Monday, December 2, 2019

“It is hard to love the gasoline station where the honeysuckle used to grow.”

 

Early this past summer the historic Steele Creek Presbyterian Church, near the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, closed its doors for good. The church, the second oldest in Mecklenburg County, having been founded in 1760—nearly 259 years ago—by hardy Scots settlers to the region, merged with another Presbyterian Church in the area, Pleasant Hill. The classic 1889 Gothic-revival style brick structure was abandoned, purchased by nearby expanding Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

As late as the early 1970s Steele Creek counted 1,000 members, but the encroaching airport and the constant deafening roar of supersonic jets every moment of the day speeding off to Munich, London, Latin America and all points in between, plus the precipitous decline in the Presbyterian Church USA, which has gone the way of all mainstream Protestant denominations and embraced the liberal social gospel, had brought the membership down to around 350, many of them adults who held on to the memory of a Presbyterianism that once boasted of a Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney…but now could only grasp for scraps from a barren progressivist table.

8 comments:

  1. "...grasp for scraps at the barren progressive table". Exactly the reason I am a solo practitioner and not a church member.

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    1. Reminded me of Bill who had more years in Saigon than I had.

      Prayer: Something I Had Forgotten About Concerning The Last Days of Saigon

      From my friend Bill Lemon: "First, I will certainly pray for ............ Although I am no longer a good Episcopalian (sort of like I am pissed at the GOPe), I have recently recharged my Christian batteries and while I don't attend a brick and mortar meetings, I do pray- hard and often. (Anyone with children should get used to praying). I recall you and I prayed in the Cholon Church (at the end of Tran Hung Dao) during the last day's of Saigon. The key is not to focus on ourselves but the soul of others."
      https://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2016/03/prayer-something-i-had-forgotten-about.html

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    2. Nicely encapsulated, and my point exactly.
      Best to you and your friend Bill.

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    3. Thanks and some more shenanigans:

      (This was TET '68. A friend of mine, Bill Lemon, was caught in Cholon when the Communists came. They were going door to door, street by street searching all the houses. After the second day, it was apparent that they would get to where he was staying the next day. Now picture this: George weighed 300 pounds, but his wife made him a white top with black pants like women wear there especially when they are selling wares, put a conical hat on his head, and he was able to walk a few blocks to where a man, who had been contacted by telephone, met him in a jeep, and got him away safely under a hail of fire! BT)
      http://www.namsouth.com/viewtopic.php?t=21&highlight=cholon

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  2. One good thing - at least it wasn't turned into some mosque.
    Sad to see our world being desecrated by undesirable lepers.
    I don't understand why people forsake their principals.

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