Epiphiney!

It was a accident, really!

I took a trip to see my mother and brother, and to also go to an Memorial service for a fellow college dear friend. It was quite an eventful trip with alot of my checkbox’s marked off. With a few surprises.

To set this up, I must tell you that my great uncle was a preacher, my father was a pastor, and also his brother. Which I had the pleasure of seeing on my trip, who has had many health issues that he has come thru the last five or more years. He’s coming around tho.

Let me slide my story in here to set the stage of epiphiney in the setup. I am a Bible,Theology, Christian nerd, with the sensation of reading every day of the week, Have book, will read!!

I had my latest victom sitting on the table of my mothers living room, where we were chatting away, and He,(my uncle) retired pastor, noticed the book on the table and abruptly started to read the title. “A Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud & Midrash” by Strack & Billerbeck. He said “that would be an interesting read”. Then, He said “I don’t know if I have even read the Bible”, “the whole Bible”. I am pretty sure I gave him a double take, if not a triple take, when he said this! He then said ” I was always pulling out of the bible sections or passages to use for my sermons”!

My brain was reeling from this statement he made, not because ‘He’ made it, but I soon understood the problem in the ‘Church’!!

I say this because I have understood the process of ‘preachers’, denominations, seminary’s. It all began to make sense now. I have been pushing the ‘New’, ‘different’, ‘radical’, ‘heresy’, or just the ‘whatever’, Kingdom Theology with eyes of ‘what are you talking about look’!

Let me explain, I myself, being a preachers kid, went to ‘Bible College’, which in layman’s terms is school to become a pastor, almost always for a denominational ‘church’.(I myself was not looking to go down that road, only if God was pointing it out to me,lol) But this is road you must go down to become a pastor, for all pastors, whatever denomination it is. Now, since it is a ‘denominational’ college it will be making sure that this ‘slant’ will be used in the pastor’s sermons, and to also more ingrained into the pastor’s faith. Seminary, The full waterhose drill of just pushing and directing this doctrine into all concerned.

Let’s back up here at this point to see where things got oh, so very wrong. I am going to cover, three issues, that will be brought up in this discussion for rebuttal. B,A,C was done on purpose.

B- It will almost a slam dunk that all parties involved in becoming a pastor have either read the bible straight thru or actually studied the bible straight thru. (Big problem,the one that my uncle mentioned above) Reading or Studing anything is totally different for any book, let alone the bible.

A- All Pastors will come into ‘college’ with a ‘pre-conceived’ Theology from the influence from their parents or grandparents that will need to be deconstructed.

C-Seminary, is the cement that encapsulizes everything in the ‘topics’,’ideology’, ‘format’, and ‘institutional’ theology, along with alot of other things.

So, Can you see the problem? Pastor’s, let alone ‘lay’ people have not even ‘studied’ the bible for it’s meaning or ‘the story’ that it tells. This ‘problem’ is more that 2,000 years old, the first covenant was not even understood to it’s true meaning, even today for the ‘Israel Nation’. The protestant, and catholic church have also failed at this simple yet important task, to ‘see’,’hear’ God’s voice tell us what his desire is for ‘His People’.

I want to plead with everyone that read’s the blog to just ‘start’ from the beginning and go all the way thru, to the end. (This is also one of the problems, we have been told it is not necessary to read from start to finish from the pulpit) This may take you anywhere from three to ten years(or more) to just read and study what the ‘Narrative’ (one complete story-bible) Everything builds on top of each other for effectual and for understanding. We know in this time of technology, what a hyperlink is(something that points to another article,story, or just backstory of the situation, this is used religiously in the bible, forward and backwards!! We must do this now to sometime in the future all get on the same page of ‘faith’, in that We are ‘all’ in “Truth and Grace” with God!!

I would like some input into this discussion from as many ‘pastors’ or lay people as to what I have come across as a problem in the “Church”!