Monday, May 14, 2012

Dennis On: "Foolishness of Preaching or Preaching of Foolishness?"




Foolishness of Preaching or Preaching of Foolishness?


1 Corinthians 1:21
For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom knew not God, it was God's good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe.


Dennis Diehl - EzineArticles Expert AuthorI have to say that I do miss teaching an attentive group of people who simply want to know the truth of the matters placed before them.  Alas...it is what it is.  In my earlier years I gave many a sincere sermon that now makes me cringe knowing the information was less than accurate and the truth of it all was less than true.  But it's a journey, at least for me, and the key is not in what one used to preach or teach but what one has learned through the years and the personal growth in "grace and knowledge" one has actually accomplished in life.  "Growing in grace and knowledge" is not actually one of the positive traits of most churches most of us know.  Grace is only extended when not really needed or just needed for the self and knowledge....well forget that.


Ministers surely do say some incredibly stupid things in the name of preaching.  I suppose this could be easily illustrated by the last three years of sermons given by Ronald Weinland, but I spare us.  This should end or get substantially worse in the next few weeks.


I was never personally comfortable giving sermons on such things as The Place of Safety, British Israelism and tithing.  The first two seemed irrelevant to actual religious belief in the real world and all of the NT message, and I hated reminded people of what we already knew.  It takes money to do "the Work."  I don't recall many times where those over me reminded the brethren to give as they were able.


The concept of the Place of Safety was not only annoying but at times terrifying when I thought of how few thought HWA would die before the time.  I always hoped he would so that would end the idea of "HWA says it's time to flee."  Most of you know that the visits of Gerald Waterhouse , to me, were exercises in the exact art of preaching foolishness.  I felt that back when I was in my 20's.  I was right.


The COGs have many foolish teachings and they usually center around on just how do we "do things," like putting leaven out or eating out on Sabbath.  Some groups become experts in foolish preaching and never get around to the core message of the NT.  Mixing the OT and the NT has been raised to an art form by some.  You know, old wine in new wine skins...kaboom!  


There are foolish preachings about "science falsely so called."  The facts of evolution and a 4.5 billion year old earth are just too much handle.  Human origins as opposed to the Adam and Eve myth are way beyond their comprehension or the fact that those OT stories were never written to advance true scientific discovery.  They had meanings, but not the ones foolish preaching assigns.


Somehow the tithing admonitions are dredged up from the Old Testament, but the ones advocating stoning rebellious children or sabbath breakers are listed as "the old ways."  Men can't have long hair because Paul aid nature tells us it is wrong, but far as I know, lions have the best manes in town and the lioness seems rather bald.  I have never figured out just how Paul's foolish comments about that were to be understood.  "Time is short," was also one of Paul's more foolish preaching concepts.


I am sure the more recent "foolishness of preaching" topics are endless in the COGs.


Some include:


  • Me and my wife are the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11
  • Jesus is coming back in a couple weeks
  • Revelation 11 is about the WCG apostasy
  • Man is still 6000 years old
  • Send it in
  • "And yes brethren, I am an Apostle..."
  • God needs a new college
  • God needs a new house
  • God needs us to give him money (He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. Can't He sell some?)
  • Fatima is somehow relevant to us today
  • Revelations and the Mayans are right!
  • The Mayans and the Wiffenpoof Indian prophecies are meaningful
  • Women are still less important than men
  • Men are the leaders  (wow...pretty well proven false by those with eyes to see)
  • There is a place of safety still  (Resurrection avoidance?)
  • God's puzzle has been solved!
  • Noah's flood accounts for all world geology
  • The story of Noah is really really true and it could happen
  • All language started at Babel 
  • If I came from a monkey, how come we still have monkeys around today!
  • We are not to wear sunglasses because the eye is the light of the body... (one of my personal favorites I was personally told.)


and so on...


What foolish preaching have you heard over the years?  What nutcase personal opinions are stuck in your mind to this day?  Why do people listen to such stupid and ignorant teachings from the pulpit and never speak up?  Will the congregants or followers of the lone wolf preacher of foolish things ever stand up for themselves and call the man out on it.


