Pastor’s gun-rally image provokes dismay

“If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be — a Christian” — Mark Twain.

After reading that quote, I couldn’t help thinking about the article in Sunday’s Kennebec Journal about a pro-gun rally in Wiscasset the day before. Interviewed in the article was the pastor from the Windsor Baptist Church, whose whole family — from his youngest child to his wife — was decked out in guns.

I am a retired United Methodist pastor whose life was dramatically changed and shaped by a community of Quakers, who introduced me to nonviolence and the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s. I was saddened and appalled by the pastor’s display.

Do we truly believe that this is the image the church now wishes to present to our community? How far we have come from Dr. King’s dream, in which love, not violence, conquers.

How dismayed I wonder is the Prince of Peace, who was never motivated by fear, but by faith, by hope and by love.

Rev. Raymond Anderson

Jefferson

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