On any given day, there are two Protestant groups that are one day old! Amazingly, an ambitious Pastor Bob starts a new Protestant organization every ten hours!
The once-respected “Protestant Ethic” has metastasized into the Destroying Angel of the older, Mainline Protestant denominations.
Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists and all their tens of thousands of spin-offs are dying. Watching the ambitious Pastor Bobs starting their new churches is to see a religious version of Wal-Mart and Amazon putting neighborhood retailers out of business.
Now, new waves of pulpit-pounding “Prosperity Protestants” are packing ’em in! Some sprawling mega-churches have heli-pads so the simpering souls of smarmy sleaziness can show up at work “refreshed”.
Pity the poor Pastor Bobs, lost in the shrinking no-man’s land. They are caught in the emptiness between Catholics’ eternal offering of Christ’s Body and Blood and the greater emptiness of the New Wave of Big-Time Pastor Bobs.
Sadly, the old line Protestants possess little but tired triteness. They have gone soft on every moral teaching from masturbation, fornication, artificial birth control, and rampant remarriage to abortion. The bargain basement is running out of inventory.
What went wrong? From the late 1600s until the 1950s, Mainline Protestants “ruled the roost” in America. The doctrines of the Protestant Establishment began to collapse in the 1930s. Then, under the auspices of professional anti-Catholic clergypersons, untrammeled divorce, remarriage, and artificial birth control became accepted and approved. The collapse continued until abortion was legalized in 1973 with little objection from Mainline Protestants.
Following their collapse, a horde of hopeless lemmings wander from one Pastor Bob to another. They seek a ladder to Heaven built by vain men. Entire denominations of Protestants, trees without roots, wither and die.
Through it all, The Only Church Jesus Founded continues. Many are called. Few are chosen. Many Protestants are smart enough to glimpse something they are missing in the words of He Who Fulfilled the Prophets. “Verily, verily, I say unto you thou art Peter and on this rock I build My Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I give you The Keys to The Kingdom of Heaven.”
Many who hear those words see the clear facts and say to themselves, “It is true. Jesus did found One Church. It has held firmly on every moral issue.” Sadly, most do not follow their own perception of that simple truth.
Are such Protestants silently concluding that sentence by telling God: “But, I am so obsessed with lesser things that I would rather risk losing my soul than be a Catholic.”?
No Protestant faces a more compelling question.
