Fake Church Bells

How old and traditional can a feller get?  I am so old and traditional that I don't want to hear those electronic church bells played through big speakers.  If I can't have real bells I don't want no bells at all.

Heavenly Sports?

I suppose there are huge TV screens in heaven, bringing in a perfect picture of every sports channel on the planet. There are lots of fans who will just refuse to go if they can't take sports with them. Not me.  I hope there is a small room someplace, far removed from the crazed sports people.  Just big enough for the handful of us who don't get it about sports. I just want to play my harp, sing in the choir and flap my wings once in a while to be sure my angel license hasn't been revoked. 
As for what hell might be like, I do not want to think about that right now.

Good old King James.

I still like the old Thee and Thou language of the  King James version of the Bible.  Do I believe God reached down from heaven in 1611 and declared it the one, true, final and authorized version of Holy Scripture?  Of course not.  

Fulton J. Sheen... if he were with us today

• Fulton J. Sheen was a masterful religious communicator on radio and in television's early days. His ratings beat some popular comedy shows.  Just think what he could do with today's technology.

         That's not my original idea.  I got it from one of today's great communicators, 
         Father Robert Barron.  I can't stop with just one of his videos. They are arresting.

The Road to Rome?

There are some Roman Catholic ideas, beliefs and practices that I like quite a lot.  Now I'm in trouble. I must tell my Catholic friends that I am a happy old mainline Prot, as Scott Hahn calls us.  (He said "All Prots go to hell")   I have no plans to hop on the Road to Rome like he did. Then I must assure strongly Evangelical friends that I am not going to embrace the Papacy, even as appealing as the present Holy Father is. Finally I will deal with those who have left The Catholic Church in anger or pain and want to tell me about it. So the only thing to do is just go into my self editing introvert mode and decide if I should delete the whole thing and keep these thoughts to myself.

The Reverend Doctor so and so

I like a clergyperson who has a lot of advanced education.  Oh boy, I can hear the comments this one will bring if anybody reads it. "What are you, some kind of far Left intellectual nerdy geek?  You might as well become a Unitarian. Isn't an ordination from a good Bible School enough?" Well, I like Unitarian Universalists.  They are interesting.  I did a couple of talks for their group a long time ago.  I have no plans to become one.  They are too much in their heads for me.
I like a Christian clergyperson who knows stuff about the Bible, church history,  what the early church fathers and the  great theologians have said over the centuries and a whole lot more that you can only get from a whole lot of education.

Avoid politics and religion??

Sometimes I get close to agreeing with those who say you should not talk about religion or politics.  They are so loaded with words that are prejudiced,  typical, stereotypical and fraught with emotional reaction.  You hear a word or phrase that makes a red flag pop up in your head and the hope of a nice, non confrontational conversation goes out the window. Oh, it's possible but not easy.

Extra goofy church stuff.

In church the far Left minister tossed a Bible to the floor in a dramatic demonstration of her conviction that it's full of stuff that is not true and downright wrong.  I didn't make that up or find it on the internet.  I was there. I can't say I was horrified.  It's more like the whole performance was just laughably stupid. It's like a fundamentalist hurling a copy of the Koran into the air.  I don't know if that has happened.  If it does, the whole world will know about it and the media pundits will love it. Some of them would applaud the lady preacher of whom I speak.  OK,   I have become a terrible cynic.

How social can the gospel get?

A friend says she learned in church that denigration of women, as practiced by Donald Trump, is a cause of rape.  That's OK with me if it came up in a church discussion group.  But I will vigorously shake my head and slap my forehead if it's from the Sunday Sermon. I can't handle that.  The old "Social Gospel" that I grew I grew up with a hundred years ago took its lumps from critics on the Right.  But it never got that outspokenly social. The infamous Father Coughlin provided that.  One of my favorite ministers had been in trouble for his anti-war stand in World War Two. But I never heard about it from the pulpit. He later became the social concerns director for one of the denomination's largest districts. He remains a cherished and admired memory.