A Happy Ending To Pastor Pokluda’s Persecution

Memo to God’s Anointed & Ordained Clergy, Blessed With the Ability To Read the Bible In Three Different Dead Languages: if you aren’t guilty then don’t apologize. 

Even if you are guilty of something, don’t apologize on demand to third parties. Instead, take a moment to consider their motivations for publicly disgracing you. Those motivations might, possibly, just maybe, NOT be inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Lastly, if you don’t understand or accept what I just wrote, then please do not author any books on “adulting”. You are the very last person who should be giving advice on how to behave like an emotionally mature adult.

Looking at YOU, Pastor Pokluda! You did nothing wrong until you stopped telling women No! But I’ll end this post by giving you the most awesome-ist altar call ever.

‘I’ve hurt some people’: Texas pastor apologizes after he ‘objectified’ woman in sermon anecdote

h ttps://www.christianpost.com/news/texas-pastor-apologizes-after-he-objectified-woman-in-sermon.html

By Ian M. Giatti, 6 March 2023

A Texas pastor is asking his congregation for forgiveness after giving a sermon in which he said he “objectified” a woman in a brief meeting nearly two decades ago.

I was about to explain the concept of forgiveness, but after reading ahead, I saw that I must first explain the concept of temptation. To a pastor. We might not even get to sin before the end of this post! So to speak.

In the clip taken from a sermon titled “Fool Proof Love” on Jan. 22, Pokluda described enjoying “chips and queso” with his friend when he says a “physically beautiful” woman propositioned him.

“She was perfect, physically beautiful,” he told the congregation. “Everything was in the right place.”

After the woman offered to buy Pokluda a drink, he said he responded by holding up his ring finger to show his wedding band.

“And she says, ‘Well, is she here? Because I don’t care,” he recalled, citing the proposition to help illustrate a significant point in his sermon.

Pokluda said he immediately thought of Proverbs 5:6-7, which reads: “She does not consider the path of life; she does not know that her ways are unstable. So now, my sons, listen to me, and do not turn aside from the words of my mouth.”

“The saving grace in that situation was, I looked at that woman and I thought, ‘Oh, she hates me, she doesn’t love me,’” he said. “She wants my wife to hate me, and she wants my in-laws to hate me, and she wants my parents to hate me, and she wants my unborn children to hate me.”

“For just a few minutes of ecstasy, she wants to take my life and burn it to the ground. And that thought was God’s saving grace in a moment.”

Okay… uhh… where’s the guilt in that story? He was tempted by a pretty homewrecker, then rejected her. Of course he liked what he saw. The reason people commit sin in the first place, is because sin is easy & fun. It feels natural.

Please tell me that’s not a new concept to Pastor.

Pokluda told The Christian Post that he is “sad that my words have stirred up so much bitterness and controversy” and said he would be “praying for those that have been impacted by my words.”

“All those men who rejected harlots because of my example… I AM SO SORRY!”

In a clip shared March 3 on social media, Pokluda gave more context for the anecdote, explaining that, 18 years ago, he was a recovering pornography addict and apologized for any hurt he caused: “Lately, I’ve hurt some people. In a message on adultery, I described an experience 18 years ago where I objectified a woman in my description of her beauty.

18 Years ago, he did the right thing. Then he mentioned doing the right thing in January, confessed to being sexually attracted to women in February, and now his death spiral pinged my radar in March. And to think, I had wondered why the Church was completely useless at keeping the Sodomites out.

“Are you attracted to women even a little bit? (Forgive me, Jesus, for putting the idea in their heads that they might be.)”

“No.”

“BLESS YOU, O HOLEY ANGELS! WELCOME! YOU ARE THE MEN THE CHURCH NEEDS!”

“And it was not clear when I told that story that I was in the mind of myself 18 years ago, a recovering porn addict, sex addict.”

Pokluda, who serves as lead pastor at Harris Creek, added that by not clarifying that point, he could “even be giving permission to some of you to do the same.”

“I don’t ever want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to hurt you. I’ve been really grieved to hear those expressions of your hurt,” he said.

“If that’s you, if you’re in the audience, I want to be the most accessible pastor on Earth. I sit up here after every service to talk to whoever wants to talk to me. Please never leave here hurt or embittered before the sunset. Let’s talk so that I can own my fault fully.

