The New Pope and World Wide Christianity

 

New Pope, New Church, New Day for Christians?

I guess we have a new pope. The white smoke billowed out from the roof in the Vatican earlier this week. An American, he grew up in Chicago and traveled all over the world for most of his life. Naturally, in the service of the catholic church. I’m not a catholic but I do realize to most people, the pope reflects Christianity to rest of the world. It’s not fair of course. Martin Luther’s criticism was about the sale of indulgences and papal authority. In other words, the church as intermediary between God and man. As the only real reflection of the church in the West, the list of grievances was long. But the core complaints could be described as men standing in for God.

We were meant to have a relationship with God the Father. The Roman Catholic church likes to have intermediaries, priests and cardinals, to interpret the divine for us. I’m not dumping on faithful Catholics. I’m merely stating facts about the top-down authority of the church. I don’t imagine the masses are much different in structure than it was a hundred years ago. The biggest difference being mass in the vernacular. A good many would like to go back to the Latin version exclusively.

The adherence to tradition is admirable, we live in an age where the gospel is always being challenged. If the church needs to update according to a moving cultural target then why bother with the church? But institutions become corrupt over time. Reform is seriously needed. That’s where I’ll leave my criticism though. I’m not Catholic. I won’t drop bombs just because I can see how broken the walls are.

My people are the Evangelicals. We’ve got our own problems. Actually, we’ve got more problems than the Catholics. We picked up our penchant for schisms from the protestant godfather himself, Martin Luther. To be fair to Luther though, he was excommunicated. We split churches along every conceivable doctrine, practice and eschatological theory. Sometimes it’s just a split over personalities. This isn’t exactly schism worthy, but it does reflect the Protestant comfort with going it alone. That’s not a bad thing necessarily. Jesus’s idea of the church (ecclesia) is a body of believers that reach the lost with the gospel. Traditionally it’s easier to reach them through an organized ministry. The sending out of missionaries, here and abroad, is easier by pooling resources.

But it doesn’t always need to look like this. In some countries, small groups of believers might be more effective at reaching the lost. Large churches can be a target for government censorship around the world. It’s much more difficult to patrol small churches that split constantly and add to the numbers of the faithful.

We’re to increase the number of believers and not just grow the institutional church. Every Christian should understand the difference.

 We need an orthodox view of the Bible and salvation and eternal life, but cultural differences will always exist. There is plenty of room for that in God’s Kingdom. But something like the Nicene Creed for a statement of principles should form the basis of our collective faith.

The “We” in the ‘we have a new pope” refers to the world. The pope is basically a world leader. I thought an African pope would be the best selection. They take a traditional view on marriage and oppose the LGBT influence in the culture. I’ve seen a few social media posts from this guy they selected, Robert Prevost. It’s typical anti-Trump and anti-Vance stuff. It’s early stages so far. Probably it’s not fair to slap a label on the guy just yet. But if he’s a typical Left-wing Cardinal, then it’s further proof that the Catholic church is focused on all the wrong issues.

Pope Francis talked about climate change more than the persecuted Christians in China. He made a morally reprehensible deal in 2018 with the Chinese Communist Government. The CCP gets to appoint bishops to posts in the country, while the Vatican can overrule the choices. Francis cut the legs out from under the loyal church in China. At the same time, he turned it into a place for CCP stooges to advance.

One line of thinking has it that church leaders should stay out of politics. But everything today is political. The scripture should be our guide in all worldly affairs. But most of the work of feeding the poor and winning souls for Christ is done at the ground level. In an imperfect age, the best we can pray for is that all Christian leaders put a spotlight on those issues first, while holding fast to the inerrancy of scripture.

The best version to date for what a Christian church should be is found in Acts 2:46-47 “So continuing daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved.”

Large institutional churches aren’t necessarily a bad thing. But where they’re focused on boutique (secular) issues like climate change and mass immigration we should ignore their direction.