I'm under no illusions here - I don't think anything will change in the grand scheme of things. Christian missionaries worldwide are not about to give up their careers because of this one group of evangelical leaders.
Nevertheless, this is still big news. If the leadership of prominent ministries can come this far, then maybe in time, they'll walk the next few steps and decide that Jews (gasp) have the right to want to remain Jewish.
Naw. I'm just fooling myself now. No Christian missionary will ever come to this conclusion. They'd have to abandon or ignore large chunks of their bible in order to come to that decision.
2 comments:
"If the leadership of prominent ministries can come this far, then maybe in time, they'll walk the next few steps and decide that Jews (gasp) have the right to want to remain Jewish."
It's not like the inquisition or anything.
In some parts of the world, it is.
I've a friend in Indonesia who chose to leave the Catholic church and marry a Hindu. (Her practice is that of a "ben noach" - a non-Jew that follows the laws that they Torah demands of Jews.)
Her and her family are regularly and routinely harassed both at home and at work. She has to keep her faith secret to avoid being fired from her job.
So, IMO, the inquisition is still alive and well. Just not in the US at this time.
But WRT my actual message, I'm referring to groups like the Southern Baptists who make it an explicit mission to seek out Jews as the targets of their missionary work. They actively seek out those Jews that are not religious and hound them with a never-ending barrage of questions that they know their victim doesn't know the answer to. They refuse to take "no" or "go away" or "get the f*** out of my face" for an answer. Then they start preaching Christianity as the answer to all those questions. Unfortunately, this approach works all too often.
FWIW, I was witness to, and a victim of, this kind of harassment when I was in college. I've also been accosted by missionaries like this while minding my own business sightseeing at Baltimore's Inner Harbor.
So I think I'm accurate in my statement that the fundamentalist/evangelical movement doesn't believe that Jews have the right to want to remain Jewish.
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