“And right now, I own my fault fully, and I want to ask your forgiveness. Will you please forgive me for the confusing, hurtful things that I said?”

I will never forgive you, Pastor, for being heterosexual. Neither will God. That’s because it’s okay to be hetero. That is God-normative behavior. There is, literally, nothing to forgive. You were tested and passed. All is well.

But you DID do wrong with that over-the-top groveling. I’m still debating how to call you to repentance without sending you further down the rabbit hole of self-hate. Hmm. Tricky problem.

In addition to his lead pastor role, Pokluda is the author of Welcome to Adulting and is the former leader of The Porch at Watermark Church in Dallas.

I laugh because I cannot cry. Clergyboy here is so ashamed of feeling natural, sexual attraction to the female form that he’s been self-destructing for a month already. This doesn’t even rise to the insult “thin-skinned”. How did our leaders become PREPROGRAMMED for Totalist struggle sessions?

The sermon that stirred the ire of some wasn’t the first time Pokluda has publicly shared his struggles with lust.

In an interview last November with accountability app Covenant Eyes, Pokluda said despite being raised in the church, he struggled with drugs and pornography.

“I was raised in the church, was raised Catholic. Went to a Baptist youth group. I was over-churched. I always called myself a Christian,” he was quoted as saying. “[But] I was totally addicted to pornography.

“I’ve wrestled with drugs: cocaine, ecstasy, I smoked weed every day of my life for a season, alcoholism. All of that is part of my journey. Nothing enslaved me like porn.”

It always comes back to Original Sin, doesn’t it? The female rebels, the male abdicates.

There is no such thing as pornography addiction. Men are wired BY GOD to be like that. What God has made is good. The reason porn urges persist like nothing else, is because it’s the last bastion of a male sexuality that cannot be turned off.

The current situation is impossible and unsustainable. On one side, men are being denied marriage by the “need” for Barbie to go to college and have a successful career so she won’t ever have to depend upon a husband. On the other side, women being given all those early successes in life get their marital demands spun up so high that 100% of male humanity is unsexy.

It’s womens’ fault. It’s her parents’ fault. It’s the Church’s fault. It’s the government’s fault.

The one group whose fault this current situation ISN’T, is the young men trying to do the right thing by God… and finding themselves literally cockblocked at every step.

Since Pokluda isn’t standing up for himself against blatantly false accusers, I shall be his champion. Let me be the first to call out the ho’s… I’ll find this other-kind-of homewrecking skank if it’s the last thing… Lauren Chastain of Twitter was representative of the early point-and-shriek, then Sheila Wray Gregoire amplified it. Ah, social media. You are both the harbinger and the doom of the Antichrist.

In the Spirit of Full Disclosure

h ttps://laurenchastain22.com

By Lauren Chastain, 7 February 2020

This blog is now defunct yet still up. This post seems a good description of why she would accuse a pastor of anything she can, just because she can.

“Your story is yours and no one else’s. Each sunset is different depending on where you stand.” Al Andrews, from Andrew Peterson’s Adorning the Dark

We open with solipsism. Bad sign.

Over the last ten years, writing has become a therapeutic way for me to make sense of my world and my faith. I started a blog 6 years ago (to the day) as a systematic way of studying scripture and sharing opinions. In so doing, I also found a camaraderie with others that were interested in the scriptures or topics about which I wrote. Shortly after I started that blog, varying parts of my seemingly formulaic world started falling apart. However, with a few choice quotes, and familiar Bible verses, I could still explain it all away and make everything fit into a nice logical space.

Until I couldn’t.

For over two decades of my life, I sat under a teacher that drew crowds and adulation ad nauseam, and I was a good student. Through his Bible studies, I learned a lot about the Bible, but mostly I learned how to center each story around me, or in other words, I learned how to “apply it to my life.”

She learned nothing about the Bible, not one thing, if her takeaway was how to make everything about HER. Interesting that she only describes her teacher as extremely popular; not even a name. This is yet another example of why women should not be allowed to “study”, serve or otherwise be under the influence of attractive men no matter how Godly.

