Friday, August 4, 2017

How Many Thousands of Churches and Seminaries Will Soon Go Bankrupt?

American individuals and organizations have experienced an extended period of easy money. Interest rates have been unusually low. In response, thousands of churches, parishes, dioceses, and denominations, as well as church schools, colleges, and seminaries, have borrowed large sums of money to renovate or enlarge existing buildings, construct new ones, purchase new and expensive technological equipment, and expand programs.
  
Has this been wise? Did this really witness to Jesus or simply express our devotion to other gods to our hurt?
  
Globally, all 7 billion of us live in the context of one increasingly integrated Global Technological System (GTS). All of us have been working ever so diligently to construct this GTS since the beginning of the Industrial (really Technological) Revolution. Too bad.
  
The GTS suffers from two fatal flaws. One, it embodies our passionate devotion to the six false but conventional gods of Olympianity. While we love these gods with abandon, they don’t care at all about us. Their goal has always been to use us simply as means to construct the GTS. They love the GTS because they are parasitic by nature. The GTS is their best means yet for sucking vitality out of all 7 billion of us along with the rest of God’s good creation. We humans have unwittingly served them very well and they have happily and unmercifully exploited us to the full.
   
So the first fatal flaw of the GTS is that it so inescapably expresses our suicidal devotion to six blood-sucking gods.
  
The second fatal flaw of the GTS: it’s not sustainable. It’s collapsing and has been doing so since 2008. The collapse is across the board: political, social, economic, financial, religious, cultural, psychological, spiritual, and ecological.
  
The elite minions of this world, those who serve the gods best and are best rewarded by them for doing so, will not be able to keep the GTS from collapsing. It’s doomed.
   
Elite minions know this. What they have been doing is postponing this otherwise unavoidable day of reckoning for as long as possible. One way leading financial minions of the gods have been doing this is by creating funny money (“quantitative easing”) and then creating very real debt bondage by loaning this funny money to churches, church bodies, and Christian schools.
  
So many churches have aging congregations. So many of those providing the substantial financial support to churches and Christian organizations are retirees.
  
As the GTS self-destructs, despite our fervent illusions to the contrary, it will include economic and financial collapse. Pension funds, whether private or governmental, will vanish. So too will medical care. The financial foundation of so many churches and Christian organizations will suddenly disappear.
  
What will be the result of this? Church buildings and land will have to be sold to pay off as much of our foolish loans as possible.
  
How many of our churches and Christian organizations have borrowed heavily based on the reckless assumptions that there are no parasitic gods seeking to destroy us, no GTS devoted to them and doomed to destruction, no end in sight of economic vitality, no possibility of retirement funds and savings accounts suddenly vanishing? How many thousands of our churches will soon face a completely unexpected bankruptcy?
  
Worse, what will happen to our suddenly impoverished Christians and landless churches? When the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth? (Luke 18:8.)

Copyright © 2017 by Steven Farsaci.
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