That's My Church!

Basil Seal links to an article by Joseph Sobran on liberal Christianity:

Liberal Christians seem to agree that the man who got the most things wrong was St. Paul. It seems that Jesus founded a simple religion of everyone being nice to each other and tolerant of everything, and right away, as luck would have it, this cranky Paul fellow came along and mucked everything up, and the Church has been haywire ever since, especially on matters of sex and the sexes. I’ll bet you won’t hear Bishop Jefferts Schori purring approvingly of “Mother Paul�! “Wicked Stepfather Paul,� maybe.

Ain't it the truth?

At a recent Vestry meeting, we were discussing the very noticable drop in attendance at services in my own Church since the summer of 2003. (A trend mirrored on the national level.) It just so happens that the beginning of this slide corresponded with the General Convention of that year, which started the current civil war within the ECUSA. However, nobody wanted to make a causal link. Instead, there was some awfully breath-taking rationalization. People are just tired of the traditional service, see? Sunday Morning Church is becoming passe, especially in these times when everyone is suddenly so busy. Instead, they're showing up for other activities like discussion groups. We should look on this as good news because it means people are relying on the Church for a greater variety of spiritual resources! Yeah, that's the ticket! So what do we do? Offer even more! Oh, and the services themselves? We should start trying different kinds, appealing thereby to various niche interests! (The Assistant Rector in particular seems mad keen on trying some kind of Celtic service.)

God give me strength......