Marlin

I’m a retired pastor. At one time I was a PE teacher and a coach. I‘ve found a lot of parallels between being a pastor and a coach. You teach and motivate and encourage and exhort. You push and pull. You lead and follow. You coach. I love being a coach.

Now I am trying to find my way into the final season of my life. I’m actually excited about it. For whatever reason, I find myself still connected to church. I’m not quite sure why, habit maybe, stubbornness, or maybe just an unwillingness to give up something to which I’ve given so much of my energy and life.

I agonize over how the church has driven out so many of our sons and daughters. It both pains and angers me, because it is so profoundly silly. And that’s the best word I could find to describe what is happening in so many of our churches.

People who ask questions, who doubt, who wonder, who challenge orthodoxy, who sit, every Sunday, silently wishing the pastor would say one thing that is interesting to them, or connected to what they see both in the world and in the Word, the Bible.

My desire is to engage with you who are also willing to question everything in order to learn something about anything, and especially about people we love who are lost to the church – not to God, not to Jesus, but to the church. That’s so very sad to me, and silly!