The New York Post reported, "The Rev. Dr. Amy Butler, ousted pastor of Riverside Church, was tight-lipped Friday morning when asked about the sex-toy shopping spree scandal that torpedoed her cushy career."
Riverside is a prominent church in Morningside Heights, Manhattan.
Forbes noted today, "The church has been at the forefront of progressive Christian leadership since its inception in 1930. Statues of scientists like Darwin, Galileo and Einstein decorate the building where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous anti-Vietnam War speech in 1967. And in 2004, the church issued a statement in support of same-sex marriage and said it had been performing same-sex ceremonies as early as 1991."
Her contract was not renewed after five years on June 30, the Post said. Her salary was $250,000 a year plus more than $150,000 in fringe benefits, according to the newspaper.
Butler rose to fame by being the first woman pastor of the church.
She enhanced her brand in October 2016 when she wrote in USA Today about her late-term abortion. She wrote, "Trump's words drove me to tears, and to write my painful story for the first time."
It was her second child. She and her husband had three other children, and then divorced.
Nearly 3 years after her anti-Trump column, Butler is without a job. In May, she attended a conference in Minnesota. She and the other pastors visited the Smitten Kitten, a sex shop.
Fox News reported, "While in the raunchy store, Butler allegedly bought a $200 bunny-shaped blue vibrator for one minister -- a single mom of two celebrating her 40th birthday -- and offered to buy a toy for the second minister -- a gay man in a committed relationship. The man declined and repeatedly told her he felt uncomfortable."
He filed a harassment complaint.
The Christian Post reported the pastors attended the 27th annual Festival of Homiletics, a week-long conference where the 49 year old presided over the closing worship service.
That publication quoted the conference blog, which said, "We wrapped up our week of powerful sermons with ‘Sink or Swim,’ a message shared by Amy Butler, senior pastor at the Riverside Church of New York based on excerpts from Genesis 6-9. In the sermon, Butler dug into a text many preachers like to avoid, the story of Noah and the Flood. The story of Noah does not appear in full in the lectionary. Maybe because as Butler put it, ‘The story of Noah and the ark is pretty much a terrible story. … The plotline centers around a natural disaster that destroys the whole world … and God is a terrible character in this story.'"
God is the bad guy?
According to a pastor?
Maybe more than Trumpenfreude is involved here.
A famous, very old saying: "The Devil quotes the Bible to suit his own ends" She can twist the words to rationalize anything she wants.
ReplyDeleteI started reading this post with the thought "Do I really want to know this?" I'm just grateful that I'll never need to set foot in New York City again. Another old saying my mother used often: "Everyone has a purpose in life, if only to serve as a bad example/"
The Bible is for those with eyes to see.
DeleteMaybe more than Trumpenfreude is involved here.
ReplyDeleteOh its much much much more! You have to know the history of this "church" to understand....
The church was conceived by industrialist, financier, and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874–1960),[3] and minister Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969), as a large, interdenominational church in a neighborhood important to the city, open to all who profess faith in Christ. Its congregation includes more than forty ethnic groups.
That was from Wikipedia.
The truth is Rockefeller built this church to escape orthodox Christianity and liberalize it. Back then they called it modernism.
He selected Fosdick to modernize theology with the junk science of evolution which says we all come from apes etc. The Bible was no longer the Truth.
Riverside opened its doors in 1930. They knew which way the wind was blowing. All of this, in addition to the Scopes monkey trial in 1925, helped launch the fundamentalist movement.
Today all the mainline, read liberal, denominations are in serious decline. Conservative churches are not and Pentecostal churches are the fastest growing.
Religion was major news back then. After the liberals took over the Presbyterian Church they banished J Gresham Machen the leading conservative theologian at the time.
Machen wrote a book about liberalism invading the church.
Christianity and Liberalism (1923) ISBN 0-8028-1121-3 New ed. 2009 ISBN 9780802864994
When Machen was banished it made the front page headlines of the Times. My how times change.
Here's an interesting tidbit about the year before Riverside opened.....
The 1929 General Assembly voted to reorganise Princeton Seminary and appointed two of the Auburn Affirmation signatories as trustees. The Auburn Affirmation was a response by liberals[3] within the Northern Presbyterian Church that condemned the General Assembly's response to the controversy arising out of Harry Emerson Fosdick's May 1922 sermon "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"
Machen and some colleagues withdrew and set up Westminster Theological Seminary to continue reformed orthodox theology.
A century later the fruits of Riverside are shown to be rotten. And its clear what the answer to Fosdick's question is.
Forbes completely censors the incident where the fired pastor bought sex toys. Given the reporter is female I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
DeleteBut Karma arrived for the fired pastor. She claimed sexual harassment a year ago. Then just weeks ago her staff hit her with sexual harassment claims over the sex toys.
What goes around comes around.
She even went public last year about interpersonal relations in her church! She saw a chance to score political points and took it.
