Authentic and compelling voices
Diana Butler Bass was the preacher at the worship portion of a recent meeting of the National Capital Presbytery (the local governing body made up of pastors and elder representatives from congregations in D.C. and the surrounding areas). Prior to our meeting and worship, she also gave an extended presentation, "Where Is God? Spirituality, Theology, and Awakening," followed by a time of discussion.
During the discussion, she made a comment on how the priesthood of all believers is morphing into something else. This priesthood was an outgrowth of the Protestant Reformation and its ideas that all believers had direct access to God via scripture, a move away from notions of a church hierarchy controlling this access. But thanks to social media, we're now seeing a "priesthood of everybody." I suspect this notion is as frightening to Protestant institutions as the ideas of Luther and Calvin were to the church institutions of their day.
If you've spend much time on social media, you know that the quality of the priests there varies wildly. Of course that's true of all priests, the formally ordained sort and the all-believers sort. There are a lot of different versions of God and Jesus floating around on the Internet, not to mention all other manner of spiritual "helps." The same has long been true in churches and temples. Social media has simply given every single person who wants one a pulpit.
