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The Plymouth Brethren is one of the original fundamentalist denominations and they don't even have clergy as such ... their elders take turn "covering the pulpit" as you put it.
I know of one such man that grew up Plymouth Brethren. He was a pastor at the church I used to attend. He said he used to preach, then get critiqued by the "old guys" after the service.
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And then many of the Quakers do away with a formal sermon as a fixture of their ritual entirely, favoring unstructured ad hoc "sharing" of members as they are moved to do so. At the other end of the spectrum, UU congregations often have members lead services and you are right, practice makes perfect; in my experience they are quite good. And when their minister leaves or quits, they are perfectly capable of keeping things going with just the members, they don't even have to bring in an interim or guest pastor while they are going through the (leisurely) process of selecting a new "settled minister".
I realize that. I'd love for my church to get to the point where the men could do that. At this point they are not, and they would be the first to say that they are not ready to begin preaching.
I did play the part of atheist at one time, but it seemed just as illogical as devout belief for me. Not because atheist are illogical (some are, some aren't like any other group), but it felt pretty futile, even if it is because I was raised in Christianity. That doesn't mean I feel it is a futile position for everyone, but an observation of my own experience.
I had to come to a new way of trying to see the Bible to try and make sense of things. Again, my opinion, but the Bible isn't the word of God. I see it as the words of men in ancient times that conveys their experience of God. And considering that most people weren't literate in earlier times and very few people had a copy of the Bible until the printing press was invented, I would have to believe in a god that didn't find it important for his word to be available to a lot of people for the majority of human history. How would others understand or find God without his word? Well, the often referred to verse of Romans 1:20 of course.
For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
So until the Bible was canonized, most people would have had to decide what they thought of the world and God simply by understanding it from what has been made. And as a result, people would have had a more authentic experience of God that isn't clouded by list of things you must believe lest you spend eternity swimming laps in a lake of fire.
Old testament brutality was another thing that troubled me in the past when I was in church. I did, however, gain a lot of understanding about the brutality of the old testament. Its easy to sit in the armchair quarterback position of a 21st century intellectual, pondering over the stupidity of those uneducated idiots. But life has always been hard and often brutal. The 21st century has shielded us from a lot of the harsh realities of people living in hard times where a person being lazy could be a danger to the very survival of a group. Many years, food was not abundant and no one knew if a bad year would be followed by another bad year or not. A lazy member of a small group village or tribe who did not keep up their labor would be a threat to the well being of everyone else when all available labor combined is barely enough to avoid starvation. Killing someone for such an offense may sound awful, but when the poor behavior of one person could cause suffering and even death for others, it sounds less severe. We live in a marshmallow world where everyone's feelings matter more than their actions often. That is why I think the old testament looks awful. Killing off entire cities including women and children? Yep, pretty much how it went frequently when there was war. Nobody flew anywhere to talk about it first. Armies gathered and fought brutally in a kill or be killed scenario. If your group had been attacked a couple of times and managed to survive, you would quickly learn to be brutal as well if you wanted to live back in the day.
Violence is not evil. Violence is order. Law and order can only be maintained through threat of violence, no matter how much I actually started buying into the idea that non-violence is right and violence is wrong. Of course non-violence is an option, but with no threat of violence, laws would be null and void as soon as someone asked "or else what?" Biblical times were a very violent part of human history for religious and non-religious people alike. I don't agree with everything in the Bible, or think the violence used was definitely right. I'm saying it just makes more sense to me that violence was part of the life of those who wrote the Bible and that is was a very different story than today.
I went to a few UU churches on my way to leaving church altogether and it really wasn't my cup of tea. I don't like to define myself as liberal or conservative because my views are frequently neither. That being said, I the UU churches I went to felt too liberal for my taste just like some Baptist churches are too conservative for my taste. I will probably consider Methodist and Lutheran churches first and see if I'm comfortable going again.
Thanks again. I have a read a few posts where someone isn't sure where to fit in a church and I hope you stick around and tell us how you are finding what is right for you.
Eusebius made a point (interesting to get a bit of Bio) that it may not matter which church, so long as you are a Christian.
The Plymouth Brethren is one of the original fundamentalist denominations and they don't even have clergy as such ... their elders take turn "covering the pulpit" as you put it. And then many of the Quakers do away with a formal sermon as a fixture of their ritual entirely, favoring unstructured ad hoc "sharing" of members as they are moved to do so. At the other end of the spectrum, UU congregations often have members lead services and you are right, practice makes perfect; in my experience they are quite good. And when their minister leaves or quits, they are perfectly capable of keeping things going with just the members, they don't even have to bring in an interim or guest pastor while they are going through the (leisurely) process of selecting a new "settled minister".
That's the long term plan with the Mr. right now. It's an historic church with a very small congregation, and the pastor wants to retire in a few years, so he's gradually stepping back to ease the transition. They can't afford to pay anyone, so it works out that the Mr. doesn't ever wanted to be a paid pastor again.
That's the long term plan with the Mr. right now. It's an historic church with a very small congregation, and the pastor wants to retire in a few years, so he's gradually stepping back to ease the transition. They can't afford to pay anyone, so it works out that the Mr. doesn't ever wanted to be a paid pastor again.
Very nice. I'm actually in a church now where I'm considered a missionary pastor. My church is small and rural enough that they could never afford a full-time pastor, so my missionary agency was invited to place me here.
I respect what you and the Mr. are doing. That's great.
I left the church years ago because God was not there , not because of the people , then ended up going back to church twenty years later because I found God ....... See I do not see any purpose going to church without God as it would by like a social club ....... Where now go to church were God is strong in the church and with the people there which is a bonus ........
Very nice. I'm actually in a church now where I'm considered a missionary pastor. My church is small and rural enough that they could never afford a full-time pastor, so my missionary agency was invited to place me here.
I respect what you and the Mr. are doing. That's great.
Thanks, but the credit goes to him; I'd like to say "I'm just the eye candy", but even that would be a stretch, lol.
I'm curious - What did you find biased about atheism?
Unfortunately, it's too easy to seize o something like 'bias' and think no further. Bias, strictly speaking, is having a prejudice. If one has done the 'judice' using the best mental tool available, the bias resulting is a valid one.
I'm curious - What did you find biased about atheism?
Atheism itself isn't biased. People are biased and atheism involves people. Mostly, I find the bias when atheists presents known science as knowing more than it does. When I first walked away from religion, I did the "intellectual" thing and replaced it with science and scientific explanations for how we got here. Science doesn't have any answers about our origins beyond math and particles. And even within the information that has been confirmed, a story has to be put together from it to tell ourselves or otherwise its lots of data and smudgy deep space pictures or data readings that have been "artist rendered" to create a story that could be told. There is a lot more to existence than the things science can figure out how to study, so pretending that science has the answers or one day will have the answers is a pipe dream.
The bottom line is that we all have a natural curiosity for understanding how we got here and what we are here for. Science tells the story with math and physics, which to most humans means almost nothing. It is impossible to comprehend how long 4 billion years is in any meaningful way. Or how many light years away a nebula is. Those are all interesting things, but in telling us about who we are or where we are going, it means very little. It is essentially factoid information in regards to our existence, because no finding ever tells us anything except that we figured that one thing out. And if we figure something out scientifically, we don't know more about the nature of existence, we know less. Well, going by Einstein's quote anyway:
As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of the darkness surrounding it.
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