Thanks for stopping by, and don’t hesitate to let me know what you think as you read through the other reviews. I’d love to hear your take on things.

BTW, my family is now reading through Reimagining Church, which you should pick up along with Pagan Christianity, if you decide to buy that. The two go together. In fact, if you were to get only one of them, I’d say get Reimagining Church, as it’s the constructive side.

God bless, and I hope to hear more from you,

Cindy

Its tough to start asking questions that go against the norm.

And sometimes during worship, something funny will happen, like the organist & piano player not being in sync or one singing the wrong verse, & we laugh along with them.

Anybody else have a “church story” like Kathy’s?

Cindy

My pastor is quite a humble, sincere man of God. His love for the Lord, & desire to please Him, are so very apparent. His wife, Marilyn, is one of my best friends as well as being my mentor (in an “unofficial” but natural way).

As I said, we are family, which gives us an informal feel, with lots of laughter & joking around, though not usually during worship or the sermon. However, a couple weeks ago, an older lady, Nancy, started laughing during the sermon. She was trying to be quiet & stop laughing but she couldn’t.

Seeing this, Pastor was amused & asked her what was so funny. It turns out that his mention a few minutes earlier about the young man who fell asleep while Paul was talking & fell out a window had just hit her as incredibly funny. We all laughed with her.

I’d invite you to stop by, but Connecticut is quite a commute from South Dakota!

I’d have to read back through my posts myself to answer your question. But yes, I’d most likely change some things whether I’d read PC or not, and likely would change some things because of having read it. They are, after all, just my musings and my take on things, which is always subject to change. I’ll have to look through them and see what I said.

Your church sounds like an interesting place. The closest I might come to something like that would be my church in Custer, before they bought the building, but I wouldn’t go as far as you have in describing it. The pastor there even tried, in some more informal meetings (post building) to get people to share, but it didn’t really “take.” Maybe it would have, if we’d done it more regularly.

Anyway, tell me about your church. I’d like to hear more.

God bless,

Cindy

Our congregation is full of people who love to share a scripture, a testimony, or an exhortation, or lead out in a song. I think we’d do pretty well if we tried to “go organic”, so to speak.

I wrote on Pauline’s blog about how our church has been changing little by little over the years, & seems open to changing the status quo.

A question for you – Now that you are reading Pagan Christianity (which I just started reading), would you change anything you wrote in your posts on I Corinthians?

(I’ve been reading through those posts a little at a time.)

It’s a long story, which is why I skimmed over it–extremely interesting, but long. Pretty much the main point of both Pagan Christianity and Reimagining Church is that the effective priesthood of all believers (not just in word but in practice) has been lost to a progression of adopted pagan practices.

Protestants replaced the clerical priests with pastors (preachers) because they, in attempting to take the church back to its foundations, went only as far as the “early fathers,” who wrote their works during the time when the sermon, brought in by the Greek orators, had become the prominent feature of the church gathering. It was later that the Eucharist came into its central position.

If you’re interested in reading the history, you could do worse than to pick up a copy of this book. It’s nice to see you again, Pan. Take care.

God bless,

Cindy

Growing up Protestant and marrying a Catholic, I’m always interested in the difference of view about sermons. To me, a good church service is defined by the sermon; everything else is decoration around it. My family sought out churches with scholarly, well-spoken pastors. But when I attend a Catholic Mass, and I’ve heard this same thing from my wife and Catholic friends, the homily/sermon is just a minor thing that decorates the true purpose of the service: the Eucharist. So some of the differences may be less between modern and ancient, and rather be uniquely Protestant.