Serious Christians are wincing this week at the reports of stupid acts by fellow believers. First, the Bolivian pastor who hijacked an airplane to Mexico because it was September 9, 2009 (9/9/09), which he interpreted as an inversion of "666" and, therefore, a good reason to jeopardize the lives of over a hundred people and make the faith of Christ look stupid.

Second, the pastors of a central Kentucky Baptist Church who agreed to have a football team bused to their church on promise of hearing a motivational speaker, only to baptize 10 of the team members, without their parents' foreknowledge, and at school district expense. Smiling all the while as they dunked player after player, these two idiots are the kind of church leaders the world loves to hate.

And, frankly, I'm getting a little sick of them myself. We're all a little silly, and certainly prone to sin. But we don't all deliberately do things that, with just a little forethought, we can see would embarrass our fellow believers, make the faith look ridiculous, and rile up people against the cause of Christ. Stupid Christians should come under church discipline. Church discipline. You remember church discipline? Well, there used to be this procedure, practiced for years by many churches, where people who were convicted of scandalous sins were, you know, disciplined - even to the point of being removed from the ministry, if necessary. You can look it up.

Ah, but that would be a serious thing to do, no? And contemporary Christians, not being prone to seriousness in much of anything, will probably just shrug and say, "Oh well," and do nothing to roll back the blight of stupid Christians that seems to be gaining ground in the pulpits of the land. Do we need an act of Congress or a Presidential proclamation to stop this trend? But then...

T. M. Moore