Reply #51: Sorry, I haven't encountered that [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

I'm not a Baptist, so my first thought upon meeting a new person is NOT how to rope them into attending my church. Northern mainline Protestants often come as a surprise to those whose only experience of Christianity has been Southern or West Coast fundamentalists. We don't greet new acquaintances with, "Are you saved?" :-)

My experiences on service projects have not been as you describe.

In fact, when I was down in Mississippi, the priest who was in charge of the center told us, "You can either serve people or judge them. You may think that someone is taking 'too much' food, but some of these people literally have fifteen relatives living in their house. They might be getting it for someone who is housebound. You don't know." In the whole group, I met one woman who seemed to be making borderline racist remarks, but on the whole, the spirit was incredibly positive, and even that one woman, an RN, worked congenially with everyone in the medical tent, where I was handing out OTC medicines, diabetic kits, and first aid supplies.

And churches are hardly the only place where hypocrisy abounds--although it abounds in some churches more than in others. If we were to get rid of all the human institutions that contain hypocrites, we'd have nothing left but solitary caves.