CRISIS IN CHRISTIANITY---Pastors: From Men of Fath to Faithless Men (hell, church)
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A crisis of enormous proportions is manifesting in Christianity today. While Christians by the millions are leaving Christianity for other religions or simply turning to atheism and agnosticism there is another group dropping out in staggering numbers: pastors--men who as youths had a fire to serve the Lord but who as seminary students and then pastors are hit from four sides: wavering faith in God and the Bible, hard work with little or no pay, complete and total loss of belief in God, and fear of the unknown/lack of secular job skills that keep them pastors working in a field they have come to hate.
Most of these men follow a typical pattern: raised Christian, idealistic unrealistic expectations of a life serving God from the pulpit, realization in seminary school that the Bible is riddled with contradictions they cannot reconcile, and loss of faith during some point while they are ensconced in a position in a church. Jack and Adam provide some typical portraits of this phenomenon:
Quote:
"I am an atheist," says "Jack," a Southern Baptist with more than 20 years in ministry.
"I live out my life as if there is no God," says "Adam," who is part of the pastoral staff of a small evangelical church in the Bible Belt.
The two, who asked that their real identities be protected, are pastors who have lost their faith. And these two men, who have built their careers and lives around faith, say they now feel trapped, living a lie.
"The more I read the Bible, the more questions I had," Jack said. "The more things didn't make sense to me -- what it said -- and the more things didn't add up."
Jack said that 10 years ago, he started to feel his faith slipping away. He grew bothered by inconsistencies regarding the last days of Jesus' life, what he described as the improbability of stories like "Noah's Ark"
"Reading the Bible is what led me to NOT believe in God," he said.
Disillusionment is a large part of this destruction of faith:
Quote:
"My thinking was that God is big enough to handle any questions that I can come up with," he said but that did not happen. "I realized that everything I'd been taught to believe was sort of sheltered," Adam said, "and never really looked at secular teaching or other philosophies. ... I thought, 'Oh my gosh. Am I believing the WRONG things? Have I spent my entire life and my career promoting something that is not true?'"
It isn't only the loss of faith that is most distressing to these men. More troubling for them is the question of how they will support their families when they have no job skills outside of preaching. Many men are well into their 40's and 50's and couldn't find work even if they did have some job skill outside the pulpit.
So they quietly live the life of believing in God and they go about their pastoral duties, all the while secretly disbelieving in Him. The stress of living a lie sometimes reaches the breaking point.
"I want to get out of the position that I'm in as quickly as I can because I try to be a person of integrity and character," Adam said. "With the economy the way it is, with my lack of marketable skills other than a seminary education, it has me in a tough spot."
A recent survey estimated that as many as 1500 pastors a month drop out of Christianity. Those living in silent faithlessness often contemplate suicide as a way out:
Quote:
I remember the exact point I hit bottom. I was staring into a bathroom mirror with a bottle of sleeping pills in my hand. A voice of reason began to speak… but a second voice interrupted, "Don't think, just swallow. Don’t think, just swallow."
And I did.
I assumed one bottle of prescription sleeping pills would do it. But just in case, I pulled out a second bottle and gulped those down as well.
The next few hours are a blur. But I do recall my wife sitting next to me in the hospital. And I can see her face as she said through tears, "We're going to get through this."
Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, noted biologist have set up The Clergy Project to help men faced with the crisis of losing their faith by offering them stipends to help support their families as they retrain for secular work outside the church. What is even more disconcerting for Christian leadership is that few and few men are coming in to fill the vacancies, prefering instead to get an education outside the seminary in the business world.
With dwindling numbers of parishioners and pastors to shepherd them it appears Christianity is facing a real threat of extinction, something not thinkable since the 1st century some 2000 years ago.
It is so tiring when your only answer to someone's question WHY DID GOD.... is HAVE FAITH and BELIEVE...
Back in my fundie existence, I was always being asked WHY this or that was allowed by the God I know and all I could say was BECAUSE IT IS GOD (back then I constantly used the masculine pronoun HE), or IF ONLY U BELIEVED YOU WOULD KNOW/UNDERSTAND GOD'S WAYS..or THE BIBLE SAYS...
I AM surprised that anyone who reads Genesis could come to the conclusion that the real God is being depicted.
Christian leaders are so devious in how they present Genesis that some of them could fool God Himself into believing it's all factual. But believers help in the process by exercising the phenomenon of "willing suspension of disbelief" like when you go to see a sci-fi movie. It's like a security blanket for weak-willed person who needs to cling to a life raft to find some meaning for what they perceive will be their afterlife when they die, and the carrot of heaven combined with the stick of eternal torment in hell provide the perfect combustible mix they are looking for. Religion is indeed an opiate for the soul.
