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This is partly [1] why Numenism was created and shaped as it has been to remain small: "When there is a large constituency, there's a lot of voices," he said. "It makes you arrogant or it makes you want to shoot yourself. When thousands of people tell you what they think, how can I be quick to listen, like the Bible says? I don't want to be a jerk and tune everyone out. At the same time you, can't love every single person and answer them."
However, it ends there, because fear is not a part of our Numenist beliefs. Yes, being Numenous is hard. It's hard to understand and grasp the incredibly deep personal responsibility we place on our celebrants. Most of the onus of being Numenist is individual.
Joshua Harris of Covenant Life Church in Maryland says: "But you can't build a church around a personality. You get up and you preach a sermon and people walk away thinking what a great guy - and that's a failure as a pastor." and that is a strong part of Numenism - it's not about us as individuals. Yes, Brian, and Bacca, and all the other Founders, and many of the other priests and ministers of Numenism have done a lot to create and shape Numenism, and we remember their names not because of the work they did [2] but because we were friends with them, and we did the work beside and with them. In Numenism, we are all Celebrants. Some of us are also Celebrants with skills in listening to others and helping to guide them spiritually [3], and some of us are also Celebrants with skills in research and development [4], but the "nuts and bolts" of Numenism is accessible and designed to be used by each and every Celebrant. We don't have "preachers" who tell us what to believe, or how to behave, or to interpret the words of the Divine to us; that's what being a Celebrant is: learning what to believe, how to behave, and interpreting the Divine for ourselves. We help each other out, but no one of us stands above the rest of us thinking we know what's best or that the Divine speaks louder and clearer to that one than to everyone else.
Numenism is deliberately decentralized in order to foster small groups and religious independence. I don't think any of us would ever be famous in the way Christians can become so, because we don't have an environment where we elevate and literally put some of us on pedestals [5] and thereby come to conflate "preacher" with "deity".
In Numenism, we may be awed by Divinity [6], and we believe that each of us is divine, each of us has the intelligence and the wherewithal to interact/communicate/determine for ourselves what this divinity may need/want - and that the basis for all of this is love. So, while I laud this Mr. Chan for seeing that particular pitfall, I still reserve the right to disagree with his ministry of fear.
[1]OK, probably mostly, but the founders are now all dead so I can't ask them to confirm this. Based on my personal friendships with the founders before they died, this sounds
[2] Which is important, but it's the work that's important, not the person.
[3] We call them "ministers" because they are ministering to the emotional, spiritual side of us.
[4] We call them "priests" but "scholar" would work just as well.
[5] OK. It's called a "pulpit", which is often raised above the seated congregation [a], so that people look up to the preacher, which is almost the same as a pedestal.
[5a] Numenism doesn't have congregations separated from the priests and ministers, we have co-religionists.
[6] I frequently am awed by how things are constructed and work and exist all around me - everything was created by someone/thing/force, and that's what we refer to as "divine". Until we elarn differently, we will continue to call it "Divine".