I see what you mean. Some of these groups are sects and, according to the testimonies given by many ex-members, can be very dangerous mentally – in the best of cases only economically, as so many sects are profit-oriented.
No, I don’t mean cults (“sect” is an innocent term in English; you’re talking about cults). Cults are those crazy mind-control religions that brainwash people and have them do dangerous things. I’m almost positive that’s not what Caroline belongs to.
What I am talking about are Protestant fundamentalist churches that practice forms of Christianity that are not unusual but that teach people to be hostile to mainline denominations. They do really good public service, but at the same time they have a lot of false beliefs about other types of Christianity. For example, they think that Catholics are taught to worship statues or to worship Mary. Many of them are taught that Catholics believe you can “buy” your way into heaven by doing good works. Of course, none of these things are true – quite the opposite.
Typical groups of this type believe that all doctrine must come directly from the Bible. (However, this dictate is nowhere in the Bible, so their idea that all doctrine must be directly biblical is itself non-biblical. Also, the Bible wasn’t compiled until centuries after Christ left, and it was the church that put it together.) Many of them believe that at the moment you “accept Christ as your personal savior” you are automatically saved from then on, no matter what you do. This idea is also not really biblical and is explicitly refuted by several biblical passages.
Most people I’ve met from these churches are very pleasant, and they truly want to do good for people. It all comes from their hearts, but they have been misinformed about other religions, and that leads them to believe that they have to “save” the people who belong to them. Some of them are mean-spirited, but you find people like that in every church. I’m all for them helping people, but I’m not for them spreading false beliefs about other religions.
But one thing for sure, most of them are not cults.
Hello Jamie and Conchita,
Wow! I didn’t know I would start a whole debate here. haha! Anyway, here is my answer, sorry it took so long.
The work of a missionary:
The Bible says:
" 19Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." Matthew 28:18-20 (NIV)
Of course to be able to do such work other things are included, like missionaries usually need to plant churches so the ministry can keep growing and stay in the place long enough to train nationals so they can later take over the ministry initiated by the missionary. That could take months or years.
Some people never heard the Gospel or the name Jesus.
Jamie wrote:
I don’t believe all Catholics are going to hell same way I don’t believe all Evangelicals are going to heaven. I have met Catholics who I believe are saved and I have met people who say they are evangelicals and think they are “saved” but really aren’t.
The Scriptures have been misinterpreted a lot. That is why there are so many different Christian denominations. The bible says that the Devil comes to steal, kill and destroy and he is surely doing a good job. The Body of Christ is becoming more and more separated. (If you can put these two last sentences together) 
Jamie wrote:
I believe the Bible is the source of truth. I believe the original Scriptures are inerrant and divinely inspired, and the Bible happens to be a collection of those scriptures . Therefore I see no wrong in using it as a standard. I am careful to choose the ones that are closest in translation to the original scriptures though.
The original Scriptures were written by people that were in close contact with God. The New Testament was written by people who were responsible for the foundations of Christianity, therefore why can’t doctrine come from the Bible? If the foundation of Christianity itself is in there?
Jaime wrote:
I believe that if you “accept Christ as your Savior” you are “saved” but I don’t agree with the statement “once saved always saved therefore you can sin as much as you want, however you want". I do not agree with that. But I don’t deny some people believe in it.
Lastly:
This is what I believe. Eternal death came to humankind through Adam. Because of his sin we were separated from God.
Through the atoning death of Jesus on the Cross, God established a New Covenant with humanity. Through his Resurrection He defeated death. That is why it is so important to recognize Jesus as our Savior, because our relationship with God begins once we get a hold of that truth. That’s God’s New Covenant.
When we receive that truth we are under this New Covenant and God shall remember our PAST sins NO MORE.
From that moment on we have a new life, where we learn how to live according to His standards. This process is called Sanctification and we go through that until our time here on Earth is over. After that we are glorified and shall have eternal life.
I can assure you that all those statements are biblical.
Talk to you later.
Carol
Dear Andreana,
I am online pretty often because I write tests for this web site.So, if you wish to have more contact with me you are welcomed to add me to your messenger list. I don’t get to travel with FIRE because it’s too risky to get in and out of the country when you don’t have permanent resident status. If I leave the country at all is to visit my family and renew my visa.
