Monday, May 24, 2004
Because Protestant mentality encourages church shopping, most
Protestants end up in a church they like with people they like. In
other words, they end up in a church with people just like them.
In the Catholic Church that doesn't work. I often say the Catholic
Church is more like a bus stop than a club. Like a bus stop, there
are lots of very different people gathered together for the same
purpose, not just because they have the same hobby.
-- Dwight Longenecker, National Catholic Register
Although I've certainly seen people leave the Methodist Church and pick up happily in other churches, I think Longenecker overstates when he says Protestants end up in Churches with people just like themselves... there's too much conflict for that to be true. Pastors play a very important role. But I really liked the image of the Catholic Church as a bus stop.
Donald Sensing has a nice entry over on "One Hand Clapping" about Ascension Sunday. The comments on the entry are interesting, too, with an apparent agnostic asking something like, "Isn't it really more probable that a couple of buddies of Jesus hid his body and none of this really happened?" This is just the type of question "Mere Christianity" and "Everlasting Man" are meant to answer... how best to boil down entire books as a comment into a blog entry?
