Monday, December 10, 2012

Ma'am

False doctrine is evil. It's telling lies about God. That's why we care about it. That's why we get bent out of shape about it, why we can't help but speak of it when we encounter it. We don't like it that people lie about God.

It's even worse that their lies twist the minds and hearts of Christ's little ones.

This is one reason, among many, that I am glad that I do not have to deal with a local "ministerium." When I served up in Chicagoland my senior pastor and I went to one. It was torture. Of course, it was a bunch of nice Midwesterners - everything was polite. But that was half the problem: all smiles and no mention of the numerous pachyderms in the room.

Worst of all, of course, was the presence of the Rev. Ladies. Deciding how to converse with them is not unlike deciding how to converse with someone who insists he is Napoleon Bonaparte. Do you play along and call him Field Marshal? Will he turn over the appetizer tray if you refuse? And he's wearing that hat! For reals?

I call them Ma'am.

+HRC


4 comments:

  1. My brief experience with a female clergyperson in a ministerial association ended badly. She wrote a very sharply worded letter to my circuit visitor about me, saying that I didn't belong in the ministry because I wouldn't call her pastor and I was not nice about the joint Thanksgiving worship service we were all supposed to participate in. So it goes.

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  2. I don't call the female clergy person pastor either, but I do what I can for the community Thanksgiving service. Usually it is helping create the bulletins and designing the flyers, etc. It keeps them happy.

    But when they insist on talking about our similarities, I am always the one to bring up our differences. They expect me to do this. The most uncomfortable time was when the Book of Revelation came up at the luncheon meeting, and he made a jab that they were the only ones who read it literally. I made two remarks: 1) So based on your literal reading, you are looking for an actual, literal dragon with ten heads to come up out of the sea? The answer, of course, was no. It was a symbol of something else. And I said, well then you recognize that the book is meant to be read symbolically not literally. And to read it symbolically is the literal reading? All I got was crickets. 2) I said, since you read the Bible literally, you then naturally believe that Christ's literal Body and Blood are in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper. Again, crickets.

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  3. re "Napoleon Bonaparte." Thanks for the good laugh.

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  4. Everyone loves to be on a first-name basis. In this case, it's helpful.

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