What we see in life depends where we are looking from. This blog is a new blog because I have again changed my position, which will no doubt change what I see and how I respond to it.
In the early 1990’s I wrote a newspaper columned entitled VIEWPOINT, which ran once a week in the local newspaper where I then lived … a small town in which I was the pastor of one of the churches. Then came the internet and the opportunity to write blogs, and I was again living in a larger city and pastor of a church there. So I had a blog entitled PASTOR DIETER’S VIEWPOINT.
Now I am retired, living in yet another city (my hometown Kitchener, Ontario actually) and travel from time to time. So what is different this time about the blog? While the opinions that I have expressed in the past have always been my own, they needed to some extent to be rather guarded. For example I had to be careful about politics. I was employed by churches that were registered charities, and in Canada registered charities can not engage in politics. So I treated my blog as if I were in the pulpit … I bit my tongue about my political opinions. I no longer have that restraint…
I am adjusting to being on “the other side” of the pulpit, namely in the pew. The view is very different on either side. The view from the pew is more critical. I wonder if everyone is as critical – or is it just those who once were behind the pulpit and now in the pew are unnecessarily hard on the one who is at the front? I don’t know. I’m still figuring that out. What also complicates matters is that I still preach from time to time, and so I commute as it were, between the pulpit and the pew.
In any case, something that I have always done, is tell it like… well I was about to say tell it like it is, but a more humble way would be to tell it like I see it.