According to the Pew Research Center, the "Nones," i.e., people who are religiously unaffiliated is growing rapidly as a percentage of the U. S. population, growing by by 22 million between 2007 and 2014.
The Nones are comprised of atheists and agnostics and people who describe their religion as, "nothing in particular."
Our gatherers are made up of people who are naive and uninformed about matters of religious affiliation and it's never mattered much to Evie and me so we've not ever talked about it, though some of our people have been in conversation with denominational muckety mucks over the years. Those people know about CGGC and ERC. In fact, the guy who holds the FCC check book just wrote out a check to the ERC to assist in paying for insurance for ERC pastors' widows.
While I, and, to a lesser extent, Evie love the CGGC and cherish our connection to it, as we met today, the first day of 2017, I was thinking about how our gathering has changed in the last year.
And, it strikes me that, in a very real and unusual way, we have become a gathering of Nones in the past 12 months.
We are Nones because, against our will, the people with whom we were affiliated, well, Noned us!
Rumors, still unsubstantiated by anyone with authority, persist that I was defrocked by the ERC at its last Yay God session.
And, I have been informed that, even though our gathering embraces CGGC doctrine and its Mission and Vision Statements, the ERC Commission on Church Renewal, has begun a discussion about depantsing us, that is, removing our status as a group of people affiliated with the ERC.
So, I was wondering, as we met today, if we are nones and I was also testing out how I feel about the way the CGGC has behaved toward us in the past few years.
Fortunately, no one else in our number was plagued by these thoughts.
Our gathering was, perhaps, more pleasant than it should have been. The New Testament commands the we spur each other on to love and good works. The verb there might more literally be translated "provoke." Gatherings of disciples are not to be pleasant. They are to provocative of a lifestyle of love. This one was way too pleasant for that.
In our defense, our friend Ward was with us for the first time in quite a while, having just returned from a nursing home as the result of a stroke.
I had doubted that Ward would ever gather with us again and we were all very pleasantly surprised to see him.
As always, we took the bread and cup and, while there was nothing extraordinary about it today, I was especially thankful that obeying His command to do it in His memory is taken for granted among us.
The meal was our take on the traditional Pennsylvania Dutch New Year's meal: Chicken and saur kraut and mashed potatoes.
The fellowship was, easy, moreso than usual because Ward was present.
Word time centered on a discussion of Galatians 4:4-7 led by Evie.
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