The Dishonest Church - New Book Release

(0-933670-09-5, Rising Star Press, July 2003, 256 pages, $16.00, available everywhere) Your Pastor has valuable information she may not be sharing with you. Your church experience may not be fulfilling your intellectual needs. Your Pastor is conflicted. You are conflicted. It's time to talk about the elephant in the sanctuary. It's time for honesty.

In The Dishonest Church, author Jack Good identifies the problem, discusses it, and offers solutions for clergy and layperson alike. The problem? The "Pact of Silence". A pact in which certain difficult issues are to be left unmentioned. The classic and paramount difficult issue in Christianity is the interpretation of the Bible as the literal truth.

From the author:
"Here is the central issue: Pastors and other trained professionals of the church often have developed a system of beliefs that is qualitatively different from the faith they communicate to local congregations. Their individual faith has developed, in most cases, after an intense and sometimes painful time of questioning, dismantling, and reconstruction. For reasons that are not clear, these leaders assume that local church members are either unwilling or unable to survive a similar process. So, in an act of dishonesty that threatens to erode the core of the church's mission, they hold one kind of faith for themselves while the literature they produce for the laity and the sermons they deliver assume another, basically different, style of faith for the non- professional."