Perhaps Jesus was a bit too wild for the Church. It was easier to expound on Paul’s letters, for instance. Ah, Paul, here was a finely tuned mind, a man of practicalities. Jesus probably didn’t know that we had bills to pay, budgets to meet, programs to run, bylaws to discuss, deacons to nominate, culture to influence, public-opinion battles to wage, doctrine to parse, lines to draw in the sand to mark who was in and who was out. Jesus became the stuff of childhood song lyrics. Church became a social club at times, then it became a burden to bear. I’ll write more about Church later in the
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