What have we gotten wrong? 10% of persons over 65 will get dementia and 40% of persons over 85 will get it.
Recently a retired Methodist minister I know from Toastmasters clued me in to a book by Thibault and Morgan, “No Act of Love Is Ever Wasted: The Spirituality of Caring for Persons with Dementia”. This minister cared for his late wife who had Alzheimer’s for maybe 20 years I heard; I went to her funeral and she had served the church as a Director of Christian Education–wonderful lady that he served her last days.
Now this minister is starting a care group within his church for caregivers. My husband has dementia–we don’t know what kind yet. I am so interested in a group within the church for dements and their caregivers.

How about telling people all they have to do is believe Jesus is god and they will be saved.

Christians are under a lot of pressure to be “right” because once you are proven wrong about something, who’s to say we are wrong about everything else? I think that is what creates the fear of being wrong. Then we become overly defensive about things.

Scot,
Are you an inclusivist? You seemed to speak approvingly of their being a “wideness in God’s mercy.” If so, I would find this very heartening. I’ve recently come to regard inclusivism as a triumph of the conscience (as well as the beatitudes and the sheep and the goats passage) over the what traditionally has been a very exclucivist theology based on Johannine and Pauline works.

Good grace filled dialogue. We need more of this. Thanks for sharing this, Scot.

…hmmm, I need to proofread for grammatical errors better before I post :~)

Very important issue to discuss as the issue of the evil and injustice Christians have perpetuated almost always comes up while sharing God’s love. When we excuse our own evil as well as our evil as a community (whether we repent of it or merely “regret” it) it becomes much harder to distance ourselves from the Fred Phelps of the world.
One point that I’ve become more aware of recently and puts a check on my own motives in this discussion: the Christian movement will never be fully accepted into the mainstream of life. If the early Christians were accused of such ridiculous things as cannibalism (i.e. communion), infanticide (baptism), and orgies (“greet one another with a holy kiss”) we shouldn’t be surprised when we’re thrown into the same camp as the Ku Klux Klan.

Jeff,
But we can’t do things that lead to those accusations.

Here’s an “evil” that I suppose I’m somewhat understanding of, as it stems from quite orthodox Christian soteriology and anthropology. It is the slandering and, well, dehumanizing of each and every human’s very soul and being.
The idea that every non-Christian goes to hell often in Christian mindsets leads to rationalizations that focus on and amplify to the nth degree the depravity of the human condition. Any human goodness as facilitated by common grace is minimized, and any depravity is maximized (real or imagined in terms of what the specific aspects of that depravity are seen to be).
Personally, I see common grace working in tandem with humanity’s sinful nature – yielding a people that can be truly quite good at times though of course imperfect. Furthermore, I see that common grace opening doorways of reconciliation to God-seeking people who just have never been convinced and are likely to never be convinced that the gospel message is factually true.
So to sum up, I would say that I consider it an “evil” (no matter how understandable given a person’s faith) to justify to themselves why it is just for children to grow up with essentially the deck severely stacked against them in going to hell – basically, why they deserve that tortuous fate worse than living the Holocaust every day without end due to the very nature of their character. To me, this is murder of the human soul in eyes of another. People are just plain more beautiful than that.

For starters, I think it is very important to use scripture to guide our criticisms of Christians who are in error. There is too much criticism of the church based on how this or that makes someone feel.
Feelings are duly noted, and we should all be sensitive to how people regard Christ through us. By the same token, the bible says those who reject the faith will despise the message.
If one of my pastors gives a sermon about tithing and why our church believes it is important, there is usually someone who makes the standard complaint that churches shouldn’t talk about money. That person will certainly get a hearing, but the difference between “duly noted” and “we’ll work on that” is scripture.

Kevin S.
Duly noted. However, conscience and spiritual perception are ultimately the basis for most Christian’s acceptance of the Bible as the word of God. If something dramatically contradicts your conscience when reviewing the Bible (or perhaps more precisely, Biblical passages as understood through your doctrine of the Bible), I think this is a completely sufficient basis to give one pause. To do otherwise, in a sense, would be sitting on the branch of your belief and cutting it off with your doctrine.

This book is similar to his “Shades of Gray” book. I’ve met Adam and found him to be a regular guy, excellent preacher, and sincere in his desire to reach the truth. I don’t agree with him on some of the issues here, but appreciate the work he does to arrive at his conclusions.

“If something dramatically contradicts your conscience when reviewing the Bible (or perhaps more precisely, Biblical passages as understood through your doctrine of the Bible), I think this is a completely sufficient basis to give one pause.”
It should give you pause, and you should endeavor to learn more, rather than criticizing the church. If the basis for your critique of a group of Christians is that your conscience is bothered by the scriptural teachings to which they adhere, don’t expect them to change.
To many criticisms are leveled with this expectation, that because a certain number of people are coming around to a certain opinion, that necessarily validates the opinion. And so many who seek to “correct” the church find their voices lost in the wilderness, partly because their voice is not rooted in scripture.

Kevin,
Please refrain from asking me to “learn” more. You frankly have no idea of how much time, effort, learning, and reflection I’ve put into understanding scripture. Also, I have absolutely no expectation as far as who would or wouldn’t change in terms of their beliefs or doctrines. I was really just making a logical argument based on a conditional set of foundational conditions for accepting scripture – mainly conscience and spiritual perception.

(Sorry, I was addressing this to Kevin and his name somehow ended up in the name field)
Kevin,
Please refrain from asking me to “learn” more. You frankly have no idea of how much time, effort, learning, and reflection I’ve put into understanding scripture. Also, I have absolutely no expectation as far as who would or wouldn’t change in terms of their beliefs or doctrines. I was really just making a logical argument based on a conditional set of foundational conditions for accepting scripture – mainly conscience and spiritual perception.