Depends on the state. Even then, state laws may be confused and confusing.
I’ve been a member of two congregations that pushed their pastors out because a significant portion of each congregration simply didn’t like them anymore. Happens all the time.
I suspect the church the OP refers to will lose a few members and get a few members back. When they get around to calling a new pastor, they’ll lose a few members and get a few new ones.
So the pastor changed dramatically from what he was when he was hired. He even professed not believing in religion (not good for the job security) and he was fired. It doesn’t sound like he fit the job description any longer.
StG
This seems like kind of a “lie down with dogs” scenario to me. If you’re going to take a job preaching to a bunch of right wing religious fundies, don’t be surprised when they act like right wing religious fundies.
Doesn’t surrogacy nearly always involve creating a lot of embryos, implanting several and freezing the rest indefinitely, then aborting all but one or two of the fetuses? That’s not something I’d expect the Baptists to be jazzed about.
I think that the purple bit in the hair was fine, and I also believe that the congregation would have given that a pass. Even a Baptist one.
The surrogacy thing is a bit weird, tho. Of my limited knowledge of that kind of stuff (extremely limited) isn’t the norm that a single person is the carrier? It sounds like something that would end in litigation, and what church needs that? Kinda weird, to me, anyway. Isn’t there anybody in all of Sweden that can be a surrogate?
The minister’s social values were at odds with those of a ‘social’ kind of job. I say tough noogies for the pastor.It was a bad fit, and why cry about that? If I were called to the pastorate of, I don’t know, Robert Schuller’s church, and a few months later I got the boot, I would have to say that I was as much at fault as the church. No fault.
Best wishes,
hh
I’m the least churchy, most non-religious atheist you’re likely to meet, and don’t have any problem with the Pastor and wife’s lifestyle, but I agree with the Church’s actions. It seems like a perfectly fair reason for dismissal to me.
I am not hinting anything.
Kaitlyn told a story that was a little too good to be true. Here we have a story of a saintly Baptist couple cruelly forced from their jobs by the narrow-minded bigots in their congregation, purely because the wife had purple hair and wanted to be a surrogate for Swedes.
This is a story that will go over big on the SDMB - it makes religious people look bad, and involves a mention of homosexuals and surrogacy. But the story is not based on first-hand information, and there is no independent verification. Even the OP refers to the story as nothing more than rumors, and from someone self-described as anti-religion.
Yet the SDMB swallows it hook, line, and sinker, and even the mods bristle at any questioning of the account.
The much-vaunted skepticism of the SDMB doesn’t seem to get applied very much to certain kinds of gossip.
Regards,
Shodan
I can’t argue with the ‘nearly always’, because it does seem like a standard practice, but it’s not required. For the doctors, it’s a numbers game. Each embryo only has a certain percentage chance of sticking. And the cost of each round of implantation is high. So they want to plant enough embryos to have a very good chance of having at least one stick. Say, implant five expecting one or two to stick.
So it’s what they’ll suggest, but you can override them as long as you acknowledge that you’re increasing your chance that you’ll have to spring for another round at $20,000 plus. My sister drew the line at three. It worked. For a surrogate, I’d imagine that the decision might involve a few more people.
Perhaps, if the story offends you so much, Shodan, you should post your evidence which shows that the OP is lying.
Yesterday, I caused a huge stink at my office by bringing in a new office chair, because the chairs they provide here hurt my back. According to you, I shouldn’t be able to post this (in the In My Humble OPINION subforum) because I don’t have any sort of citation which proves it happened.
Jeez, Shodan, you’re being a pain. I didn’t say the couple was “saintly”. I never called the people “narrow minded bigots” and I said she put a purple streak in her hair.
In a small town, when everyone knows something, that’s about as first-hand as a thing can get. Regarding independent verification, CNN doesn’t get out here much, sorry. It happened. If you can’t believe it, I’m sorry about that too. I have tried to be as objective as possible telling about it. Regarding the entire story being a rumor. No, I did not say that…look at it again. I said after the wife appeared in church with the purple streak in her hair, the rumors were so rampant, I heard them. You also said I was “someone self-described as anti-religion”. Out here when someone says he “tends to be anti”, that falls a bit short of your translations of my words.
Shodan, it was something that happened in a community in which I live. I shared it on this board (another community in which I live) and I reacted to it and I asked others for their reaction. If you choose to be skeptical, that is your right. I have been on this board around a decade, maybe a bit more, and I don’t believe I have the reputation of creating stories from whole cloth. Maybe that’s why people choose to believe it, that and because it is true.
