Dear Editor
Re: Kenneth Platz’s article, From The Pulpit, March 22, 2011 issue of The Journal.
With all due respect Ken, there are a number of reasons why people are leaving the church in droves and have been leaving the Church for the last 50 or so years.
There are some mighty good people in this community who do not attend church. Or, whom do not feel the need, or the inclination to attend a church. And I don’t think that any of those reasons is because they lack the “discipline” which you mentioned.
The reasons are multifarious. Maybe, they are agnostics. Maybe they are atheists. Maybe they do not appreciate the rituals of worship. Maybe they are traditionalists in the native sense. Have evolved their own rituals of worship, - such as the sweat lodge, the burning of sweet grass or sage. Maybe they can just sit in a meadow and pray to the Creator as their conscience and their minds feel what can often be impossible to explain or describe.It was not discipline that built the Church or any religion. Church, mosque, temple. It was Faith. And Faith in the unseen has always been a kind of miracle.
Jeff Beck, former pastor of Cache Creek Pentecostal Church once declared, “The church is not a building.” I’ve never forgotten that.
Fortunately, O, so fortunately!, we live in a free society. We can choose. Some mighty disciplined people who go to work every day, support their families, apply themselves to the arts, social services, education, sciences, etc. etc. choose not to attend a house of worship. They have their reasons. We should respect that. That’s what Democracy is all about.
Esther Darlington MacDonald
Cache Creek