to play Cello but it is quite another to play as does Yo Yo Ma. A good player has talent, Ma is gifted. The evidence speaks for itself. So it is with preachers and teachers.

So, when I hear anyone say something derogatory about someone else’s ability, be it musical or spiritual, I can only ask what is the reason – or as Mike asks, “why” is the situation as it is. Teachers are responsible for the education of those in their charge and preachers are responsible for the spiritual lives of their congregations.

The man who scolded his congregation for their lack of maturity in the Word should be very cautious about what he is saying. Someday he will give account for the accusation and he would be well advised to make sure he has done all within his power to insure he has taught them well. If he thinks he has been called to preach but has not been gifted for the task, my opinion is has made a mistake that has eternal implications.

Cheap Imitation

Here it is Sunday and I'm at home. Health concerns have me at only about 1/2 operational efficiency. That's fancy talk for I'm not feeling well. That's OK! I will get over it; or I won't. Whatever.

Anyway, because I'm home I was wandering around the "web" looking at some of the Churches around the country. (Who said the internet is not useful?) I visited the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Idaho Falls, Idaho. On their web site I read this about their sabbath day worship service:

Substantial, reverent worship:

The apex for every Christian week is Sabbath worship.

It is the duty of all Christians to present themselves with all of the family in the assembly of the saints to render praise to God, submit to the life changing discipline of the Word preached and the Word made visible in the sacraments of baptism and holy communion, sing the songs and Psalms of the Kingdom, confess doctrine, and give of our earthly goods for the support of the church.

We are called out of the world for these few moments to live in a world fragrant with the air of the coming Kingdom of God. Thus, we seek to provide the true laborers of worship (you, the saints) with all of the ordained elements of worship so that we might provide the true audience of worship (not you, but God) with worship that will be pleasing to Him.[emphasis mine]

I have never read a more beautiful description of what worship should be. "...a world fragrant with the air of the coming Kingdom of God." "We are called out of a world...!" How is it that we have come to believe that in the name of pride - we call it relevance - we think our choruses about what we are doing for God, the mind-numbing "modern" hymns we sing, the pointless shallowness of sermons about...about what?, we think are viewed by God as Worship?

The Sabbath should be the day when our entire focus should be on the God who is our savior and the Kingdom he is preparing for us, but what do we do? We drag our secularized desires into this sphere - rock bands and all - call it worship and wonder why we don't attract the unsaved. We don't attract them because the schmaltz passed off as a sermon, the garage-band sounds, and the constant harping about money is what they see on TV every day. Why would they want to spend their day off with a cheap imitation of what they live now?

Why can't we just show them the "fragrance" that is coming and allow God to do what He is going to do?