{"id":7707,"date":"2004-03-16T12:55:35","date_gmt":"2004-03-16T12:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/the_congregation_and_the_offender.html"},"modified":"2004-03-16T12:55:35","modified_gmt":"2004-03-16T12:55:35","slug":"the_congregation_and_the_offender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/the_congregation_and_the_offender.html","title":{"rendered":"The congregation and the offender"},"content":{"rendered":"

A thought-provoking story about a church and a criminal<\/a><\/p>\n

The prosecution of an ex-policeman convicted of coercing sex from women has brought attention to an unlikely place: a large, liberal and feminist church congregation that offered to oversee his punishment so he could avoid going to prison.<\/p>\n

First Congregational Church had never before gone to such lengths for a parishioner – in this case, former Eugene officer Juan Lara, who stalked several women while in uniform and harassed others who rebuffed his advances.<\/p>\n

The pastor and other church members wrote letters to the judge, asking that Lara be placed under their supervision. They rallied around his pregnant wife, a church board member. They attended Lara’s court sessions last month.<\/p>\n

They said they’d require Lara to do community service, attend spiritual growth meetings and face his victims under an amends-making program known as restorative justice.<\/p>\n

“Did this man make very bad and harmful choices? Yes, he did,” Senior Pastor Greg Flint said. “The question is, do we cut him off? Our tradition is, we don’t – at least not based on our reading of Scripture and understanding of what it means to be brothers and sisters in Christ.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A thought-provoking story about a church and a criminal The prosecution of an ex-policeman convicted of coercing sex from women has brought attention to an unlikely place: a large, liberal and feminist church congregation that offered to oversee his punishment so he could avoid going to prison. First Congregational Church had never before gone to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe congregation and the offender - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/the_congregation_and_the_offender.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The congregation and the offender - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A thought-provoking story about a church and a criminal The prosecution of an ex-policeman convicted of coercing sex from women has brought attention to an unlikely place: a large, liberal and feminist church congregation that offered to oversee his punishment so he could avoid going to prison. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}