An interesting point came up in our last meeting:

Commonly we expect Christians to have this elevated status of purity, faithfulness, and so on. We expect that, because we claim Christ's blood, we definately display the fruit of the Spirit. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that we are different from the culture in which we live. More "Christians" are divorced than non-Christians, work ethic is often worse with Christians, we cheat and use shortcuts like it is our job, we are as prone (if not more prone) to premarital sex, we steal from work, we gossip, we view pornography in our alone time instead of praying, we do all that we preach against. By no means am I insinuating that every Christian adopts all of the above behaviors, but I am saying that it is easy to find the foresaid amongst even three randomly selected Christians.

And we are NOT talking about those who have honestly repented of the above!

What then are we to do? In the past, Paul suggested leaving people with these ethics out of fellowship... but is this our method now? Do we preach condemnation? Do we continue to give grace for the sin (not the change of heart)? Do we ban such Christ "believers" (not "followers," obviously) from service in the church? Do we sit in a room and pray about it without taking action (prayer with action is normally effective...)? Or do we continue to ignore it and pretend it is not there?

Without a single statistical fact, it has been observed that Christians with these ethics last approximately less than two years in any given church or Christian social club before hopping to the next, where people will not know them, or dropping away from the Church completely. And usually there is a path of destruction left behind.

One might call this exageration, or maybe not... we're interested in hearing other opinions.