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One of my earliest childhood memories is of
hearing the church bell toll for Sunday morning worship in the small, rural
town in which I was raised. The Methodist Church was an old, wooden structure
with a bell tower, two children’s Sunday School classrooms cubby-holed behind
folding, wooden doors to separate it from the sanctuary, and a choir loft that
housed the Sunday school classrooms for the older children. It stood less than
two blocks from my home. As the bell rang, we would come together as a family,
and make our weekly pilgrimage to the church.
In that rural setting from the 1950s, the three
churches in the town of about 500 were the center of community life. The local
Methodist Church, to which my family belonged, sponsored ice cream socials
with hand-cranked, homemade ice cream, chicken potpie dinners, and corn
roasts. My family and I were always involved in all three, but each came only
once a year. In addition, there was a two-week community Bible school every
June, and I was a regular attendee through my eighth grade year in school.
However, Sunday morning worship and Sunday school were weekly events, and I
strove to keep extending my collection of perfect attendance pins and of awards
for memorizing Bible verses.
By my junior high school days, the local Methodist Church had closed, and we were attending the Methodist Church in the neighboring
town, which was only slightly larger than the town in which I lived. There, my
thoughts first began to focus on the ministry as a personal calling. I became
active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship, and eventually served as both a
district and a conference officer. I also became the regular “preacher” during
the annual Youth Sunday service. My preaching began to draw community-wide
attention, and before long I was occasionally filling pulpits at other
churches, at a nursing home, and at various church-affiliated youth and ladies
groups, where I typically set attendance records.
By age 17, when I began my freshman year at Harvard College, my decision to enter the ministry had solidified. During my freshman
year, I enrolled in a two-semester course in comparative religion, which was
taught by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whose specific area of expertise was Islam.
During that course, I gave far less attention to Islam than I did to other
religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, as the latter two seemed so much more
esoteric and strange to me. In contrast, Islam appeared to be somewhat similar
to my own Christianity. As such, I didn’t concentrate on it as much as I
probably should have, although I can remember writing a term paper for the
course on the concept of revelation in the Quran. Nonetheless, as the course
was one of rigorous academic standards and demands, I did acquire a small
library of about a half dozen books on Islam, all of which were written by
non-Muslims, and all of which were to serve me in good stead 25 years later. I
also acquired two different English translations of the meaning of the Quran,
which I read at the time.
That spring, Harvard named me a Hollis Scholar,
signifying that I was one of the top pre-theology students in the college. The
summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Harvard, I worked as a youth
minister at a fairly large United Methodist Church. The following summer, I
obtained my License to Preach from the United Methodist Church. Upon
graduating from Harvard College in 1971, I enrolled at the Harvard Divinity School, and there obtained my Master of Divinity degree in 1974, having been
previously ordained into the Deaconate of the United Methodist Church in 1972, and having previously received a Stewart Scholarship from the United Methodist Church as a supplement to my Harvard Divinity School scholarships. During my
seminary education, I also completed a two-year externship program as a
hospital chaplain at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. Following
graduation from Harvard Divinity School, I spent the summer as the minister of
two United Methodist churches in rural Kansas, where attendance soared to
heights not seen in those churches for several years.
Seen from the outside, I was a very promising
young minister, who had received an excellent education, drew large crowds to
the Sunday morning worship service, and had been successful at every stop along
the ministerial path. However, seen from the inside, I was fighting a constant
war to maintain my personal integrity in the face of my ministerial
responsibilities. This war was far removed from the ones presumably fought by
some later televangelists in unsuccessfully trying to maintain personal sexual
morality. Likewise, it was a far different war than those fought by the
headline-grabbing pedophilic priests of the current moment. However, my
struggle to maintain personal integrity may be the most common one encountered
by the better-educated members of the ministry.
There is some irony in the fact that the
supposedly best, brightest, and most idealistic of ministers-to-be are selected
for the very best of seminary education, e.g. that offered at that time at the Harvard Divinity School. The irony is that, given such an education, the seminarian is
exposed to as much of the actual historical truth as is known about:
1) the formation of the early, “mainstream”
church, and how it was shaped by geopolitical considerations;
2) the “original” reading of various
Biblical texts, many of which are in sharp contrast to what most Christians
read when they pick up their Bible, although gradually, some of this
information is being incorporated into newer and better translations;
3) the evolution of such concepts as a
triune godhead and the “sonship” of Jesus, may the mercy and blessings of God
be upon him;
4) the non-religious considerations that
underlie many Christian creeds and doctrines;
5) the existence of those early churches
and Christian movements which never accepted the concept of a triune godhead,
and which never accepted the concept of the divinity of Jesus, may the mercy
and blessings of God be upon him; and
6) etc. (Some of these fruits of my
seminary education are recounted in more detail in my recent book, The Cross
and the Crescent: An Interfaith Dialogue between Christianity and Islam, Amana
Publications, 2001.)
As such, it is no real wonder that almost a
majority of such seminary graduates leave seminary, not to “fill pulpits”,
where they would be asked to preach that which they know is not true, but to
enter the various counseling professions. Such was also the case for me, as I
went on to earn a master’s and doctorate in clinical psychology. I continued
to call myself a Christian, because that was a needed bit of self-identity, and
because I was, after all, an ordained minister, even though my full time job
was as a mental health professional. However, my seminary education had taken
care of any belief I might have had regarding a triune godhead or the divinity
of Jesus, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him. (Polls regularly
reveal that ministers are less likely to believe these and other dogmas of the
church than are the laity they serve, with ministers more likely to understand
such terms as “son of God” metaphorically, while their parishioners understand
it literally.) I thus became a “Christmas and Easter Christian”, attending
church very sporadically, and then gritting my teeth and biting my tongue as I
listened to sermons espousing that which I knew was not the case.
None of the above should be taken to imply that
I was any less religious or spiritually oriented than I had once been. I
prayed regularly, my belief in a supreme deity remained solid and secure, and I
conducted my personal life in line with the ethics I had once been taught in
church and Sunday school. I simply knew better than to buy into the man-made
dogmas and articles of faith of the organized church which were so heavily
laden with the pagan influences, polytheistic notions, and geo-political
considerations of a bygone era.
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