What If...

Here is something I wrote several years ago. I just found it and thought I would post.

What has always amazed and perplexed me about liberals of all kinds is that they constantly holler about tolerance until it is their turn to tolerate. Oh sure, they will tolerate anything except opposition. For example, our liberal church friends will tolerate all types of heresy but no hymns. They will allow every new-fangled fad but want nothing to do with the Faith that was once delivered to the saints. Their tolerance, which they tout as what makes them so different, has well defined limits. When a person dares cross the boundary, they are quickly and summarily declared “out of step” and relegated to irrelevance. It is not enough for them to discard all of Christian history before the 20th century, they also feel the need to decry anything that is not absolutely the newest and the trendiest. If a person happens to “transgress” and appear to them to be “out of date” (meaning something from earlier than last week), they are told that they will never be able to go to the “next level” (wherever that is) and are doomed to stagnate and die.

It would probably have been good if they had caught up with the Early Church before it made all the “mistakes” that it did; I am certain it would have been called “out of date” and irrelevant. After all, they relied on a book that was over 400 years old (at it youngest part) and sang from the Psalms. Surely, they couldn’t grow with a unfriendly non-seeker-friendly program like that. Instead of being seeker sensitive, they provoked the crowd following the tradition of a “wild” preacher that had addressed His audience as “whited sepulchers” and “snakes and hypocrites.” If only they had known how to engage their culture and open up avenues of communication rather than just “speaching” at people. It is obvious that they were bound to shrivel up and die. Far from being user friendly and adapting to the pagan polytheism and philosophy of their day, they preached ludicrous ideas like the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus. In fact, the culture of their day seems to have been the thing they really railed on because one of their “officials” told them to “be careful not to let anyone rob you of this faith through a shallow and misleading philosophy. Such a person follows human traditions and the world's way of doing things rather than following Christ.” (Colossians 2:8 God’s Word) Wow, they were really old fashioned and out of date, weren’t they?

So woefully backward, they didn’t have a drama or mime team and still expected young people to be attracted to their services. They did not conduct surveys to find out the felt needs of their community and thus continued preaching to people’s often unfelt (but deepest) need. The theory (so outdated) was that if you spoke the Word of God, the Holy Spirit would bring people past all their temporary felt needs and reveal to them their true need. The Early Church was so irrelevant and “not with it.” No wonder they foundered.

They were really out of touch in that they believed there was one truth and that it couldn’t be compromised in order to win people. The same leader mentioned earlier even condemned (O, the horror) anyone who preached another message. He was so narrow-minded. Some of them actually felt it was better to die than to accept the premise that there might be another truth. They even flaunted their Pentecostal distinctives by heading to the streets with the Gospel and the power of the Spirit. How could they expect to grow like that? They needed to be more seeker sensitive and become emergent. IF they had, we might have known something about their movement today. As it stands, we seem to know very little about them and their methods.

Ramblings on Halloween

After reading John Sanidopoulos blog about Halloween, my mind was stirred about the subject. I have already let my feelings on the subject be known in a post called “Halloween” on 25 October 2008
(http://chrisconjectures.blogspot.com/2008/10/halloween.html). I am not going to rehash that post or try to improve upon John’s post. Rather, I just want to post some random thoughts on the subject.

I am at present a pastor of a Protestant church. Therefore, I am compelled to deal with this question much more frequently than I care to. When I was growing up, there were never any problems. We had our Church Halloween parties complete with costumes, apple bobbing, hayrides, and tons of candy. I even remember that one year our church had a haunted room (which was not very scary—more like haunted comedy).

Now the shocker, I have not turned into a devil-worshipper, an animal sacrificer, nor a child poisoner. I am not a Satanist, a Wiccan, a pagan, or a Druid. I do not associate with nor am I in league with Anton LaVey, Beelzebub, Samhain, nor any other pagan or neopagan deity, spirit, or practitioner. Wow, it is hard to believe, is it not?

I have often wondered why some of the folks that are the most opposed to Halloween are also opposed to Christmas and Easter celebrations. Then again, there is not much mystery there because they want to avoid all things pagan or with pagan origins. Nevertheless, they are strangely inconsistent in that they still call the days of the week and the months of the year by their pagan names.

Then there is the group that celebrates Easter and Christmas (ignoring the dire warnings from the aforementioned group about the pagan origins of said holidays) but won’t have anything to do with Halloween because it is pagan. This bunch celebrates Easter or the Resurrection on the Day of the Invincible Sun and avoids Halloween because of paganism.

This phenomenon highlights a contention that I have held for many years: logical consistency is not valued by religious right type folks. I could also point out the same odd inconsistency in them screaming for their “religious freedoms” and being more than willing to deprive others of theirs. They want to be able to pray to the Protestant God in schools but wouldn’t dare allow a Buddhist to offer prayers (but all that’s for another post).

Can we go too far? Of course. But I cannot see how it is different to desensitize kids to violence by allowing them to go to a spook house or watch a horror film and allowing them to be desensitized by visiting Hell House or the like. If the problem is desensitization both are equally problematic.

As far as horror films go, I will say there are some that should be avoided. Most of the older films, however, are almost preachy in that good triumphs over evil in the end. No matter how much success the monster or villain has in the course of the film, he/she is soundly defeated in the end. They can be viewed as parables of sorts (much as some see the Harry Potter movies). Even if the evil cannot be permanently stopped (or keeps coming back) that teaches that evil is always with us and even when it is defeated it must be defeated repeatedly. The real monsters are the ones that live in us and it’s for certain they have to be repeatedly vanquished.

I didn’t like Stephen King until I started viewing them as commentaries on social issues (The Shining as a commentary on alcoholism, Carrie on bullying and teenage angst, and Pet Sematary about the dangers of playing God with life and death). These stories are little different from morality plays of old when viewed like this.

In any case, these are my ramblings. Read, think, and react.

A Unique Post

This will not be a usual post in any sense. I read a blog that carried an excellent evaluation of Halloween and wanted to share it.

http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2009/10/orthodoxy-and-halloween-seperating-fact.html

John has done a super job with his research and injecting some common sense into this emotionally-charged and ignorance-drowned issue.