***
Watchtower May 15, 1964 pp. 294-296 Should You Change Your Religion? ***ADMISSION
OF FAILUREMany religious leaders openly admit that their church organizations are failing to provide their members with what they need to meet God’s requirements, and admit they themselves are not meeting these requirements.
Why should this admission of failure concern you? Because Jesus said: "Every tree not producing fine fruit gets cut down and thrown into the fire." (Matt. 7:19) Any religion that does not produce the kind of Christians God requires will come to eventual destruction. Individuals who do not meet God’s requirements will meet with similar disaster, for Jesus added: "Not everyone saying to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the kingdom of the heavens, but the one doing the will of my Father who is in the heavens will."—Matt. 7:21.
Note some of these admissions that should alert you to the possibility that your own religion is failing. Archbishop Coggan of England admitted: "The tragedy within the Church today, all too often, is that the Gospel that is preached is but a section, a fragment, of the Gospel as it is given to us in the New Testament."
The Italian magazine Europeo contained this comment in regard to church failure in Italy: "‘The progressive support given to Marxism in Italy,’ sustained the President General of Catholic Action during his press conference, ‘can be considered an aspect of the phenomenon in the decline of spiritual and religious values, and the cause must be attributed to the loss of the Christian mentality, of the Christian manner of judging, of the Christian conception of existence.’" But why did this decline and loss come about? The article adds: "Catholic morals and conduct fall to pieces by themselves at the first contact with the new ideology because for centuries they had lost their substance and their truth, they had been reduced to rites, to practices, to folklore."
In Australia, the president of the South Australian Methodist Conference stated: "The church has become a club to be enjoyed by those within its membership, and it forgets the purpose of its existence." A Baptist clergyman there declared: "We have lost our grip, our way, our faith. We are filled with foreboding and fear, worried about nuclear weapons." How could these religions represent true worship when the Bible plainly says that those persons having the right religion would not fear because they would know for a certainty what the future holds for this earth, yes, for this very generation, and that they would be bearing witness of this in all parts of the earth?—Luke 21:28; Matt. 24:14.
In this regard astounding are the words of the late Archbishop Yngve Brilioth of Sweden, who said: "Whether mankind will ever get peace, is a question the answering of which would require a prophetic endowment that I have not got." If what this clergyman had was the right religion, he would clearly know that peace will come to this earth, and how it will come, since the Bible pointedly answers these questions.
A prominent American bishop, James A. Pike, admitted: "The story of Christianity’s retreat is more than one of numbers. It is a story of a Church that has become largely complacent and irrelevant. The Christian community seems incapable of heeding the religious admonition to ‘love thy neighbour’ at a time when the need for such love was never more apparent." But this could not be true if he represented true religion, whose adherents have always practiced such love and do so at the present time. In fact, it is a prominent feature that distinguishes them from those who have the wrong religion.—John 13:34, 35.
Related to this are the words of the late Pope John XXIII, who, when speaking of boxing, said: "It is barbaric to put brother against brother." Yet, it is far more barbaric to witness millions belonging to the same religion slaughtering one another on the battlefield in time of war, each side supported by their respective clergy who are also of the same religion! What a fantastic failure of these religions when we consider the words of 1 John 3:10-12: "The children of God and the children of the Devil are evident by this fact: Everyone who does not carry on righteousness does not originate with God, neither does he who does not love his brother. . . . we should have love for one another; not like Cain, who originated with the wicked one and slaughtered his brother"!
If you face things honestly, the way they really are, you will find the words of the German Lutheran church paper Amtsblatt der bekennenden Kirche (Official Journal of the Witnessing Church) accurate when it said: "In this period at the end of the modern world, we theologians and clergymen, due to our false course, belong to the same class as the Pharisees and Sadducees spoken of in Matthew 16:1-4. We, too, fail to understand the signs of the times."