Featured TOTALLY Disgusting ... my old church comes out of the closet!

Leave them off. Not because you're afraid anyone reviewing your resume would get the wrong idea; I don't think you're "afraid" of much. Leave 'em off because you dis-associate with them.

If the resume is for another church, and they ask about the gap in the work history, tell 'em the truth.

If it's for a secular job, just tell them it was a job entity with whom you no longer can support their moral, ethical, and political views.

 

Retroactively rewrite history? Interesting concept. I'm trying to recall the kind of people that do that sort of thing...

Regarding your plan, a certain type of phobia comes to mind, trying to recall the name of it.

One thing for sure, you should apply aggressive spell checking to your resume, no matter the level of truthfulness it ultimately attains.


Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

Seems a tough ethical question to me. I can sympathize with your delimma and I am not sure I have an answer for you. I'd have to mull this over for some time if I had to make the decision.

I can see not wanting to be associated with the church as it is now. But that is only part of the equation. However with the dates given and I werre reading your resume I would not immediately think this means you approve of the current pastor or gay marriage.

The church is part of your history. I can see that you some who would or could accused you of not honestly reporting your experience in your resume if you do not show it in that part of your resume. It could be seen as a lie of omission. For me that, again if I were reading the resume, would carrry weight.

There are a number of points to consider in this decision.

As I said, I do not have a final answer on what I would do if I were making such a decision on my resume.

This is not a question to answer by shooting from the hip.

 

Simply leaving off that part of your past may be seen as possibly hiding something. If a church got wind of it during the interview process they would likely just round file your resume due to a major red flag. I might ad a caveat indicating I do not agree with the church's current stance. Not much information but enough to leave room for reasonable questions.

 

I have a problem with people making a "professional" resume out of their ministry experience.

I seen too many times where somebody wants a job, pimps their ministry work in a professional resume, and then some church gets enamored with his credentials and name dropping.

I think there are too many "professional" church workers who were called by men rather than God

 

Would keep the resume as is, but make sure that you higlight what you did and what the church taugh back then!

 

Curriculum vitae provided by Mark Dever, well known pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church:



Topsfield Congregational where he was a youth minister was United Church of Christ like your former church:

http://www.topsfieldchurch.org/open-affirming-statement

 

I attended a United Methodist cemetery and pastored with them for 13 years and you think you have history problems?

 

I don't understand why this is a dilemma. It is still your experience and part of your story. People who would be in a position of reviewing resumes should have the common sense to know that just because you have ministered somewhere, you are not giving a blanket endorsement of their ministry, or that your ministry resembles theirs.

Frankly, my concerns with the UCC are bigger than the gay question. I have a friend (a gay, married man) who sought ordination with them (he was/is Baptist) so that he could be a pastor of a UCC church, and the sticking point with the ordination council for him was that he believed in the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus and would not back off from that position after an extended period of questioning. They finally consented to ordaining him since he had the "gay thing" going in his favor.

When a religious institution makes a serious attempt to weed out persons who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, all other matters are secondary. I don't know if that is true in practice throughout the UCC, but that would be my biggest concern about that association.

To counteract any negative repercussions regarding that experience, you may want to include a brief theological summary or a disclaimer that your views and the views of some of the previous church bodies to which you have ministered are not congruent.