No, I am not going to post my Lenten sermon series. But, I will point out that the couple of posts on Christian rudeness that I just finished doing have led me to do my Lenten sermon series on practical Church behaviors. What do I mean? Well, that post on the other blog is now nearing 150 comments and still going. Apparently, it has hit a very raw nerve. And, interestingly enough, the nerve it hit is the disconnect between Christian teaching and Christian behavior. Yes, the disconnect is on hypocrisy.
However, when we think of hypocrisy, we normally think of a person who goes to a congregation which is against alcohol, but they drink. Or, we think of someone who goes to a congregation which is against pre-marital sex, but they have friends with privileges, etc. What has been most interesting in reading the comments on that other post, is the comments about other real life behaviors. You see, we tend to concentrate on the major sins, and miss the fact that we can by hypocrites in other areas of our life.
For me, it has been most interesting to read of how much our Christian witness has been hurt by our attitudes towards money. And, it has not been what I would expect. I would have expected someone scolding us on how we fail to give enough money to charity. But, the comments on the post have had to do with our lack of generosity in every day life. So, the comments have been about how Christians are known to be bad tippers, but demanding customers. Or the comments have been about how we are bad at paying on time for what we buy, then excusing it by saying that we are a church. Or how we manipulate people to get lower rates because one is giving unto God. In other words, a severe lack of generosity in every day life.
Worse, at least one study shows that we not only lack generosity, but we are also willing to cheat other people more than the non-church goer on the street. See http://friendlyatheist.com/2009/01/19/would-you-pay-for-something-if-you-didnt-have-to/
Since the Christian is fully sinful and fully justified at the same time…there will be times when Christians exhibit bad behavior.
We hope that they wouldn’t make a habit out of it as the world does.
We know who the baptised are but we do not know who are the true believers. We can’t know that.
The problem is that sociological studies are designed to find out what normal group behaviors are. Unfortunately, both the many comments on the other blog and the sociological study cited above do appear to show that Christians do have unfortunate habits in the areas cited.
Two, we may now know who the true believers are (whatever that term means), but we do know who claims to be Christians. We can certainly take the fundamentalist line that there are very few true believers. Or, we can simply admit that Christians have developed some bad behaviors in the USA and many other First World countries, behaviors that occur regularly enough that many people report on them, and regularly enough that they can be studied with sociological methods.
This is a fascinating study, I’d encourage everyone to read the abstract. One thing stood out to me: those who volunteer are more (honest? giving?) likely to pay for a paper than a “churchgoer”. Going to church means nothing, really, unless the actions are there to provide the proof of our belief (or lack thereof).
I guess this is a scientific confirmation of the anecdotal evidence coming from the IM’s blog responses. Very sad.
“I guess this is a scientific confirmation of the anecdotal evidence coming from the IM’s blog responses. Very sad.”
I think the only way it could be scientific is if we could read hearts which we can’t.
Those that went before Christ and said we did this and that in your name, O Lord, and Christ said get lost…I never knew you.
All the meanwhile all the good church people said, Look at Bobby…he’s such a good guy.
Yeah, right.
And to the scumbag, Jesus says, enter the kingdom thy good and faithful servant.
We walk by faith and not by sight doesn’t mean much to works oriented churc. Not much at all.
Steve, you are grasping at straws here rather than facing the evidence that shows inappropriate behavior by Christians. This has little to do with the faith/works issue per se, as no one is arguing about salvation, but about hypocrisy, a hypocrisy which harms the Church.
The letters written by St. John to the Seven Churches in the Book of Revelation assume that the members of the churches are Christian despite their sins. The same is true of St. Paul in Corinthians. But, they both jump on the churches for their inappropriate behaviors.
There are a couple of other interesting parts of this study, at least to me. One is the subjective assertion of a researcher that churchgoers do not pay the full price because they may feel like the company is wealthy and won’t miss it. We’re back to Fr. Ernesto’s idea of the deserving poor here, perhaps.
The other thing I wondered about is why someone would pay less than the full amount? Tossing out the ideas that they don’t have the change and will catch up later, and other “honest” possibilities, are we left with some sort of relativism, where the paper has value of X depending on what it is worth to me, not the price set by the seller? Could this be related in any way to the way some Christians treat servers?
All those are possibilities. Since the authors were not telling the interviewees that their study was about the paper that had just been picked up, it meant that there were certain questions they could not ask.
However, the sense of entitlement present among those who call themselves Christian is rather sad.
Are you judging churches, or individuals.
Nobody lives up to it. Nobody. Lest of all those that are judging. What makes then so all fired “good”?
While we may not be able to speak to the inner state of a Christian, we can certainly see his/her outward behavior. As you read the epistles, the apostles were all quite willing to judge the outward behavior and to make judgments on discipline, or even on ordination, based on outward behaviors.
Or are you advocating that the Church may not have any internal discipline?