Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Spiritual Leaders

Mere Comments: Men as Spiritual Leaders. Whether You Like It or Not.


Found the following yesterday. I don't think I read this when it was first published, but it resonates with what I have thought about worship being both "intellectual" and "sensual" but with the latter being ordered to the former.

Please Me, O Lord
S. M. Hutchens on the Roots of Romantic Worship

Nor do churches that may elect their own pastors without interference from the denominational intelligentsia favor the women that have been forced on mainline congregations. The Evangelical churches, in accordance with their tradition, can remain “merely feminized”: “soul-winning,” now in the sense of gravid with “seekers,” full of the warmings sought by Evangelicals, and marked by preaching and music that present no particular challenge to the mind or tastes of a child of ten—a child that in traditional cultures has not yet, as Leon Podles observes in The Church Impotent, left the society of women. The church feminized is not only the church demasculinized, but inevitably the church infantilized as well.

The excuse for this is that to “reach” people, the churches must operate on this level, but this becomes suspect when it appears that nothing deeper is available in these congregations for those who have for many years been “reached.”


No comments: