The marriage of clergy is a controversial subject. Here are the current practices in the Christian tradition:

Roman Catholic: Clergy may not be married unless they are transfers from traditions that allow marriage. In such cases, the divorce or death of the wife means that the priest/deacon may not remarry without a dispensation from the local bishop. Bishops may not be married.

Eastern Orthodox: Clergy can be married IF they are married prior to their ordination to the priesthood – but married clergy are forbidden to be consecrated bishops. If a priest’s or deacon’s marriage ends from death or divorce, he may not remarry without a dispensation from the church and only for extraordinary reasons (such as a cleric family with many small children).

Anglican: These matters are handled by the diocese and/or jurisdiction where the cleric is from. In most cases, a cleric can marry, divorce, and remarry without concern once. Second remarriages are rare…and more than that are rarer still. Bishops can be married. Jurisdictions that allow same-sex marriages are in a state of technical disfellowship within the communion, thought that is not enforced.

Protestant: Wide variation. Marriages are generally allowed for Protestant clergy. In some places, when a cleric is divorced, he or she is also defrocked and disfellowshipped. In other communities, divorce has no bearing on the cleric…even to the point of permitting her or him to remain in their current ministry.

The various groups within Christianity that forbid remarriage do so with the belief that marriage is a sacrament (or a Biblical model) of the relationship between Christ and the Church. It is a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience. And while there are allowances for certain conditions, remarriage is an exception, not a given.

Most faith communities that do not excommunicate their divorced clergy might require some sort of divorce recovery program or individualized therapy before allowing the cleric to return to vocational ministry. In almost no settings would a member of the clergy be allowed to remarry before a healing period of 18-36 months. All of these steps are prudent.

In cases where clergy endure divorces as the “victim” of divorce (meaning she/he did not seek the divorce and wanted reconciliation), there is very little difference in remarriage. For example, some denominations would treat the “victim” of divorce the same with regards to whether or how remarriage happens. In a few denominations, a divorce-is-divorce approach means even if the spouse leaves, the cleric’s days as a vocational minister is over. If your spouse leaves you, that’s life.

There is another critical factor involved in this discussion: The leadership role of clergy. We expect clergy to be true paragons of virtue. Pastors find themselves on pedestals because, “to whom much is given, much is required.” This means that clergy must be “above reproach.” A divorced cleric, therefore, carries a stigma. Marital failure is often like the “Scarlet Letter”.

We need more discussion on this subject. Yes, I have a “horse in this race”. Let’s keep the discussion going anyway.

America’s public school systems has some amazing teachers – some I know personally. But there are many teachers, administrators, and even advocates of the current system that are blind to the many failures the current system produces.

I was blessed to have some amazing people in my student years who challenged me to do better. And while I was often deaf to their voice or emotionally upset by their comments, I learned a few things…and even practiced one or two of them.

I hope that what follows can be included in any future curricula at any school in America. We need a return to this formula to truly Make America Great Again…political party differences notwithstanding.

Do you want to be the best you can be? Here are a few ideas about that noble and wonderful path:

1. Leave your ego at the door.

2. Be prepared to work harder than you’ve ever worked before. The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary.

3. You must sacrifice good things that do not matter for the great things that do.

4. You must get ruthless with yourself.

5. You must forget everything you think you know about yourself. The only thing that matters is the generation of references to prove what you can do in the world of experience.

6. Mediocre people don’t like high performers. They will tell you to slow down, take a break, be realistic. You must speed up, keep going, and be “UNrealistic”.

7. You must make an ally out of two paradoxical principles: self-knowledge and faith. You need to have a clear understanding of where you stand at any given moment, but have a powerful belief in where you will be by working hard and getting better.

8. You must have a clear demarcation between what you believe and what you know. Don’t mix up the two.

9. Less than 1% of the people in this world are willing to do what it takes to push the limits and become the greatest they can be. That’s why they are the most prosperous and happy people on the planet.

10. You have no idea how jealous and petty people can become when you become great.

This is a painful entry to write because it is critical of the Church. I hope the readers of my materials will understand that I take no delight in exposing the truth about the Christian community…I love the Church. But we must face our own demons if we are to heal and change the perception of the world about who we really are.

