While Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear (D) pushes for gambling expansion, a pastor is being criticized for trying to use prayer to help encourage lawmakers to make decisions that are consistent with God’s “eternal character and truth.”
Hershael York, pastor of Buck Run Baptist Church in Frankfort and a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, was invited to open a joint session of the legislature with prayer, just before Governor Beshear spoke to lawmakers about why he wants them to pass gambling expansion. The pastor reportedly shocked everyone by praying specifically against the expansion, asking that the legislators and the governor “never resort to leveraging vice and avarice to pay our bills.”
York tells OneNewsNow he did not expect the uproar his prayer has produced.
“It strikes me that what they really want [in the legislature] is a meaningless prayer,” he says. “If you pray a meaningless prayer, no one objects. But if you pray something meaningful, something that really is the desire of your heart, or if you even pray in the name of Jesus, there are some members who object.”
( Pastor not inclined to ‘meaningless prayer’ )
