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I often get the impression that the media are waiting to repeat the refrains that they have already decided people need to hear.

Maybe a preferable design to the other one.

I guess you wouldn't now, unlike previously.

A relevant verse is, "Grow in grace, and the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 3).

Times of plenty can lead to unthankfulness, indeed.

I wondered, too...o_O

Those who haven't done it don't really know how positive it feels, do they.

I know what you mean, yes. With various of the posters there is a very positive feeling to them.

But it's not the post-Pentecost church (which ought to be a tautology); it's not the same, indwelt body of believers in the risen Lord from both Jewish and Gentile backgrounds that the Holy Spirit has indwelt since Pentecost.

Sometimes its date is obscure but testimony of a Scripturally recognizable experience is indeed there.

The entities are different, as 1 Corinthians 10.32 shows.

My focus was on what is the church, rather than to question the true believer's justification by faith, in whatever dispensation.

I would not use the term 'born again' in the same way to describe Old Testament saints, because they lived - as the justified - before Pentecost.

Again, because Pentecost had not happened, and because the Spirit in the Old Testament did not indwell in the same sense as after Pentecost, the term 'born again' - very much a New Testament concept - does not apply in the same way in the Old Testament.

Vastly different from the outlook of so much North American 'evangelicaldom'.

My reading of Hebrews is fundamentally different. As regards the Old Testament system, the law was changed (Hebrews 7.12) and what we now have is better than the law (Hebrews 7.19). The justified, on the other hand, are indeed present in different dispensations.

This was before Pentecost, therefore it was not the church in the sense of the New Testament. In Acts the word ecclesia can even be used to describe an unruly rabble, so it's mere use in another context in Acts 7.38 does not somehow negate the birthday of the church at Pentecost, Acts 2.

I would see Hebrews on the contrary as saying that the Old Testament system has been set aside, rather than the church supposedly being an institutional continuity of the old system. I belong with the carcasses of the dispensed with sacrifices burned outside the camp. But the Lord Jesus is there...

So much 'evangelicaldom' even is seemingly based on presumption and delusion.

Yes, it is indeed likely to be relatively small groups.