Page 127 - moondani kyema
P. 127
ndani kyema, My Story - Ray Moore 127
and some crazy, would stand on their soap boxes and see who could draw the
biggest crowd. In a funny sort of a way, they were an inspiration to me!
So this battle between the mystic and the sceptic continued in me for many years
When I was preaching in the four churches that I pastored, I would often be asked to
preach on ‘the second coming’. I found this a most confusing part of the Bible with
equally competent experts giving opposing views. I did not know what I believed, so I
did not preach on this particular subject. I was also expected to preach on
‘stewardship’. I did not mind preaching about good use of your finances and other
assets, but I had a real problem with the fact that the expected result of this
preaching was meant to be that people put more in the collection plate. You will
understand that in my small churches, there was very little money to pay my stipend,
so I felt that in the end I was drumming up my own pay. That did not feel right.
This leads me to think of another problem, that of motivation. I was always having an
inner battle about the motives for my actions. As a pastor, what was I trying to
achieve? A bigger church? More people responding to my preaching (“Ray is a
great preacher isn’t he”)? A greater feeling of belonging (read ‘power’) in the
community? I don’t know. Maybe it was all of these, but what should my motives
have been? Even now, I really don’t know.
The next stage in my pilgrimage was to try and clarify all this and then discard the
things I had hung on to because I did not “Constant development is the law of
want to ‘backslide’. This took a long time
and it involved breaking from many aspects life, and a man who always tries to
of my life which were comfort zones, but maintain his dogmas in order to
were not congruent with my newly clarified
template. As I took each step I experienced appear consistent drives himself into
a false position.”
a wonderful sense of freedom and a Mohandas Gandhi
lightening of the burden of guilt. I became
more comfortable with myself and eventually
worked a lot of these things out with Bev, so that our relationship had no hidden
corners. We are now more in love than we have ever been!
I still have two sides in me, the mystical and the sceptical, but now I don’t experience
it as a conflict, but as two equally important parts of my personality. My Christian
faith is strong, but does not escape scanning from the sceptic in me!
Return to Table of Contents
and some crazy, would stand on their soap boxes and see who could draw the
biggest crowd. In a funny sort of a way, they were an inspiration to me!
So this battle between the mystic and the sceptic continued in me for many years
When I was preaching in the four churches that I pastored, I would often be asked to
preach on ‘the second coming’. I found this a most confusing part of the Bible with
equally competent experts giving opposing views. I did not know what I believed, so I
did not preach on this particular subject. I was also expected to preach on
‘stewardship’. I did not mind preaching about good use of your finances and other
assets, but I had a real problem with the fact that the expected result of this
preaching was meant to be that people put more in the collection plate. You will
understand that in my small churches, there was very little money to pay my stipend,
so I felt that in the end I was drumming up my own pay. That did not feel right.
This leads me to think of another problem, that of motivation. I was always having an
inner battle about the motives for my actions. As a pastor, what was I trying to
achieve? A bigger church? More people responding to my preaching (“Ray is a
great preacher isn’t he”)? A greater feeling of belonging (read ‘power’) in the
community? I don’t know. Maybe it was all of these, but what should my motives
have been? Even now, I really don’t know.
The next stage in my pilgrimage was to try and clarify all this and then discard the
things I had hung on to because I did not “Constant development is the law of
want to ‘backslide’. This took a long time
and it involved breaking from many aspects life, and a man who always tries to
of my life which were comfort zones, but maintain his dogmas in order to
were not congruent with my newly clarified
template. As I took each step I experienced appear consistent drives himself into
a false position.”
a wonderful sense of freedom and a Mohandas Gandhi
lightening of the burden of guilt. I became
more comfortable with myself and eventually
worked a lot of these things out with Bev, so that our relationship had no hidden
corners. We are now more in love than we have ever been!
I still have two sides in me, the mystical and the sceptical, but now I don’t experience
it as a conflict, but as two equally important parts of my personality. My Christian
faith is strong, but does not escape scanning from the sceptic in me!
Return to Table of Contents
