[Dialogue] 5/31/18. Progressing Spirit: Wolsey/Vosper: A Call to Spirituality and Religious participation; Spong revisited

Thu May 31 07:19:08 PDT 2018

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A Call to Spirituality and Religious participation.

 Essay by Rev. Roger Wolsey, May 31, 2018
A growing number of people who identify as progressive Christians also identify as being post-Christian, and/or post-Church, or even post-God. While this is of course perfectly okay and welcome, I experience this as less than ideal or optimal. To my mind following the way, teaching, and example of Jesus cannot truly, or at least not easily, be done without also having, nurturing, and tending to an active personal spiritual life communing with God (being present to Source/Presence) as well as an active communal/collective shared spiritual community. While some people may say that forums such as this newsletter and other online resources “meet that need” in their lives, words on a page pale in comparison to actually engaging in centering prayer, meditation, communion, shared singing, potluck suppers, organized community service, and experiencing big loving hugs from gifted kindred spirits.
Bottom line: I’m saying that progressive Christians do well to find ways to not just be in our heads, but to be in our bodies and hearts – and to do so with and for others. I’m calling us to be spiritual and religious.

I realize that saying this may be swimming against an increasingly common and increasingly strong current, but they each inform and complement the other.

Here’s an analogy. I enjoy playing my trumpet by myself and practice it as I have time. This is like my spirituality (in fact, it is a spiritual practice for me). It’s a personal way for me to express myself and to commune with God.
And yet I also enjoy and am blessed by playing my trumpet with others in bands and orchestras. This is like religion (which comes from the Latin “religare” – “to unite, to bind together.”)

Humans are social creatures and when I play with others, I’m exposed to new ideas and different forms of music and styles and techniques and I play at a higher level than I would experience on my own. I feel invited and inspired to play at my best and to enjoy the exhilarating experience of being a part of something larger than myself and participating in something that I simply couldn’t on my own. It’s a bit like how giant redwood trees grow tall by intermingling their roots with each other in order to support each other.
To use another analogy, if we are “fish,” spirituality is awareness of the water, and religions are the currents in the ocean that fish can choose to swim in to go faster and further than they otherwise could or would. (Flying fish are spiritually blessed in that by jumping out of the water they can perceive and maybe even fathom that they’re immersed in it.)
Fundamentalisms are aquariums that keep fish confined.

Humans thrive best (live longer with more happiness) when nurtured in communities that provide comfort, support, challenge, accountability, inspiration, and fellowship. A person can say that they’re a football player, but if they only practice alone by themselves in their backyard, and aren’t a part of a team that practices and plays together, they won’t be as much of one as they could be.
Similarly, as a Christian, I realize that following that radical dude from Nazareth and his Way, teachings, and example – ain’t easy if attempted solo. Jesus banded people together to follow him. We need one another.
Sure, it’s possible to come to a place in life where one feels that they no longer need a team. In some ways, that could be true, but there’s often some denial and self-deceit going on. Moreover, there are times when we participate in a group not so much because we need it, but because they need us. People groups don’t change unless people who care about them are willing to actively engage in them – and change them from the inside – which is the only way things ever change.
All this said, I couldn’t be a Christian if fundamentalist churches were the only kind of church that there was. Happily, that isn’t the case, they’re actually in the minority. There are plenty of other churches ranging from conservative to progressive. There’s no such thing as a perfect church, and they’re all mixtures of various levels of health and dysfunction. That’s humans for you. That’s you for you. I invite us to choose a congregation/cohort that fits “well enough” and then allow it to change us – as we change it.
* Daring to darken the doors of a church might feel a real stretch to many of us. Do I really want to attempt this again? Do I really expect things to be different? Won’t I just be hurt or disillusioned again? A place to start might be when you see someone in the lobby drinking coffee or eating their donut and you notice a tear welling in their eye as you speak with them, invite them to stroll with you down the hallway or to a corner of the room saying “Say, I notice some emotion welling up in you, perhaps something is alive or tender for you, would you like to talk about it?” And be ready for ministry to happen. You never know what’s going to happen, you might be there for someone, or someone might be there for you, just when it’s needed. That’s the magic of community.
Blessings as we each do our private spiritual inner work and as we grow in Christ together.
~ Rev. Roger Wolsey

Click here to read online and to share your thoughts
— Here are links for how to find a progressive Christian congregation near you.