Foolishness of Preaching...or Preaching foolishness?   

Dennis C. Diehl
DenniscDiehl@aol.com


19 comments:

Anonymous said...

More like telling lies to get a salary.

Man[kind] is still 6,000 years old

Yes, indeed. 6,000. 10,000. 30,000. 47,000. 6,000 fits well into any of the following number of years.

DennisCDiehl said...

In my experience, no pastor aquaintance or friend told lies so he could have a salary. My pastor friends or former friends believe what they preach as far as I can personally tell. It doesn't mean they are right, but I don't see them doing the one thing just so they can have the other as in lying for the living.

Virtually all COG ministers simply live in a small theological world. They don't read outside the box and seem to never have even heard of some of the most basic theological views on all sorts of topics. As I have said many times, most fundamentalist ministers and COG pastors are trained in Bible reading. They know the book well as in what the story is and who the players are.
They know virtually nothing of the origins, composition and intent of most of the scriptures. Bible reading is the most shallow form of study and knowing.

Pious conviction with marginal information is the rule of the day.

Anonymous said...

Yes, the ministers may not knowingly tell lies, but they still preach what they preach and they take the money.

And the days of innocence have passed. There was a time when we didn't know such things as DNA and Waldensians, but now we do. I've sat right there while the ACoG minister stood in front of us and knowingly lied. The tells were just amazing. Bold, brazen, outright deliberate lies.

It's just like the Mafia. They have their code.

It doesn't mean a thing except respect for the Don and making money.

The time is past.

Anonymous said...

Ahem.

Here's the acid test:

If Herbert Armstrong insisted on having an unpaid all-volunteer ministry, who would have been left?

Lake of Fire Church of God said...

Another great Plain Truth article, Dennis.

Here is one that stayed with me most of my life. It is a direct quote written in my Sabbath Services notebook:

"There is a great chance you will die in the next three years. When you die, be brave and die faithfully” (January 18, 1969 F. K. sermon).

You can only imagine the impact such a statement would have on a young 13 year old - my age at the time.

I have written an essay about my WCG experience. It is full of foolish quotes from the WCG pulpits that are recorded in my Sabbath Services notebooks.

Richard

Lake of Fire Church of God said...

Here is another direct quote recorded in my Sabbth Services notebooks that I now realize is "foolishness from the WCG pulpit":

Another age will start within the next 3 to 5 years” (April 7, 1969 Roderick C. Meredith sermon, Special Bible Study).

My understanding is that Meredith went on to say this for 50 years. I should scan the notebook page, and send it to Living Church of God so they know how long Meredith has been saying it.

Richard

DennisCDiehl said...

"Yes, the ministers may not knowingly tell lies, but they still preach what they preach and they take the money."

Well, that describes a lot of careers and religions. Politicians do that with our taxes too.

There is a big difference between "Ok, I know I'm teaching lies but I need the job," and "Of course I believe what I say and I also get paid"

DB noted: "If Herbert Armstrong insisted on having an unpaid all-volunteer ministry, who would have been left?"

That would also have to be true of all churches and you'd end up with worse and less educated pastors in all churches than you have now. There is nothing wrong with a paid ministry. People have to function while they do their jobs or live their calling as teacher etc.

I don't begrudge a minister a salary to live and be available to do what he feels he is doing for others and for his belief system. It's the Gulfstream Two I begrudge along with those who have lost total touch with reality, and with themselves.



There might be a few say the first but in my experience it is mostly the second.

DennisCDiehl said...

Here's how it seems to me.

Kings have power but are not particularly moral (They wage war, spy, kill, execute etc) We expect this.

Priests have no power but are moral or at least teach it and do the best they can.

When a King has both power and seems moral we usually get fearful he will use his power to impose his view of moral on us.. We either don't vote them in or we let them go one way or the other. Or we get suspicious the moral part is a show to win the moral. (A Santorum type) A King can become moral , step down and become a priest but not both.

