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Pastoring a Purple Church: “I Absolutely Bite My Tongue Sometimes”
posted on April 9, 2019NPR’s Tom Gjelten writes about the difficulties in pastoring a church with congregants of disparate political views. Christopher Edmonston, the senior pastor at White Memorial Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, N.C., said, “Many of the people who have come to church here in the last 25 years are from other parts of the country, and they bring their ideas, their politics, their viewpoints, with them. So we almost have to be purple if we’re going to continue to be open and welcome to any person that wants to come.” Gjelten adds, “The promotion of discourse over discord may strengthen civic culture in an era of political polarization, but for Edmonston, the mission is more a reflection of Presbyterian theology than it is a commitment to democratic process.”