The Fields Are Ripe If Only We Look Beneath The Income Barrier...

[Meg]

Back in 2005-2006, I tried to convince a local church that there was a need to reach the people making between $12,000 and $20,000 per year. This isn't exactly a desirable tithing base, and my pleas were dismissed. The following OP Ed describes the fallout...

The Changing Culture War
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/op...outhat.html?hp

But as religious conservatives have climbed the educational ladder, American churches seem to be having trouble reaching the people left behind. This is bad news for both Christianity and the country. The reinforcing bonds of strong families and strong religious communities have been crucial to working-class prosperity in America. Yet today, no religious body seems equipped to play the kind of stabilizing role in the lives of the “moderately educated middle” (let alone among high school dropouts) that the early-20th-century Catholic Church played among the ethnic working class.

As a result, the long-running culture war arguments about how to structure family life (Should marriage be reserved for heterosexuals? Is abstinence or “safe sex” the most responsible way to navigate the premarital landscape?) look increasingly irrelevant further down the educational ladder, where sex and child-rearing often take place in the absence of any social structures at all.

This, in turn, may be remembered as the great tragedy of the culture war: While college-educated Americans battle over what marriage should mean, much of the country may be abandoning the institution entirely.

[mattfivefour]

Since when is income a condition for being given the gospel? And for being loved and welcomed into fellowship by the ones who bear Christ's name?

I like Robert's comment in another thread where he wondered if Christ were to enter today's churches, to how many of them would He give the same message He gave the Laodicean church?