It is a chicken and egg question.PetrChelcicky wrote: ↑Sun Jul 10, 2022 10:49 am Shouldn't we look at the whole matter from the opposite direction?
There are Trumpists and there are Wokeists in the population. Some of them drift to a church which is not to far from them politically. And churches (at least Evangelical churches) are for sinners, not for saints.
So the problem is not that a church attracts either Trumpists or Wokeists and that a church does not try to convert them.
But the clergy ought to support the people of both parties to "transcend" their standpoints a bit, simply how we do it here, namely by seeing: At the other end of the spectrum there are people rather like you, with the same emotional apparatus (but opposite triggers), and the Creator providex for them, too, and the Redeemer redeems them, too.
Are most churches a reflection of their population? or is the population a reflection of the church?
I don't know about Germany, but in the US there has essentially been a sorting going on for generations that seems to be accelerating. People are sorting geographically and churches are a reflection of that. A church in rural Arkansas is going to look a LOT different from one in urban Minneapolis even if they are of the same denomination.
I think perhaps that was less the case in previous generations when smaller towns had more diverse and robust economies.