If a priest has power and claims morality we call him a King and the Pope and we fear the priest will inflict his morality on us with his power.

When one has neither power nor morality we call that an American President

When a priest has neither power nor morality we call them a wolf in sheeps clothing.

Most priests who have no power but morality are what most pastors of all denominations are, a pastor doing the best they can with what they accept as true.

Most Kings who have power and no morality we just accept as a normal King and we pray "May God bless and keep the King...far away from us."


When a Priest gets power he usually

DennisCDiehl said...

"...When a Priest gets power he usually" starts the Inquisition, gets and Edifice Complex and builds monuements to himself, says stupid stuff and it is taken as true by the blind, deaf and dumb and generally makes a fool of himself. This goes on until he loses the power and either wants to become moral or starts a new church hoping to rise to power again.

DennisCDiehl said...

oh...and finally...When a person has no power and no morality we call that an artist. We expect the King to have power but be shaddy. We expect the Priest to have no power but be moral. And we expect the artist to be neither and that's why we idolize them.

Anonymous said...

I guess I'm terribly spoiled: I know volunteer ministers who are extremely well qualified and are good at their ministering as well as competent at their day jobs.

But when we are speaking of Armstrongism, there's no real worth anyway and paying people to preach on it is sort of like a corporation hiring workers for its Ebola factory (though not quite as extreme, unless you buy into the idea of extreme spiritual damage).

Armstrongism seems to be the moral equivalent of manufacturing cigarettes. We wouldn't want those poor workers to go unpaid....

No wait.

They should make the product at all.

DennisCDiehl said...

I didn't say there weren't good, compassionate volunteer pastor types. I find it hard to imagine they are anything but fundamentalist Bible readers however and totally lack a background in all things theolgical and historical. I don't just want a sincere bible reading Engineer telling me how the whole world of God, Bible and Religion works.

I am endeavoring to portray a bigger picture than just WCG. Filtering everything through bitter and angry clouds the view at times as well.

I know many catholics, baptists, presbyterians,,,,christians who would also portray ministers and their church experience the same way. WCG did not invent any of this. They may, however, have perfected it.

I am curious in what way you are spoiled and what faith you currently have adopted Douglas. Tell me about the background of your volunteer pastor etc. I sincerely would like to know about this and how it works.

I know what you don't believe as you know me, but what have you come to believe outside of your WCG experience??

NO2HWA said...

Al B:

Can you please email me at no2hwa@yahoo.com. I cannot read your entire comment to me because it went into the spam folder. To open it fully I have to post it to the blog and I don't know if you want all the comments published.

Anonymous said...

Dennis wrote:

"That would also have to be true of all churches and you'd end up with worse and less educated pastors in all churches than you have now. There is nothing wrong with a paid ministry...I don't begrudge a minister a salary to live and be available to do what he feels he is doing for others and for his belief system. It's the Gulfstream Two I begrudge...I don't just want a sincere bible reading Engineer telling me how the whole world of God, Bible and Religion works..."

The way it has typically been is you have a sincere, (or not so sincere in a few cases) former salesman, trying to sell you on how the whole world of God, Bible and Religion works. Most ministers I have ever known were former salesmen, which is fine, because at least half of the job of being a pastor is being a cheerleader and event planner. The other half is grinding the sausage, otherwise known as sermon preparation. Engineers don't usually make good cheerleaders or event planners, unless they were also flamboyantly gay, I suppose. I have never seen such an odd bird.

The trouble is, you don't need a four-year degree to be a salesman. Either you are born with the power of persuasion, or else you are not. You really don't find sales skills taught anywhere. And the education most ministers have is either AC, if you count that, or else not more than a four-year degree in who knows what. Once you have a master's level education, as I do (that's when religion really started to fall apart for me), or a Ph.D, most people either would want to use their degree, could no longer afford to be a minister, or else they would no longer be able to put stock in religion and would stop attending altogether. Advanced education has a way of forcing one to learn how to think about how an aspect of the world really works. You can't help but think a little bit differently, a little more rigorously, about everything else. Your standards tend to go up across the board. Religion cannot survive such scrutiny. Unless their field of study is specifically theology, a highly educated minister must compartmentalize. (A Ph.D in theology is kind of like a Ph.D in fairy tales.) An advanced degree in anything else will probably go a long way toward destroying one's faith. For a COG minister, this is not an option anyway, so for them, less education is probably best. Their faith depends upon them being just bible-readers. Armstrongism was always a very homegrown sort of religion anyway, which was formulated merely by a bible-reading salesman in the first place.

