This may be the case. I knew one family as a child where this was definitely the case.
However, your claim is that you are a superior faith in relationship to us. From any faith that claims to be “superior” to us, I expect to see a “superior” outworking of this faith from Monday to Saturday. Otherwise I will conclude that you are just as messed up as we are and I will stay where I am thank you very much.
This is true.
Actually, they are welcome in our church. You just can’t serve in leadership. I heard a great message a while back about belonging before believing and how a church should be welcoming to sinners.
But isn’t it a mortal sin for any Catholic who is living in sin and doesn’t go to confession to take communion?
I would disagree with you here, although I realize that things might have changed in the five years that I’ve been Catholic and out of membership in an evangelical Protestant church.
My husband and I grew up in evangelical churches. I was Conference Baptist, and he was Assemblies of God. Both of our churches were (and still are) large churches, over 500 people in my church, and several thousand in his AG church.
After we married, we attended a Christian church (non-denom) for a few years, a Southern Baptist church for a few years, and then settled into a Christian and Missionary Alliance Church for ten years. (Church changes due to moves.)
Then we moved again, and attended another C and MA church, a plant that failed. Two years in the Conference Baptist church, two years in the Reformed Church of America, and seven years in the EFree church. (Church changes due to conflicts in the churches that alienated us.)
My point is that I have had a lot of experience with different evangelical Protestant churches. I realize that I still have only a small sample size to work with, and that a lot of the evangelical non-denoms vary greatly in their practices.
In my experiences, a person who practiced a sin was theoretically welcome at church, but in practice, not welcome at all. Hoo, boy, no.
It was OK–kind of–for the blatant sinner to come to a worship service. But as you know, the worship service is only a very small part of life in an evangelical church. There are a lot of evangelicals who never make it to worship service because they’re so involved in other ministries in the church! (I was one of those people!)
Evangelicals generally spend a great deal of their free time in various ministries within their church–Bible studies, committees, trustees, deacons and deaconnesses, club and other children’s ministries, youth ministry, evangelism, prison ministry, church charitable ministries, grounds care, etc.
In addition, when evangelicals socialize, they generally socialize with each other, not with non-evangelicals or…non-Christians. Yes, they SAY they have non-Christian friends, but they also try not to contaminate themselves with “worldly assocations.”
The person who practices sin is excluded from all the ministries and activities. No, no one comes out and says, “Sinner, go home.” But the person is shunned, or treated like a leper. It can be very subtle, but it’s obvious to the pariah.
When I say “blatant sin” BTW, I’m talking about visible sins like shacking up, affairs, questionable business practices, drinking (more in the past than this decade), partying, smoking (up North, that is–this is OK in the South), drugs, etc. Generally the addictive sins. Gluttony is OK, as long as the person is struggling with it. If the person is a joyous glutton who doesn’t seem to recognize that they are sinning, they may find themselves shunned.
When I was Protestant, I realized that many of these people eventually left our churches and didn’t come back. When I tried to make contact with these people, I discovered that many of them were so bitter over their treatment in the church that they didn’t attend church anymore and were not interested in associating with anyone who was in the church. Many of them kept their faith in God, but some of them even lost that.
This bothered me immensely. The evangelical teaching, as you know, is that anyone who practices sin and rejects God (church) was NEVER really a Christian to begin with. Well, this was frightening to me, because many of the people that I knew who departed from our midst had ACTED like fantastic Christians, more involved with ministries than me! It terrified to think that these people, some of whom I had trusted my children with, were never really Christians to begin with!
In fact, this is one of the major reasons why I believe that the Catholic Church is the Church that Jesus established. I believe in what the Bible says, that when we do sin, we have an Advocate, and we can be forgiven (See Apostles Creed) for our sins and restored to fellowship, even if we sin seventy X seven, or lots in modern translation. I believe in the doctrine of "State of Grace. I believe that yes, sins do vary in their seriousness. I actually heard evangelical preachers say that stealing a pencil from work was just as serious as raping and killing a little girl. That’s monstrous and it isn’t Biblical–the Bible talks about different kinds and levels of sin.
I still miss Anglicanism after all these years, & a lot of people will feel the same about the Protestantisms to which they were used. It’s a very serious matter indeed to expect someone to change religious affiliation, & IMHO it is treated much too lightly.