One of the women in in my church said to me: "Obviously your experience of the Church in the 1950s was very different from mine."
In the 1950s the churches were full and all children went to Sunday School.
But my memories of that period are not good.
The Church was part of the Conservative Establishment.
It taught obedience to authority, repentance of sins, and the redemptive power of the cross.
But my intuitive understanding of Jesus and God, based on the stories in the Bible, did not match what I experienced in the Church.
The Church was cold and forbidding.
It moralized about sex.
And its members were hypocrites.
If everyone went to church and the Church was God's representative on Earth then why was it a "jungle out there"?
It seemed to me that people just ignored what they were told.
Even if half of it was wrong.
They just believed that they were saved and put nothing into practice.
So the nostalgia for the past in the Church is not sustainable in the present.
And that is why the Church is dying.
Photo Credit: Richmond.
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