What the bojangles does this even mean: "He is mighty to save."? ??
????? It's not even a real sentence. It's like saying, "It is orange to lift," or "She was pretty to confuse." Incomprehensible. Sarah Palin-league word salad.
Is this the kind of religious gibberish employed by 501(c)(3) organizations to confuse its members and obfuscate the organization's workings to as to bolster its administrators' authority?
(RNS) It’s time to bury the myth that liberal theology is causing the decline of mainline churches in America — and with it, the twin falsehood that because of their conservative creed evangelicals will own Christianity’s future.
For many years now, it’s been treated as common knowledge in some circles that the liberal beliefs of mainline churches have been the instruments of their decline. As the story goes, if you want to know why the Episcopalians, Lutherans and others like them have suffered precipitous drops in members and cultural clout since the 1960s, you need look no further than their acceptance of society’s changing sexual mores, women’s equality and so on.
Conservative churches and their strict, unbending doctrine, we’re told, are why they have held onto, and have even grown, their numbers.
.......
As Robert P. Jones documents in his important new book, “The End of White Christian America,” white evangelicals are also shrinking now when measured as a proportion of the population.
http://religionnews.com/2016/08/10/why-a-stout-theological-creed-is-not-saving-evangelical-churches/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Evangelical denominations have indeed grown hugely since the 60s while mainline sects plummetted - that's the great mass of Christians going to where they can find the reassurance they used to find in every church that they are special and the rest of us hellbound beasts which now they find reliably only in evangelical asylums
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/factchecker-are-all-christian-denominations-in-decline
Is the guy right that fundy churches are now, just, starting to lose their saps? Yes, but they are losing them far far more slowly than the increasingly inaptly named "mainline" churches who are taking it from both ends as they lose their rational saps to either disinterest or disbelief and their irrational saps to fundy churches and grafted on imports in that order and depending on politics. The evangeloons are only losing on one front, and that's very slowly because, having absorbed most of the committed Christians who need that crutch, they won't lose them to the milquetoasts who quibble, gently now, about Christians maybe not hating people quite so much and God maybe not roasting them for eternity. They only lose them when they decide they no longer need a crutch at all and that it's been bullshit all along.
The only reason the RCC is declining slightly less slowly than mainliners is because of Hispanic immigration. Non-Latino Catholics are dropping faster than just about anybody, for obvious reasons.
This is good news in one way for the reason community as the only growing group. It means though, sadly, that at this rate we will be about where the rest of the OECD is in roughly 60 more years. Yeah USA.
