Fifty Basic Questions to Ask Your Pastor
"50 Basic Questions to Ask Your Pastor" by Shawn McCraney encourages believers to critically examine authority and church structure through open, expository methods. This guide gives readers fifty simple questions to ask their pastor, which should be very easily answered - but in the process might instead and more often expose gaps in the church's structural integrity. We offer answers in this book to which the questioner might refer, so that they might have a better understanding of the church they go to, the leadership that holds authority over them, and perhaps might bring to light an empowerment in the individual to pursue God directly.
Sample: Introduction: Fifty Basic Question To Ask Your Pastor
This short book is not about presenting unassailable answers to difficult questions. The responses (included herein) can, in fact, be challenged and may, in some cases, be flat out wrong. I doubt it, but it’s certainly possible. The fact of the matter is I wrote this book to show that there are alternative answers, biblically supported, to what most Christian denominations serve up as truth. Many of those answers (to many of these questions) are based on illogical assumptions, faulty traditions, and just bad exegetical and contextual analysis of the Word of God.
As Jesus Himself said, to know the true and living God and His only begotten Son (in spirit and truth) is life eternal, therefore accepting traditional but often illogical answers to questions is serious business and they ought to be challenged whenever possible. Unfortunately, the world is full of religious rhetoric and is generally resistant to people challenging untenable teachings.
We hope that this book will help you to both understand some of these alternative yet biblically supported responses to the fifty questions supplied herein and to also directly test the men and/or women who stand over you with their self-proclaimed authority.
In any case, read on – consider the questions, and the answers provided, and see if you can see room for change and alternative views to what most believe are set doctrinal standards in the faith. Test all things! Along the way you just might discover that the people you have trusted with teaching you the truth really doesn’t know much more than the traditions they have been taught. Perhaps this little book will help them see the need for change.