[should pastors have formal training?]
my question is what does the bible say? did Peter have "formal" training? Did John?
Scripture says He will use the foolish to comfound the wise, and it also says He qualifies the called. If the man is allowing the Spirit to teach through him, and committed to the Word and only the Word, he should be fine.
39 comments
"Our current pastor doesn't even have a high school diploma. ( he was Homeschooled and didn't get a GED or anything.) But he did go to 2 years of Bible college."
Talk about the half-witted leading the witless.
Nah, they don't need any information to babble nonsense, they might need to learn some brainwashing techniques to keep successful though.
This goes a long way to explain why these people are such morons. They are being led by the truly ill-educated.
Which, incidentally, is frowned on by Jesus: "Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch." Matthew 15:14 (KJV - the fundies' choice).
"Our current pastor [was] Homeschooled and didn't get a GED or anything. But he did go to 2 years of Bible college."
Well then he is completely ignorant of everything. Just like mullah Omar of the taliban.
Including the bible.
Fine. keep him chained up in your Sunday barn, and don't allow him to speak in public.
Two years of beggar's college. That's nice.
Of course they shouldn't be trained or educated. Fundies don't need an education, everything they need to know is in their bible.
It explains a lot, really.
A degree from a Bible college is like a piece of paper that says you attended sunday school. I laugh every time I hear of someone who has a "doctorate" from a Bible college. I've met dozens of pastors who claim to be "Dr." So-and-so in the fundamentalist Baptist circle I grew up in. They could barely spell their own names, and couldn't construct a grammatically correct sentence if their lives depended on it.
Personally, I have nothing against home schooling. I was home schooled throughout high school, and didn't get a GED. I felt that taking the GED test would've been rather demeaning as I had aced the dual enrollment courses offered at the nearby community college (I took college level Physics, Chemistry, and Calculus while in High School), was bilingual, was an accomplished pianist, and smoked the SAT. As a home schooler without a GED, I had no trouble getting into my 1st choice college, the Univerisity of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where I am currently studying.
No education needed since there's no real logic or inherent wisdom in organized religion. Any idiot can preach, and preach foolishly. In fact, education, a REAL one, would probably move someone away from teaching the lunacy and blindness most faiths do.
I mean, who saw The Colbert Report where that one guy that lived with insane evangelicals was talking about his experiences? He said that a pastor made his parishioners vomit "demons" into a bag backstage, this vomiting session took place over a span of a few hours, and they vomited the demons of such ilk like "handwriting analysis". *LOL*
"I think what's more important, is who did He study under?"
Hmm. Should we call that capital H emphasis or a "freudian" slip?
In other words, the word of god should be taught to people by other people who have done absolutely nothing more than read it themselves. If all pastors and the like need to do is interpret the book by themselves, why don't you fuckers trust the general congregation to interpret the book by themselves? Because the pastors' interpretation is the right one, and anyone else might be wrong? Why, when they arrived at it in exactly the same way as anyone else?
"Our current pastor doesn't even have a high school diploma. ( he was Homeschooled and didn't get a GED or anything.) But he did go to 2 years of Bible college.
Oh, I'm sure he knows it. But can he spell it?
"Scripture says He will use the foolish to comfound the wise...."
Oh, we're confounded all right. We're absolutely gobsmacked that you would not only deliberately follow someone you know to be foolish, but openly and proudly acknowledge doing so as if ignorance were somehow virtuous. Anyone who isn't confounded by this certainly doesn't rank among the "wise."
This is the guy who will tell a church full of people that a fetus is a fully-formed human hours after conception, and that we can't possibly be related to other primates, and THEY'LL BELIEVE HIM!! The real question is, who's the biggest idiot in his church?
I don't believe it's the form of "formal" education that matters, it's the man's heart for the Lord and truly knowing the Word in order to pass it on to the people.
Heart is a blood pump. You sound creepy.
If your so-called pastor endorses the notion of The Rapture, he does not, in fact, know the Word, as you put it.
As priests are also councellors and confession recipients, they ought to have some kind of formal education to cope with all that is required of them.
Two years of Bible "college" just can't be enough. It would take longer than that to read and interpret the whole Bible, let alone discuss it from all possible viewpoints, so that you can talk to your congregation about it from different angles.
If you want to preach like Jesus, wandering the streets, talking to people, eating when someone offered food, sleeping wherever there was dry and warm, then you don't need formal training. But if you want to be paid on a regular basis, as a professor, you need professional training as well.
Yes, without any training and any real education you can be a preacher. Tell us something we don't know. This isn't because of any inner vision but because it's as easy as shit.
There's video of kids and retards preaching on Youtube, not because it's inspiring or remarkable but because it's simple repetition of the same shit over and over.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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