Posted on 12/05/2017 7:37:41 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Jim Palmer, a former evangelical pastor who once served in ministry at Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago and went on to preach the power of faith to hundreds as lead pastor of his own church in Brentwood, Tennessee, is now the vice president of the Nashville Humanist Association, which promotes humanism and a secular state.
Palmer, 53, told The Tennessean that his journey away from faith in God was triggered about 20 years ago by two devastating events. He said his faith was shaken when he learned that a church staff member was beating their spouse. It then suffered another blow when a woman encouraged by his sermons believed her unborn child diagnosed with a fatal disorder would live. The mother blamed herself when her child died soon after birth.
"That triggered, 'How can I preach this stuff?'" Palmer said. "Beneath the appearance and the surfaces of people's lives there was a level of suffering and brokenness for which my theology did not touch."
In his journey away from faith, the former pastor also lost his marriage.
Despite the loss of his faith and his family, however, Palmer is forging ahead with his belief that there is no God and has now placed his faith in humanity.
"I'm still going to plant my flag down on the belief that we are who we've been waiting for. There is no God in the sky who is going to rescue us," he told The Tennessean. "We've got to pull up our big boy and big girl panties and be human beings."
Palmer, along with Kay Overlund, 34, another former Christian, came together to found the Nashville Humanist Association in August.
Despite Nashville's reputation as the "Buckle of the Bible Belt," some 21 percent of Nashville residents are unaffiliated with any religion, according to the PRRI American Values Atlas.
And Palmer and his team of humanists are seeking to unbuckle the city.
"While it's true that our city is often referred to as the 'Buckle of the Bible Belt' for being a hub of Christian fundamentalism, there is also a fast growing secular community in the Music City and Middle Tennessee. The Nashville Humanist Association aims to connect that community together in meaningful, enriching, empowering and productive ways," the Nashville humanists say.
"Humanism encompasses a variety of views such as atheism, agnosticism, rationalism, naturalism, and secularism. As humanists, our outlook on life attaches prime importance to being human. We stress the value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems," they argue. "Outside the framework of religion or supernaturalism, Humanism affirms our ability and responsibility to lead meaningful, ethical lives capable of adding to the greater good of humanity and working toward a world of less suffering and more flourishing."
Palmer became a Christian when he was in high school, then went on to seminary in Chicago to deepen his faith. After his spiritual unraveling, however, he is now teaching a course about Life After Religion.
"I find that there are many people who leave religion behind but still struggle with finding and experiencing true peace and liberation and happiness and I see that one of the reasons why that is, is that even after one leaves the externals of religion behind there is often a very deeply rooted religious pathology that's persistent in people's lives," he said in a discussion of the course.
"Certain ways of thinking about ourselves and life and other people and these beliefs and mindsets, these narratives that have been indoctrinated into us can be very saboteurial into our journey of wanting to be at peace with ourselves and to live a life of liberation," he said.
Palmer, who is a member of The Clergy Project, an organization that supports religious leaders who no longer believe in God, hosted a screening of a documentary about the organization called "Losing Our Religion" at the Metro police department's West Precinct on Sunday.
His “faith” wasn’t very strong to begin with if it was founded on God justifying Himself to Man.
What theology was that, sir? Certainly not Christian theology.
Never gave much thought, apparently, to that guy that got framed by religious/political enemies and condemned by a kangaroo court--- they spiked him up there on a piece of wood and then they knifed him--- and as he was bleeding to death, called out "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthnai."
That's the only One who could answer his questions.
I believe the order was that they ‘knifed Him’ after He was seas, to test if He was dead or if alive still, to break His legs so He would suffocate quickly because He would not be able to push up and open His lungs.
I believe the order was that they ‘knifed Him’ after He was dead, to test if He was dead or if alive still, to break His legs so He would suffocate quickly because He would not be able to push up and open His lungs.
Quite so.
As Chesterton observed, it doesn’t take faith to believe in Original Sin and all its consequences. You just have to read the newspaper.
I don’t mean to denigrate this gentleman, who might be perfectly sincere and well-intentioned, but if so, he never had any notion of Christianity. Shocked out of your faith because you met a Christian who did something bad? Preposterous!
On the other hand, he might have been huckster all along, and he’s just changed his shtick.
His faith wasn’t in God. It was in people. Then he was appalled to find that God has Free Will.
He was preaching the Prosperity type Gospel. If you do “good” things, God is obligated to do good things for you. In short, you can manipulate God with your actions. God is under your control.
It doesn’t work that way. God is not your employee and you can’t fire Him for non-performance.
Ironically, he believed in Humanism all along.
I am ashamed to admit, I suffer with doubt about God more often than I’d like.
But I am certain about one thing....I have more faith in God than I do in humanity.
It is in tough times that our faith is tested.
