Watch What You Believe
I don’t know how many times I have heard that the church is declining in numbers. Intuitively it just didn’t seem to be true to me. And then I find I was right. A noted Sociologist Rodney Stark has proven by an extensive study that the church has been the same number of folks for the last four decades at least. Of course this means we are less as percentage of the population but it doesn’t mean that people are leaving the church in the numbers we have been led to believe.
A few years ago I was involved in a situation where a husband was accused of molesting his two daughters. I knew him well. And I felt in my gut it wasn’t true. The police used a doll in their investigation for the children to depict what the father had done. They reenacted after some questioning what had supposedly happened.
It has since been proven that the doll approach is bogus. In fact the mere act of the questioning caused children to make up things they thought the adults wanted to hear. It just plain isn’t true that children can’t lie about such things. Fortunately five court-appointed and hired psychiatrists proved that in fact it was the mother who had done the molesting.
Things just aren’t always as they appear to be.
I am an environmentalist. But I don’t believe man is causing global warming. I am satisfied as a thinking person I have done my research. Some believe we may have, in fact, entered a small ice age. This week a noted scientist has warned congress that CO2 isn’t as much a poison as we think. In fact he suggests we need more CO2 for the planet to keep greening. It makes sense to me.
I think some of the global warming line of thinking is more about politics than science. Things just aren’t as they appear some times.
Remember a while back they had signs on gas pumps to not use your cell phone because it might start an explosion. One of the major anecdotes behind this was a story told by a local fire chief, Pat Kick. He stated a fire was ignited by the ringing of a cell phone. Several days latter he retracted the story and it turned out something else started the fire it just so happened that the phone rang at the same time. Cell phones are safe at gas pumps.
No one has ever been harmed by a cell phone nor has there ever been nor will there be an explosion started by a cell phone.
Things just aren’t as they appear sometimes. I think we just like scary bad news.
So don’t believe all the press that the church is on resuscitation. She is strong and expanding despite the skirmishes. I am persuaded we are not better or any worse than we have always been. And I get around. We just want to be better and that’s good. And it seems at times we aren’t getting better.