Paul's Passing Thoughts

On BOXCAST live: Sunday 11/12/2017 @ 7pm

Folks, despite the nonsense we hear coming out of the institutional church in general and Baptist churches in particular, sin is not one moral equivalent, there are greater and lesser sins, and there are greater and lesser sinners, and sorry, if I don’t go to church because I think it is filled with hypocrites there will NOT be one more hypocrite if I decide to go.

And furthermore, churchians themselves, like politicians, deny these truisms by their own actions. This nonsense is just talking points.

Rape is a pretty bad sin, yet, we hear accounts of church leadership challenging the victims to “own their own sin” that contributed to the situation, and a refusal to forgive by the victims is supposedly tantamount to rejecting the gospel because that’s not “forgiving the way we were forgiven” and after all, “we are all just sinners saved by grace.”

Pedophilia is a pretty bad sin, yet, churchians bemoan outside involvement by secular authorities as “interference in church affairs,” and “God’s church being judged by the world” (two examples are the Tom Chantry and SGM cases). In fact, former churchians have been excommunicated for reporting incidents to the police.

Now enter the Sutherland Springs mass murder and consider; where is all of the usual rhetoric? Most prevalent is the absence of all the usual “forgiveness” jive. Am I missing a statement by one of the members that “we have already forgiven him”?

This horrific incident clearly exposes church-speak and the false gospel it flows from for what it is; a pile of toxic waste.

While the church puts victims who come forward under the hot light of scrutiny, the church is given a pass due to the, yes, gravity of this particular sin. No doubt, the shooter was utterly evil, but did this church foolishly do something that poked the hornet’s nest? And indeed, this question may be deemed inappropriate because there are degrees of sin and moral equivalency is a Protestant farce.

Within a week of the shooting, the shooter and his second wife were together and having public and private positive fellowship with this church. The day of the shooting, the shooter’s wife and kids were not present at church, and apparently, not in town either. The pastor was, as we finally find out, in Oklahoma City, but for what purpose we know not. The pastor’s wife was in some other state, and which state or for what purpose is unknown. I was a Baptist for 30+ years, and I can tell you this would be highly unusual. In addition, in contrast to the Vegas shooting that followed the norm of reporting heavily about the wife, this guy’s wife isn’t even on the radar screen.

In accordance with my past experience as a Baptist pastor and counseling, there are dots present that if connected would form a typical pattern I saw in how churches handle certain domestic issues, and the pattern is very incendiary. Plainly stated, churches have a tendency to deal with crazy people in a reckless way.

Is that what happened in this case? We may never know, because unlike the pass parishioners don’t get when they are victims of church violence, per the usual, church leaders tend to get a pass; especially when they are the victims of one of those greater sins.

paul