![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Pastors Who No Longer Believe
May. 10th, 2010 06:17 pmMy conservative friend included me in an email referencing this blog entry about this academic paper examining five Protestant pastors who now identify as non-believers.
My comments to my friend:
This reminds me very much of my father’s experience. He left the pulpit, but he kept up the façade of being a Christian believer until he and my mother moved from our home town, even though he continued to hold Christian ethics and value the church.
This, to me, is the key and the tragedy: “What unites these ministers is their isolation from the believers in their pews, their awareness that they cannot honestly discuss their doubts and evolving beliefs.”
How very sad that doubt and questions are not part of religious culture. If they were, I might have stayed a Christian. Instead, I “knew” that my questions and doubts put me beyond the pale, outside of fellowship. The older I got, the more sure I became that I was not alone in my questions -- but by then it was far too late for me to recover the sense of fellowship I'd had as a child and young woman.
Utter loss of faith is a different thing, of course. . . . I can’t imagine maintaining a sense of integrity while being a pastor who has utterly lost faith. But where is the reverence for a God so great that questions are welcomed as the mark of a mature person?
Obviously I write this as someone who left the Church, and who would never be happy within a strongly orthodox (note the small “o”) congregation, so there’s a limit to what I can offer to this discussion. But having been raised in the church and denied my own spiritual vocation because of my questions, I think I have some perspective.
* * * * * * * *
I think that monotheistic belief, based as it is on a paradigm of One God Who Is The Only Truth, lends itself to a binary attitude of right/wrong, true/false. I am not not not saying that all monotheists are this way, only that I see it as a tendency.
Where is the respect for the one who questions with a heart and mind full of agony? Who longs for answers but who can not -- will not -- settle for the tradional answers?
Perhaps such people do not belong in pulpits. . . or perhaps they belong in the pulpits of congregations of questioners.
I am not a Christian anymore, however much I reverence Yeshua the Christ. My part in such discussions is necessarily limited. But I was once a very reverent daughter of the church who ended up unable to stay because -- rightly or wrongly -- I did not believe the fellowship of faith was stronger than my questions.
This article hits very close to home, and it breaks my heart.
My comments to my friend:
This reminds me very much of my father’s experience. He left the pulpit, but he kept up the façade of being a Christian believer until he and my mother moved from our home town, even though he continued to hold Christian ethics and value the church.
This, to me, is the key and the tragedy: “What unites these ministers is their isolation from the believers in their pews, their awareness that they cannot honestly discuss their doubts and evolving beliefs.”
How very sad that doubt and questions are not part of religious culture. If they were, I might have stayed a Christian. Instead, I “knew” that my questions and doubts put me beyond the pale, outside of fellowship. The older I got, the more sure I became that I was not alone in my questions -- but by then it was far too late for me to recover the sense of fellowship I'd had as a child and young woman.
Utter loss of faith is a different thing, of course. . . . I can’t imagine maintaining a sense of integrity while being a pastor who has utterly lost faith. But where is the reverence for a God so great that questions are welcomed as the mark of a mature person?
Obviously I write this as someone who left the Church, and who would never be happy within a strongly orthodox (note the small “o”) congregation, so there’s a limit to what I can offer to this discussion. But having been raised in the church and denied my own spiritual vocation because of my questions, I think I have some perspective.
* * * * * * * *
I think that monotheistic belief, based as it is on a paradigm of One God Who Is The Only Truth, lends itself to a binary attitude of right/wrong, true/false. I am not not not saying that all monotheists are this way, only that I see it as a tendency.
Where is the respect for the one who questions with a heart and mind full of agony? Who longs for answers but who can not -- will not -- settle for the tradional answers?
Perhaps such people do not belong in pulpits. . . or perhaps they belong in the pulpits of congregations of questioners.
I am not a Christian anymore, however much I reverence Yeshua the Christ. My part in such discussions is necessarily limited. But I was once a very reverent daughter of the church who ended up unable to stay because -- rightly or wrongly -- I did not believe the fellowship of faith was stronger than my questions.
This article hits very close to home, and it breaks my heart.