There is something else wrong with a paid ministry. If you have a volunteer ministry, then you have people doing it because they believe it is something worth doing. Being in charge of an all-volunteer organization is a labor of love. In WCG, being an usher, or a songleader, or a deacon, or a minister, or a pastor, or a preaching elder, or an evangelist, was always a labor of prestige. If no one is getting paid, then no one's ego is getting involved either. Why was there a Gulfstream Two? Ego. No salaries + no corner offices = no old boys club. All you have left are positions, which don't imply a stroked ego, they imply a burden of responsibility for your evenings and weekends. Pick any organization you want, this is how organizations of all types generally pan out. So, start your own church, make the theology anything you want, pay your ministers and make them the business administrators too, and you've already gone a looooooong way to recreating the organizational dynamics of WCG - which were horrendous - no corporate jets required. I don't begrudge an honest day's pay for an honest day's work either, but the paid ministry was a big part of everything that was wrong with WCG.

Joe

DennisCDiehl said...

Actually the men and women who end up teaching the realities of religion, history, origins and theology were well trained in it all, came to see it for what it was and yet had the credentials, credibility and experience to continue to teach others what they actually learned from the whole process.

You have your Bart Ehrman's who tell the truth about origns, scripture etc coming out of a fundamentalist ministry in his youth.

You have Karen Armstrong and Ellain Pagels.

You have Dan Barker, now of the Freedom From Religion foundation being a fundamentalist minister and musician from his youth, with a good education in it all an waking up to what it really meant.

Experience is not only the best teacher, it is the only one. Everything else is just hearsay.

To pay or not to pay I suppose depends on the group and the value the group puts on the teaching of the man as they relate his view to what they perceive as "the truth."

It never ends....

Anonymous said...

Yes, but when you say "teaching" I assume you mean in an academic setting behind a lectern in a classroom, not in an ecclesiastical setting behind a pulpit in a church.

There's a huge difference between "teaching" and "preaching". In the first case the people you're speaking to are students with a wide array of beliefs who expect a degree they can use to go out and make a living. In the second you're talking to parishioners who show up because they sense a commonality of beliefs and may expect what you have to say is going to guide them toward the saving of their souls.

Teaching is dispassionate, preaching is not. Nobody expects a teacher to practice what he teaches, otherwise he wouldn't be a teacher, he'd be a practitioner. People do expect a preacher to practice what he preaches, otherwise he's a hypocrite, and what's worse, no one should expect his guidance to be worth a hill of beans.

The cornerstone of fundamentalism is the inerrancy of scripture, ergo the value of strict adherance to it. There's no such thing as a highly-educated fundamentalist because education does violence to the fundamentals of fundamentalism by disproving the bible as a book of truth. A fundamentalist who has "woken up" to the bible being a book of fables cannot still be a fundamentalist. Nor does it make any sense to strictly adhere to a book of fables. That's sillyness. I am not familiar with Dan Barker, but I can only assume you meant he is a former fundamentalist.

I wouldn't be against fundamentalism if it simply meant a belief that what you see ought to be what you get. Unfortunately this is not the case. I believe, people ought to practice what they preach. If you don't want to practice it, you ought not be preaching it. If you want to live how post-modern secular people live, fine do that. If you want to live the way you believe the bible says to live, fine do that. But don't pretend that they're the same thing and that the bible justifies the lifestyle of a secular atheist. I am sure that in the South circa 1850 you had a few fundamentalist slave owning preachers who thought nothing of killing a slave on Saturday night and showing up in his lily-white finery on Sunday morning with an equally white conscience to preach his sermon. Today there are preachers far and wide who preach you can embrace the lifestyle of a good post-modern secular atheist, except perhaps on Easter and Christmas, and this is equally justifiable. Cognitive dissonance springs eternal. No matter how much things change, they stay exactly the same.

