Saving Jesus from the Church [antikvár]

PROLOGUEA PREACHER'S NIGHTMARE; AM I A CHRISTIAN?ii A m I a Christian?" What a strange question for an ordainedttminister of the gospel to ask. Born a minister's son and . raised in a parsonage, I spent my childhood in the conservative Church of Christ, where no musical instruments are allowed in worship. As a college student, I discovered the Congregational Church and the liberal United Church of Christ, which I was warned to avoid, and then never looked back. The UCC has been my home ever since, a brave and messy denomination that has been speaking truth to power for a long time and insisting that we make more room at the table for those who are forgotten.Try as I might to be a "normal" kid (as a teenager I once hid copies of Playboy in plain sight, lest I be mistaken for a saint), 1 was a member of a generation that got its marching orders from Bob Dylan and Martin Luther King Jr. When I was at the tender age of sixteen, two of my heroes were gunned down just weeks apart, one on a hotel balcony in Memphis, the other in a hotel lobby in California. The faint smell of tear gas hung over many college campuses in those days, and the New York Times reported that God was dead. The last thing I wanted to grow up to be was a preacher.As fate would have it, or destiny (if 1 could figure out the difference between the two), the seeds of the ministry had alreadyk:- : i