Today is known as Reformation Day…the yearly remembrance of Martin Luther nailing his 95 ideas on the door of his church building that launched a rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church. The Church in the West needed reforming. It needs reforming again…

Few people are more adept at understanding the true nature of the Church than His Beatitude, Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen. He was the former head of the Orthodox Church in America. His story epitomizes the real sickness of Christianity that demands we move down the road of repentance, sackcloth, and ashes.

Metropolitan Jonah addressed the Anglican Church of North America in 2009 during one of their first meetings. His intent was to reach out to this new Anglican movement in the United States and hopefully create a link that would bring these Anglicans into full communion with the Orthodox Communion. The link to his address is here: https://youtu.be/sHRgCIPofc8?si=vEr4XY-kF2odlzv_

My focus is on his simple words uttered at the beginning of the address: “We are all hypocrites.” Metropolitan Jonah wanted to make clear from the outset that he was not living in an unrealistic, “pie-in-the-sky” world where the millenium had arrived. He understood that the Church was an organization filled with hypocrisy, denial, and even outright deceit. The extent of the corruption was later to make itself plain to him in great power.

Shortly after this address, Metropolitan Jonah was confronted by bishops from his own church for his “mismanagement”. As a result, Metropolitan Jonah was forced to take a leave of absence from his duties as the senior bishop of the OCA. Not long after that, he was railroaded into submitting his permanent resignation as Primate of the OCA.

I’ve never discovered the full reasons behind his betrayal and expulsion, but I have my hunches. The bottom line, however, is that the bishops of the OCA acted because they wanted to preserve their church from Jonah’s reforming ways. Their was sin in the camp, and Jonah intended to expose it no matter where it was. The bishops would have none of that.

In 1991, I attended the Chaplain Officer Basic Course at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. One of the themes repeated to us over and over was this: “Beware of S.A.M.: Sex, Alcohol, and Money.” In the intervening years, I’ve come to believe that acronym should be S.P.A.M.; add the word “power” for that “P”. Clergy are held to a higher standard of human behavior on S.A.M., but not P. Clergy are not trained well in handling power, which explains why we do such stupid stuff so often. It is also the greatest source of the church’s corruption…because so many men and women in church authority use power to cover-up abuse of sex, alcohol, and money. It’s a predictable pattern.

In the early 1990s, the Roman Catholic Church was rocked with stories of clerics and other leaders using their power to abuse women and children. Some priests who violently raped children were sent to new parishes where their proclivity to molest children surfaced again. This cycle sometimes repeated itself 3 or more times in a diocese. The bishops involved were often hindered in their willingness to help by the confidentiality of the sacrament of reconciliation. But more often than not, they were trying to protect the church from litigation and public exposure. What’s worst some bishops actually blamed the victims of this conduct in an attempt to say that children “seduced” priests to rape them.

Of course Protestant churches often raise their heads arrogantly and say that this didn’t happen in their denominations. Truth be told, however, the Protestant churches in America had MORE miscarriages of justice and bureaucratic maneuvering to cover up sexual abuse of their leaders than their Roman Catholic counterparts. At least that was what the statistics suggested in the mid-90s when I studied this problem.

One can hardly turn on religious TV without seeing greedy clergy exploiting the poorest and most desperate for their money. No one best represents this mess than the rise and collapse of Robert Tilton. An uneducated salesman, Tilton fleeced his own flock for millions of dollars every year while also taking his “TV Ministry” nation-wide to get “$1000 vows) from people looking for a miracle to heal them of terminal disease or a way out of bitter poverty. ABC News exposed Tilton as a charlatan in 1991, and his organization finally fell apart. But there are thousands of others using the same approach to steal millions of dollars from the lowest of the low on the social-economic ladder.

But there is another serious problem. It is the wholesale abuse of the clergy by their congregations and their ecclesiastical superiors. Anyone who has been in the ministry longer than 5 years hears stories of local congregations putting their pastors out on the streets for reasons as crazy as “wearing worldly ties” to “not using the right translation of the Bible”. Truth be told, most of the people who were my contemporaries at Asbury Theological Seminary were good men and women wanting nothing more than to serve, love, and minister to their congregations. Too many of my seminary compatriots are no longer in ministry because congregations have abused their pastors, leaving broken marriages and emotionally scarred clergy in their wake. I have not addressed the abuses of bishops, district superintendents, and boards of ordained ministry involved in destroying clergy.