I have no trouble believing it happened. I’ve been involved in churches for 35 years- seen ministers come & go for various reasons, some leaving the same way they arrived- “fired with enthusiasm”. My own church has just narrowly avoided a split after the elders ousted a pastor that I personally like very much but who apparently had faulty judgment in being overly gracious about some situations he should have been stricted on. The situation still sucks- I’d have no problem being in a church he pastors in the future but I do hope he learns something from this & I can’t see how his firing could have been avoided this time.
And I see that there are enough people on the SDMB here who can’t muster up any outrage, so if the story was tailor-made for the board, it kinda failed.
I think there was probably a LOT more things before the purple streak. And I have no problem with surrogacy being a cause for the ouster. That whole situation just sounds weird (Sweden?).
So your position is that the OP should be allowed to post, ‘In My Humble OPINION, this piece of gossip is true’, but I should not be allowed to post '‘In My Humble OPINION, this piece of gossip is a little questionable’.
Like I said, skepticism about anything anti-religious tends to be a little thin on the ground here on the SDMB.
Regards,
Shodan
Jeez, Shodan, your being a pain. I didn’t say the couple was saintly. I never called the people “narrow minded bigots” and I said she put a purple streak in her hair.
In a small town, when everyone knows something, that’s about as first-hand as a thing can get. Regarding independent verification, CNN doesn’t get out here much, sorry. It happened. If you can’t believe it, I’m sorry about that too. I have tried to be as objective as possible telling about it. Regarding the entire story being a rumor. No, I did not say that…look at it again. I said after the wife appeared in church with the purple streak in her hair, the rumors were so rampant, I heard them. You also said I was “someone self-described as anti-religion”. Out here when someone says he “tends to be anti”, that falls a bit short of your translations of my words.
Shodan, it was something that happened in a community in which I live. I shared it on this board (another community in which I live) and I reacted to it and I asked others for their reaction. If you choose to be skeptical, that is your right. I have been on this board around a decade, maybe a bit more, and I don’t believe I have the reputation of creating stories from whole cloth. Maybe that’s why people choose to believe it, that and because it is true.
It doesn’t sound unlikely to me at all.
My own father was fired from a church, many years ago, for marrying too soon after divorcing my mother and this was from a UCC church (the welcoming church, nowadays).
I know of another minister who was fired for running a counseling practice out of his church office and not inviting parishoners to the parsonage enough.
And another minister of which I am aware was fired for believing that a murderer in his church was innocent before he was proven guilty. It was a terrible crime and he was proven guilty eventually, btw.
Firing a minister who wishes to remain a minister does generally mean he or she has to leave town, because it’s not like there are many churches of the same denomination in a given town and certainly not churches that need a minister.
[Moderator Note]As you well know, complaints about how the board is run belong in ATMB, not IMHO.[/Moderator Note]
Wow somebody needs to reassess their touchy meter. I’m fairly agnostic don’t regularly attend church… and I find what the congregation and/or the board of directors did was perfectly fine. You are assuming that everyone will see it as you see it. This liberal Mother Jones reading dude finds it to be perfectly acceptable to give a minister his walking papers when the congregation finds his actions/beliefs to be out of line with theirs.
Depends on the denomination and the location, really. In certain areas it’s not uncommon to have multiple Baptist churches in a town of a few thousand people. It’s a crapshoot as to whether any given one will need a new minister at any given time, sure, but given the rate at which churches around home split, it doesn’t seem terribly unlikely that you could find something.
As for the OP’s story, I have no problem with them firing him. It’s part of the whole having a job thing–you don’t do your job to your boss’s satisfaction, out the door your ass goes. And a conservative Baptist congregation in a small town is not terribly likely to be satisfied with the sorts of changes he’s making, nor with his apparent personal lifestyle choices. Yes, your personal lifestyle is relevant when you’re a minister, because you’re there as a guide for other people’s lifestyles.
But yeah, the story does sound… a bit off. I was with you right up till the international surrogacy, which frankly doesn’t make a bit of sense to me–they couldn’t find a surrogate on the same continent with them? If she felt the need to be a surrogate, she couldn’t find someone on this continent to do it for? At the very least, it implies that there’s more to this story than what you’ve heard or are telling us.
I will see what I can find out about the surrogacy group.
But everything is gossip by that standard. When a poster talks about his dog or cat, we don’t know that he’s not making it up (unless that’s why we demand pics). I mean, it’s true of pretty much anything, whether it’s bitching about an acquaintance or bragging about something good. Why so skeptical when this is something that doesn’t seem to be all that unusual?