Last night I went to a skeptics' Meetup group to get to know some of our local heathens. I had a great time, but what really blew my mind was the fact that two of the people there used to be Christian Pastors!
One of them told me about a group he had helped found, called The Clergy Project. It's a support group for pastors who no longer believe in supernatural mumbo-jumbo, pastors who are agnostic or skeptical and trying to make sense of the disconnect between reality and faith, and ex-pastors who left because they stopped believing. They currently have around 600 members nationwide, and he told me that about 25% of them were atheists who were actively pastoring a church, and didn't see how they could do anything else because all their education was theological.
I was astonished to learn that so many pastors don't actually believe what they preach. He also told me about his own transition from ministry, which started when he attended a Pastor's Conference and confessed his growing agnosticism to the group. To his surprise, about half of the pastors there said they, too, had lost their faith or were in the process of losing it.
I gotta wonder, how many pastors out there are simply going through the motions? Do any of them outside the spittle-spewing iggorant fundy crowd actually believe the crap they're saying?
What a weird thing.
One of them told me about a group he had helped found, called The Clergy Project. It's a support group for pastors who no longer believe in supernatural mumbo-jumbo, pastors who are agnostic or skeptical and trying to make sense of the disconnect between reality and faith, and ex-pastors who left because they stopped believing. They currently have around 600 members nationwide, and he told me that about 25% of them were atheists who were actively pastoring a church, and didn't see how they could do anything else because all their education was theological.
I was astonished to learn that so many pastors don't actually believe what they preach. He also told me about his own transition from ministry, which started when he attended a Pastor's Conference and confessed his growing agnosticism to the group. To his surprise, about half of the pastors there said they, too, had lost their faith or were in the process of losing it.
I gotta wonder, how many pastors out there are simply going through the motions? Do any of them outside the spittle-spewing iggorant fundy crowd actually believe the crap they're saying?
What a weird thing.