7 Ways to find a progressive Christian church

ProgressiveChristianity.org/Progressive Christian organizations locator

About the Author
Rev. Roger Wolsey is an ordained United Methodist pastor who directs the Wesley Foundation at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is author of Kissing Fish: christianity for people who don’t like christianity; The Kissing Fish Facebook page; Roger’s Blog on Patheos “The Holy Kiss”

Question & Answer

Q: By Reader from the Internet
Would it be fair for me to promote the notion that you - a self-declared atheist leading a United Church of Canada congregation - and your church are generally promoting humanist values as well as providing the community benefits that churches normally provide?

A: By Rev. Gretta Vosper

Dear Reader,
Definitely!
What we do is build community around humanistic values. I believe very strongly that humans flourish in community and that when humans flourish, they engage beyond themselves investing in the people and the world around them. The liberal church has hemorrhaged from the left for decades, but many who have left have not found their way to communities that support them and offer the broad perspective that the same liberal church they left often does, mostly because those communities don't exist. (The liberal church, in my opinion, had a responsibility to create them, but that is a whole other conversation!)
When I speak on Sundays, I'm talking about world issues, personal well-being, parenting challenges, dying with dignity, the whole swath. We deal with it all and still do the stuff of church. For example, we celebrate the birth of a child and gather around a table for communion, served and received in a unique way, consistent with our values. We stand up and sing songs. We hold the typical church fundraising events.
But what all these things really do is build relationships. In preparation for our Holiday Bazaar, for instance, a group of women met for almost a year making crafts. Another group came together the week before to put everything together. On the day of, everyone donned Santa or elf hats and laughed their way through the day, dealing with customers with happy faces. Afterward, there was a bunch of stuff left that needed to be dealt with so another group got together and cleared it all out. It sounds like ordinary volunteer work, I know. And it is. But the goodwill and serotonin that is created when people come together in community is transformational. Never let anyone underestimate the importance of what I call the "off-label benefits of religion."
~ Rev. Gretta Vosper

Click here to read and share online
About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Dark Side of Evangelical Religion

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on August 31, 2005

I often wonder what Bible it is that people read in America’s Bible Belt. I wonder what the religion is that is practiced by the Religious Right. It certainly does not connect with my understanding of Christianity. Perhaps I am the one who is blind to the things they perceive, but seeing their enthusiasm for war, their lack of concern for the welfare of minorities, their overt homophobia, and their violence (as expressed in the number of legal executions in that region), I cannot help but ask those who live in the Bible Belt and those who hold membership in the Religious Right to help me comprehend the religious understanding that they espouse.
This issue was raised sharply for me recently by a remark from Pat Robertson, president and owner of the Christian Broadcasting Television Network. On his 700 Club program, Robertson — one of America’s leading evangelical voices — called for the assassination of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez. Murder, apparently, is a legitimate Christian solution when you have a disagreement with someone. Robertson, who was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1988, is a major force in the religious base dedicated to the presidency of George W. Bush. (Bush’s “red state” region is the home of the most overtly religious voters in this country.) The president has represented their point of view well with his opposition to abortion, stem-cell research, homosexuality, and the right to make end-of-life decisions. Utterances emanating from Pat Robertson’s lips, however, do not sound to me like the words of a religious leader, at least not a Christian religious leader.
This murder recommendation, by the way, was not his only bizarre moral lapse. Writing about the feminist movement in a fund-raising letter, Robertson said: “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” That does not sound like the feminists I know and is especially offensive to those feminists who are my wife and daughters. About homosexuality Robertson has not only been hostile but also uninformed and judgmental. Additionally he has combined his prejudices by adding the faint odor of anti-Semitism to his homophobia. In a Christmas Eve program, he once said: “The acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of gentile Christianity.” Now he has decided that the murder of Hugo Chavez is within his understanding of Christianity. This is the same man, I remind you, who championed the right of Chief Justice Roy Moore of Alabama to hang the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. Perhaps Robertson has not read those commandments recently, but the last time I looked they still contained the injunction: “Thou shalt not kill.”
It was amusing yet frightening to watch some of this nation’s other evangelical leaders dance around these comments by their colleague. One of them tried to justify Robertson’s words by suggesting that they came during “the political side” of Robertson’s television program rather than “the religious side.” This strange logic suggests that murder is okay in the political arena, but not in the religious arena.

