Apologetics & Evangelization: June 2009 Archives

I heard a really good rejoinder today for those wandering from the church. It was in the context of an Orthodox Christian's conversion story (he was on the receiving end of it) but it works for us Catholics as well: "We're not going to change the church just for you." It's kind of a wake-up call for those who consider themselves a fount of wisdom and divine revelation. It is we who should conform ourselves to the church, not the other way around. I discovered this one summer in college when I went around with a Pentecostal friend of mine to a different Protestant church every week, analyzing (and judging) each one. Eventually I woke up and said, this is not how the members of the first-century Corinthian church conducted themselves. You believed what the church communicated to you, you didn't go around saying, "Well the Corinthian church is too charismatic, and those Galatians are just too legalistic, and the Thessalonians are too focused on end-times. "We're not going to change the church just for you."