It was easy to miss it in most Texas churches yesterday, but it was Evolution Sunday. Darwin’s birthday, February 12, comes this week.
Dallas Morning News columnist Steve Blow offered an explanation that deserves reading outside of Dallas. I think he’s a little optimistic, saying “hundreds” of preachers participate — in Texas? Really?
Blow writes:
“Evolution Sunday offers an opportunity to educate our congregations that science is a gift,” said the Rev. Timothy McLemore, senior pastor at Kessler Park United Methodist Church in Oak Cliff.
“If we believe God is truth, we don’t need to shrink from truth in whatever way it presents itself. We don’t have to be threatened.”
The State Board of Education is set to review and revise science curriculum standards in Texas. And Dr. McLemore said he is “deeply concerned” about attempts to inject religion-based “intelligent design” theories into science classes.
“It seems profoundly unhealthy,” he said. “Do we really want the government deciding what religious beliefs and viewpoints are taught in school? It’s our job to promote our understanding of faith, not the government’s job.”
Even in Texas. We can hope government officials in Texas are listening.
[Full text reproduced here, in case text disappears from index.]
Finding room for evolution in the pulpit
08:10 AM CST on Sunday, February 10, 2008
As Texas debates creationism in the classroom, here’s a different question: Should evolution be in the pulpit?
Absolutely, say hundreds of clergy who will observe Evolution Sunday today.
If there were more discussion of evolution in the pulpit, they believe, creationism would rightly recede from science classrooms.
“Evolution Sunday offers an opportunity to educate our congregations that science is a gift,” said the Rev. Timothy McLemore, senior pastor at Kessler Park United Methodist Church in Oak Cliff.
“If we believe God is truth, we don’t need to shrink from truth in whatever way it presents itself. We don’t have to be threatened.”
The State Board of Education is set to review and revise science curriculum standards in Texas. And Dr. McLemore said he is “deeply concerned” about attempts to inject religion-based “intelligent design” theories into science classes.
“It seems profoundly unhealthy,” he said. “Do we really want the government deciding what religious beliefs and viewpoints are taught in school? It’s our job to promote our understanding of faith, not the government’s job.”
Evolution is well settled among scientists but remains controversial in some religious circles, Dr. McLemore said, “because it strikes at the heart of how we interpret the Bible.”
He said those who insist on a literal reading of the Bible’s creation story are trying to make the Bible something it was never meant to be – a science text.
“I think the Bible gives us a great creation account, and I think it’s profoundly true,” he said. “I just don’t think it was ever intended to be scientifically true or even historically true.
“The Bible is true when it teaches who God is and what God is like. The Bible is true when it describes the human condition. The Bible is true when it teaches us about human relationships.”
Dr. McLemore, 52, knows well the literalistic approach to Bible study. He grew up in Beaumont in the “ultraconservative” Foursquare Church denomination. He graduated from the Foursquare Gospel Bible College, then located in Mount Vernon, Ohio.
There, he was thoroughly indoctrinated in literalism. But he said he was also taught “to seek truth and trust God in that search, even when it raised questions.”
That search ultimately led him away from the intellectual contortions required by biblical literalism. He found a welcome for his searching in the Methodist Church and enrolled at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology.
Because he’s in the midst of a sermon series, Dr. McLemore said he will actually observe Evolution Sunday in a couple of weeks. And he said he will stress that even in his own congregation, there is a wide range of opinion.
“My purpose is not to defend evolution as much as it is to make the point that science and faith are not antithetical. People who take the Bible seriously can also take science seriously,” he said.
Evolution Sunday is an outgrowth of The Clergy Letter Project. Dr. McLemore is among more than 11,000 clergy who have signed an open letter calling for evolution to be taught in schools as settled science.
The letter says in part:
“We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as ‘one theory among others’ is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”
Must evolution push God from the picture? Far from it, Dr. McLemore said. For him, it only exalts God higher.
“As I understand the complexities and intricacies of what has been produced through human evolution, not only does it not make me want to run away from God, it strikes a chord of wonder and awe that I can only describe as worship,” he said.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 