ABOUT ME
I am a married, retired, 70-year old, Caucasian male, born and raised in the US midwest, where I still make my home. I have spent my entire working career as a licensed social worker specializing in health and mental health care. I have practiced social work in the Army, in hospitals, in home health care and hospice agencies, and in private practice. I have worked in administrative, consulting, mentoring, teaching, and clinical positions. I served on several community boards through the years. I have two masters degrees, a few other credentials, and a bunch of letters after my name, none of which mean much of anything unless you are good at what you do. I think that I was, as I spent the last 16 years of my career operating my own successful counseling practice, helping individuals and their families deal with the changes that accompany aging. I have been blessed in that I was able to provide employment for several other social workers in all of the settings where I worked.
I was born into the Protestant church, and have been active in congregational activities and leadership positions all of my life. My views on religion are expressed in posts categorized under FAITH and RELIGION. My views on Christianity, as currently practiced in the United States, are discussed in the blog: Reflections on the American Christian Church.
Jim Loomis 
Jim, your words have improved over the years…..and I never thought that possible at the time as they were very good then. Have fun with your art.
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Thank you Terry for your kind words.
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Jim – thoughtful and well put-together piece. I had read some of your source documents as you have, and came to a similar synthesis – though yours is much better expressed than mine. When I have tried to express my own, similar frustrations, I often choose a wrong word to describe it and then suffer attacks from people who have attached other or more meaning to the words I have chosen. Unfortunately, as you have noted, the main complaint (not criticism, since that suggests to me something constructive) comes from people who, in my mind, center far too much of their life around their faith. One area I think is overlooked when determining why younger people are not drawn to faith like they were in the past is that matter of too much commitment they perceive – right or wrong – to be a requirement of faith. I still have one more section to look at, but I am called right now to one of my faith commitments – choir practice. (I have been church organist for 50 years now, and while I enjoy it immensely, I do find the commitment to be a burden sometimes. When it is, it takes the fun out of it.)
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Thanks for your words of affirmation. As my pastor once said to me, “You have a lot of angst about the church, don’t you?” Yes, I do! Interestingly, I just returned from a leadership meeting at our United Methodist congregation at which we heard initial reports from some of the task force groups charged with pursuing the “prescriptions” that we received from our Vital Church Initiative (VCI) consultation process. (There are some pieces in this blog that I wrote earlier this year about VCI, including a link to our “prescriptions”.) It was encouraging to hear of their experiences visiting other congregations and beginning to process how we “do church” at our congregation, and their ideas and initial plans about what we need to do differently inside of our building, and especially out in the community. They are beginning to “get it.”
If other readers are reading this for the first time, the piece that Bob is referring to is entitled, “Reflections on the American Christian Church.” There is a link to it on the right side bar of this page.
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