Dreams Unlocked

This has never happened to me before. I picked a book at random off my shelf. I believe I received this book free at a conference I attended a couple of years ago. It is a book for Pastors. And for the first time in my life - I disagreed with the very first sentence of a book. This is the offending line: "The Christian pastor holds the greatest office of human responsibility in all creation." Stunning. In one compact statement, the authors have managed to belittle and diminish any Christian who does anything else besides being a pastor. I would have re-written it as follows: "A Christian pastor holds an important office within the Kingdom of God, along with any OTHER Christian fulfilling their Divine calling." What the author's have done is perpetuate a hierarchal system that I believed evangelicals were growing out of. For a long time Christians had a structure like this: Missionaries Pastors Para-Church Workers Everyone Else Missionaries w...

Unlike Putty from Seinfeld, I never had it on my car. Mallory Ortberg has written an interesting article in Gawker magazine about losing her religion. Anyone who grew up born again can relate to some of her Christian pop references. I thought I would respond with some thoughts on my own experience growing up evangelical, and why I came to a different conclusion from Mallory, as I grew up. I was raised by conservative parents who felt that attending church was so important that we did it TWICE on Sundays - AM and PM. This resulted in the semi-traumatic weekly absence of the Wonderful World of Disney. Sometimes we were lucky enough to watch Tinker Bell fly around the castle, and then it would be into the station wagon headed for a hard wooden pew, trying to make sense of what was happening around us: singing, preaching, small talk. We attended a smallish evangelical church in Saskatoon Saskatchewan. My parents had a good circle of friends in that church. They had kids - ...