Moron hillbilly Catholic should join his old church

I saw this hillbilly who likes the National Rifle Association, country music and Republican join the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America which is the most Marxist progressive church in the United States and baptizes his kids in it.  It sheds members like clockwork.  I personally haven't been inside any ELCA church since October 1999 and I tend to stay away from them like the plague.  Why hillbillies join the ELCA is beyond me other then he's a moron.  What I can't figure out is why this ex-Catholic hillbilly doesn't join a Catholic church.

A new commenter named El Cid popped up in my Rosie O'Donnell post, so I followed his link and read through his posts. A fellow Lutheran, he put this article up two weeks ago. I found it fascinating. I still think that one of the greatest dramas that's unfolding in the Christian church is what to do about homosexuals. In the OT God said to kill them. In the NT Paul continues to say that it's immoral, but Christ let the adulteress go, and said, "Let the one who has not sinned throw the first stone." Does this mean the throne has been stowed? That there will no longer be hierarchy of sin, and that anything goes?

There is no clarity within the ELCA church on this topic. And the ELCA has been riven. Many women are leaving the traditional mainline churches on the charge that they are sexist. Even Muslim women are leaving the mosques on this charge (I have two students who privately informed me of this decision). How to be inclusive, and yet retain the authority of scripture? The churches and mosques are being riven, but people are often left in a no-man's land between tradition and so-called progress -- without any authority other than the MSM.

The ELCA voted in 2009 to ordain homosexual pastors and the flight from the church has been staggering. While the ELCA had a budget of 88 million in 2008, the money coming in this year has been less than half of that amount (about forty million). Some of this can be attributed to the downturn in the economy. But there is also a wholesale flight of congregants and congregations to other denominations and precincts. People are voting with their soles.

What expectations ought we to have on entering a church? What expectations should people have a right to expect? How is it that when a church (or any institution) doesn't contribute that which is expected, that those who are then disappointed, will leave? Suffice it to say that this is an exodus like that from Egypt under Moses. People are looking for different leaders, and a way of life that includes a tight family, a mom and dad, and their respective children. The ELCA leadership has condoned not just masturbation, but also S & M, and other practices. Lord love a duck. There has been no official sanction regarding bestiality but expect it to follow, along with necrophilia. Who's to judge? The ten commandments themselves have been silenced, and even mocked, and are now being taken down as a set of guidelines which once demarcated American law. The new laws are more and more Marxist in their origins, and intentions. Meanwhile, the Christian churches are mysteriously silent on many issues of great concern. Jesus never had a wife. It took Martin Luther to open up the idea that it was possible for a priest to have a wife. Many mainline churches allowed women to be ordained in the 1970s following the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The Catholics are slowly giving ground on that topic, but not much. Homosexual ordination is now allowed in some denominations, but is intensely fought in others. When tradition gives way to progress, many feel that the tradition has been destroyed. Many people will scream I should shut up about this, as it makes them nervous. But it's obvious that something momentous has occurred in the ELCA, and it's weird to watch since I grew up in the Lutheran church, and its strange to watch it disintegrate and fragment while many who are against the new rules are silenced. Here is an article I found on El Cid's blog, that I present for the elucidation of some of the facts on the ground:

ELCA Follows Episcopal Slide to Oblivion
Evangelical Lutheran Church Follows Episcopal Church in Gadarene Slide to Oblivion As in the Episcopal Church there is still and always will be a faithful remnant in the ELCA
Five Congregations leave ELCA every week. Lutheran Congregations that leave can keep properties

By Robert Luther
Special to Virtueonline
http://www.virtueonline.org/
March 2, 2012

The ecclesiastical realignment that has been going on in North America over the last decade has not been confined to Anglicanism.

Since August, 2009, when the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Churchwide Assembly voted to allow congregations that choose to do so to recognize same gender unions and accept those who have entered into such unions to serve as rostered leaders (pastors, deacons, chaplains, etc.), the resulting schism in the ELCA has been devastating.

The ELCA was formed in 1987 by a merger of three Lutheran denominations that combined to form one ecclesiastical adjudicatory that promptly went down the same revisionist path as the Episcopal Church, sadly but predictably bringing the same results. Membership started a slow decline so that by 2008 the ELCA had lost over 12 percent of its membership and 737 congregations, all this while the population of the United States was booming.

Then in 2009 things got worse. While the befuddled revisionists celebrated their muddled gospel of inclusion, affirmation and social justice, many of the faithful shook the dust off their feet and gathered in Columbus, Ohio a year later to start a new Lutheran denomination called the North American Lutheran Church (NALC). As Edmund Burke wrote, "There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue."

Others left for Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) or the American Association of Lutheran Churches (AALC). LCMC has 772 member congregations, with 683 of those in the US; however, some of these congregations also maintain membership in the ELCA.

