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Should Buddhists Be More Socially Engaged?
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07-05-2012, 08:26 PM
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GenryDont
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Oct 2005
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This discussion is a bit perplexing to me.
Being socially engaged is something that individuals do. Individuals start organizations to help others and then find like minded people to work with them for that goal. Churches, Sanghas, Jewish Temples etc. can help start and work with these organizations but they are not the church/sangha/temple.
What I'm trying to say is that para-church organizations are not the church. Local Christian Churches focus on their congregations and on worship services. As part of that focus they reach out to their communities to try to reach the "un-churched".
Christianity has been around in the west for a very long time and has had the time to build infrastructures that are socially engaged. In the first few centuries after Christ the church was struggling to survive in a hostile environment and did not have any of the programs it has now. If you read the New Testament you will see that the Apostles had to write to various churches to get them to support their own people with charity. The New Testament is not like a Sutra where someone is teaching, the books are letters to churches to straighten out problems and correct doctrinal issues.
Most local Sanghas are not affluent at all. Money to support the Sangha is very tight. Not a lot of room for the local group to reach out to the community with charity as an organization. I'm not sure about this but are there many Sanghas in the US that have over 100 members?
A very small church in the US has 100 families or 300 - 400 members. Many churches have 5000 - 10,000 people in attendance every week. Also, the Church teaches tithing. Everyone should give 10% of their income to the church.
Buddhism in the west is poor even though we live in an affluent society. Other than a few celebrities, Buddhism does not attract the very rich like the large Christian churches do. Buddhism has been in the US for only a little over a century, and that is being generous. We need to give Buddhism a chance to "become" in the west. Give the western Sangha time to grow up and I believe it will exceed what the Christian Church has done. Most likely we will not see it in our life time.
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