The Waterloo Region District School Board voted to let Gideons International in Canada distribute Bibles to Grade 5 students.

Predictably, amongst the first to protest this distribution of Bibles in schools was Rev. Rick Pryce, a pastor for the uber-liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. As he points out:

“In this country we are supposed to protect the vulnerable and impressionable from abuse from pressure. And the Gideon’s Bible is clearly designed to turn the kids who read it into Christians.”

Obviously the last thing the pastor of an ersatz Christian church wants is to convince impressionable children to become Christians by encouraging them to read a Bible. That would be exploiting the vulnerable; perish the thought.

The “mission statement” of the particular parish that Pryce pastors carefully avoids anything crass like bringing people to Christ or making disciples; instead we have the insipid:

St Philip’s strives to be a caring and friendly church, for all people. Through our worshipping, learning and serving others, we believe that God will show his love to the world.

No doubt this is supposed to be a model of bland inoffensiveness: it is an offence to the Gospel, though.