The leadership lost its nerve. Instead of taking the lead in the reform movement... they pulled the plug on it. They tried and are still trying to return the church to the dry ice of the previous century and a half.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The church wasn't an organization in the first century. They weren't writing checks or buying property. The church has matured and developed over the years. But for some reason, the last thing to change is the structure of leadership.
Ten years ago, 15 years ago, I think the church would have been asleep at the switch. This level of activism and engagement with the needs of society by local churches I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime.
For a radical feminist to try to change the church was like a black person trying to reform the Ku Klux Klan.
The Reformers, therefore, as instruments in the hands of God, in delivering the Church from bondage to prelates, did not make it a tumultuous multitude, in which every man was a law to himself, free to believe, and free to do what he pleased.
The evangelical movement has become just a bit victimized by a success-oriented culture, wanting the church - like the corporation - to be successful.
It's hard for the Catholic Church to accept change. When the mass was no longer said in Latin, loyalists went into mourning for years.
No one can fail to see that the power of the Church among large numbers in many communities is today diminishing, or has already ceased.
Although the church has often been far too slow to follow his lead, Jesus' insistence that women, as well as men, bear the full image of God has had a way of sparking reform movements across the centuries.
There is too much theology in the Church now, and too little of the Gospel.
It is an absolutely unique success of the church community to have introduced such an epoch-making change, in just a few years, without having a serious division.