So Maybe.

Education is the key. Maybe that's what Matt was talking about Sunday. Encouraging a young'n who has artistic interests to remain interested--even funding camp/school/training for that particular student. That's the model we are seeking to create in the public arena--if at a snail's pace. The sentence that has taken me on this line of thought speaks to this area in many ways.

In Cahill's latest work, the remark is made that with the invention of the printing press and the subsequent flood of ideas that began to penetrate the minds of Europe, that the influence of the church was diminished.

How can that be? Why do the ideas of the church not stack up to the ideas of the world? They do. So the influence of human hypocrisy has had a devastating effect on those ideas? Then what chance do we have, for I fear that in professing Truth I will always appear a hypocrite. I do not do what I want to do and I do what I don't want to do. So weak and fragile.

Maybe it's more. Maybe it's the fact that education among believers has waned. What is the thought level in mainstream churchland? How has the influence of worldly thought patterns influenced those of the church? Is it even valid to speak of "the church"? Aren't there really many different churches? I know the scriptures about being One, but is that a reality? If so, isn't it much smaller than we imagine. Startling.

Cahill says there are three things worse than the transformation of the early church to that of Constantine's dominion: 1-the separation of Judaism from Christianiy and vice versa, 2-the breakup of the church into many different divisions, and 3-the creation of a professional clergy and the common laypeople diluting or eliminating the Truth that we are all priests and "responsible to all for all."

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