allischalmers:
A half century ago Brazil and South America where predominantly Roman Catholic. Today there are two Protestant churches to one Catholic church. Is the catholic Church fading away in South America and Brazil ?
Twenty eight thousand mainland Chinese become Protestant believers every day
More than 20,000 Africans become Protestant believers every day.
Over 40% of Koreas are now Protestant Christian. Now there are more than than 7000 Protestant churches in Seoul alone, with one church-Yoida Full Gospel Church - claiming a registered membership of more than 700,000, making it the largest single church in the world.
And on it goes thoughout the world. Is the Catholic Church fading away ???
forever Baptist
allischalmers
There are several things to be said about this - for instance:
If people come to a saving faith in Christ, I don’t think it matters much whether they are Catholics or Protestants while doing so, or what they are. God is not restrained by human limitations, nor does He give grace only to His Church
The material fact of belonging to body X rather than body Y, is of itself irrelevant to one’s standing before Christ: God has no favourites, but is good to all.
A Christianity which leaves one praising oneself before God because one does not believe OSAS, or does not pray to the saints, or whatever, is worthless, because it is based on one’s own success in avoiding what is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as evil. The one thing a Christian is not, is a
self-made man - he is a Christ-made, grace-made man. The self-made man is an American idol having nothing to do with the grace of Christ - and idols are good only for destruction.
It matters not a jot what size a Church is - whether it has ten members, or a thousand billion, God is equally well able to pour the fury of His righteous wrath upon it. Mere numbers are of no importance - nothing could be of more utter irrelevance than mere bigness of number, space, or bulk. Do people really think God will be impressed by bigness ? If He increases a Church in faith or numbers or any other good thing, this is entirely from His gracious kindness - so Christians have no reason to congaratulate themselves. We can be thankful, but never boastful.
If we think we are privileged - so we are: & with privileges go responsibilities. Jesus, Who is infinitely privileged as the man Who is God, did not boast of His Sonship of God, but poured it out on others.
If size was a guarantee of being loved by God, the Roman Empire under Nero was more loved by God than the young Church described in Acts; and the Babylonian Empire ruled by Nebuchadnezzar was more loved than the exiled Jewish Church.
Abraham was only one man - Ur was an entire city. Was he wrong to follow the call of God - or should he have ignored it, and stayed in Ur, to continue worshipping the moon-god, whose sanctuary it was ?
So it is a mistake to judge a Church by its outward circumstances - Laodicea was more prosperous than the other six in Revelation 2 & 3; it is also the most severely judged. So we can never assume that because our standing before God in Christ is blessed by Him at one time, we cannot come under His wrath at another. This is not because His faithfulness fails - it does not, cannot; it is because we do not have in us that changelessness which is His. His faithfulness is no guarantee that we will not be faithless: it is He, not we, Who is Holy and Righteous. That’s why we cannot pride ourselves on our identities as Catholic or Baptist or whatever - & all such self-esteem and self-pride have been demolished by the Cross anyway; that, nothing else, is what we are to be proud of. ##