Such a situation is directly analogous to Cindy Crawford teaching math to men while rubbing tanning lotion all over her bikini-clad skin.

I say it again for the slow class: EVER SINGLE FEMALE STUDENT IN A SEMINARY, IS GUILTY OF LUSTING FOR HER MALE PROFESSORS. Because that’s just how women are wired. It’s not a choice they are capable of making, any more than I can stop liking a bouncy pair of titties. Would you fault me? THEN FAULT THEM, TOO!

Horrifically, that “pastor” was caught being a sexual predator, and even though I would never defend him, I was such a faithful loyalist to the church, I wholeheartedly defended his moralistic teachings and the enormous kingdom he had amassed.

She had it bad for him, then he fell from grace. “I was traumatized by the fall of a hot sexy pastor that I -hic- would neeever have defended even after taking all of his classes twice. But I defended him anyway.”

I became so good at explaining the Bible as it relates to us, complete with “to do lists” and bullet points, that I began writing for other online publications in addition to my own. About the same time my husband became a pastor, and consequently I became a pastor’s wife which was a whole new world to try to understand. Predictably, the further down the rabbit hole we went, the less things made sense. I watched as scripture was used to control the benign behavior of some and then excuse the malicious conduct of others. Little by little we seemed to step fully through the looking glass at which point writing became impossible.

If her husband is ALSO a pastor, then there’s no chance I’m wrong about her being sexually attracted to Senior Pastor Big-Man. The only question is if she committed physical adultery with him. It would explain why his downfall traumatized her.

Along with the confusion, came devastation. So much loss. Most of the losses were too complicated to understand myself, never mind share about on a blog. I hardly knew what was true. The answers we fought to find seemed just out of reach. Trust was broken. And we had to walk away- not from God, but from those we really believed were our “family.”

During this time I had developed an unexpected community on Twitter. People who are willing to help me hash through difficult concepts without giving me trite answers. People who simply say. “I’m sorry for your pain,” without a silver lining tagline. People who encourage me in ways I didn’t know I needed encouraging. People who think differently than me, but are willing to stick around and discuss. People who make me laugh all day long. And my favorite, people who have shown me how to disagree with kindness and even humbly concede to being wrong.

Pastor Pokluda awaits your concession. You did evil to blame him for involuntary attraction to an attractive woman twenty years previous. Who even asked you for your opinion? You already hated Pokluda… and like Daniel denounced for praying to God, you denounced him for resisting temptation.

You witch, Chastain! You faithless rebel, whore of Satan, you homewrecker!

..Blah blah me me me blah me blah…

And while these reasons are quite enough, the moment that tipped the scales for me is when I realized how many women and men are legally being kept from telling their stories. This made me realize the true gift I have to be able to tell my story to anyone I choose, and that is a gift I cannot waste. So for all of those that have been silenced, I am taking this risk for you, in the spirit of full disclosure.

She didn’t tell her story even when she did. She told the part of the story that she cared about… herself… and then further edited out the parts that wouldn’t make her look good.

Today, apparently, she goes prowling on social media for vulnerable men to destroy… handling her internal pain and insecurities, not to say unrepentant sins, by projecting them onto whatever male is most convenient.

Which is where Social Justice comes from. Not psychological mass-effect shared psychosis or whatever, nope. Barbie just needs a spanking but the government won’t allow it. Now she’s out of control and we’re being strangled.

On to the professional bitch-ass whupping.

Can pastors please stop salivating over women’s bodies in sermons? A response to Jonathan Pokluda’s objectification of the ‘perfect’ woman

h ttps://baptistnews.com/article/can-pastors-please-stop-salivating-over-womens-bodies-in-sermons-a-response-to-jonathan-pokludas-objectification-of-the-perfect-woman/

Opinion By Sheila Wray Gregoire 24 February 2023

Megachurch Pastor Jonathan Pokluda made a splash on Twitter when a three-minute clip of his Jan. 22 sermon went viral. He narrated how, early in his marriage, he ventured to a restaurant with a friend for chips and queso when a woman with a “perfect body,” where “everything was in the right place,” propositioned him by asking if she could buy him a drink.

