NY Times Features Street Prophets and Pastor Dan Schultz
Congrats to Pastor Dan. He comments here. Though we occasionally disagree, Dan has been a good friend to this blog--he even gave us some great advice when we couldn't figure out our bitchin' new Apple. I'm glad he's found a way to serve two flocks and to find a group of good Wisconsin folk who understand and appreciate both roles. I actually read this article in today's Wisconsin State Journal, which played up the local angle.
A Pastor Finds a Way to Serve Two Disparate Flocks:
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
CAMPBELLSPORT, WIS.
The brick church, more than a century old, stands at the junction of two county roads tracing the glacial hills of southeastern Wisconsin. In the field across the way, the summer corn stretches eight feet from root to tassel. This being a Sunday morning, the Rev. Daniel Schultz greets the faithful on the front steps as they arrive for 9 a.m. worship at the Salem United Church of Christ. Pastor Dan, as he prefers to be known, is the only man in the congregation wearing a coat and tie.
Over the next hour, he leads the 70 worshipers in a round of "Happy Birthday" for Jim Maul, a longtime member. He invites a half-dozen children to the pulpit, where he crouches among them to teach them to recite "The Lord's Prayer." In the part of the service designated for "sharing joys and concerns," he listens as people rise in the pews to tell of a relative's surgery, a brother's recovery from a liver transplant.
Here is ministry at its most venerable, ministry at its most tender and intimate and finely grained. And it comes from a minister with a strikingly unlikely double-life, one part as the small-town preacher in a socially conservative spot of the Midwest, the other as an abrasive and confrontational voice of the religious left in the blogosphere.
Exactly one week after Mr. Schultz presided over Sunday worship at his home church here, he gave a sermon in the vast arena of the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago. Instead of the farmers, factory workers and tradesmen who typify his regular congregation, the audience for his denunciation of the Iraq war consisted of the self-proclaimed "netroots" attending Yearly Kos, the annual political and media convention organized by the Daily Kos Web site.
For three years, Mr. Schultz has supplied the voice of religion for Daily Kos, an epicenter of left-liberal activity with an otherwise fiercely secular bent. In 2004, Mr. Schultz began fielding prayer requests every Sunday night as part of a Daily Kos feature called "Brothers and Sisters." A year later, Daily Kos's founder, Markos Moulitsas, let Mr. Schultz spin off a formally connected online community, Street Prophets.
The article also notes many other friends of this blog:
In choosing the blogosphere as his pulpit, Mr. Schultz forms part of a trend in which liberal members of the clergy are using the Internet the way Christian conservatives used cable television and talk radio in earlier decades. Diane Winston, a professor of religion and media at the University of Southern California, points to such similar figures online as Mr. Wallis, Rabbi Michael Lerner at Tikkun, the Rev. Tim Simpson at PublicTheologian and Rachel Barenblat at Velveteen Rabbi.
A Pastor Finds a Way to Serve Two Disparate Flocks:
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
CAMPBELLSPORT, WIS.
The brick church, more than a century old, stands at the junction of two county roads tracing the glacial hills of southeastern Wisconsin. In the field across the way, the summer corn stretches eight feet from root to tassel. This being a Sunday morning, the Rev. Daniel Schultz greets the faithful on the front steps as they arrive for 9 a.m. worship at the Salem United Church of Christ. Pastor Dan, as he prefers to be known, is the only man in the congregation wearing a coat and tie.
Over the next hour, he leads the 70 worshipers in a round of "Happy Birthday" for Jim Maul, a longtime member. He invites a half-dozen children to the pulpit, where he crouches among them to teach them to recite "The Lord's Prayer." In the part of the service designated for "sharing joys and concerns," he listens as people rise in the pews to tell of a relative's surgery, a brother's recovery from a liver transplant.
Here is ministry at its most venerable, ministry at its most tender and intimate and finely grained. And it comes from a minister with a strikingly unlikely double-life, one part as the small-town preacher in a socially conservative spot of the Midwest, the other as an abrasive and confrontational voice of the religious left in the blogosphere.
Exactly one week after Mr. Schultz presided over Sunday worship at his home church here, he gave a sermon in the vast arena of the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago. Instead of the farmers, factory workers and tradesmen who typify his regular congregation, the audience for his denunciation of the Iraq war consisted of the self-proclaimed "netroots" attending Yearly Kos, the annual political and media convention organized by the Daily Kos Web site.
For three years, Mr. Schultz has supplied the voice of religion for Daily Kos, an epicenter of left-liberal activity with an otherwise fiercely secular bent. In 2004, Mr. Schultz began fielding prayer requests every Sunday night as part of a Daily Kos feature called "Brothers and Sisters." A year later, Daily Kos's founder, Markos Moulitsas, let Mr. Schultz spin off a formally connected online community, Street Prophets.
The article also notes many other friends of this blog:
In choosing the blogosphere as his pulpit, Mr. Schultz forms part of a trend in which liberal members of the clergy are using the Internet the way Christian conservatives used cable television and talk radio in earlier decades. Diane Winston, a professor of religion and media at the University of Southern California, points to such similar figures online as Mr. Wallis, Rabbi Michael Lerner at Tikkun, the Rev. Tim Simpson at PublicTheologian and Rachel Barenblat at Velveteen Rabbi.
posted by Faithful Progressive at 1:03 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home