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* Have you ever been convicted of a Felony?
* Have you ever been a Youth Minister?
You’re a musician whether or not you happen to have a paying gig right this moment.
If you’re a stock clerk or a police officer, you have a job. If the grocery store or police force fire you then you are no longer a stock clerk.
The question is whether being a youth pastor is more like being a doctor, a musician or a stock clerk. Is it a specialist skill, is youth-pastoring inherent in the person? Or is it a job, so that if you have the job you are one and if you don’t, you aren’t?
Sounds to me as though youth pastors are being treated like stock clerks. It’s assumed to be low-skill, a generalist position for which a lot of people are qualified.
So you want to be an actual pastor? Great. You need to have lots of letters of recommendation from a variety of sources--your home congregation, your home district/synod/presbytery/etc, personal references.
You'll need a bachelor's degree first (preferably something like religion, but sociology or psychology will also do) and get admitted to a seminary. My sister's seminary did FBI background checks on their students as a matter of course. You'll do lots of classwork and practicum in your course of study, which may require further background checks. (Sister Griffin did a "student pastor" gig as a VA hospital chaplain, and had to do a lot of extra checks to get in).
In essence, if you're doing it above board, for a legit church (not an independent non-denominational Holy roller type place), there are a ton of checks to the system. Is it perfect, no, but it's better than nothing.
Want to be a youth pastor? You just show up, guitar playing skills are a plus. Youth pastors are not vetted any further than their local church and have no additional requirements for mental soundness/generally not being a douche/some sense of how the doctrine of that church works. There's a lot or trust (often too much ) at this level.
No need to imagine that journalists are reassuring us that these guys are all *former* youth pastors because religion. The simplest explanation is that journalists think (presumably with good reason) that youth pastors are analogous to stock clerks.
I mean the "Central Park jogger" remained that name, and she ain't exactly been doing any jogging since then.
Keep up the good work!
It's actually one of my pet peeves when journalists pull a job out of someone's youth to create a rags to riches story. From caddy to PGA champion! Most everyone washed dishes or ran copies at some time in their life.
But that is far from the case here.
I mean, sure, there's lots of perverts in positions of trust within the chuck that take advantage of said trust. The same can be said for literally every other vocation that places individuals in a position of trust over children, from teachers to doctors to police officers.
Is the point supposed to be that there's a HIGHER incidence of sexual molestation among pprotestant youth pastors then in the general pop? If so, actual data would be more relevant. Picking and choosing individual cases shows nothing other then the fact that people I'm positions of trust over children sometimes abuse them. I could post stories about molesting teachers all the yield, and I don't think that would say anything inherent about the teaching profession.
And I say this as a committed atheist. I have no love for the church or its hypocrisy. I'm just not sure the point of it.
For those of us who a ready know that organized religoon is literally the biggest con ever perpetrated on the human race, we don't need stories about pastors to know it's mostly a sham. And for those who DO believe the Church has some moral authority, these won't change a thing. They'll just wrote them off as a few bad apples.
I think the number of people who fall in between these two polar extremes would astonish you. Really.
The "few bad apples" crowd is an enormous swath of the middle American population, far from only being True Believers. Dan is right to call this shit out for as long as it continues to be swept under the rug by (tax-free!) mega-church authorities.
Dan Savage, raised a good Catholic boy, is simply pointing out the plank/beam/branch in their eye with regards to children that needs removing before they can point out the splinter/mote in the eye of homosexuals in general, and his parenting in particular.
that he can aggregate so many incidents, week after week, year after year, is pretty fucking appalling.
What's wrong with this picture?