Originally Posted by seebs

Frankly, it's an excellent place to preach, if you don't mind being kicked around for your trouble.

Originally Posted by Dorothy

You were replying to a post that said there are a "lot of evil people who post on cf" (which can't be proven). And you said that "most of them call themselves Christian". YOu cannot extrapolate from the fact that the majority of cF members are Christian to most of the "evil people" who post on cf call themselves Christian. And the evil people thing is a straw man anyhow. :huh:

Originally Posted by Ciborium

Reps all around for ST, and I say so as one of the most conservative Christians I know. I appreciate the recognition that CF errors are seemingly from a conservative base. I don't think CF's core problems actually have much to do with conservative Christianity or Calvinism or Roman Catholicism, but with an entire Administrator leadership, down to the last person, whose actions evidence a rather ignorant flair on administrative matters, completely clueless managing of a discussion board, an utter lack of applying any site rules and agreements to themselves, an ignorance of most aspects of Christianity (which is posited as the slogan of the board), a callous disregard about any will but their own (including that of God, their idea of god, or the impetus of Christian Scripture), the bankrupting of empathy and love for people, and use of a discussion board only to feed their own egos.

Originally Posted by Dorothy

If CF is affecting your mental, emotional or spiritual health in a negative way, my advice is to leave and don't go back. Seriously. It is so not worth it.

Originally Posted by Crazy Liz

You know, as I read ST's most eloquent rant, it occurred to me that it bears a great resemblance to what the Free Churches have been pointing out to the state churches since the Reformation. Power corrupts. Putting Christians in power will corrupt Christianity. When church and state are married, the corruption of the church will outweigh any improvements in the state. Exercise of coercive power over others to try to make them Christians or to make non-Christians act like Christians or to require them to claim to be Christians in order to have access to power is completely inconsistent with the message of Jesus, and has proven through history to fail every time.

The Christian Right in the US has abandoned its roots in the Free Church tradition that separated church and state for theological reasons. The main theological reason is that God is not coercive. Jesus attracted those he called through love and caring. Jesus never once exercised coercive power over humans. He exercised power over demons and diseases. He exercised power to feed the hungry & even to provide wine to people who were already drunk. But he never exercised power coercively over people.

The fact that all CF's Execs are American conservatives whose political views are marked by an abandonment of this tradition in favor of grabbing power to exercise coercively over gays and other "non-Christians" is part of the problem with CF. We had one Brit on the Exec who couldn't march in step with the American Christian Right, and had to be replaced by another American who thinks enough like the others. The idea of ecumenism as a goal, looking for diversity among the leadership, and valuing the other voice is just not part of the mindset of those who wish to consolidate power. But consolidating power is not part of the Christian mindset in the Free Church tradition a majority of CF's Execs come from. They are rootless. They have denied their roots. If they understood their roots, censorship would not be among their methods, not because of the political traditions of the liberal modern West, but because censorship is a form of coercive power the Christian Free Church tradition has deliberately turned away from.

Ecumenism can't come from top-down force. It's been tried and failed. The countries with state churches are more post-Christian today than those with free churches, which in turn are more post-Christian than those with persecuted churches. Both political history and the New Testament tell us a free church is to be desired, rather than to be persecuted or persecutor. Yet Christians in the most powerful country in the world are again trying to seize power and become persecutors, and CF's leadership is overwhelmingly populated with people who uncritically accept this mindset.

Originally Posted by chaoschristian

Is there any way to fix the thread titles for LVIII and LVIV to their correct LXIII and LXIV?