Back Again

It's been months since I last posted anything.  It's not that I haven't had things to write; it just hasn't been convenient.  My desktop died, my workplace blocks Blogger (Only God knows why), and I find it inconvenient to type anything of any length on my daughter's notebook or my wife's Chromebook.  The inter-relatedness of much of what I've been reading and thinking about hasn't helped.  Some of the things I've been thinking about touch on other things I've been thinking about in such ways that it is difficult to talk about one subject without talking about, or at least making reference to, others. I didn't like the thought of putting together monster posts that tried to cover way too much.

But it turns out I can't keep my mouth shut; things that should have wound up here, where I enjoy a relative amount of anonymity, and where I can make cloaked references to organizations for the sake of illustration without members of those organizations ever having much of a clue (if any) that I am doing so and getting all honked off about it, wound up in other forums, doled out sentence by sentence.  The fact that I never used names, that I would generally talk about things in general ways, turned out not to be enough.

I shouldn't have been surprised.  If you get annoyed (for example) at a goofball approach to music ministry, reflect that it's epidemic throughout the Southern Baptist Convention, and that it's produced, overall, negative results, all that may be true, and it may never mention your church, but it doesn't require an Einstein for a member of your church to figure out that your inspiration for the comment came from observing the shenanigans at your church.

That wasn't smart.  Oh, every scrap of it was true.  But it still wasn't smart.

Well, I won't be making comments like that in other forums anymore, and the one or two readers I have here, if they know where I go to church at all, will be able to take comments that I make here as illustrative, as I generally intend them to be.

I've heard a lot of horsequeeze lately, and I don't deny that I'm frustrated, so much so that I'm finding it difficult to hold my peace, so I've decided to start writing at work, saving it to a flash drive, and uploading it to Blogger when I get a crack at my daughter's notebook.

I've never had but a handful of readers here, and of those few, of the few that know or suspect who I am, remember this:

It's true that I vent sometimes, especially about what's going on in the North American church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and even my own church.  Sometimes it seems to me that all of them are in the grip of some kind of collective insanity.  Leadership seems deranged to the point of being psycho and members seem unable to discern this and wind up mindlessly defending what should be considered indefensible.  If you're one of those members, one of those people, and what I say here upsets your applecart, please remember this much: I am not trying to destroy any of those institutions.  In fact, my great fear is that they are on the verge of suffering very great damage, and all I am trying to do is throw some thoughts out there for the handful of people that might consider them.