Dutch Protestant Church – 1 in 6 clergy atheist/agnostic
The Dutch Protestant Church
redefines Christianity
“No After Life”
“Jesus not Son of God”
Klass Hendrikse is a Pastor at the Exodus Church, a Dutch Protestant Church in central Holland. A conventional service, with hymns, readings from the Bible, and the Lord’s Prayer. But the message from Mr Hendrikse’s sermon is not conventional at all – “Make the most of life on earth, because it will probably be the only one you get”.
“Personally I have no talent for believing in life after death,” Mr Hendrikse says. “No, for me our life, our task, is before death.”
In 2007 Klass Hendrickse authored a book Believing in a God that does not exist: the manifesto of an atheist pastor. Church authorities decided to keep him in a job because a study by the Free University of Amsterdam found that one-in-six clergy in the Dutch Protestant Church were either atheists or agnostic. Dismissing Hendrickse and others would have put the Church into a critical decline, so in true Dutch fashion, they compromised. At a special church meeting decided his views were too widely shared among church thinkers for him to be singled out.
Mr Hendrikse describes the Bible’s account of Jesus’s life as a mythological story about a man who may never have existed, even if it is a valuable source of wisdom about how to lead a good life.
The Rev Kirsten Slattenaar, Exodus Church’s regular priest, also rejects the idea – widely considered central to Christianity – that Jesus was divine as well as human.
“I think ‘Son of God’ is a kind of title,” she says. “I don’t think he was a god or a half god. I think he was a man, but he was a special man because he was very good in living from out of love, from out of the spirit of God he found inside himself.”
VIDEO of a BBC Interview with Klaas Hendrickse
The atheist Pastor – dressed for work
Atheist pastors working for the Dutch Protestant Church, what next, politicians that tell the truth?
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Plurality of rule under the headship of Jesus seems to me to be the way to go. In order for one man to rule, the entire church must be in agreement with him. If they are not, one by one they will be asked to leave, to find a ministry with which they are more “comfortable.”Thus, those who continue to patronize the original church only strengthen this one man’s rule. There seem to be some who have a need to conform…
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Why should the stats of 1 in 6 be just for the Dutch Protestant Church? Wouldn’t those stats apply more or less for other countries with a Christian religion? If that was so, I guess there are a hell of a lot more atheists out there than what we think ! They’re just afraid to lose their job because they don’t know how to do anything else but preach.
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Odd choice of careers for an Atheist.
In this economy Bradley an atheist has to do what an atheist has do.
But Preisting for profit? I like my Atheists with ethics. How can I give any creedance to an Atheist/Pastor?
He isn’t compromising in his sermons. I think he is quite courageous. I can’t imagine me going into a Southern Baptist church and preaching ‘no afterlife’ and be able finish a sentence.
Well now, is he doing this on principle or doing it for profit? I know being controversial, (for example, being an Atheist/Pastor) generally doesn’t hurt your book sales.