Anyone need more than they get from their pastor?

[BlenderWizard]

I had been going to the United Methodist Church for years. About 4 years ago i switched churches because I moved. I be came heavily involved with the youth group (as a counselor) at my latest church. I met the woman who became my wife at the church. But after we had been seeing each other for a while, and before we got married, we moved in together. We got kicked out of the youth group over this. This ****ed us both off severely and sort of soured us on that church. What had bothered us probably the most is that I knew the youth leader personally, and also knew that while she had a boyfriend, they spent every night together, and I kept my mouth shut. The only way anyone could have found out that my present wife and i were living together, was for this youth leader to have been running her mouth (she lives next door to us). On top of that, the fact that they kicked us out over that bothered me. After all, it was our business, not theirs, and we had made a point not to talk about it. At that point, we cut off all other extracurriular activities with the church. We went for service only. However, last summer, our pastor retired, and we got a new oneWe went to a few of his services, and neither of us really liked him. Now, bear in mind this new guy is a PhD. The last service of his we went to, he preached for 20 minutes on how the Bible was true because it says it's true inside it. Extremely circular argument. I'm sorry, but not only do I expect a little more than this from a pastor with a PhD., but I found this to be completely moronic on any level. She and i have not been back to a service there since this, and we are presently waiting for her tenure as a Sunday school teacher to end so that we can move on and look for another church.

[darjeeling]

My local church has always had good pastors, but when I went to parocial school we had some pretty bad ones. They were all from a canadian order of catholic fathers, and most of them came off as pretty clueless and irrelevant. One of them had a 10 minute sermon on the PA because some punk made fun of a couple of hoods outside the school on a daily basis and (suprise suprise) got the snot beat out of him. He made some crap out of the world being a dangerous place and alot of chaff, but he avoided the obious answer--this kid deserved what he got. The golden rule has got some practical applications, and this was a good example. The worst were the bible hippies who would give sermons with a guitar and sing crappy christian-hippy kumbya crap. They were so obsessed with the idea of christian love that they had no real idea of what it was, and thusly resorted to overusing the term instead of helping people understand what it meant.

The best pastors there were pretty heavy drinkers (I would be too if I had to live with the rest of those nutjobs). They had a very good grounding in the real world and could actually deftly used scripture and christian philosophy to the point where the ideas of chrisianity became slightly attractive to an atheistic-leaning agnostic (me in highschool). They didn't teach the no-blame christianity popular among the the love hippies, and didn't preach the dogma laden christianity so popular among the catholics there, but a practical and honestly examined faith.

Good luck on finding a place with a good pastor BlenderWizard. Seems like you had some really bad ones there. But until that happens, keep on smiling.

[Tunug]

Anyone need more than they get from their pastor?

yep!!! we all do! here is how i figure we can get what we need based on who can provide what we need:

God is infallable and can provide all. We (ourselves) are fallable but we can control what we get in life. Others (any other men and women, including pastors) are fallable and we cannot control what we get from them. Therefore, it makes best sense to rely on: God first, self second, others third. Sometimes dogs fall in between # 2 and 3 :lol:

A good quote I once heard about church goes something like this:

"Don't expect to find God in church; you must bring him to church."

Or my version:

"You may not find God while looking for him in church, but you can expect God will be with you while looking for a church."