It’s time for more than adjustments. We need reform. Here are just a few items to consider:

1.        We need to hear more about how to prevent our clergy from getting destroyed by S.P.A.M. We need to reinforce standards, not cover up abusers. But we need compassionate answers to the all-too-human tendency to abuse our sexualities, substances, and money.

2.        Denominational officials need policies that provide pastoral care for people abused by clergy. There must also be a clear delineation in the penitent-confessor relationship where these denominational officials are concerned. Bishops Ordinary should never hear the confessions of their priests. Ever. It is a formula for covering up and abuse at every level.

3.        Denominations need to embrace that they have a duty to help their clergy, even when they fall into moral failure. Defrocking and expelling is the old answer…but it is inadequate. Even when violations of standards are severe enough for a lifelong expulsion from leadership in congregational matters, there must be means to support the sinner and his/her family for a limited time to help the former cleric’s loved ones survive through the earliest stages of healing. Pastors are human beings…and none of us are perfect. “We are all hypocrites”.

4.        Finally, it’s time for we clergy to realize that we cannot serve God and mammon. Minimalism is as much a part of our calling as learning church history and biblical theology. If we are not ready to support ourselves in ministry, we are probably exposing ourselves and our families to tremendous risk. This philosophy of minimalism applies to substance abuse as well…we need to have tools at the ready to manage our ongoing emotional and spiritual development so that using alcohol and drugs to numb our hearts instead of growing interpersonally happens less often.

A Reflection on an Election.

The end of the election cycle this year brought relief for many Christians. Kamala Harris was soundly defeated, Donald Trump was overwhelmingly (in the electoral college) elected, and we expect the Millenium to start the day after inauguration.

At least that’s what I’m seeing from many evangelicals and conservative Christians.

I awoke Wednesday morning about 2:00 AM local time and checked my preferred news outlets to see what was happening. It seemed clear that President Trump was well on his way to winning. In past years, this would thrill me. This year the experience was different.

I felt sad.

After I checked the local elections, I was especially concerned about the various Missouri constitutional amendments, especially Amendment 3 which would legalize infanticide in the womb (I refuse to us the language of the Left. It’s not “abortion”…it is killing at best, murder at worst.) Three of the amendments I voted against (including Amendment 3) were passed by the peopl of Missouri, overriding the legislature and governor. The other two amendments created a “public school funding” amendment to allow sports betting and a mandate that increased the minimum wage, forced employers to allow their employers time off for family and personal reasons, and other “pro-employee” requirements.

I felt nauseous that my state, an otherwise conservative bastion, would tolerate allowing our unborn children to be slaughtered in the womb. Then I discovered that the same amendment mandates that children who want to “transgender” can have access to the procedure and even receive state funding for the procedure. Finally, I discovered that young minor girls can get abortions without mandating that their parents know and give consent.

I also see through the whole sports betting nonsense. All this does is solicit organized crime to blackmail professional athletes to blow games so these manipulators can make millions of dollars. They shroud their corruption in the “money for education” nonsense…the same drivel that was used to allow the poorest among us to spend their money on the lottery, hoping that their purchases of tickets will allow them to be millionaires. Of course, we still have problems funding salaries for our teachers here…and I predict we will even with this stupid new amendment passing.

And these “pro-emp[l;oyee” requirements will only make our state poorer and our workers face an increased risk of unemployment. Employers forced to pay their workforce more money will now be looking to increase efficiency with fewer employees, sending more of the poorest on social services for the sub-par pittance they provide. In addition, businesses will now raise their prices on goods and services to make their bottom lines balance, hitting their customers with inflation. Finally, some small businesses, already fighting to stay in business, will close their doors, sending their former employees onto the social service lines. Misery, indeed!

I did an analysis of this election. 67 million Americans voted for a candidate to be our president that was supremely ill-prepared and ill-equipped to be the most important person of the greatest country of the world. She received 47% of the vote in this country. This means, in simplified terms, that we were 4% away from electing a person who would destroy America, multiply the misery of the average American, and give the nuclear launch system to a person who can’t even put together a substantive sentence.

