To many churches, trying to spread the message of the Bible to as many people as possible is one of the most important functions of the church. There's many different approaches on how to do this, from the neon "God hates Fags" signs of Westboro Baptist, to the Chick Tracts many hand out, to the door-to-door evangelizing of some churches, to the casual witnessing to friends more moderate churches practice.
So when one church near Salem decides to reach out to the local pagan community with "psalm readings," you'd think that the umbrella church that funds them would be pleased, right? Wrong. Instead, the parent churhc, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, decided to cut ties and pull funding.
Instead of promoting peace and understanding, Foursquare seems intent on being philosophically inbred.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
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6 comments:
Having belonged to both a church and an astronomy club, i have to say that both require evangelism for survival. Now, the astronomy club member doesn't have to hit people over the head with issues of Astronomy Magazine. This technique isn't very good for churches either.
In both cases, two things need to happen. First, you need to attract people by offering them something they might want. First person invitations are the most effective. Secondly, when they do show up at an event, you need to make them feel welcome. You also need to avoid turning them off - which means you need to avoid politics as much as possible.
Consider that people move, die, etc. It turns out that generally, there is a turn over of people in any community. There is often an identifiable rate. In one metropolitan commmunity, the average stay was 60 months. That means that if your club has 60 people, you'll lose one per month. Just to break even, you need to recruit a new one each month. If you recruit faster than you lose, then you have exponential growth. Otherwise, your organization suffers exponential decay (death).
I've seen a number of organizations fall over and die.
So, if your parent organization is hell bent on kicking you out - by all means leave. Darwin will take care of the parent organization.
"Many churches"? Oh no, you are not prejudiced when it comes to religion.
I am thankful that your degree will have the word Kansas in it.
Bahahahahahahaha
Bertam, would you disagree that there are a great deal of churches that try to spread the Gospel? If you say they're not, you're either lying or ignorant to the world.
In the past month alone, there have been four seperate churches preaching here on campus. Drive across Missouri and the higways are littered with billboards promoting religious messages.
A very large number of churches are vocal. Thus, I have made no generalizations here. Unless you can somehow show that there haven't been any churches preaching on campus, or that there aren't churches spreading the word of Christ through billboards, or that churches don't have their own TV stations to spread the word...
Good luck with that.
And the degrees in the university system are not in danger of being devalued fortunately. The anti-science standards the soon-to-be former school board imposed only affected the grade schools. I'm forunate, however, that most people aren't as intellectually bankrupt as you and can get past the "guilt by assosciation" fallacy.
Bertam, would you disagree that there are a great deal of churches that try to spread the Gospel? If you say they're not, you're either lying or ignorant to the world.
In the past month alone, there have been four seperate churches preaching here on campus. Drive across Missouri and the higways are littered with billboards promoting religious messages.
A very large number of churches are vocal. Thus, I have made no generalizations here. Unless you can somehow show that there haven't been any churches preaching on campus, or that there aren't churches spreading the word of Christ through billboards, or that churches don't have their own TV stations to spread the word...
Good luck with that.
And the degrees in the university system are not in danger of being devalued fortunately. The anti-science standards the soon-to-be former school board imposed only affected the grade schools. I'm forunate, however, that most people aren't as intellectually bankrupt as you and can get past the "guilt by assosciation" fallacy.
The narrower a belief is, the more likely it is to atrophy.
"Many churches"? Oh no, you are not prejudiced when it comes to religion.
I am thankful that your degree will have the word Kansas in it.
Bahahahahahahaha
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