Did it hurt, Sheila? That a man you didn’t know existed until yesterday, thinks you aren’t the prettiest woman since Cleopatra’s skin wrinkled in the Egyptian sun? You female Church lead-duhs have bigger hypergamy hamsters than the planet you’re standing on. With insecurities to match.

Pokluda, now pastor of Harris Creek Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, explained he was married. She replied “Is she here? Because I don’t care.” He then dramatically recounted how his saving grace, the only way he managed to resist the temptation of a few minutes of “ecstasy” with a complete stranger, was that he remembered Proverbs 5.

Outrage and derision

Christian social media erupted in outrage at his objectification of women’s bodies, as well as derision at the idea the story unfolded as he said. Many posited a more plausible explanation of the encounter was a server asked him if she could get him a drink; he misunderstood and replied he was married; and she was confused, since no woman was with him.

But let’s give Pokluda the benefit of the doubt: A “perfect” woman propositioned him when he was eating chips and dip with a friend. And his study of Scripture was the only thing that kept him from betraying his wife for an ecstatic encounter with a stranger.

Yes. It was Pokluda’s love for God, not head-knowledge of Scripture per se, but yes.

Men are not to cheat on our wives. But… we can and we’re constantly tempted to. Think about that the next time you aren’t in the mood for nookie, Church chix. If you won’t boink your husband then another, prettier woman will.

Women exist in a world where people judge, use, ridicule and ogle our bodies everywhere we go.

Isn’t that nice? No burden of performance. No career in the mines and bilges. You just find a man with tolerable body odor, rub your curves on him and poof, you spend your life with babies and girlfriends while he bends all of reality to your benefit. God forbid you clean a toilet even when half the shit is yours.

That’s exactly how I plan to survive Judgment Day. Whatever the spiritual equivalent of boobs are, I will make sure that mine bounce gently while Christ Jesus tries to review my life’s accomplishments. Because I know what He’s gonna find on that short list.

Unlike a woman, however, I’ll be grateful forever that the distraction worked.

Women exist in a world where people judge, use, ridicule and ogle our bodies everywhere we go. One study found between 34% and 65% of 5-year-old girls have ideas and opinions on dieting. And then we get to church and hear, once again, we aren’t enough — we’re merely the consolation prize, the one he settles for instead of the “perfect” woman he is barely able to resist.

Bitch, you WERE the perfect woman… when you were age 20. Then you had a career so you wouldn’t ever need a husband, and now, you resent that he isn’t as attracted to you as he would have been if you had acted wisely in your youth.

Oh. Ohhhh! AT LAST, BWAHAHA!!! This is gonna be SCHWEET!

Women deserve better than to go to church and hear all that stops our pastors from having sex with total strangers is a Bible memory passage. We’re all for Bible memory, but we’re also for marriage vows, faithfulness and holding Christian men to at least the same moral standard as your average non-Christian husband at your local Applebee’s.

That’s why so many Christian women erupted in anger at Pokluda’s sermon. We heard Pokluda, in the kind of breathless, hushed tone often reserved for worship, describing the “perfect” body of this woman, with “everything in the right place.” Instead of church being a place where a woman can feel comfortable in her own skin, the pastor invited men to judge every woman around them on the basis of where her body parts landed.

Do you see what’s happening here? The real reason for the outrage? The sex cartel is crumbling! All the skanks who grudgingly settled at age 35 for unattractive husbands… they’re watching the younger women reject the Eat Pray Love life path, make their bodies attractively feminine to hungry men…

And now, the only thing keeping those meal-ticket husbands in a marriage to a woman that he knows despises him for being the best she could do, is devotion to a God who forgives every sin unconditionally, forever, with no need for repentance or (shudder, eww!) touching a husband’s naked body.

The younger, hotter, tighter generation know that privation and scarcity are upon us, and they’re compensating by…

by…

…making themselves desirable to stable but unsexy men!

INSTEAD OF RACKING UP $200K IN STUDENT DEBT AT FEMINIST UNIVERSITY!

Burn, thou witches of the West! Your life was all about you. Even when you took marriage vows, you knew you had that gold-plated exit door of chilamony to backstop your every faithless act. You secretly gloated at how miserable you could make that husband you needed, but never loved.