Finally, I remain appalled at the mainstream media. I call the the “LameStreamMedia” for a simple reason: they are liars and propaganda mouthpieces for the statist minority in America. They propped up Kamala Harris and trashed Donald Trump with lies, distortions, fake news, and outright slander. In America, we have a dirth of real, objective news. It’s time we ignore ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and yes, even Fox. We need real news and objective reporting, not the infected puss material hoisted on us regularly by the LameStreamMedia.

I pray for the President – whoever he or she is. I pray President Trump discovers ways to make America better. I believe it starts by neutering the federal establishment in Washington, DC…which he could easily do because he can only serve one more term this iteration. We need libertarian ideas, smaller government, and an America-first approach to economics that stops allowing other nation states to block access to their markets from our goods and services without cost to their own businesses. I’m hopeful.

But we better be ready, because the statists are coming to derail all that…and they are good at that. When it comes to the next two years, I hope the GOP has a “take no prisoner” approach and stop trying to compromise with people who never extend that courtesy when they are in power. Politics is war…and elections have consequences.

We have work to do. So let’s roll up our sleeves and get busy.

Recently a friend of mine posited the argument that with the end of the elections, it was time for the people of the United States to come together and unify. In fact, he argued that this was the biblical and Christian position to take.

But something about that didn’t ring true with me.

I responded that there are opportunities for unity, but that this is not one of them. To illustrate, one need only remember the elections in Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1933, with Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany, elections were held for the Reichstag, the German parliament. The Nazis took control of the Reichstag in that election, opening the door wide for all sorts of evil done by the hands of Germany’s government apparatus. Now imagine a genuinely German Christian suggesting that an orthodox believer in Jesus Christ should “unify” with the anti-Semitic Nazis.

For the last four years, the Democrat Party has been in control of the presidency and the Senate. In 2022, the GOP took control of the House of Representatives, which meant that the Democrats could not wield unlimited legislative power. But look at what the Democrats did during that period:

1.        The Democrat Party committed massive cheating to give Joe Biden the White House. The cheating in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania was shocking.

2.        The Democrat Party falsely claimed that the January 6th event was a “coup” that Donald Trump incited. They then rounded up people they could identify with MAGA and put them in prison…many of them are STILL locked up awaiting parole or the completion of their sentences.

3.        The Democrat Party used the justice department and courts in Democratically held areas to indict Donald Trump on ridiculous charges from violating election laws to rape. None of these charges were serious…and the presidential election of Trump is evidence that the American people didn’t buy what the Democrats and their sycophants in the media were selling.

4.        The Democrat Party advanced an agenda of permitting children to determine their own gender and allowed Naziesque doctors to chop off breast and genitalia. The militant trans-gender movement has no greater ally than the Democrats and their allies in the press.

5.        America’s new racism moved deeper inside America’s heart as the Democrat Party helped Black Lives Matter become mainstream, looking away at their extremism. In addition, the Democrat-controlled education establishment perpetrated racial hatred by promulgating the 1619 Project and Critical Theory, despite the Marxist origins and outright lies within them.

6.        The Democrats turned the US military into a Woke organization…permitting cross-dressers into base libraries to read to children.

7.        Democrats like Bill Clinton, Tom Hanks, and Bill Gates (among many others) are connected to pedophile rings. Instead of exposing these infestations, the media and Democrats are in full cover-up mode to protect these people from justified scrutiny.

8.        The Democrats opened our borders and allowed millions and millions of illegal aliens into the United States. Among these masses are criminals who kill our children and market addictive drugs like fentanyl.

9.        Finally, the Democrats and RINOs in Congress have spent us into a debt hole we can never payback. The United States is $35 trillion in debt…with most of that coming in the form of our federal government spending trillions of dollars more than we bring in via taxation. We now have no other choice but to declare national bankruptcy in the near future.

I could go on talking about how Obamacare has destroyed our healthcare system, our police now view the American people as the enemy and violate our rights repeatedly and with the blessing of Democrat judges, and the militarizing of government agencies like the Post Office (of all groups!)

No, I have no interest in unifying with Democrats. In fact, I am interested in only one activity regarding Democrats:

Defeating them at the ballot box and annihilating them politically.