First Contact – Part 24 – Presbyterians

When I was in the third grade, my mom and dad and I moved from a rental house to a purchased house. There were a number of boys close to my age that lived near our new dwelling. One boy, Mike, became a close friend that I stay in contact with to this day. He attended a Presbyterian Church just a few miles from home. The church had a dartball team, which is a knockoff of baseball using darts and a dartboard. At some point Mike joined the dartball team. The first time I set foot in a Presbyterian Church was with Mike at his church. We used to go by occasionally to play some dartball and table tennis. Sometimes we would stop by during the day when the minister was in his office. One day we stopped into his office when he wasn’t there. Mike sat in his rolling chair behind his desk while I sat on the opposite side. Mike got to goofing off by rolling the chair around on the plastic mat it sat on. At one point he pushed off hard, sending the chair and himself across the plastic. But he had pushed too hard because he suddenly disappeared behind the desk. The wheels of the chair had rolled off the plastic onto the carpet which brought the chair to a sudden stop, toppling it and its passenger onto the floor. Luckily Mike wasn’t hurt, and we had a belly laugh over it.

I love pipe organs. There’s something powerful and majestic about being in a large building such as a cathedral and hearing the sound of air rushing through those carefully tuned pipes and then echoing multiple times off the walls. It’s even better with an expert at the helm of the keyboard.

When I was in college in Louisville, Kentucky, my friend Richard and I heard about a pipe organ concert at a local Presbyterian seminary. Richard loved pipe organ music as much as I did, so we made arrangements to attend the concert. It was not in a large cathedral, but sounded fantastic anyway.

After Kathy and I got engaged in early 1982, I heard about a pre-marriage counseling class being held at our local university. I thought it couldn’t hurt to attend. Perhaps I could pick up a few tips about how to be a good husband and how to keep my marriage alive. Since Kathy lived 300 miles away, she was unable to go with me. As it turned out, a Presbyterian minister from a nearby church was conducting the class. From the get go I realized he was different from other ministers I knew. He was very informal, sometimes conducting the class while we all sat on the floor. I don’t remember anything that was said in the class except for a brief exchange about the words in 1 John 4:8, “God is Love”.

After getting married, a couple of friends, who were members of the Church of Christ just as Kathy and I were at the time, came to visit so they could attend a wedding. Interestingly, the minister who conducted the wedding was the same one who had conducted the pre-marriage class I had taken.

After the wedding one of those friends expressed his dismay that at the reception the minister had ordered an alcoholic beverage. When the bartender asked how he wanted it, he replied, “Straight up, the way God intended it.” Our friends, being teetotalers, were flabbergasted that a minister of the Gospel would be drinking any type of alcohol. Even though I was not a drinker, I knew that the Bible did not condemn drinking alcohol; only drinking alcohol to excess. So we got into a spirited discussion about the issue. Unfortunately, I later learned that the minister had become an alcoholic, which led to some problems in his life. Far be it from me to condemn this man. It seems that everyone has their own personal demons they have to fight. And I’m not picking on Presbyterians. I remember my parents talking about a Baptist minister they knew that had had a drinking problem. Apparently he used to tell people, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Hey, there was a Church of Christ minister who was friends with one of the elders at our church that hired a couple of men to murder his wife. So, immorality can strike any of us regardless of our status. We must all be ever diligent lest one grab hold of us and not let go.

There was a TV and radio evangelist I used to watch and listen to years ago named D. James Kennedy. He was the founder of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. There was something compelling about his preaching style, although it sometimes seemed overly dramatic and almost arrogant. Some of you may remember D. James Kennedy because of his support of Judge Roy Moore, a former and now current Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. In fact, Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries was the group that filmed the 2001 installation of the 5280 pound granite block that contained two large carved tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. I know many people supported Moore’s action in installing the monument, but I found his actions problematic. Moore’s contention is that the laws of the United States are based on the Ten Commandments. But if one studies these commandments in the Bible along with God’s decreed punishments for breaking them, you will quickly see that U.S. law departs greatly from them. I cover in detail the Ten Commandments and their associated punishments in my book “God Is”.

First Contact – Part 1 – Church of Christ

Since it’s the holiday season and a time of the year where quite a few religious people celebrate, I have been thinking about interesting first encounters with religious groups. I thought I would share some of the best stories with you. Keep in mind that I may have had earlier contact with people of these faiths, but not in a religious context.

I wasn’t raised going to church much, but when I did attend it was Baptist churches. So, my first religious encounter with a Church of Christ member was in college. Mark was a friend in high school, but we never really discussed religion until we started college. I can remember one day standing in the school parking lot discussing the book of Revelation. Mark did not believe that the tribulation, rapture, thousand year reign, lake of fire, etc were actually going to happen. At that time in my life, this was foreign thinking. The Baptist churches I had attended and the evangelists I had listened to on TV all taught that they would actually happen.

