I am a pastor, and I teach and preach the Bible to my congregation every week. But the Bible is not a manufacturer's handbook. Neither is it a science textbook nor a guidebook for public policy.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ. The Bible is my primary way of knowing Him and what it means to follow Him. And I am a pastor, and I teach and preach the Bible to my congregation every week. But the Bible is not a manufacturer's handbook. Neither is it a science textbook nor a guidebook for public policy.
I feel a part of the congregation. I've never had to do special music. The kids sing in the choir. It's just normal. We're treated like everybody else.
The decision to allow clergy to perform same-sex marriages at the discretion of the congregation poses challenges for seminaries training new pastors who come from denominations fundamentally opposed on biblical grounds to same-sex marriage.
In the John Paul II days, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had the advantage of staying in his cupboard - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - exchanging views only with the Pope, and speaking publicly only through carefully written missives on doctrinal issues.
The really funny thing is that most all of my friends who are priests have seen me perform, and they say, 'I wish I could talk the way you do on stage. I wish I could reveal truth to my congregation the way you do.'
My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.
The church is not made up of one person but a whole congregation, and they should be able to interact with art without being told what to think.
Our calling is not just within the walls of the congregation, but we are part of the life and community in which our condition resides.
As a kid spending weekends in the Ozarks, I remember my granny's preacher shaking his fist, his jowls waving in the wind not unlike a bloodhound's, excoriating the congregation and condemning it to hell.
