{"id":2375,"date":"2011-08-08T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=2375"},"modified":"2011-08-08T06:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-08-08T12:00:00","slug":"channeling-my-inner-lawyer-an-sbc-pastors-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=2375","title":{"rendered":"Channeling My Inner Lawyer: An SBC Pastor’s Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"

“You teach yourselves the law. I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush, and if you survive, you’ll leave thinking like a lawyer.”\u00a0 Professor Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr.,<\/em><\/strong> (The Paper Chase<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a young law school student in Tallahassee from 1988-91, I could relate to Hart and his friends who were terrorized<\/del>\u00a0intimidated by Professor Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr. in John Jay Osborn, Jr.’s 1970 novel, The Paper Chase<\/em>.\u00a0 Thankfully at F.S.U., I did not have any professors quite as harsh as Kingsfield\u00a0(immortalized in the\u00a0movie and television series\u00a0by the legendary John Houseman).\u00a0 There are a few professors’ names which still send chills up and down my spine, but that is a different story altogether.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of middle school and the beginning of high school, I began to seriously consider becoming an attorney.\u00a0 As the son of a funeral director, I had grown up watching my mom and dad serve people during times of grief.\u00a0 For my parents, particularly my dad, he viewed what he did as a ministry.\u00a0 But, I never felt a calling to be a funeral director.<\/p>\n

As a Political Science major at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., I was determined to do all that I could to prepare for law school.\u00a0 By God’s grace (because my grades were not nearly as good as I had hoped), I was admitted to Florida State’s College of Law.\u00a0 And, it was in\u00a0Seminole country\u00a0that my journey\u00a0from small-town funeral director’s son to lawyer to pastor really began.<\/p>\n

When I began my law school studies in the Fall of 1988, my\u00a0skull was full of mush.\u00a0 But, for the next three years, my mind was trained to think like a lawyer.\u00a0 Funny thing is, once a man has been trained to think like a lawyer, there will always be a part of him that thinks like a lawyer.\u00a0 Even 17 years after leaving the practice of law to answer God’s call to the Gospel ministry, my inner lawyer still comes out from time to time.\u00a0 And, for those of you who\u00a0believe that\u00a0thinking like a lawyer and thinking like a Christian are always incompatible propositions, all I can say is, “Shame on you!” \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

The kerfuffle surrounding\u00a0Surry Baptist\u00a0Association’s seemingly quick vote to\u00a0disfellowship Flat Rocks Baptist Church\u00a0<\/a>has brought out my inner lawyer once again.\u00a0 I can’t speak for\u00a0any other lawyer turned pastor, but as for me, my life as a law student and practicing attorney\u00a0continues to inform my thinking\u00a0about religious, cultural, political,\u00a0and legal issues today.\u00a0 I don’t expect other pastors\u00a0who have not had my life experiences to view every issue through the same lenses that I do nor do I expect to always be understood when I may defend those who hold political or theological positions with which I may personally disagree.<\/p>\n

Unlike some, I have had (and continue to have) a myriad of diverse friendships with people across the political and theological spectrums.\u00a0 Some of my dearest friends in life are my fraternity brothers from my days as a Phi Sigma Kappa at G.W.U.\u00a0 It would be fair to say that not a few of them are proud liberal Democrats in the grand\u00a0New York\/New Jersey tradition (you know who you are).\u00a0 I have other life-long friends, some of whom I\u00a0have known since Mrs. Christian’s kindergarten, who do not see eye-to-eye with me on\u00a0political or religious issues.<\/p>\n

If any of my fraternity brothers or life-long friends were in trouble or was being treated unfairly, I would not hesitate to come to their defense.\u00a0 Just because someone defends the rights of others does not necessarily mean that you agree with what someone else believes.\u00a0 I think that too often, Christians, particularly pastors, are\u00a0simply too afraid to defend the rights of those with whom they disagree.\u00a0 Why should that be the case?\u00a0 Look around the\u00a0SBC blogosphere and watch how\u00a0otherwise conservative pastors\u00a0are\u00a0maligned\u00a0with the\u00a0“moderate” label (no offense to moderates, which, just by my saying that, will offend some who see themselves as “true conservatives”) and you may begin to understand the dilemma.<\/p>\n

In the last year, I have made what I\u00a0would call “blogging friends.”\u00a0 These are people who I have gotten to know through my blog, other blogs, or communities like BaptistLife.com.\u00a0 Some are theologically and politically more conservative than I am\u00a0while some are more moderate.\u00a0 I have blogging friends who could be labeled as Calvinists of one degree or another, Baptist Identity folks, and those who eschew labels other than Christian and\/or Baptist.\u00a0 Most of my blogging friends I have never met face-to-face.\u00a0 From what I know of my blogging friends, there would be some that I would be more inclined to eat a pizza with or\u00a0shoot the breeze with, but\u00a0that is not necessarily determined by\u00a0whether I agree with their theology.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Call me contrary, call me an iconoclast, call me a lawyer,\u00a0or call me whatever you want (just don’t call me late for dinner).\u00a0 In the end, I’ll keep calling them like\u00a0I see them, from the viewpoint of a lawyer turned pastor, from one who was in law, but is now in grace.\u00a0 And, if defending a political or theological opponent’s\u00a0rights to be treated with grace, dignity, and basic Christian courtesy is now seen as theologically suspect, then my inner lawyer will have to plead guilty as charged.\u00a0 I think I can live with that!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“You teach yourselves the law. I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush, and if you survive, you’ll leave thinking like a lawyer.”\u00a0 Professor Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr., (The Paper Chase) As a young law school student in Tallahassee from 1988-91, I could relate to Hart and his friends…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,8,35],"tags":[106,3368,170,3370,248,1094,1103,1104,1106,439,451,1126,1127,1133,1134,1137,1145,778,3392,3393,1174,1180,982],"class_list":["post-2375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-christianity","category-religion","tag-attorney","tag-blogging","tag-blogs","tag-christianity","tag-conservative","tag-disfellowship","tag-flat-rock-baptist-church","tag-florida-state-university","tag-funeral-director","tag-george-washington-university","tag-grace-2","tag-john-houseman","tag-john-jay-osborn-jr","tag-law-student","tag-lawyer","tag-liberal","tag-moderate","tag-phi-sigma-kappa","tag-religion","tag-southern-baptist-convention","tag-surry-baptist-association","tag-the-paper-chase","tag-theology-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1LP7G-Cj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}