Article January 27, 1997 Issue

Don't limit God!

by Kim Shippey

In a recent "Word of the week" column in the American weekly newspaper The Vermont Standard, the Reverend John C. Pate, pastor of the Woodstock Baptist Fellowship, apologized to those who had become disengaged from Christianity because of the behavior of Christians. He said he felt that those who felt they had been emotionally or spiritually burned by churches hadn't witnessed the real thing, real Christianity in action. What they had seen was invalid, even phony. "We church people have not been what we should have been," he wrote, "but we're trying to change."

In a conversation with the Sentinel, Rev. Mr. Pate explained that what had impelled him to apologize in this way was a conviction that we cannot even begin to compare the Church today to the Church described in the New Testament book of Acts. "This is a path of thought I have been following recently," he said, "and I just felt I needed to step outside of my institutional box long enough to see the big picture."

The rest of his column speaks for itself:^{ Reprinted with permission of The Vermont Standard, Woodstock, Vermont.}

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