Robert H. Meneilly

Robert H. Meneilly (March 5, 1925 – July 20, 2021), known as "Dr. Bob", was an American Presbyterian pastor who was the founding pastor of Village Presbyterian Church in Kansas.

Meneilly in 2016

Quotes

"Separation Of Church And State" (1986)

Sermon "Separation Of Church And State" at Village Presbyterian Church "Audio: Separation Of Church And State" (2 February 1986)

• Aspiring to be President of the United States, televangelist Pat Robertson preaches, "The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-government by the Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society. And that's what's been happening." If any statement is more anti-American and more contrary to the Christian gospel, I have yet to hear it.

• Hear a statement by the founder of the Moral Majority, and now a new movement, the so-called Liberty Movement, the Reverend Mr. Jerry Falwell, "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country." People, the very foundation and fabric of our nation is really being threatened more by these popular religious voices, mesmerizing millions by way of television, than any threat of communism has ever presented us.

"Restoring God's Creation" (1990)

Sermon "Restoring God's Creation", at Village Presbyterian Church (22 April 1990)

• This is your Mother Earth speaking today on behalf of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood-sisterhood of our common family. I am speaking to you Christian Americans in particular. You along with other citizens are raping me. There is not one among you who is altogether innocent, no not one. You have become so accustomed to abusing me for profit, jobs, luxuries, conveniences, and pleasures that it has become a natural way of life for you. It isn't that you intend to be malicious; it is only that you are thoughtless. But thoughtlessness doesn't clear you in a court of justice.

• The ruination of your environment respects no human-drawn borders nor any family's fenced in private property ... All of you, my citizens, are very interdependent. Each must learn to care for all, and all must learn to care for each. Not to love your neighbor as yourself is to surely perish.

• Unless you allow the world of nature to flourish, you will perish.

• You Christians ought to be most highly motivated to practice environmental stewardship. If you are accountable to God for every idle word you speak, do you think you are going to be held any less accountable for everything you waste and all that depletes God's good creation?

• You Christians are called upon to balance your quest for personal salvation with reverence for nature. Either you live for the common good of all, or you live for no good or God at all!

• And who is it that always suffers from the affluent people's overkill and superfluity but the poor again. You are making a wider and wider gap on the earth between the rich and the poor. And that is always a far greater threat to our national and international security than any nuclear arms race.

"Saving God's Good Earth" (1992)

Sermon "Saving God's Good Earth", at Village Presbyterian Church (14 June 1992)

• You and I are destroying God's good earth that sustains us - biting the hand that feeds us. We are fighting God's natural systems in our determination to keep increasing our gross national product. In order to be comfortable, make as much money as we can, have it as easy as possible, and enjoy more pleasures now, we are leaving our children's children a wilderness that will not sustain them.

• Crises get our attention, but only love for God and his earth will hold our attention and move us to saving action.

• Would God be concerned with saving a soul, only to have that reborn person live in an impoverished and unhealthy environment? Salvation is a word that means "wholeness." Christ claimed that he came so that everyone might have life more abundantly. Christ's salvation includes the wholeness of the creature and the creation.

• Secular environmentalists have grounds to blame the Christian forces for the idea of life that will be good after death that they have ignored the consequences of people's irresponsibility with earth.

• Until we Christians see that the Gospel's good news of redemption applies to the earth, as well as the earthling, we will proliferate the sin of raping God's good earth. God's work of redemption in Jesus Christ encompasses the whole of creation and provides the grounds for restoring the brokenness in the relationship of humankind to creation, and the relationship of both to God.

• We must reclaim a sense of reverence for the earth and a recognition of our essential relatedness to the earth.

• Only love for God and God's good earth will keep our attention and move us to commitment. Nature is rising up to judge us Nature is striking back to call us to repentance.

• Healing and saving the creation is God's work, and he calls faithful persons to be co-creators with him.

"Harry S Truman Good Neighbor Award" (1995)

Speech "Harry S Truman Good Neighbor Award" at Kansas City Marriott (1995)

• Mr. Truman excised the best of the Good Neighbor policy when he sent the very first civil rights message to the Congress of the United States and desegregated the Armed Forces. Folks, I think on this day in honoring Mr. Truman with that civil rights move, we need to all acknowledge the fact that we do have our prejudices, systemic prejudices, within each one of us. When we will honestly acknowledge those prejudices that we have, when we're in touch with those feelings, then it is that we can begin to discipline ourselves to love our neighbors with different pigments, and cultures, and races, and yes economics.

• If we love God, we can't help but love our neighbors because we're going to respect them as our brothers and sisters. In fact, folks, if you stop to think about it, the only way in this world any of us has of loving God is by loving our neighbors.

• The deepest religious concern on this earth today is being a good neighbor. The most crucial political issue in the world today is learning how to do rightly neighbor-with-neighbor. The greatest social urgency is learning how to be a good neighbor to one another. And certainly the most crucial concern of our global economy, call it economic justice, is caring about our neighbors simply the same way we care about ourselves.

• Now if the greatest single power in a democratic republic is the power of a single vote, then the greatest power any human being has on this earth is love. Love for God. Certainly, love for self. And love for our neighbor. And when I talk of love today, I'm not talking of that simple, sentimental, otherworldly, ethereal kind of love. I'm thinking of a kind of love with which God loves every last one of us. It's the kind of love that transforms the human personality. It addresses the will. And it molds the human mind. And the love of which I speak today actually instills holy habits even in the least of us.

• Now honest down-to-earth tough love is the only virtue that I know of that's guaranteed never to fail. We often fail loving, but love never fails.

• Good neighborliness is really the common denominator by which we can all live together in harmony in a world of difference. Love is the only thing that tears down those walls that tend to separate us neighbor from neighbor, and bridges all the gaps between religions, races, cultures, and economies.

• The wonder of spontaneous, tough-hearted, uncalculated, discipline, and unexpected love, that's living. True kindness never stops for one moment to calculate the cost of time, of money, of inconvenience, or even danger, but jumps to the aid of a neighbor, even an enemy. Love for neighbor is ever ready. And once we get it going, it keeps going and going and going.

• You know, if you and I would really want to make a real difference in this world today, to make a real difference for God and good, all we need to do is to learn how, and to begin to discipline ourselves, to treat our neighbors just the way we treat ourselves, would want to be treated. It's that simple and it's that difficult.