An atheist teaches sunday school: One church I’d like to see closed

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Written By Jeremy Reynalds

With its blatant disregard and disdain for the authority of the Bible, the open-minded California-based Simi Valley United Church of Christ is one church I’d like to see closed.

According to an article late last year in the Los Angeles Times, the group’s mission statement reads, “For us the Bible is a record of faith journeys to be taken seriously, but not always literally … our church seeks to be multicultural, respecting and learning from traditions which differ from our own.”

Happily, such a broad minded mission statement hasn’t been bringing people in droves to the church. As Richard John Neuhaus pointed out in a recent edition of his excellent publication “First Things, the mission in the statement is apparently flagging, according to the Los Angeles Times, since two churches were merged to make up the present congregation that counts a hundred members.”

As if the mission statement wasn’t bad enough, the church proudly uses an atheist for one of its Sunday school teachers. As the Times commented, church leaders thought that if they were going to do justice to their mission statement they needed to bring an atheist in to teach their youth group.

With that in mind, they thought of Stuart Bechman-Besamo, a former Methodist who abandoned the church while still in high school and who told the Los Angeles Times that he’s been calling himself an atheist for over 15 years. While he’s even more fervent now about his atheism than he was formerly, he nonetheless agreed to instruct the Sunday School at least in part to “teach tolerance for people like me.”

According to the Times, Stuart said “If they know a person who is an atheist … they won’t have any negative preconceptions about atheism. If they find their beliefs head that way, they won’t feel like an outcast, that something is wrong with them. I consider this process similar to what gay individuals go through.”

Despite that depressing statement, the church’s pastor told the Los Angeles Times that Stuart is the sort of person his church wants. He’s “a caring, bright, perceptive, inclusive kind of person who has a strong sense of justice … We are not starting an agnostic club. It’s just that here is this incredibly fine man, with honesty and passion for justice, who is in our church. And that’s a blessing for us, and for all of our kids,” said Rev. Bill Greene.

Stuart’s wife, who’s an ex-Mormon, told the Times that “We have a church here with differing viewpoints and we want the kids to know that there are organizations and churches that don’t insist you conform to a certain way.”

In that same vein, there are also troubled individuals who are convinced they don’t have to “conform” to the law of gravity. A recent episode of the ABC series “The Practice” dealt with a mentally challenged man who was convinced that once he put on his Superman costume he would be able to fly. He couldn’t and had to deal with the consequences.

It’s the same way with the Bible. Those who don’t literally believe what the Bible says about the way we should live our life are not free from the effects of that disobedience. Stuart needs to think about the effects of his teaching and his atheism in light of the Bible being literally true.

A cover story a few years ago in U.S. News & World Report addressed the issue of the Bible’s truthfulness. Under the banner headline “Is the Bible True?” the front cover read, “New discoveries offer surprising support for key moments in the Scriptures.”

That was almost worthy of headlines itself, a fairly positive story about the Bible of all things, in a national news magazine.

The article was extracted from a book titled “Is the Bible True?” by Jeffery L. Sheler, who wrote that “modern archaeology may not have removed all doubt about the historical accuracy of the Bible. But thanks to archaeology, the Bible no longer appears as an absolutely isolated monument of the past, as a phenomenon without relation to its environment,’ as the great American archaeologist William Albright write at mid century. Instead, it has been firmly fixed in a context of knowable history, linked to the present by footprints across the archaeological record.”

That’s not all. There is strong evidence for the historical accuracy of the Bible in other formerly hotly disputed areas. The same author also wrote that one archaeological discovery “has been widely acclaimed as a significant affirmation of Biblical history because, in short, it confirms that the man depicted in the Gospels as Judea’s Roman governor had precisely the responsibilities and authority that the Gospel writers ascribed to him.”

So what does all of this mean for Stuart? (And us?)Well, if the Bible’s true as I believe it is, it means that Stuart’s atheistic “Socratic dialogue with teenagers” is both useless and dangerous. If the Bible is indeed the infallible, inspired, inerrant LITERAL Word of God, rather than indulging in useless academic pontification about multiculturalism and the like, Stuart needs to be teaching those youngsters to start obeying the moral absolutes contained within the pages of Scripture.

Think if you will about what an honest thoughtful consideration of the Bible could do for those youngsters (and others at Simi Valley United Church of Christ). Most importantly, they could come into a relationship with Jesus Christ, and start obeying the words contained in Scripture.

Then instead of seeking fulfillment in unfulfilling one night stands (and risking sexually transmitted diseases), these youngsters could find emotional happiness in Jesus Christ and save their body for their future life- long marriage partner.

There are so many practical advantages offered in the Bible (and that’s not even taking eternal life into account) for those who practice a literal obedience to God’s Word instead of philosophizing over whether it applies to them. Of course, beginning to see the Bible as a book we need to obey would necessitate a change in our vocabulary. Our modern culture has softened the terminology for what the Bible calls “sin.” For example. When we see an unmarried couple living together, we typically gloss over what God calls the relationship adultery or fornicationa nd instead say, “Susie is Joe’s significant other.'”

Then in the same vein, instead of calling an abortion the termination of a fetus, or the removal of unwanted tissue, we’d need to call it exactly what it is, murder.

We’d have to stop calling homosexuals “gay,” (which they most definitely are not) and call them what God calls them, “Women (who) exchanged the natural use (of their bodies) for what is against nature and men (who) leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error.”

So with that in mind, isn’t it time that we gave the Bible its rightful place as a historically accurate and truthful document that needs to be obeyed, and not just as “a record of faith journeys to be taken seriously, but not always literally.”

Such a decision could, quite literally, revolutionize our troubled post-9/11 culture. And who knows what the effect would be on Simi Valley United Church of Christ. One thing for sure, there wouldn’t be an atheist teaching Sunday school anymore.

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