My last email to the pastor from part 1 was May 3. Four days later, I received a response at church. The pastor stopped me at church and said he would be getting with me about coffee.
Tonight I went to a business meeting, just to observe. Before the meeting, I ran into the pastor and told him I was invited by one of the other ministers. He visited with me for a bit about our emails, telling me that he did want to visit. He said he didn’t feel right about throwing certain words out but was concerned about their impact. I affirmed that I understood there were many understandings of some words, and that I wasn’t trying to throw anything out, but wanted his definitions of certain words because they are so often misused. I explained that there were some things that were so misused that I needed to redefine them, to study them out, and had come to a quite different understanding of them than this group might believe, but that it was for my own safety. I also explained that sometimes those words and the definitions by which they were misused had to be gotten away from, not only to maintain any understanding of them but to maintain a belief or faith in God at all, or that some verses had to be studied and new understandings developed in order to even read the Bible.
He talked about being a shepherd again tonight. I don’t see that in the Bible – the comparison of pastor to shepherd. And he mentioned “they that must give account” (Heb 13:17). He has no idea what that verse means to me or how triggering it is. I don’t think he understands it the way it was taught in my former church. I don’t think he has any idea.
So, somewhere in the near future, coffee is waiting, and maybe some explanations that I’m not sure I’m ready for.
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Author: Through Grace
I was raised in a somewhat unhealthy church group within the Nondenominational Christian Church. After graduating high school, I began attending a United Pentecostal Church (UPC). I've been a member of four UPC churches and visited many others. Of the four of which I was a member, I was "encouraged" not to leave the first and then later sent to the second; attended the second where an usher repeatedly attempted to touch me and the pastor told me I should not care about the standards of the organization and was wrong to do so; ran to a third at that point, which threw me out after a couple years; and walked out of a fourth. For these transfers and because I refused to gossip about my former churches, some called me a "wandering star, a cloud without water" (Jude 1:12).
I love the fact that when the blind man was healed, questioned by the Pharisees and temple rulers, and expelled from the temple, Jesus went and sought him out. He very rarely did this once someone was healed, but for this man, he did. I believe God has a special place in his heart for those who are abused, wrongfully accused, or condemned by religious leadership. I believe He loves those who are wronged by churchianity--yes, churchianity, not Christianity, because those who do these wrongs follow a church, not Christ.
1 John 4:7-8
7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.
10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
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