"Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother's name Mary, and aren't his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Aren't all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?" And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, "A prophet is not without honor except in his own town and in his own home."
Matthew 13:55-57, NIV
There was a little item recently about the fact that creative thinkers are not respected locally. Jesus said that about two thousand years ago.
The article continued by saying that even the separation of a phone call makes new ideas more acceptable. Attribution to a distant source helps a lot. More than the prejudice against the familiar, there are perceptual reasons for this preference for remote sources. But whatever the basis, local talent and ideas are often ignored.
How many churches are touted as bursting with the Holy Spirit, yet are unable to produce a candidacy for a pastor? Rather, a "pastoral search committee" will be formed to find some unknown from another location. We can't have a pastor that we used to sit next to in the pews.
I read a story about vacationers at a tiny lake. In the morning they would get into their boats and travel to the other side of the lake. To those on one side of the tiny lake the other side was new territory.
When a church cannot produce a man fit to be a pastor, someone has not done his job.
My uncle, a famous chemist, used to say, "An expert is an S.O.B. from out of town."
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