There is an incredible amount of prejudice in Evansville, IN. Mention Hispanics and inpenetrable walls go up. They are 'illegal aliens', and they 'don't speak the right language' are the common rejoinders.

I tire of American exceptionalism. It is not just uncivil; it is immoral. I'm tired of borders and politics, and the dehumanization of all 'outsiders' by American imperialists. It's sad that Christians are fooled by this nonsense. In my judgment, American Christians are more American than they are Christian. They worship Caesar, not Christ. Or perhaps it's better to say that they worship Caesar (the United States) as the Christ. The Kingdom of God is borderless, and it transcends all rights and prerogatives of any nation.

I continue to tire of American Christianity. It is completely vacuous.

Pink Floyd

The child is grown; the dream is gone. I have become comfortably numb.

The old notion that church (and religion in general) is something you 'grow out of' when you 'grow up' seems truer to me now than it ever has before. Maybe it's time to 'put away childish things'.

I find theism increasingly irrelevant and void of justification, particularly in light of the growing complexities of our world. To say that 'God' is the answer seems trite.

My basic premise is this: the church is dying. It's structure and theology make no sense today and haven't for decades. Far from being innocuous, their outdated uselessness goes beyond a nostalgic irrelevance to purposeful insidiousness, not just taking up space, but monolithically standing in the way of the spirit.

--Chuck Meyer, Dying Church, Living God

How true.

Sadly, the congregation I presently serve has spent a year on visioning and it counts for nothing. Intractable parishioners are already clogging the works. They will be successful in halting the kind of change necessary to save the dying corpse we know as the church.

Maybe that is really my mission, and should be the mission of all progressive pastors. Before there can be rebirth, there has to be death. As Meyer points out in his book (cited above):

Renewal movements are irrelevant when they merely remold the same old material. They resurrect the undead--a contradiction in terms except in zombie horror movies. Just as you cannot put new wine in old wineskins because the old wineskins will burst, a new church cannot be built on an old foundation. We have to let it die, even assist it to die, before it can be resurrected. It must be dead the institutional equivalent of three days in the tomb. Really dead. Stinking dead. bone rotting, rafters to basement, dust-to-dust dead.

Amen, and amen! Meyer knows the church well!

My basic premise is this: the church is dying. Its structure and theology make no sense today and haven't for decades. Far from being innocuous, their outdated uselessness goes beyond a nostalgic irrelevance to purposeful insidiousness, not just taking up space, but monolithically standing in the way of the spirit

Why Pastors Feel Worthless

"A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live." --Voltaire

Favorite Lyrics

I believe I've past the age of consciousness and righteous rage;
I found that just surviving is a noble fight;
I once believed in causes too, I had my pointless point of view;
but life went on no matter who was wrong or right.

--Billy Joel


Gods of the season, lead me to my next incident.

--Collective Soul


I'm all out of faith...the perfect sky is torn

--Natalie Imbruglia

Nothing more

I fear that religion is nothing more than superstition. That's difficult to admit, given the resources and time I have devoted to Christianity. However, it is a conclusion to which I am driven when I note how Christian people think and act. Rites of the church, like infant baptism, are treated like magical actions whose very performance (opera ad operata) produce actual benefits in the person who undergoes them. Rites have become invested with mysterious power to effect salvation.

Superstition is the false attribution of causality. It seems to me that's what religion--or at least church--is all about. As we pastors 'dance between the altar and the mercy seat', are we not in reality continuing to employ smoke and mirrors to deceive people about the nature of things, i.e., the way things really are, and the way things really happen.

God, the superhuman, personal deity made in our image, does not exist. Shouldn't we be honest and let people know Christianity is a manufactured deception that has been kept alive for centuries, ever since the first believers feigned knowledge of a resurrection.

Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for superstition. --Paul Keller