Rev. Rochelle Stackhouse remembers being called “Anathema” to her face. And being asked if she planned to do “all that woman stuff” is she was appointed to a certain church’s ministry. Abd getting silenced at a faith-based meeting where her ideas were overlooked for her husband’s.
The episodes happened in different places: when she was young and newly ordained, and living in a small town in rural Michigan, and people would cross the street if they saw her coming; and when she moved to the East Coast, where getting situated took a little more time when she expected.
None of that, she said on the latest episode of WNHH Radio’s “LoveBabz LoveTalk,” has taken her off the path of faith. Instead, it has made her stronger as a religious leader in the community, and more thoughtful as a wife, mother, and devotee of God
From whether Christianity soured at some point — perhaps with the Left Behind series, which so profoundly botched the books of Revelation when it came out in the 1990s — to the precipitous decline in Church attendance among millennials, the two tackled serious and touchy questions about Christianity and about faith more generally.
Like how some people — including some of the GOP’s presidential candidates — who have chosen to take selective parts of the bible not only literally, but as a source of scientific fact.
“The problem is people are getting their history of the bible not from the bible … that’s problematic,” Stackhouse said “We need to challenge each other. We need to hear dissenting voices. People pick and choose … but you can’t … No one has ever said: ‘The entire bible, God dictated it.’ There is a component of that. But for the vast majority of literature, that’s simply not the case. I think that somehow we’ve got a confusion going on. I think people are missing the richness that … the bible is people’s experience of God.”
Did the church need to change? Rawls-Ivy asked.
“It’s morphing,” Stackhouse responded. “The way we are doing things has to change.”
“We’ve got to bridge this gap between what people think the church is, what the church is, and what the church can be,” she added.
To hear the full episode, click on the above audio file or find the episode in iTunes or any podcast app under “WNHH Community Radio.”
Church, like the Republican party, will adapt or perish if it will remain relevant to future generations. Mistaking the Bible as the word of God is a classic example of Baudrillard's 'precession of simulacrum' where the symbol has somehow become the thing it was originally meant to represent. It's quite common, but never so detrimental as when it deals with matters of personal faith. I predict further sectarianism within Christianity as groups splinter over the recognition of this fundamental concept.