In Reply to: Re: His Dark Materials posted by Jo on November 04, 2007 at 23:47:13:
I like your assessment & am "pleased", that with MG and you I get "confirmed" that I am not totally "screwed up" & that there was probably something like a lowest common denominator: people got evangelised...told the good message...even if that meant at the cost of a more
& more horrific structure behind it...you can may be even spread the news/gospel by internet & "machine" so to speak...so I don't know what's wrong with the term evangelical.I was brought up in the evangelical church/lutheran & left later, after leaving Tf, out of conviction...I put my saved tax money more into something I believe in.
We had some debate here about how Christian TF is nowadays or has been...Christian is for me how much you live what you heard & read...evangelical has the emphasis IMO on the spreading of such news...whereby there could be quite a discrepancy between what you preach/spread & live yourself...but that has always been a topic also between Jesus & the Pharisees.
I used to be super impressed by Mother Theresa even as far back as in India...but once I came
across a verse, which made me reconsider MTs efforts: the poor have the gospel preached to them (Matthew 11)...and she believed, that love can convert at any time & avoided strictly the preaching of the gospel...may be also due to the staunch communist/atheistic government in West Bengal at that time.
So you can have charitable work...evangelical work
..you have charismatic movements and fundamentalists...it's evident, that they don't all go well together...all the different "Christian branches"..Darbyist(brethren/fundamentalists)would argue, that charismatics got there "anointing", speaking in tongues etc. from "below"...so you could have a formidable debates /fights here & elsewhere (& I witnessed it), even if TF isn't the issue...
(The German lutheran church asked on their recent council fro more respect of the Vatican, since the pope recently said, that the Lutheran church wouldn't really be a church...rather something like a communityor whatever the exact wording was...so much for the ecumenical efforts...personally I don't care too much, cause I tend to disagree with both, but just to say how much discrepancy there is since long as a little sample of very many)
The "irony" is, that even a former pastor of the
"baptists" (??)...Amos O Test...from Australia...got "lured"/won into TF...if I remember correctly.I also remember the father of a prominent German member was some elder in the Baptist church and in the beginning fairly favourable....the examples are quite numerous, where outsiders...other evangelical groups, welcomed the evangelical efforts of TF.The clinch came latest with FFing but some warned way before that.
TF's history is also linked IMO with the level of being on guard for wrong teachings in the Christian community & I think to some degree TF's failure is also a failure of modern heology & Dr.Chancellor should have done more the warning part...as his collegues...which again shows, that
within Christianity, some tend to be a bit milder
in their assessment.
On the other hand I get the feeling that sometimes
we tend to characterise TF as complete hellish from the beginning in some sort of penance or may be to please the ears of some listeners...whatever.
Even if I cannot generalise my experiences when joining, I think they were somewhat similar to what others told me from elsewhere or what I read.Taking those accounts & basic pratices into consideration - I have to allow worse exception/contrary examples of course - I'd say TF was evangelical & had in the very beginning not even "Mo-letters" to "share" & to follow...so following Berg right from the beginning is IMO somewhat of a poor misconcept...emphasis on beginning of TF's history &/or when joining (because most of all I was read from the Bible, even if all was TFstyle interpreted)