Many pastors have spiritual egos. Their flock looks to them for comfort and strength in times of need.
If a pastor is working from his own ego and not from being an empty vessel for the Holy Spirit to work through, he becomes toast.
I watched this happen to a very wonderful human being, a surgeon who was caring, giving, non-judgmental, the church organist, .........
However, his faith was shallow and when he encountered difficulty in his life, he committed suicide. There was no depth to his faith and therefor, no place to find strength in his time of need.
Upon seeing this, I met with the pastor and told him I was leaving this liberal church with my family of six. Shortly after, the pastor left the ministry to find depth in his own faith.
There is a stage in soul development where a person’s religion or spirituality is merely a part of their identity and how they fit into the church community. It is not about their relationship with God. They fall like a house built on sand.
If this man was following a “me centereded” gospel or a health and wealth gospel where God is nothing more than a Genie in a bottle at ones beck and call and the Christian life is expected to be pain and trouble free, then he would be in for disappointment when life does not happen that way. Jesus never said it would be that way in the first place. The Bible is filled with people of faith going through hard times, but the main message is that God is there with them and they are to have faith and trust in Him. GK Chesterton observed, “Jesus promised his disciples three things: that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy and in constant trouble”.
He appears to be angry at God that God did not heal the woman’s unborn child. But did he tell her that God would? Did he presume it? We can pray and ask God for miracles. And I have seen many answers to prayers where God has chosen to answer in the way that was prayed. But it is in God’s hands. He is God, not us. If this former pastor promised this woman a miracle, than he was wrong to do so.
That this former pastor would be shocked when he finds out that someone who called themself a believer was not living the Christian life tells me that he was either very naive or looking for a reason to chuck his faith. Again, the Bible is filled with examples of imperfect people who violated God’s laws and did not always act with love. Church history is not pretty. So-called Christians throughout history have gone against God’s will millions and millions of times and lost opportunities to reflect Jesus’ light, love, grace, and mercy. And the Bible tells that they will be held accountable for this. But to go from that reality that Christians are sinners too to conclude that God does not exist and that you will live the rest of your life with an evangelistic zeal spreading your faith in atheism and the goodness of humanity is quite a jump. It appears to me that he had a shallow understanding of Christianityin the first place. Very sad.
Just a few days ago some of us were discussing
once saved always saved and here it is again.
He is either still saved or he was never saved
according to some,. I don’t know.
But he seems to be some one who wanted to believe
but got nabbed by the great professional
religious leaders whos only purpose is their profession.
It appears that his faith was in his profession and not in
God.
He was never theologically “qualified”!
He chose to leave God. God will not extinguish the “smoking flax” or the “broken reed” of a battered faith. We are a sorry lot if we depend on sinful people or what transpires in this sinful world to judge whether God is faithful to His promise, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”
I agree and that “liberation” comment sounds Marxist. I want to ask him just what it is he needs to be “liberated” from?
Another former pastor there, Jim Dethmer, took an equally puzzling turn. He’s into “conscious leadership” now, whatever that is. Sad. No, tragic.
Right!
And the person who has disappointed me the most is - me!
Oh, well - gotta get back up and keep fighting the good fight!
:-)
Thank goodness!
I couldn't count the times God has allowed something into my life that I would not have chosen - even would have run from - which turned out to be a beautiful gift in ugly wrapping.
Yep, as soon as I saw Willow Creek, I immediately knew the source of his confusion and weakness. Willow Creek is obsessed with a corporate model of church expansion, and seems to want to merge an experience-based form of nominal Christianity with a variety of New Age practices. In other words, it’s typical of the “Emerging Church” heresy that has infected far too many evangelical churches the past number of years.
These “churches” also preach a hyper-grace distortion of the Gospel, and tend to stick to a very narrow selection of Bible passages that they distort to bolster their “don’t worry, be happy” approach. As far as I am concerned, any church that shies away from teaching large sections of the Bible because they think those might be “controversial”, or might alienate certain parishioners is not a church at all.
So when experience-chasing so-called Christians who have been fed a diet of false doctrine inevitably run into the harsh realities of a fallen world, it often leads to their disillusionment and falling away (though I’m not sure falling away would be the proper term if they had never know the real God in the first place). The whole “Emerging Church” mess is both incredibly sad and infuriating. I am so tired of seeing “training” courses and training literature that have virtually no biblical citations in them whatsoever, but instead read as if the CEO of New Age Inc. had written them.
There’s a simple solution: Submit yourself to God, realizing that Jesus made it very clear that this life would not be a bed of roses, but rather that we would face trials and tribulations and would be hated for His namesake. Then, attend a church that sticks to the true Gospel, that teaches the “whole counsel of God”, and that shuns hyper-emotionalism and unhealthy fascination with signs and wonders.
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