When I read a political post on Facebook or Twitter, I rarely respond unless I completely agree with it and it isn’t insulting to anyone as best I can tell. I do this for several reasons, the prime one being that I believe that if you want to say something out loud in a social setting, you are allowed to do so. If you are otherwise interesting or worthy, people will forgive your lapse into boorish behavior. If not, they will ignore your remark for now and you in the future.

I discussed my concerns about my own church in an earlier post. We have since taken a break from that church to see what else is out there. I fear I don’t fit in anywhere. The people in the congregation we left have been wonderful and understanding. Those who agree with our pastor’s political views are particularly understanding because they want to hear more confirmation of their political beliefs from him. Many understand the impetus for our sudden departure, which was the Father’s Day sermon. It covered every hot button politically left slogan/phrase/call to arms out there and we were done. I hope that one day he understands that calling out white, southern males for their society’s racist past and their current white privilege wasn’t the BEST choice for a sermon in his South Carolina church on Fathers Day. He reached out to us after we had largely disappeared for a few months, but didn’t want to have an email conversation. He wanted to talk in person or on the phone, which he conveyed by email because he didn’t want to talk enough to CALL or come by. Lack of self-awareness aside, at least he put the offer out there.

Today I read his blog for the first time in months, only because Dwight said I should. He lamenting the circumstance of a fellow pastor who couldn’t be “real” because he/she had to segregate his/her Facebook friends into groups to keep the conservatives from seeing his/her political posts. He posed the question, how was he to give a sermon with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other if he couldn’t be political? I think once a pastor decides to align himself blindly with a political party or with a political ideology and stops objectively looking at the issues, he needs to step out from behind the pulpit and out of the role of pastor. However, rather than address the question, I wrote a comment on how a pastor can be political and not offend anyone, but didn’t post it because it’s his blog and he should have his say there, as I should have mine here. I offer this:

When the pastor makes people who actively participate in the work and worship of the church, who interact with and care for the sick, the grief-stricken, the needy themselves rather than insist that the government filter more money to them via the bureaucracy, who want to be in that church to worship and do the work of Christ, begin to feel marginalized and disrespected for not aligning themselves with that pastor’s preferred political party, it’s time to do more than segregate Facebook friends. It’s time to examine how they are leading. It’s time to live the talk, because nobody argues with that. It’s time to take in a refugee family chosen for them by someone else, it’s time to live in an area with a diverse population, it’s time to give all they have (ok, all they have above three times the poverty level) to the charitable organization with the highest overhead costs. Because those things are all the reality of what they say they want. It’s time to quit talking and quit posting and do something that makes those they already know feel loved and valued by them and by God and to set an example of something other than the holder of the bully pulpit. It’s never just the posts or the sermons. People see when anyone isn’t living up to their own demands for others. It’s time to stop mistaking humility with stupidity. It’s time to stop creating a personal hierarchy of membership based on level of education or giving. It’s time to let someone impartial help them do some soul-searching. It’s time to be a servant, too.