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Aidan T's avatar

I suggest that they have a big meeting, preferably lasting for years, before they do anything hasty. That should do the trick.

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A F's avatar

The Catholic Church needs to spend more time asking "what is it evangelicals do that make them so effective at evangelization and retention, and how can we adapt it?" And they need to spend less time imitating Mainline and Liberal Protestants whose communions are in utter collapse while their professional and academic bureaucracies scramble to justify their existence by rearranging chairs on the Titanic.

The future of the Church in Africa - and Latin America and the US - depends on it.

My suspicion is that the reason the Church has such a difficult time responding to Evangelicalism globally is because many of the people in positions of power in the Church are highly educated professionals who are experts and bureaucrats at heart, who highly value their respectability in Western, liberal society. They therefore have such a natural sympathy to the polite and respectable professionalism of Mainline Protestantism and NGOs, coupled with an aversion to and even embarrassment of Evangelicalism, which they see as a crude, intellectually weak, and populist threat to their own academic and bureaucratic power.

This blind spot among the Church's professional class is a massive albatross.

I see it in America at the parish and diocesan level. Just absolutely deaf ears if you try to highlight what it is that evangelical churches effectively do. It doesn't fit their mold. It's "icky."

The parish professionals go to professional conferences where they mingle with other professionals and hear talks from more professionals which take place on the campuses where professionals are trained by academics who put pronouns in their bios and read America and Commonweal while looking down on Bishop Barron and Scott Hahn as intellectual lightweights.

Meanwhile, who is actually evangelizing effectively?

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