You can't make this stuff up

So a well known LGBT advocate is leaving her pastorate, to be replaced by an openly homosexual pastor who is in a relationship with a gay hairdresser who moonlights as a drag queen named Fruitbomb.  That's the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America for you.

I kid you not.  Go to the link. I don't think it can be called Christian anymore.  Maybe it can.  I don't know.  Many mainline denominations are producing people who have long ago left what seemed anything close to being Christian.  Probably more heresy than anything.

They could be good people who are doing this of course. I knew a dear, sweet lady who pastored a United Church of Christ back in my ministry days. We often chatted and sometimes sat together in regional meetings and ecumenical conferences.  Nonetheless, she sometimes pondered what is so wrong with Gnosticism, or whether it's presumptuous of us to believe in some personal God who cares about us on an individual level.  I used to wonder what her sermons sounded like on a Sunday morning.

Of course these are extremes of what I fear is a pandemic infecting much of the modern Christian Faith. I fear, in the end, that a great many people from the top down just don't believe it anymore.  We've been blinded by science maybe.  Or after a century or so of technology, industry, world war and atomic power, we've just lost a God centered model of creation.  Or Bultmann was right.  Whatever, I fear few even believe in Creation traditionally understood, and merely accept an atheistic universe model with a God stamp slapped on it.

There are many reasons for this I'm sure.  But I don't know if there has been such a crisis within the Faith since its inception.  This isn't to downplay the many crises it's had over the centuries.  It's to say that the Faith is being assailed on almost every front, and the question isn't which doctrines we jettison to keep up with the latest, but how many will be left once the latest round of assaults are replaced by the next round.