Recovering Baptist

I’ve said it before

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

and I’ll say it again. My pastor is cooler than yours. His response to me telling him that I lost my job was, “Damn…that sucks.” And then he prayed for me. I don’t recall a member of the clergy praying for me personally in many, many, many years.

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It makes a bit more sense now

Monday, May 5th, 2008

I’m coming to grips with the fact that I no longer identify myself as a conservative. While I agree with many conservative principles, the truth is that the gap between so-called conservatives (and worse, their evil cousins the neo-conservatives) and me is widening on a regular basis.

The topic of abortion came up this weekend while I was on a camping trip with a bunch of men. While I am pro-life, I don’t understand the obsession that some on the right have with this topic. One of the men gave an explanation that sheds some light on the subject. In short, he believes that God is going to judge “us” for the fact that “we” allowed this horrible sin to be legal. I’m hesitant to take on this man’s theology since he is an elder in our denomination, but I’m thinking it’s worthwhile.

There’s no doubt that God judges people. The Old Testament is full of genocide at God’s direction because some people group has harmed the Hebrews in some way. And the Hebrews found themselves a part of one empire or another due to them turning away from God. But I can’t find any clear indication of God judging the empire because His people didn’t stop the sin of other people groups within that empire. In fact, I can only think of two documented cases of God’s judgment against a people group for their internal sins (that is, for something other than poor treatment of the Jews) - the flood and Sodom and Gomorrah. In both of those cases, God preserved His people; he didn’t judge them because of everyone else’s sins.

So it seems to me that the problem is that the religious right has decided to claim responsibility for the entire nation. This feeling of responsibility feeds the paternalistic impulse of religious conservatives to support laws which restrict freedom for activities which some people can enjoy without problems but would tempt others beyond their capabilities to enjoy in moderation. And this is the fundamental difference between the religious right and the religious libertarians - we believe that God will judge the Church for its sins of commission and sins of omission, but He will not hold us responsible for failing to control the impulses of those outside the church.

Now, all of this being said, do I wish abortion were illegal? Yes. I’ve told my story before of how as an embryo I came a bit too close to the doctor’s knife. And as a libertarian I don’t see how we can say someone has basic human rights which must be respected only to ignore the most basic one. However, when it comes to choosing the person who sits in the Oval Office, I think the obsession over who a President might choose to fill a potential vacant seat on a court which might face a case on whether a woman has a right make a choice to murder her baby makes sense. Especially not when the same person will directly make a choice to send people to the front lines where certainly some of them will die and others (as a sad but unavoidable fact of war) will kill conscious human beings. If God is going to judge “us,” then we need to consider all of our actions.

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Colliding worlds

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

I have a facebook page. I don’t know why. It’s the kind of timesuck that doesn’t appeal to me - virtual hugs, attacking zombies, or pretending to race. I just don’t get it. It would be a lot more fun to get together and play scrabble face to face over a real beer rather than spread the game out over days with a virtual opponent over a virtual beer…

I ran into someone at church last night, and I told her I was mad at her. Since we really don’t hang out that much, she was taken aback. But once I understood that my old church friends were suddenly able to find me, including an ex-girlfriend, she understood.

The ex-girlfriend and I left on good terms, and we’ve run into each other in the past without any awkwardness. But when I saw her profile I laughed. Her religious views are classified as “Born Again Christian” and her political views as “Very conservative.” Those phrases used to describe me.

Any orthodox Christian will tell you that Christ talks about being born again. But when someone describes themselves explicitly as a “Born Again Christian,” well, you know a lot about them from the start. It just seems that most of those people claim to cling to God’s grace while rarely exhibiting it themselves. My acquaintance and I laughed that our old friends from the megachurch where I once worked or the church where I grew up would probably say that we now attend one of those “liberal” churches since our pastor is handing out virtual beers and swearing online.

Liberals don’t go to heaven. At least, that’s what I used to think. I’d never say as much out loud, but honestly, the way “they” were demonized in my religious circles, it was a logical conclusion. I was an observer to an online conversation where someone stated that if conservatism were a country then anyone who claimed to be conservative but voted for Obama should be hung for treason. I guess I’m not a conservative.

My acquaintance and I agreed that we’re torn in how to handle our facebook friends from our old lives. On the one hand we really want to do something outrageous to throw our newfound freedom in their faces. On the other hand, we’re a little afraid. It turns out that I don’t want to be rejected by people who belong to the form of Christianity that I rejected. The human mind is a very strange thing indeed.

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It’s the most natural thing, but…

Monday, April 28th, 2008

I hate births. The whole process of babies being born makes me very nervous. I come by it naturally. My parents lost their first child due to a bad forceps delivery. If my first child had been born one hundred and five years ago as to five years ago, I would have lost both a child and a wife in the same day. Like I said, everything about the whole process puts me on edge.