Yes, I want to do missions in other places.Even though there are a lot of American organizations sending out missionaries to other places, they send people to America too. That is why I say I’m a type of missionary, because I’m part of a ministry here. Serving the community is not all I do. About my neighborhood…well…there’s not a lot to say. I live with a family. Their daughter just graduated from college. Her parents are on their mid 50’s and live in a neighborhood where most people are probably on their mid 70’s. I haven’t met anybody around my age. I have moved around a lot though. I live in a small city and people are really friendly. I’m in the South. There are a lot of differences between North and South. I don’t exactly know how to point out all the differences other than the fact that people from the North are “city” people and Southern people are “country” people. They have real different accents too. I constantly see people from the north giving a hard to time to southerners because of their accent and their way of living. I bet all countries do that. Same thing happens in Brazil. Except that the most developed places are in the south and the least developed ones in the North.
Hope to talk to you soon!
Carol
Then your beliefs are more or less normal mainline Christianity.
The scriptures are not complete, they do not deal directly with every situation, and they have to be interpreted. So, they form the basis of doctrine, but the church is needed to explain their meaning and application. Some Christians claim not to recognize any authority other than the Bible, and to operate only on direct revelation, but then they turn right around and submit to the authority of their church and pastor. So even the ones who say they follow the Bible directly, actually follow their church. And in 1 Timothy 3:15, it says that the church is the pillar and ground of the truth. So the church is the basis, not the book, since the church created the book. The church draws doctrine from the Bible. The Bible doesn’t spit out the doctrine by itself.
Do you believe this?
Be careful before you answer. I’m tricking you! 
I agree with Jamie completely. I live in the US in an area where immigrants are quickly becoming the main labor force. They come here to work and they bring their families. They are a very valuable labor force, especially for those who need hard manual labor. Unfortunately, they often come with little to no knowledge of the English language. Their children are learning in the schools and teaching some to parents, but many of the Americans here are having to learn the language to be able to accommodate them, as we have better resources and more ability to do so. I don’t know that it will ever become the dominate language, but it is becoming almost necessary to know it to communicate with half of my local community.
Hey Jamie,
Sorry for the long delay. Just wanted to let you know that I saw what you wrote and that I do have an answer for you. If you are catholic I can pretty much assume you won’t agree with me in certain points I have to make . It has also come to my understanding that you don’t believe one is justified by faith alone and that one can only understand Scripture if someone interprets it for him.
Well, I say I believe you can interpret the Bible on your own too by letting God reveal Himself to you through His Word with the help of the Holy Spirit. Sure, Leaders of the Church can teach you stuff and show you ways of interpreting the Bible, but you need to be responsible for what you believe yourself. Do you want to come to God someday and say: I believe You, because someone said I was supposed to? God wants to see that you believe Him yourself. That You know in your heart that He is real. He knows you and He knows your heart better than anybody else. You can’t lie to Him. And He will charge you for what you know.
Anyway, I could go on and give you answers to points you raised here, but I believe that you should get a Bible, pray before you read it asking God to reveal Himself to you and read His Word. And I know that He will guide you through it. I could give you answers, but we would probably get caught up in an endless debate and never really get anywhere. I want to challenge you to make conclusions yourself rather then on what somebody told you. By the way, when I say I could give you answers, I don’t mean that I have answers for everything. God is too Great and is way beyond our understanding. That’s where Faith steps in. If God (YAHWEH) was predictable and had limits, then He wouldn’t be God.
As for the church being the Pillar and supporter of the truth, well, my interpretation of it is that the Church is not the Truth per say, but the holder of it. It does not have any authority over the Bible. In John chapter 1 you’ll find verses like,
and
These are only a few verses that I decided to put down here but there are many more speaking of the importance of reading God’s word.
Anyway, I have tons of other points to make. About everything you said. The innerancy of Scripture, justification, etc. But I’ll stop here. Claudia has made a point to go back to the old topic. I would really like to encourage you to read the Bible though(in case you don’t) and draw your own conclusions. In the book of Romans, Paul gives a real good overview on a lot of things we have discussed about. Hebrews too. These books are really short it won’t take very long to finish them.That way it will not be me saying things, but you getting a hold of the truth yourself. You are still welcome to talk to me about these things and I extend this invitation to anyone else that is reading this and is also interested in talking about it. Just don’t think it would be proper to do it on a web site that is directed to learning English.
As you read it, don’t think about what people has told you. Not me or anybody else. Just read it, medidate on it, ask God to show you what the Scriptures mean. Then just wait for the results!
Hello everybody,
This discussion on the replacement of English by Spanish seems to have drifted a long way apart, which is what makes it more interesting to me. Being a Muslim living in a democratic and secular country, I have to say, I find this change of topic quite strange. I have difficulty understanding the relationship between language learning and religious missionary practice. I understand that the topic,somehow, changed along the way. What is striking is the range and length of the discussion and the interest it arouses. It reveals that people are more interested in the spiritual world than they are in the materail world.
So shall we go deeper into it?
Can I ask what you think of other religions, say, Islam, and their teachings and believers?
