Presby-Musings

When I was in middle school, my family attended a small independent, fundamentalist Baptist church in Colorado. I remember the pastor as a fairly likable guy. He was quick with a smile, always wore cowboy boots, and kind of looked like Elvis.  But when he got into the pulpit, it was like an evil spirit would come over him.  I have a memory of listening to a recording of one of his sermons once.  I can't recall the context, but I distinctly remember a portion of what he shouted at the top of his lungs.   "YOU'RE EVIL!  YOU'RE ROTTEN TO THE CORE!  YOUR MOUTH IS EVIL!  YOUR TEETH ARE EVIL!  YOUR TONGUE IS EVIL!"   Needless to say, we didn't stay at that church very long.  You can only take so much of that kind of stuff and it starts to wear on you.   My former pastor was convinced that the true nature of humanity was corrupt and terrible.  It informed every aspect of his life, and drove him to be an angry, judgmental, se...

Recently, I received an email from a former attendee of my church who expressed a great deal of anxiety over the state of Christianity in America.  He was of the opinion that the current debates over various social and cultural issues were tearing the Church in America apart.   He also believed that any deviation from what he identified as the "plain truth" of the Bible was a sign of the end times.  I didn't have the time or the space to share with him all of my thoughts, but I did my best.  The more I thought about it, though, the more I wished I'd said. The thing is, there have always been issues that have torn at the heart of the Church.     Consider the following quote from the 16th century reformer Martin Luther on the great controversy regarding the heliocentric theory of the solar system:   “People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. Thi...

So this week I am preaching on hell. I've never done this.  I'm Presbyterian.  We don't talk about hell a whole lot. It's not polite. Or decent and in order. But I've heard my fair share of sermons on hell because I grew up in fundamentalist Baptist churches where it seemed to creep into most of them. Hell, as it was described to me was a place of eternal torment.  There was fire in hell as well as brimstone, agony, anguish, eternal regret and the Devil and his minions, who added to the horror by dreaming up even worse ways of torturing lost souls. And as if that wasn't bad enough---after spending years in hell, lost souls had the Lake of Fire to look forward to after Jesus' Second Coming.  There they would do laps in a burning "lake" for all eternity alongside the eternally doomed Lucifer and his band of fallen angels. I was a rather frightened child. In fact, at a "Watch Night" service for New Year's Eve I watched ...

Some months ago I purchased The Sword of the Lord:  The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family  by Andrew Himes.  It was one of those impulse Kindle purchases that I made because of some recommendation or another  of the book that I read in a magazine. Then I promptly put it on the virtual shelf in my iPad.  I had other books to read at the time, and wasn't sure when I would get around to it. To my surprise when I picked up The Sword of the Lord  recently, I couldn't put it down.  It was an amazing read about an amazing family---perhaps the "first" family of Christian fundamentalists in America:  The Rice's. Full disclosure:  I was born and raised a fundamentalist Baptist.  My dad graduated from Bob Jones University, and I only attended fundamentalist Baptist churches, and went to fundamentalist Baptist schools.  I have baggage.  In fact, I have only recently begun to deal with my baggage in a productive way. ...