Most mainline protestant ministers are well educated

What do you mean by "well educated"? What do you mean by "most"?

C.S. Lewis addressed the issue of faith in Mere Christianity as follows:

In one sense Faith means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people—at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then— and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other. When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, “Perhaps she’ll be different this time,” and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water—or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down. Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

Although many religious people use the word differently, this is how I use Faith, and I propose that it would be an acceptable one to facilitate this discussion: a determination to hold on to what you have already established a high confidence level in, despite signals you may have received from less rational sources (i.e. emotions).

When the topic of religion and rationality comes up, I think the classification atheist / theist might be a very flawed one in this topic. I propose a different classification:

Let's consider group A to be people who are curious about whether there is much more to our world than what we can perceive with our organs and our instruments. They ask themselves whether there might be some higher meaning in this world, whether we are really just looking at shadows cast onto the wall in a cave, thinking that that's our entire universe, while there might be something much more out there, something we can't even imagine. And these people search for ways to experience this feeling, they seek to understand the concept most people call "God". Some of them find it, and become theists. Some people don't find it, or assign a different concept to it, or find other goals which they perceive to be more fulfilling, and become atheists/nontheists. But both of these know what they were searching for and don't condemn those who reached a different conclusion.

Let's consider group B to be people who wish to feel that they are better than other people, or at least that there are plenty of people who are worse then them. They want to belong to a group, to a community, where they are respected because they have similar opinions as others in the group. Another major motivation for joining that group is that they can now feel themselves to be superior to people outside of this group. To this group belong those atheists, whose main motivation for being an atheist is that they can feel themselves superior to people who they consider stupid, and also to this group belong those religious, whose main motivation for being religious is that they can feel themselves superior to people who they consider immoral.

I think the difference between the groups A and B are much bigger than the difference between atheists in A and theists in A, or between atheists in B and theists in B.

I admit that I'm basing these observations on my personal experiences, but as I'm eager to explore different communities with very varying value systems, I had the opportunity of meeting many people from all 4 groups of the above classification.

Secular people start with the faith that they can trust their sensory experience. Religious people start with conceptions of the divine. Yet, after each starting point, both seek to proceed in a rational logical manner.

This is one of the false moves of Christian apologetics. Religious people start with faith in their sensory experience as well. Fetuses don't "start with conceptions of the divine", and there is no concept of "the bible" or "the koran" to have faith in without faith in sensory experience.

Religious folks start from sensory experience as well, but at some point they start overriding sensory experience and the methodology they use with it with religious commitments. I suppose they're not alone in that, and not the worst. "There is a man in the sky who will punish/reward me depending on whether I obey him" is only wrong, and not "not even wrong".

Having said that, in my experience Christians are more rational than most where their "concepts of the divine" do not intrude, and this fellow is doing "God's work" in trying to bring a conscious commitment to rationality to Christians.

Finally got a chance to start an account. Sorry for the delay. I've enjoyed reading the comments and there are some very good point raised. I realize now that trust in sensory experience was not the strongest argument. What I was hoping for with it was to show an example of faith that secular people can relate to. It does not seem like it landed so I may have to keep thinking about what those might be. Realizing that there is not going to be anything directly analogous to religious faith. I wonder if something like "faith in the scientific method to help understand the world" might better illustrate the point I was going for?

rationality is useful for a religious person

This changes the entire color of your text. It makes it sound like its intended audience is believers, not seculars.

Secular people start with the faith that they can trust their sensory experience.

There are two main problems with that statement. First, the secular view has no place for the category of "faith." It's just not a concept we use. It's seriously inaccurate to call our reliance on sensory experience "faith." Second, everyone starts from sensory experience, including religious people. All your conceptions of the divine were learned via some sensation (reading, conversation, etc.).

I like this one, for a change. I'm uncertain LW is the place for it, except insofar as it might be a useful starting point.

You could allocate more space to talking about historic rationalist figures in the church, I think, as examples to live up to; some suitable imagery about leading the world into the light might work.

I think I explained that above the piece itself - Caleb Pitkin is the only Minister who is also an aspiring rationalist, and I thought LWs would find his perspective enlightening.