The Amish? Dif­fi­cult? Pray how? They are prob­a­bly the most peace lov­ing peo­ple on Earth today.

AF:
I absolutely agree. The com­ment was meant tongue in cheek. If you click on the link (on the word “dif­fi­cult”) you’ll go to the story that elicited that response from me, and you’ll see that there’s some­thing a lit­tle com­i­cal going on.

I’ll go ahead and say, just in case you’re new to the blo­gos­phere, that you see that kind of thing a lot. If there’s a sen­tence with one word in a dif­fer­ent color type, try click­ing on it — chances are it’s a link to what the author is talk­ing about. (If you already knew that, par­don the word of instruction.)

Would that more peo­ple in this coun­try would be so “dif­fi­cult”. We were dis­cussing this the other day…as much as peo­ple claim Amer­ica is a “Chris­t­ian nation”, the gov­ern­ment has taken over many of the func­tions that the Churches used to take care of in terms of alms, min­istry to the poor and dis­en­fran­chised. The sec­u­lar­iza­tion of the coun­try is evi­dent that the Churches largely take less and less respon­si­bil­ity for the Gospel except in terms of “evan­ge­lism”. This is one way in which the “spirit of the age”, ie., West­ern democ­racy as a phi­los­o­phy and resul­tant polit­i­cal sys­tem has infil­trated the mind of the Church and com­pro­mised it. End of rant.…

Pick­ing up your rant where you left off …

This is a huge prob­lem in this coun­try. I would’ve thought it was obvi­ous to every­one when Kat­rina struck that the best hope of intel­li­gent, tar­geted char­ity is still through the churches. But alas, every­one quickly found a way to start blam­ing the state, and that story was lost in the hubbub.

Real char­ity is life-changing, both for the giver and for the recip­i­ent. But the sad truth is that when it becomes leg­is­lated, it becomes dehu­man­ized. It becomes an oblig­a­tion to the giver and an embar­rass­ment or an enti­tle­ment for the recip­i­ent. I’m not say­ing I know what the answer is, but it seems to me that if the con­tri­bu­tion of churches hadn’t been mar­gin­al­ized, we might have found a way to prac­tice char­ity on a large scale and still give it a human face.

As it is right now, I think you make a good point by say­ing that the biggest inter­est most churches have is for evan­ge­lism, to bring in more bod­ies. But we don’t often ask “Bring them in for what? Just to turn around and bring in even more?” For us all to be on our jour­ney in theo­sis is won­der­ful, but sooner or later, the con­gre­ga­tion that has started to live the faith will want to go to work in the world around it. And when it does, those invested in the nanny state get deeply offended and accuse us of bridg­ing the gap between church and state. Ugh.

Huh? Who knew there was an Amish quota for food stamps and why would do they need one in the first place? So glad my tax money is being spent wisely on ad cam­paingns like this one.

Good point by S-P

Sheesh!

Deb