WEIRD BIBLE QUOTE ON CHURCH WEBSITE
A few days ago I noted the St James UCC website which featured a weird quote from the devil -- something totally out of context. Today their website has an explanation -- they screwed up. However, their explanation doesn't quite get the blogging angle of the story right. The bloggers, trying to be gracious, were speculating that hackers had actually put the quote up on the site without the church's knowledge (not removed it). The bloggers couldn't imagine how even a far left liberal church would do such an outrageous thing.

Now we have our explanation. The church leadership somehow skipped hermeneutics 101. :-)

Here is what the church says on their website today:

St. James United Church of Christ in Limerick, PA is a church for all people to join together to worship God and Jesus Christ and be thankful for all the blessings they have received. Come share the Holy Spirit with us.

For those of you who were kind enough to inform us about our previously inaccurate quote...we thank you!

We were recently made aware that the former quote we had posted in the header on our site was actually not based on the word of Jesus but was a quote posed to him during his temptation. As soon as we were made aware of this we removed the quote from our site. We removed it...not hackers as some ill-informed bloggers would have you believe. This unfortunate lesson is a demonstration why when using tools online to identify quotes that you think deliver the honest and sincere message you intended you should always view the quotes in their whole context.

They don't quite get the Trinity language/theology right in their first paragraph -- but by now we're not surprised. St James has become a poster child for contemporary Arianism and liberal theological method. Sigh.