That is what alienated her initially with their leadership. The sex toy incident simply provided the excuse to be rid of her. But this woman was on a moral crusade and it backfired spectacularly.
She even said her church started a Safe Space program at her church apparently to keep those sexist lepers away.
Then she engages in Newspeak....
"We have had to confront difficult situations, engage in some hard conversations, and consider how the values we claim are reflected in clear and comprehensive policies — all while holding in tension an unwavering commitment to protect members of our community with the gospel invitation to all of us to repentance, forgiveness, and redemption"
I don't even know what that means. The Gospel protects us from being offended? Whew. The woman cannot communicate a common aIlment among liberals.
But it gets worse as she concludes with....
"It’s time for those of us committed to changing inappropriate conduct, harassment, and abuse in the church to speak up and say: it’s true, #ChurchToo. Now let’s lead the change so the church can use a new hashtag: #NeverAtChurch."
The biblical command to handle this is simple as it usually is.
Mat 18:15 "If your brother sins against you, go and confront him while the two of you are alone. If he listens to you, you have won back your brother.
Mat 18:16 But if he doesn't listen, take one or two others with you so that 'every word may be confirmed by the testimony of two or three witnesses.'
Mat 18:17 If, however, he ignores them, tell it to the congregation. If he also ignores the congregation, regard him as a gentile and a tax collector.
But she doesn't regard the Bible as her authority. Few liberals do.
Harry may have been Fearless, but he wasn't very smart.
ReplyDeletePS Never mess with the Airborne Ranger In The Sky.
I hear she has a private pastoring agreement with Jeffrey Epstein. Of course she's too old for his tastes, but she has the, erm, tools, to get him what he wants.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the most effective arguments against abortion is this: "Your right to choose is outweighed by the unborn child's right to exist."
ReplyDeleteIf, by chance NASA ever discovers a bit of moss on a rock on Mars or Europa watch all the scientific community go absolutely bonkers over the LIFE !!! that they discovered on another planet. You know what I will be saying if that happens? "big whoop, according to you scientists a 6-month old baby in the womb who can learn language and has a beating heart is not LIFE, your crappy little piece of moss is not life either."
Eric W.
Eric,
DeleteShame on you. You brought up the child!
So deluded are these people they claim the child in the womb is NOT a baby. Right.
But try to get them to watch an abortion on ultrasound and they're outraged. Out of sigh out of mind and they are certainly out of their minds.
I can believe the Rockefellers descended from apes. As for my family tree we ascended from apes.
ReplyDeleteWell phrased! I wish I'd have thought of that.
DeleteI heard a story - supposedly true - about a liberal missionary who went overseas, I think in New Guinea - and tried to teach the natives about how man was descended from apes. The natives mocked him and threw him out of their village. They believed they were descended from the gods.
Delete"It's Ireland's biggest lingerie section, I understand."
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foFXj7pEj4g
Did she and Al Sharpton both graduate from the same "divinity" school?
ReplyDeleteLOL
One's a racist hustler and the other a perv.
They put the "end" in reverend.
Left out was the brother of Harry Fosdick named Raymond...
ReplyDeleteFosdick's brother, Raymond Fosdick, was essentially in charge of philanthropy for John D. Rockefeller, Jr., running the Rockefeller Foundation for three decades, from 1921.
Rockefeller funded the nationwide distribution of Shall the Fundamentalists Win?, although with a more cautious title, The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith.
This direct-mail project was designed by Ivy Lee, who had worked since 1914 as an independent contractor in public relations for the Rockefellers.
Ivy Lee was among the very first globalists. Lee became an inaugural member of the Council on Foreign Relations in the US when it was established in New York in 1921.
In the early 1920s, he promoted friendly relations with Soviet Russia. In 1926, Lee wrote a famous letter to the president of the US Chamber of Commerce in which he presented a convincing argument for the need to normalize US-Soviet political and economic relations.
Wikipedia calls him a PR expert and he was. They note his chief competitor Ed Bernays who wrote THE book on propaganda. There was a very thin line between PR work and spreading propaganda.
Finally many attribute Lee with inventing the press release in 1906.
When you follow the money on any significant issue you really run into historical details that are quite revealing. Globalism began with the League of Nations although our Senate refused to support it.
That would change after WW2. For anyone curious about the architect of the EU globalist efforts check out Jean Monnet who is called the father of modern Europe
In 1935, when Monnet was still in Shanghai, he became a business partner of George Murnane (a former colleague of Monnet at Transamerica) in Monnet, Murnane & Co. Murnane was connected to the Wallenberg family in Sweden, the Bosch family in Germany, the Solvays and Boëls in Belgium, and John Foster Dulles, André Meyer, and the Rockefeller family in the United States.[7] He was considered among the most connected persons of his time.[8]
So just researching the efforts of Ivy Lee and Jean Monnet you can better understand how we got to the time Bush announced a new world order in 1989.