Sunday, January 20, 2008

Anonymous Notes

This morning I found this anonymous note in a place where I would find it:
Any sermon, or just dogmatics??

I suppose this was left by someone who doesn't care for my preaching style, though I don't think of what I do as being very dogmatic. It's not a very stinging criticism. It's also possible that this was left by someone from the AA group that meets in the space on Saturday nights.

From time to time I get these kinds of critical notes, I suspect most pastors do, too. The usual advice given about these things is that you should ignore any anonymous criticism, because if you let it change the way you do things than you create a very toxic and passive-aggressive kind of dynamic. So I'm doing to ignore this one, too, but I wanted to post it here just because it's an interesting artifact of parish ministry.

-t

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