I have got to go now…
Looking forward to replies
Caroline, you gave me the answer I expected when I gave you that Bible quotation:
Evangelicals who believe in justification by faith alone usually have no good response to this citation, because it is scripture that directly contradicts their belief. For that reason, when you present them with it (and other citations like it), they generally ignore it and go off in some other direction. Sometimes they pretend you pointed to something else on the page and discuss that instead.
You are telling me to take a scripture that was written thousands of years ago, in a different historical context from ours, and in different literary traditions from ours, and just read it completely ignorant of those things. Doing it all on your own leads to some fallacious and often dangerous misinterpretations, as we have seen throughout history. No one would even dream of interpreting a sentence in a newspaper like, “Tigers flatten Twins on opening day” without knowing the cultural, social and linguistic context it was written in, but people frequently do the same with the Bible.
hey Jamie,
that is not what the verse really means. Like you said, it is dangerous to interpret things without looking at the context, that is why it is important to at least read the chapter before and the chapter after the verse, so you can get the context of it. What James is trying to say with that verse is that you should demonstrate your faith by your works. It doesn’t have to do with the doctrine of Justification explained by Paul in the book of Romans. Perhaps if they had used a different word than “justified” on the translation of that verse, that wouldn’t cause so much confusion.
Anyway, you can find a better explanation of that on this link: carm.org/questions/faithorworks.htm
Also, because I work for this web site, I do not want people thinking I’m using it to try to evangelize instead of teaching English, but because there seems to be an interest on this subject I just created a website so we can freely talk about it. So if you would like to reply to my post, please do it over there. I extend the invitation to anybody else that is interested in this topic and wants to talk about it more. Here is the link to the web site:
xanga.com/morningstar_cb
If it requires for you to set up an account in order to post a comment over there, and you do not wish to do so, you can try just leaving a message on my guestbook or e-mailing me and I publish my answer over there.
The e-mail you can use is: morningstar_cb@hotmail.com also set up just for this purpose.
This is my last post on this topic over here. Thanks for your understanding!
Hey all, I’m a USA citizen but I lived in Honduras for 2 years. I’m very fluent in Spanish from that. But my point in posting is that I met many people in Central America that had once lived in the United States (most of them illegally) for 1 to 10 years that don’t know any English. But the ones that come legally do seem to learn English. I don’t really know why this is, but it’s true. I was with people every day all day in my work down there and that seemed to be the trend.
I also think that English has become so popular because most Americans refuse to learn any other language and that forces others to learn English. We get taught Spanish or French or German or what ever in our public schools, but most people don’t seem to care about “Really Learning” a new language.
Any ways… thanks for listening to me 
and good luck with your studies
I suppose it’s possible that a person could also be asked to learn German, Japanese, Spanish and/or Portuguese if the following were the case:
- The person was a soccer coach, and
- The person was going to be coaching some players who spoke those languages.
hehe
Quizá el español no sea una lengua que el estadaunidense promedio desearía aprender más por la rivalidd histórica entre las culturas Católica-Hispánica y la cultura Protestantes-Anglosajona, sin embargo existe una palabra en español que cualquier estadaunidense tiene que aprender. América.
Perhaps Spanish is not a language that average USA citizen would like to learn, more because of the historical rivalry between both cultures, in one side, Catholics-Spanish and in the other side Protestants-Anglosajons, However there is a spanish word that every USA Citizen have to learn, America.
And also we can see in all Airports of USA and Mexico, signals in both languages, Speaking Spanish do not prives hispnics from the so called “american dream”, which by the way has become the morgage nightmare.
Spanish is the most commonly taught foreign language in the US, but most people don’t remember it after they learn it, because it’s not that useful here. Competition between Catholics and Protestants is not an issue at all in the US anymore, so that explains nothing about any problem an English speaker might have with Spanish.
You’re wrong that all US airports have signs and announcements in both English and Spanish. In my large city, the announcements are usually in English, Japanese and Chinese, and occasionally German. They are almost never in Spanish.
English Vs Spanish
I have read all the discussion, and I found it very interesting. I personally do not believe Spanish will replace the English language.
I learned that the language will become dominant when spoken by the powerful leaders or organization. Because language is the way of life, style, and it will be imposed on others. Sometimes, language can be replaced completely. For example, Native American languages were replaced by English and Spanish as the result of colonization.
English is a dominant language and acceptable almost all over the world, although, if you speak more than one languages, you will have a good job opportunity.
I would love to learn Spanish language. I took Spanish I and II a few years ago, but I do not remember anything at all. I do not have anybody to practice with. Maybe if I start taking Zumba class, I will find friends to practice Spanish language.
I will be grateful for your comment.
Thank you,
Kkebe