Christian leaders are so devious in how they present Genesis that some of them could fool God Himself into believing it's all factual. But believers help in the process by exercising the phenomenon of "willing suspension of disbelief" like when you go to see a sci-fi movie. It's like a security blanket for weak-willed person who needs to cling to a life raft to find some meaning for what they perceive will be their afterlife when they die, and the carrot of heaven combined with the stick of eternal torment in hell provide the perfect combustible mix they are looking for. Religion is indeed an opiate for the soul.
That strikes me as an unpleasant characterization to make about billions of human beings who choose to believe in Christianity (or, to be fair, other religions). I'm sorry you feel this way, and I pray that you will find some comfort and cheer today that will make you smile or laugh. I hope you have a spectacularly great rest of your day.
That strikes me as an unpleasant characterization to make about billions of human beings who choose to believe in Christianity (or, to be fair, other religions). I'm sorry you feel this way, and I pray that you will find some comfort and cheer today that will make you smile or laugh. I hope you have a spectacularly great rest of your day.
Thank you, Mark. Appreciate the concern. My objection is not with people believing Genesis is accurate. If they choose to believe it and it gives them comfort, that's fine. My difficulty arises when ministers deliberately try to conceal the truth from their parishioners of what science has learned from studying geology of the earth and the anthropology of early man. That is deceptive and it's done because ministers are terrified of their church numbers dwindling to the point they have to close their doors. This all boils down to $$$'s and cents and survival of their religion and so clergy are not above using devious tactics to stop the hemorrhaging away from Christianity. Once Christians know both sides of the story and choose to continue believing in Genesis and everything else it is their freedom to believe anything they choose, even the tooth fairy.
But this thread is about ministers, pastors and clergy who are finding out Genesis and all the rest of the Old Testament is a fraud and this is the primary reason large numbers of them are desperate to get out.
Christian leaders are so devious in how they present Genesis that some of them could fool God Himself into believing it's all factual. But believers help in the process by exercising the phenomenon of "willing suspension of disbelief" like when you go to see a sci-fi movie. It's like a security blanket for weak-willed person who needs to cling to a life raft to find some meaning for what they perceive will be their afterlife when they die, and the carrot of heaven combined with the stick of eternal torment in hell provide the perfect combustible mix they are looking for. Religion is indeed an opiate for the soul.
I feel the same way about atheism. How can someone believe this is all just one big "cosmic accident"? Seriously?
I feel the same way about atheism. How can someone believe this is all just one big "cosmic accident"? Seriously?
I don't believe this is one big cosmic accident either. I believe it was an ordered creation by God starting with the Big Bang. From there it followed a predictable set of natural laws as the giant dust cloud cooled and then coalesced into heavenly bodies of planets, stars and galaxies. It's all too ordered to have happened randomly. Where I split with Genesis is that man has been on earth for 100,000 years gradually evolving into modern man. To think that man appeared in one place in a Garden just 6000 years ago is a bit of a stretch when we know from anthropological evidence that the first fossils of creatures resembling man were found on the African savanna.
I don't believe this is one big cosmic accident either. I believe it was an ordered creation by God starting with the Big Bang. From there it followed a predictable set of natural laws as the giant dust cloud cooled and then coalesced into heavenly bodies of planets, stars and galaxies. It's all too ordered to have happened randomly. Where I split with Genesis is that man has been on earth for 100,000 years gradually evolving into modern man. To think that man appeared in one place in a Garden just 6000 years ago is a bit of a stretch when we know from anthropological evidence that the first fossils of creatures resembling man were found on the African savanna.
Is just resembling man the same as the Adam of Eden. That area as the crossroads to civilization.
There is No way to tell details since the Deluge of Noah's Day could have helped distort the things prior to the Flood.
Jesus believed the Flood account, and used the violent atmosphere of Noah's Day as a warning example for us at Matthew 24:37
Sure there may be people who are disobedient to Jesus and turn to the fallen church who deny Christ and may listen to the lying spirit of the world and turn away from Jesus Christ and may even turn back to the world and be condemned lost again ...... See there are people who deny the miracles of Jesus and hate people who have witnesses of the living God through Jesus Christ , and God does not have anything for faithlessness iniquity as God demands people come believing in faith of Jesus the author and the finisher ........
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