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I do believe, however, that the more highly educated one becomes, the more difficult it is to find a comfortable church home. You are probably the best educated person in your church, especially including your pastor. It's tough - sitting in the pew and listening to poor grammar, poor homiletics, and poor exigesis all coming from the pulpit.

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Laurie said:
Unfortunately, until Jesus comes this church of ours and its various entities will be filled with severely faulted humans who are capable of great perfidy, cruelty, intellectual dishonesty, guile, jealousy, and hatred. Oh, don't let me leave the sanctimonious, venal, and self serving off the list. There's a shaking coming (is it here already?) and the chaff will be sifted out, those with uncircumcised hearts will fall away.

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But for the grace of God, there go I. In the meantime I choose to put this principle to practice, as the Lord permits.

"Love bears up under anything and everything that comes, is ever ready to believe the best of every person, its hopes are fadeless under all circumstances, and it endures everything [without weakening]."
1 Corinthians 13:7 AMP Brackets theirs

" BRETHREN, IF any person is overtaken in misconduct or sin of any sort, you who are spiritual [who are responsive to and controlled by the Spirit] should set him right and restore and reinstate him, without any sense of superiority and with all gentleness, keeping an attentive eye on yourself, lest you should be tempted also.

Bear (endure, carry) one another's burdens and troublesome moral faults, and in this way fulfill and observe perfectly the law of Christ (the Messiah) and complete what is lacking [in your obedience to it]."
Galatians 6:1-4 AMP Brackets theirs

Blessings!!

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D_Bishop said:
I grew up in a small SE Texas town called Silsbee. We were the average middle class, or slightly working class black family. My Mom, and I, and later my step dad, lived next door to my grandparents. We had another relative, Uncle Tiny, as we called him, who lived just out of town, out in the woods. Uncle Tiny had a cabin that he built out there, also a well and a outhouse that was further back in the woods. Uncle had come back from the Korean war and decided to semi drop out of society. He worked as a handy man, doing electrical work, carpentry, this and that, a sort of jack of all trades.

Lots of folks in town, including some of the family, thought Uncle was a bit strange, living out in the woods alone. They thought it especially strange that he had this weird thing about stopping everything on Saturdays, and having church. After coming back from the war, Uncle attended the regional VA hospital in Austin, Tx., for various war related problems he had. While there someone, a white man, as uncle likes to tell it, gave him a bible study card for some vop bible lessons. He accepted the things he learned as bible truth and became an adventist.

There were no adventist churches near by, at least none that were predominately black. There was an ostinsibly white adventist church in nearby Beaumont, Tx., but uncle, back then, had seen too much racism, lynchings, etc., to feel comfortable with worshipping with white people. You have to understand, some of the nearby towns were places like Vidor, Tx, and a town many thought as a racially benign called Jasper, Tx.

So Uncle would have church by himself. Sometimes he would invite some of his neighbors, those that would come. Saturday evenings, around dusk, he would come up to the grandparents house, his parents, and we would talk. The family would sort of chide him about his sabbath keeping, and from that a discussion would start. My grandfather, who was a local deacon and who did some speaking in the local baptist and methodist churches, would be the lead person arguing, and disagreeing with my Uncle, his son, about the sabbath issue.

After awhile they would get out the big family bible, and have a bible study/set to. All the family would gather around them. Sometimes other aunts and uncles and cousins from Houston would be there. It would be my grandfather against my uncle, and everyone else watching, and backing my grandfather. My grandfather would make a point, and my uncle would counter that with a verse. The verse would be so clear and so unmistakable that I would here some of the other grown up say, "it sho does say that, um hum".


This went on, off and on, for some time, perhaps years. Then one year the sda churches in Houston were having a big tent effort in the 3rd ward area of Houston, near Tx Southern University and the University of Houston. Uncle persuaded all the family members to come out to the meetings, which were conducted by EE Cleveland. After those six weeks or so of meetings were through, several of my greater family became sda, including my grand parents and my mom. That's when I first became acquainted with the sda church, and all that. Afterwards, I was on quite a few occasions one of those 2 or 3 having church with my uncle in his cabin out in the woods.

DB

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