Interview: Clarification

I really appreciated the North County Times doing a story on the Branches. I also understand how difficult it must be to interview someone and try to get everything right. Sometimes there are things that just get changed, misunderstood, or are lost in translation. So here is a list of things that were a little skewed let's say: (by the way, you can find the article here)

1) I didn't go to "seminary", I went to Barclay College in Haviland, Kansas.

2) "The church's mission, Pinkerton says, is to emphasize the Bible." Now I can see how Dan Bennett got that from what I said, and I am very happy with that, but what I really said was, "The church's mission is to ask people to come as they are, hear what God says, do what God says, and tell others how awesome He is!" I then went onto say that we are all about the Bible.

3) There was a section that was a long quote by me and at the end it said, "Our purpose is to love people with God's love, and understand that we all have God in us." Now I'm sure that I said 'Our purpose is to love people with God's love' but where the discussion went from there, I'm sure I didn't say that we all have God in us. As someone who "Confesses with their mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believes in their heart that God raised Him from the dead." then you have God in you. We were all created in God's image but we need to repent and believe into Jesus. We hope this happens at the Branches for a lot of people!

4) "We have a vision, and our core values speak to the mission, but people are free to use those as they will." I don't know where this actually came from. I know I talked about the vision, our core values, and the mission but I don't know how this came out sounding like this. I probably said something like "We have a vision, and our core values speak to the mission, but people are just invited to come as they are."

5) "We hope to have a Bible Study every other week." I said we have a Men's Bible Study every other week right now and we want to add a Woman's Bible Study.

6) "We don't necessarily want to have a large sanctuary" I said something very similar to this but my emphasis was the fact that we don't want to have a "sanctuary" at all. I wouldn't mind having a large gathering place, but it will not be called a sanctuary. ;)

I want to commend Dan Bennett for having a set of great questions for me to answer during the interview. I also understand how papers work. There are so many words that can be dedicated to an article. I talk a lot and there was no way he was going to get all of those words in there. For the most part the article was great. I'm not complaining at all, just clarifying so that some of you could hear what I fully meant by some of my comments. Thank you North County Times for the love. We really appreciate it!