Some good friends of ours were convinced they wouldn’t be able to have kids. Then a “Christian” adoption agency turned them down as adoptive parents (which, as an adopted child still makes me see red). But somehow, after years and years of trying, they conceived nine months ago. They decided to give birth at home with the assistance of a midwife and a doula. Great idea; my mom was delivered in her parents’ bedroom with the assistance of my great-grandfather who delivered most of the kids in that part of the state. But, still, it made me even more nervous. So when I read on their blog on Sunday morning that she had been in labor for nearly a day without any action, I was really scared. I spent most of the service at church figuring out how to follow along on their blog just so I would know when they finally went to the hospital.

The end of the story is that I just talked to the proud papa. The baby is fine, but mama’s got to heal up a bit. I fully understood it when he said that up until he saw the baby’s head that yesterday was the worst day of his life. Heck, there are parts of our birth story that are not fit to print or even mention in any circumstance. For some it’s a wonderful process full of endorphins, but for my friend and me it was a hellish experience which reinforced the fragility of life. But I don’t know if a more wanted baby has ever been born then the one who made her appearance yesterday. And for that it’s all worth it.

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White smoke

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

It was just under a year ago now that the pastor of our church announced his intentions to move on to another line of ministry. My wife commented at the time that I would do well on the search committee and that I would probably get recruited. I told her she was crazy.

A couple of month later one of our elders gave me a call, and my wife turned out to be right. At first I refused, but then I allowed them to put my name on the ballot. On the one hand, I didn’t want any part of it. I knew it would be a major time suck. On the other hand, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had some experience that might help our committee out. I’ve been discipled by one of the best communicators in the country, and I was later a staff member at his church (granted, I was a lowly staff member, but I saw how the sausage is made, so to speak). I’ve endured an ugly church split, and I was a member at another church when the founding pastor was replaced and things didn’t turn out so well. I thought these experiences might turn out to be valuable, and I was right. However, as it turned out, my most important experience turned out to be prayer. Finding the right pastor isn’t about what you know, it’s about finding who God is calling to fill that role; we were just a part of the process.

This past Tuesday night our committee of ten people met again. It had been over ten months since our first meeting, but we finally held our last vote. We will be announcing his name on Sunday, and the congregation will have a chance to meet him next weekend. It’s then up to them to either accept him or tell us to start over. But may also mean electing a new committee, as we’re exhausted.

I’m very excited. The man we’ve found thoroughly fits what the committee has been looking for, and I think he’ll do an excellent job. I’m looking forward to getting to know him and to learning from him. I’m also looking forward to getting a night a week back. I’ve learned a lot in this process, and God has done some amazing things through it. But I hope I’m never asked to serve like this again - I’m tired.

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Score one for the Methodists

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

Back in my Baptist days I never understood the Methodists. I knew (or at least thought) that their ministers wore robes. I knew that they had strange people like Bishops. I knew that the denomination had a lot of control over everything. And, oddly enough to me, I knew that they regularly rotated pastors.

This last one seemed so strange to me. Everything I knew pointed to the pastor as being the most important part of the church. How could the church survive regularly changing its figurehead? And how could the congregation be sure its next preacher would be as good as the last. After all, isn’t preaching what church is all about? These questions continued to cause me to wonder about our UMC brethren even when I became a Presbyterian.

I started seeing the value of the Methodist system a few years ago when I came to grips with the fact that the pastor has no business being the figurehead of the church. We should have no figurehead other than Jesus, and regularly rotating pastors helps enforce that fact.

Our church had to come to grips with this fact about 10 months ago when our founding pastor announced his future resignation. He felt that it was time to return to being a missionary, so he decided to step down. It’s been a good thing for our church overall. We’ve come to realize that the church is about its members and their relationship with Jesus, and that the pastor is just there to facilitate that. It’s also been an interesting time for me. Despite my better intentions, I was elected to the pulpit committee.

We’re now 9 months into a process that at many churches takes 18. On the one hand it’s been an amazing journey. On the other hand, I’m wondering about the futility of it. My conservative estimate is that we’ve now spent about half a man-year in meetings alone. That doesn’t include the time spent reading resumes, listening to sermons, talking to references, interviewing, and, of course, praying. And the burden is becoming more intense. If things don’t go well, if we don’t pick the “right guy”, if there’s a bad match, then we’ll be at this again in a year. If things go well, then we can probably hope to put this process off for about 7 or so years. I can see why it makes sense to have a bunch of professional Christians coordinate the rotating of pastors every 4-8 years; it just speeds up the inevitable.

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Recovering Baptist

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I’ve said it before

It makes a bit more sense now

Colliding worlds

It’s the most natural thing, but…

White smoke

Score one for the Methodists

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