Fundamentalists cannot fail to be as guilty of such hypocrisy as the religiously liberal, except the liberals are at least somewhat more honest about this since they'll tell you point-blank they expect Jesus to support any lifestyle that modern society supports regardless, and you can simply dispose of that old bible anyway. The reason for their belief in such an expectation has never been exactly clear to me, but at least they're honest about that much. Fundamentalists try a lot harder (to no avail) also believe that Jesus will support any lifestyle they happen to be in denial that they are leading, and are in denial that there is little difference between the substance of their lives versus that of the liberal.

I figure that no one will be around to be disappointed when Jesus fails to save anyone's soul.

Joe

John said...

Joe said:
There is something else wrong with a paid ministry. If you have a volunteer ministry, then you have people doing it because they believe it is something worth doing. Being in charge of an all-volunteer organization is a labor of love. In WCG, being an usher, or a songleader, or a deacon, or a minister, or a pastor, or a preaching elder, or an evangelist, was always a labor of prestige. If no one is getting paid, then no one's ego is getting involved either. Why was there a Gulfstream Two? Ego. No salaries + no corner offices = no old boys club. All you have left are positions, which don't imply a stroked ego, they imply a burden of responsibility for your evenings and weekends. Pick any organization you want, this is how organizations of all types generally pan out. So, start your own church, make the theology anything you want, pay your ministers and make them the business administrators too, and you've already gone a looooooong way to recreating the organizational dynamics of WCG - which were horrendous - no corporate jets required. I don't begrudge an honest day's pay for an honest day's work either, but the paid ministry was a big part of everything that was wrong with WCG

I seriously couldn't put it better myself Joe!

Look at the debate over teacher salaries, for instance. I've heard those arguing that if only teachers salaries were higher we'd somehow be able to attract "better" teachers. You mean just like politicians obscene salaries has attracted "better" politicians?! Yeah right! It's a totally false connection! You just can't equate salary with quality. And all you'll end up attracting are those power-mad or money-hungry types in society who'll have no hesitation in casting aside all morals for a little profit. So am I in favor of a volunteer ministry? You betcha! If you take money out of the equation those with the real passion for the job will stay no matter what--without the pricetag or ego!

DennisCDiehl said...

To me, and how naive that was, teaching was a function of the pulpit too. You're right, it is a function of the class room. Some around here say, "I hear you used to be a preacher." I'd try to salvage the image by saying "pastor". They would ask the difference and I'd say, "an education." I did not totally rely on the theological education of my youth of course, as it was shallow and merely four years of Bible reading. The education came later .

But when I "taught" from the pulpit, ministers told me for years, "You are ahead of your time," or "You only say the things I am thinking." Now I understand that is because one does not teach from the pulpit as you noted. You simply preach, repeat, tell, yell and sell.

I was naive to think I could thrive in a religious setting as , after all, we were all wanting to learn truth. No go. Churches want sameness and the Old, Old story is just fine thank you. Introduce anything more true or an update of the Old old misunderstandings and the rest becomes history.

Religion is suppose to give one final truth and compfort to get us through all the change and chaos of life. If one attempts to actually ad knowledge gained since the bronze age or medeval times, it seems to go badly when religion is involved.

The only time preachers can be blunt teachers of "truth" is when it reinforces the current errors the church has accepted as reality. Creation scientists, ministers do this well.

However:

Sanctified ignorance is still ignorance...

Anonymous said...

Well said, Dennis.

I think you are spot on that classrooms are places where the truth as it is understood, based upon the evidence at hand can be stated. When new evidence presents itself, academic settings have no problem with updating what they teach to reflect new evidence. Not so with churches. Churches are places for comfort, not truth.

Joe