So, I asked Mark, “Well, if the book doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means, then what does it mean?”

Mark replied, “You have to first understand that some parts of the Bible are literal and other parts are figurative.”

I inquired, “Okay, so how do you tell the difference?”

Mark said, “Well, that which is literal is literal and that which is figurative is figurative.”

I was dumbfounded. What he said was obviously true, a tautology in fact, but it helped not one bit in making a determination about literalness or figurativeness. There had to be something more definitive. Yet, we kept going around and around and never really understanding each other. This did not leave a very good impression on me of the Church of Christ. And to make it even worse, Mark’s preacher had a regular radio program which I began to occasionally listen to after my conversation with Mark. One day the preacher started talking about how some things in the Bible were literal and some were figurative. “How do you tell the difference?” he asked the audience. His answer: “That which is literal is literal and that which is figurative is figurative.” Oh, boy! Well, at least I now knew where Mark had gotten that phrase from.

Interestingly, after I graduated from college and took a full time job in Alabama, I made some new friends. They invited me to church, and I went. Lo and behold, it was a Church of Christ. I was a bit hesitant, but decided to give it a chance. Over time I began to understand how they actually distinguished literal parts of Bible from the figurative parts. I began studying with a teacher, Jim Massey, at a local Church of Christ college every Sunday evening. Jim was a man of many hats in the church. He was a minister, evangelist, teacher, missionary, author, and more. I was very impressed by the logical manner in which he approached the Biblical text and how he attempted to look at the Bible as a whole when determining doctrine. I eventually joined the church, and Jim baptized me.

Shortly afterwards, I was back home visiting my parents in Kentucky, so I decided to give Mark a call and tell him the good news. (Note that the conversation may not have been exactly as I quote below, but the gist is accurate.)

“Hey, Mark. Guess what.”

“What?”

“I joined the church.”

“Which church?”

“The Church of Christ.”

I was ready for his excitement to burst forth.

“Okay. Let me ask you a few questions.” Mark said.

Uh-oh, I thought. What’s up?

“Do you have a kitchen in the church building and eat in the church building?”

Oh, no. I had learned enough about the Church of Christ in the short time I had been a member to know that there were a number of divisions in it with differing beliefs. One of the more conservative wings was known by the group I had joined as the “anti brethren”. Not in the sense that they were not our brethren, but in the sense that they were opposed to more things than we were.

I responded, “Yes we do.”

Several more expected questions followed. I finally said, “Okay, you are apparently in the group we call the anti brethren.”

“Yes, I am,” he said.

So, after getting past my initial impression of the Church of Christ and then actually joining it, I was still not in the right group according to Mark. I guessed I was still bound for hell; I just didn’t know it. I wondered how many other people were in my situation. After all, if you believe you are right with God, but really aren’t, you don’t even know to seek out an alternative.

Oh, well.

Before I close, I would like to relate an interesting story about Jim Massey. He was known for being open minded. If he ever became convinced he was wrong about a Biblical issue, he was not above admitting his error and changing his position on the matter. In fact, in one of the classes I took from him he admitted that his position on a particular doctrine, after studying the issue in more detail, had changed since he taught the class the previous year. This impressed me.

Anyway, shortly after Jim baptized me, I had been studying the issue of drinking alcohol and had come to the inevitable conclusion that the Bible taught that drinking was not a sin, only drinking to excess. Somehow word got back to Jim. He caught me one day and asked me if I indeed believed drinking was okay. I said I did. In fact, I told him, the wine used for the Lord’s Supper was obviously alcoholic. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul chastised the believers for misusing the Lord’s Supper by getting drunk. Jim told me that the Greek word used there meant to be full, not drunk. I asked then why the translators translated it as drunk. He asked me to come to his office with me. Jim knew Greek and always carried a Greek New Testament with him to church. He pulled this out, went to the passage I was referring to and showed me the Greek word. Then he pulled out his Greek dictionary and looked that word up. I asked him what it said. He responded, “to be drunk.” After a pause, he said, “I’ll have to study this some more.” I never heard back from him on what he concluded from this study, but I always admired him for not trying to weasel out his dilemma, but rather used it as an opportunity to come to a deeper understanding of Scripture.

As for me, I was also open minded and willing to change my beliefs. After studying the Bible in more detail over the next several years, I ultimately concluded that many of the “facts” in the Bible could not be substantiated. I was therefore compelled to leave the church. I discuss all this in detail in my book God Is: Exploring the Nature of the Biblical God. It can be purchased in paperback or Kindle format at Amazon.