And now… Now, you’re realizing that he DOES have options. Because Generation Younger, Hotter, Tighter does NOT want to end up like YOU!

Don’t worry, Church ladies! God will treat your husband exactly as He treated you… easy forgiveness for everything, am I right? Hubby will care as much for you in your old age, as you cared for him in his youth! NOW THAT HE HAS OPTIONS, HE CAN AFFORD TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING YOU DID TO HIM JUST BECAUSE YOU COULD!

In frat-boy movies of the ’80s and ’90s, men proved their masculinity by the “notches on the bedposts,” by how many women they’ve slept with. But Christian men are only supposed to have sex with one woman — their wife. One way to prove their manhood without promiscuity is to brag about how they could have slept with many women but chose not to.

Sociologist Sarah Diefendorf notes how Christian men often seem to relish describing their struggles with lusting over women’s bodies, as if such assertions are a way to assure us of their manliness. Maybe this explains why pastors so often give these tone-deaf illustrations. At some level, they think this signals their manhood.

No, ladies, that is what YOU think. YOU are attracted to notch count; men are attracted to virginity. Sheila has no excuse to not know this, being the best-selling author of The Good Girl’s Guide To Great Sex.

I might need to look at Sarah Fattened-Ork someday.

Pastors, you face a choice: You can normalize treating women as whole people made in the image of God, or you can normalize objectification. You can imitate how Jesus sat with the Samaritan woman and talked with her, and how Paul praised women as his co-workers, or you can imitate locker room talk.

When you choose the latter, you tell every man in your church: “It’s normal to see women as objects. No one can expect more from you. Your wife is unreasonable by feeling hurt by you wanting other women.” You harm marriages.

Again, women naturally want the men that other women want. The reason that isn’t happening here, is because THESE women already have husbands… that they know, even if they’ll never admit it, have been treated cruelly by the only women they’re allowed to have. Most of those husbands can already justify a divorce on the grounds of marital abandonment.

No wonder, then, that Mrs. Strong&Independent is nervous whether that last little fuse of “God said so” is going to hold under the pressure!

Women just want to feel safe – in our marriages and our churches. But, quite frankly, many of us don’t.

You don’t deserve to feel safe. Reconsider your sexual treatment of your husbands and, this time, opt for the correct answer. If it’s not too late.

In social media polls I’ve conducted, just over 60% of women said they felt more sexually unsafe at church than in the workplace. And Pokluda’s own denomination has given only lip service to the sexual abuse crisis at its doorstep, persistently claiming they’re helpless to act, while somehow managing just this week to disfellowship churches that have female pastors. Perhaps it’s not surprising that irreligious young women now outnumber irreligious young men, reversing a trend that has held for centuries.

Women want to go to church and worship Jesus and feel part of his body, rather than having our own bodies judged.

Heh, and you thought my “boobies at Judgment Day” idea was gross.

We want to go to church without having to hear a pastor call his wife “smokin’ hot,” or brag about the hot women who want to have sex with him, or tell us how hard it is for Christian men not to lust.

We’re tired of being framed as the dangerous ones when we’re the ones in danger.

“We’re tired of being reminded that our husbands have options… more every day.”

“We’re tired of having to care about the males infesting our liberated lives.”

And we’re tired of being framed as the dangerous ones when we’re the ones in danger.

Pokluda certainly is not the only pastor guilty of reinforcing objectification from the pulpit. And he is far from the worst. He is, however, the most recent, and this dust-up reveals much about the frustration women feel in evangelical circles, and the refusal of men in power to confront their complicity in normalizing female objectification.

Pastor Pokluda must learn to tell women No. No, they must not be allowed access to high-status men at Church. No, they don’t get to abandon their husbands while enjoying his bank account. And No, hubby shouldn’t stray… but if wifey makes him miserable at home, then straying is what’s going to happen.

And while he preaches that gloriously patriarchal message, Pokluda’s own wife is going to notice all the young flesh making eyes at her husband… and decide that Pokluda could use a little more lovin’, too. Especially if he winks at a couple of them… not that he would, but (heh heh) he certainly could.

Find your spine, Pokluda, if not for God, then for the head. Ahh, I finally found a way to call you to repentance!