The result has been a schism that has been much faster and deeper than that in the Episcopal Church. Why is that so? because ELCA congregations can disaffiliate from the ELCA and keep their property. It takes two, two thirds majority congregational votes ninety days apart and they can leave with their property and join the Lutheran denomination of their choice.

No lawsuits, no clergy deposed, no pack of wolves trying to take property from those who paid for it and for which the synod would have no use; an altogether civilized and gracious way to treat those leaving.

In the 2009 - 2010 period alone the ELCA lost nearly 8 percent of its membership and 388 congregations, with most of these congregations moving to other jurisdictions and some closing.

It's also likely that additional thousands of church members quietly left their liberal congregations without a word, in typical Lutheran humility, but are still being counted as members on the rolls. Many of these folks headed straight for the local Lutheran Church Missouri Synod congregation, where the Holy Scriptures are still faithfully preached and taught.

2011 numbers are not yet available but they will be just as bad. Over the last year an average of 5 congregations each week have been leaving the ELCA to join the North American Lutheran Church, and after only a year and a half well over 300 congregations have taken this step.

One would think that the leadership of the ELCA would have looked at what happened to the Episcopal Church and decided there is no way they could all join hands, drink the same Kool-Aid and then jump off the same cliff into oblivion, but amazingly and regrettably that was not the case. This writer will leave it to the psychologists and other deep thinkers among you to try to fathom why.

As in the Episcopal Church, there is still and always will be a faithful remnant in the ELCA but as so many of the faithful have left, this group will have less and less influence, be more and more marginalized and most likely will find their presence more and more difficult; however, the Lord always has a purpose for the faithful and prophetic voice crying out in the wilderness, and some will always feel called to the lonely ministry of the scorned prophet.

May God comfort and strengthen them. One can't help but wonder what the similarities between the Anglican Church of North America and the North American Lutheran Church may lead to. Anglican and Lutheran theology are very similar and there has been a substantial and visible presence of Anglican purple shirts at both convocations of the NALC.

It's also pretty clear that the realignment in North American Protestantism over the last decade has not been along denominational lines but along the lines of those who are orthodox in matters of faith and morals as opposed to those who have adopted the values of a secular and increasingly pagan culture.

This leaves the ACNA and NALC with a lot in common. One thing is very clear: these two churches have a lot more in common with each other than they do with the churches from which they disaffiliated.

Democracy changed the ELCA. They let the voting constituency become 66.6% laity, and the votes went 666 for ordination. I wish only pastors could vote. You have to really study these questions deeply, which means knowing the original languages, etc.

It's like letting students give themselves their own grades.

A hierarchy is a good thing. A lowerarchy is a pain.

The problem is that all the authority is going out of scripture as people rewrite it, and reconfigure it, marginalizing Paul, marginalizing the OT, and pushing the sermon on the mount as the only part of scriptrue that matters.

The universities are gonzo. the government is gonzo. Families are gonzo. all that's left are a few denominations.

Maybe these people are just going to other congregations, other denominations. I would assume that would be the case. We ourselves are a motley crue -- former Catholics, Methodists, Congregationalists, and what have you. We have a good pastor and a fine building. Build it and they will come.

Undermine it, and they will flee, taking their money with them.Certainly many of the younger people are leaving the fold. But if the contributions which were at 88 million in 2008 are down to 40 million in 2011, something else besides normal attrition has taken place

No drop in Missouri Synod versus 23% for ELCA is still significant. The numbers I read were 88 to 40 but it was in a partisan pamphlet without a citation. I don't know where these numbers can be found, and whether they are bound to be legally responsible for getting them right.

I'm not sure how this whole thing works in economic terms. Those who have lost jobs of course have less to contribute, and the numbers have doubled to about ten percent in some places, a bit more or a bit less in others. For those who've kept their jobs, they should be able to contribute the same amount. 

With the rise of secular institutions came a revival of Greek paganism within classical scholarship. German Romanticism gave rise to a renewed cult of paganism with the Schlegels and Schleiermachers and others trumpeting the ancient Greeks as the truest culture, then giving rise to Nietzsche and further on Jung and others arguing that the Greek gods were a system of archetypal mayhem that underwrit the truest images of humanity. Zeus the rapist and Dionysos the rapist and Hades the abductor became the new images of mankind and Christianity was thought to be a farce.

Now you have so many people pointing back and saying but this culture allowed that, and that culture allowed this, Christianity is so restrictive, let's get all pagan and put on parades like they did i ancient Rome where all hell broke loose.

And then all hell did break loose, but America put a stop to it. We not only shut the Germans up, but the Russians, and the Japanese.

But in doing so we caught some of it. The younger people began to get interested in Zen, which represents a total absence of values. And in communism, which represents a total absence of values. And in Nietzsche, which represents a total reversal of all values.

And all these negations now creep through the churches unbeknownst even to those who are supposedly the gatekeepers. I alone can stop all this.