Valuable history
Valuable history
Thanks … for your “This Day in History” article on Sunday, Sept 14 — in particular, the 1939 article about the banquet for Dr. Hilario Moncado.
I recognized his name from a sign on a Banyan Tree on Banyan Drive, dated in 1937. That’s awesome to have a little history on that name, and to see how big his tree has gotten in 80 years. Thanks.
Kevin Logan
Hilo
Facing free-fall
Congratulations to St. Augustine minister Bill Rhodes on re-producing their long-running bazaar as a fundraiser for scholarships and food vouchers for the North Kohala Food Basket.
It is these kinds of fundraising activities that are the hallmark of organized religion’s philanthropy, and we should be ever grateful for such church-related good deeds.
The Rev. Rhodes seems acutely aware of his involvement in the large underlying problem of diminishing church membership, recognizing that church membership is now in a free-falling decline. The downside of dwindling membership roles brings increasing hardships, especially the problem of retaining paid staff.
The problem is magnified in turn by dwindling church membership, which cuts deeply into efforts to retain overall fiscal stability. It should be noted that many fundamentalist churches are not in decline, but rather are flourishing. It’s the mainstream moderate churches that are suffering in their mostly futile efforts to remain afloat over time.
But why is this religious downturn occurring? Simply put, it’s evolution. The world’s populous is so much more sophisticated today and much better educated than were the folks of Biblical times.
The agricultural, industrial and information revolutions have brought us forward, sometimes at an incredibly rapid pace.
And now we are catching up with the bulk of the European countries whose percentages of “believers” have sunk into the teens and lower. As this ongoing decline continues inexorably, Americans will be on a par with European nonbelief.
What can failing churches do about this predicament? As Walter Cronkite used to say at the close of his televised news: “That’s the way it is.”
Don Bremer
Keaau