4/28/08 DOES RICH MOUW USE "POETIC LICENSE" TO MAKE HIS POINT RE DIVORCE? "When someone comes to talk to me about the personal pain of divorce, one that has happened or one that will soon happen, I typically tell them about the experience of a friend who went through two divorces. The first one happened when he was a member of a very conservative church. When his wife told him she was leaving him, he went to his pastor, who responded harshly by telling him that he wanted my friend—a lay leader in the congregation—either to resign his membership voluntarily or to face formal excommunication proceedings. My friend resigned and moved on to a congregation that belonged to a more mainstream denomination. Soon he remarried, but a few years later his second wife also filed for divorce. Again he informed his pastor, but this time the pastor seemed surprised that he would even bother to make an issue of it Basically my friend was told, “No big deal.” Soon after, he came to me to talk about his experiences. “You know what I want?” he asked, with tears streaming down his cheeks. “I want to hear two things from the church. One is that divorce is a horrible thing, that it is one of the biggest failures a human being can experience. The other is that this is not the end of my life..." http://www.netbloghost.com/mouw/?m=200804

4/28/08 DOES RICH MOUW USE "POETIC LICENSE" TO MAKE HIS POINT RE DIVORCE? "When someone comes to talk to me about the personal pain of divorce, one that has happened or one that will soon happen, I typically tell them about the experience of a friend who went through two divorces. The first one happened when he was a member of a very conservative church. When his wife told him she was leaving him, he went to his pastor, who responded harshly by telling him that he wanted my friend—a lay leader in the congregation—either to resign his membership voluntarily or to face formal excommunication proceedings. My friend resigned and moved on to a congregation that belonged to a more mainstream denomination. Soon he remarried, but a few years later his second wife also filed for divorce. Again he informed his pastor, but this time the pastor seemed surprised that he would even bother to make an issue of it Basically my friend was told, “No big deal.” Soon after, he came to me to talk about his experiences. “You know what I want?” he asked, with tears streaming down his cheeks. “I want to hear two things from the church. One is that divorce is a horrible thing, that it is one of the biggest failures a human being can experience. The other is that this is not the end of my life..."
http://www.netbloghost.com/mouw/?m=200804