Somehow murder seems to me to be both terminal and evil in either place. Jesse Jackson’s request that the Federal Communications Commission discipline Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network for his comments, just as they disciplined CBS and MTV over the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast during the half-time show of the Super Bowl in 2004, was dismissed by the same evangelical leader as not being “in the same category of moral concern,” the implication being that the comments were a lesser offense. That argument’s value escapes me. A performer’s exposed breast is certainly in bad taste but no one died as a result of that insensitive act. To call for the murder of a head of state because you dislike his politics strikes me as of a totally different and far more severe moral dimension. Members of the Religious Right do seem to be more obsessed with issues of sexuality than they are about issues like war and peace or discrimination. Sometimes they remind me of the old joke that “fundamentalists are opposed to sex because it might lead to dancing!”
I grew up a Southern evangelical fundamentalist in the Bible Belt. I certainly needed the security it offered me during the early years of my life, as I dealt with both death and poverty. I left that movement, however, because I found it intellectually bankrupt and morally indefensible. It was their indefensible morality far more than their intellectual bankruptcy that bothered me the most even then. Intellectual issues can be debated, facts cited, and minds changed. I know that from my own spiritual journey. When immoral activity done in the name of religion occurs, however, the scars created by both the pain of disillusionment and the loss of integrity are very long lasting. So out of the
embarrassment of listening to a person identified as a Christian calling for an act of murder, I seek answers to my searching questions.
What Bible do people read in that region of America we call the Bible Belt? In that part of our nation, church going is more popular than it is in any other part of America, and people living there hold to their religious affiliations very deeply. Yet that is the same part of America that engaged in slavery until they were required to give up that inhumane practice by force of arms. Is the enslavement of human beings compatible with the Christian life? Certainly quotations from Holy Scripture were used to justify slavery and to remove any pangs of guilt that might have accompanied that institution in the hearts of the “fine Christian slaveholders” of the South. Yet how does slavery square with Jesus’ words: “By this will all know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). Would they have me believe that slavery is simply a form of love that I do not recognize? Is the calling for the murder of a head of state also a form of love that I just do not understand?
When slavery was made illegal in the Bible Belt following the American Civil War, its bastard stepchild, known as segregation, took its place. Black people were separated from white people by law. Their children were forced to go to inferior schools. They were not allowed access to public libraries, public parks, or public toilets. They were refused service in both hotels and restaurants, and they were prohibited from trying on clothes in department stores and dress shops. Black people had no standing and few rights in the white-dominated courts. Enforcing these brutal practices was an organization called the Ku Klux Klan, which used the primary Christian symbol, a cross, turning it into an instrument of intimidation and fear by setting it ablaze. The Klan was also served by a “Khaplain,” who invariably articulated the values of what was called white, gentile Christianity, while at the same time seeking to dominate and coerce people of color with physical violence. The great majority of the white people of the Bible Belt supported segregation until it was declared to be illegal in 1954 by a unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court. Even then the white Christians of the South resisted that law by every possible means, legal and illegal. “Massive resistance to the law of the land” was the motto adopted by the church-going political organization run by Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia. It was fully supported by the junior senator from that same state, A. Willis Robertson, who along with his wife, were quite overtly religious, God-fearing, church-going Christians. They were also the parents of evangelist Pat Robertson. Perhaps neither the Byrds nor the Robertsons ever read Jesus’
words describing his purpose as that of bringing life, abundant life to all (John 10:10). Or perhaps they were able to convince themselves that segregation offered enhancement, not diminishment, of the humanity of black people.
What kind of religion was being practiced in the Bible Belt of the South when lynching, mostly of black males, occurred there with great regularity until the mid-twentieth century with the full support of both the white law-enforcement officials and the white dominated courts? How was it possible that Southern sheriffs, police officials, judges, and juries, who winked at this murder of black people, were also God-fearing, Bible-reading, church-going Christians? If they could square the lynching of “offensive” black males with the Christianity they practiced in the Bible Belt, then calling for the murder of an offending head of state in Venezuela by a well-known Southern Christian evangelist a generation later should be easy to understand.
America’s Religious Right was appalled at the sexual misconduct of President Clinton. So was I. But again their moral compass seems askew when they are not equally appalled at the behavior of a president who has taken us into a war based on blatantly false intelligence data. He has presided over a tremendous abuse of human rights in both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo for which no persons other than enlisted personnel have yet been convicted. His actions have cost the lives of some 1,900 American service persons, the wounding of thousands more, to say nothing of his responsibility for the deaths of uncounted Iraqis. His religious supporters appear to feel no outrage about this. Yet this president claims that his religion guides his every action.
I am glad Pat Robertson got caught with his moral pants hanging at half-mast, for it is time that the citizens of country awaken to the dark side of the religious coalition that threatens, if it has not already done so, to seize power in the United States.
So, I return to my questions: What Bible do they read in the Bible Belt? What kind of religion do those who are said to be members of the Religious Right practice? What kind of Christian evangelist is it who thinks it is moral to call for the murder of a head of state? I would love to have an answer. So would an increasingly larger and larger segment of the citizens of the United States.
~  John Shelby Spong

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