When I was ordained as a pastor, I walked away from secular music for seven, eight years. It took me that time to learn that God is love.
Status quo just means that everyone's doing it. It doesn't mean that this was divinely ordained, and of course this is the right decision.
In the Bible, ordination - I don't see that in the Scripture. In the Bible, it's whether you're filled with the Holy Spirit, whether you're anointed by God, whether you're called by God, whether you're obedient to Him. I want to be those things, but I don't see any purpose for me in being ordained.
Issues over same-sex marriage and LGBT people in the PCUSA are not new: there is a 40-plus year history of arguments and tacit agreements over the issue of sexuality in the denomination, and the first openly gay minister in the PCUSA was ordained in 2011.
Most of the early monks were not ordained. It was the pastoral work they undertook with the faithful that, over the centuries, gradually led to the present situation in which most monks are ordained priests.
Something I try to instill in others is to just be a good person. It's a decision you make a million times a day. But if you just keep trying, good stuff comes to you in an ordained way.
Christ has not only ordained that there shall be such officers in his Church - he has not only specified their duties and prerogatives - but he gives the requisite qualifications, and calls those thus qualified, and by that call gives them their official authority.
Our second remark is, that the office is of divine appointment, not merely in the sense in which the civil powers are ordained of God, but in the sense that ministers derive their authority from Christ, and not from the people.
The level of study that I was at, I was probably only about two or three years away from being ordained as a rabbi, so I really needed to figure out in my head where I wanted to go with things. And I just couldn't do it habitually anymore.
The question of whether women should be made bishops once they had been ordained is absolutely pivotal. It seems to me absolute nonsense for women to be ordained to the priesthood but not to the episcopacy because the two are inextricably linked.
