[Oe List ...] 2/27/2022, Progressing Spirit; Rev. Deshna Shine: Hope For The Future; Spong Revisited

Ellie Stock elliestock at aol.com
Thu Feb 17 06:34:48 PST 2022 

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Hope For The Future
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|  Essay by Rev. Deshna Shine
February 17, 2022I will begin with a story I recently shared in a Seminar for the Progressive Christian Network in Britain. A young girl falls in love with the passion and message of a teacher she learns about from her step-dad, a youth pastor and a TV evangelist. So she asks her parents to take her to church. She also knows at this young age of eight years old, that she too wants to be a pastor. She feels it in her bones and it is a calling that will stick with her through life.Her step father, raised in Seventh Day Adventism, only knows his own experience and so takes her to their local Adventist church. She gets dropped off because she is the only one in her family who actually wants to go to church.She becomes enveloped in the church community. There she finds meaningful work, has a group of loving and kind fellow youth, and has opportunities for learning and leadership. She travels all over the world on mission trips mostly building schools, churches and renovating hospitals. She is confident in the ministry and belief system she is immersed in.But deep within her she also knows she is different. She knows she isn’t a “normal” girl. She likes girls not boys. And she always has. But she keeps that to herself because she knows that isn’t acceptable. She is something like a tomboy but that isn’t quite right either.Her parents tell her she is too sensitive, too needy, even as a baby. And her church tells her that those desires and feelings she holds within her are wrong, she is told Jesus can change this sinful part of her.So she pushes the feelings down and denies her longing and who she really is. She goes on to lead churches and communities for 20 years of her young adult life. She is exceptionalized for playing the part in a fundamental system that prioritizes pseudo-supremacy, masculinity, and whiteness even though she is only some of those. She marries a man because that is what thought she should do. She doesn’t question the beliefs she is taught. She, along with everyone else, is not allowed to question. She must show a solid faith.She is successful but she is not fully herself.Until one day her authenticity can not stay hidden any more - it is pushing at the tight lid, threatening to emerge of its own accord. Her true essence is brimming over and her questions are getting too big.She has an affair with a woman. She leaves the Church and the only community she has ever really known in the midst of a full explosion of all the pieces in her life. She gets a divorce and she begins to question her faith and herself. Her parents are hurt and disappointed. Her church responds in love but they don’t understand. Her friends aren’t surprised that she is with a woman but many hoped it wouldn’t be true. She can no longer push down her true self. With the accompaniment of a therapist (also ex-vangelical) she will risk everything to find herself.She discovers that she is a seeker, a questioner, a musician, a Queer person in a woman’s body, and in her truest heart a pastor and a follower of Jesus.She is left without community, without a solid belief system, and with a lot of guilt, shame, and confusion. She leaves Seventh Day Adventism and begins her search for a spiritual path and community where she can be her fully authentic self. Eventually, she comes across progressive Christianity but she still has a lot of questions and doubts.Fast forward 8 years, she has found her soulmate and is married to this woman. She is candidating for a pastoral position in a progressive christian church. She is voted unanimously by both the Search Committee and the Board.But the big day is when she will stand in front of the largest church in the conference, with in person and online attendees and she will tell them who she is. And not some watered down, careful version, but the truest version of herself because she is at a point in her life when she can only be her authentic self and she will take nothing less than full acceptance of that.She tells them who she is and she makes the congregation laugh and cry and she calls them to live into their beliefs. She calls them to remember themselves as the Beloved community. Perfect and whole even as they are broken and growing. Like her.At the end of the service, she and her wife are asked to step out of the church while they vote. They wait in an office down the hall, holding each other and quiet.She is asked back into the church. The church voted unanimously yes to call her into their pastoral leadership.When she and her wife return to the sanctuary, hundreds of people wave colorful banners and cheer as they walk down the aisle together, hand in hand. They are received.She is extravagantly welcomed. Radically welcomed and celebrated. With her gayness, her mestizo self, her questions, her doubts, and her vision of a Beloved community.She is seen for who she is and she is radically included and celebrated. Inside of her is a young being who is fully seen and loved in community.I was recently remembering this moment of radical and extravagant welcome when I was a part of a conversation with a local church about why historically under-represented groups aren’t showing up to church. I remembered that story I shared and I imagined a church where people who want to, can stand in front of their community and share their fullest, messiest, truest selves and be extravagantly welcomed and celebrated.I imagined they are asked to step out and the rainbow colored flags and banners are pulled from under the pews and readied.  I imagined each person is cheered for as the doors open and they walk down the aisle to shouts of joy and smiling faces. “We see you! We welcome you just as you are!”I thought back to a ritual I attended during my Interfaith Ministry training. Similarly, we were asked to wait outside. Our ritual guides were inside and one by one we went in the door to a room where people waited with colorful scarves, music, welcomes and hugs. “You are here!” They cheered, as they rang bells and pounded on drums. “You are welcomed!” They cried out with open hearts as they hugged us. We were given an instrument and we then turned and welcomed together the next person to enter the room. And the voices grew and the community grew.Imagine if we are all seen in our fullest selves and extravagantly welcomed by communities of faith. Imagine if we all feel safe enough to been seen — the messy parts, the broken parts, the grieving parts, the growing parts, and the unique gifts we each bring to this world.During an interview with Bishop Yvette Flunder, the Senior Pastor at City of Refuge in Oakland, California she told me,“I don’t think church was ever supposed to be theatre style and choreographed, down to a fine science. I don’t think that was ever the intent or the heart of God. I think it was supposed to be less ceremonial and more familial."She said: “The success of church should not be determined by the number of people in seats on Sunday. That is one of the things we do, we ask ourselves at the end of the week: How many people did we serve? That is a different number. I see that as church unusual.”And when I asked her, “How do you imagine the future of the church?”Her answer was, “A familial sacred community. Secure, inclusive, welcoming, raggedy. In that raggedy environment, we don’t need choreography because our people show up with all their realness and their unique needs and authentic selves.”She says church should be full of real moments, like your mama’s house. “In your mama’s house, she said, “if Mama knows that one of your children is real different, then your mama is going to make provisions for that child. And she will start with the child that needs the most support.”And so I ask, how many people did we welcome? How many did we serve? They go hand in hand, I believe.This story, shared by Deepa Bharath, in the Orange County Register, is another example of that welcome we all deserve.     Lorraine Fox of Mission Viejo, raised as a Christian fundamentalist, was
     ostracized from her church because she was gay.     “They kicked me out of Bible school,” she said. “For the next 25 years, I stayed
     away from church. I just couldn’t sit with people who sang about love
     but didn’t practice it.”     In 1991, she heard about the church in Irvine that had opened its doors to
     the LGBT community.     “The minute I walked in, I cried,” she said. “And I cried the entire service.
     I felt like I’d come home.”     Fox says she has never wanted to go to a “gay church.”     “It’s just like going to a gay bar,” she said. “It’s like I have to hide for
     being gay. But here was a place where I could practice my faith and be myself.”     That was exactly how Christine Roy, a transgender woman, says she felt, too.
     Roy had stopped going to church when she “got serious” about her identity
     because she believed the two were mutually exclusive.     The Irvine (UCC) church was the first one she “went to as Christine.”     “It’s a big deal to be able to go to church as yourself – your true self,” said Roy,
     of Laguna Hills. “That’s how you get a deeper connection to your faith.”“We belong to each other,” as indigenous teachers have said. So, how do we create a bigger table with every voice in mind and make sure every one is there when we start to wrestle with solutions? How do we create a safe, loving, familial community who embraces each human being in their truest self? How do we extravagantly welcome our community members as they are? Perhaps this is something you can explore in your own community.Following the path of Jesus means we live and love with Wild Abandon. Can we love wildly, extravagantly welcoming our neighbors to our communities?~ Rev. Deshna Shine

Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Deshna Shine is Project Director of ProgressiveChristianity.org’s Children’s Curriculum.  She is an ordained Interfaith Minister, author, international speaker, and visionary. She grew up in a thriving progressive Christian church and has worked in the field for over 13 years. She graduated from UCSB with a major in Religious Studies and a minor in Global Peace and Security. She was Executive Director of ProgressiveChristianity.org, Executive Producer of Embrace Festival and has co-authored the novel, Missing Mothers. Deshna is passionate about sacred community, nourishing children spiritually and transforming Christianity through a radically inclusive lens.  |

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Question & Answer

 
Q: By S J

I have been researching Paul's mental and physical ailments, and it seems that he fits exactly the profile of someone suffering from Geschwind syndrome, as well as bipolar disorder and some degree of dissociative disorders. My question has always been, since it is evident that Paul's "Visions" from Jesus were probably nothing more than hallucinations, brought on by temporal Lobe epilepsy, and influenced by postictal events including perhaps being prayed over by Christians, then WHY should people today misinterpret Paul's writings as divine in nature? In Paul's time it was commonplace to accept hallucinations and altered mental states as Divine prophecy, example the Oracle at Delphi. So why can't we see Paul for who he really was, which was a sufferer of neuro-psychiatric disorders to whom no treatment was available, instead of some great prophet, of which he should not be?

A: By Rev. Roger Wolsey
 Dear S J,Thank you for submitting a fascinating question to ponder. I’ll begin by saying that many people have speculated about “the thorn in Paul’s side” – as well as about his general psychology. I’ve seen people (frequently homosexual persons) suggest - or even flat out claim - that Paul (or Jesus) was a homosexual and that this was “the thorn” he struggled with. He wasn’t married that we know of, and he chose to be celibate, but that isn’t exactly much evidence to work with.

I’m reminded of two things. First, an emphasis of the liberal Christianity of the modern era (1880s-1900s) was embracing science – to a fault. Many liberal theologians sought to explain (away) miracles described in the Bible by saying things like, “Well, we know there are certain weather patterns that take place where the Red Sea could have parted by known winds that can take place; or that Jesus could’ve used certain medicinal herbs to heal people; or that, …, etc. The progressive Christianity that evolved from liberal Christianity fully embraces stories of the Bible, as story. Not something that we need to explain as fact or history, but rather, to read ourselves into so that they might speak to us and invite personal and collective transformation. [For discussion about the shift from liberal Christianity to progressive Christianity see these articles: “Christianity for People Who Don’t Like Christianity" & Progressive Christianity isn’t Progressive Politics” ]

Second, Anaïs Nin invited us to realize that “we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Essentially, we often engage in eisegesis, rather than true exegesis. Eisegesis is the process of interpreting texts colored by one's own presuppositions, biases, experiences, and agendas. As an example, how wealthy, straight, white men interpret scripture can be quite different from how poor, lesbian, brown women experience the same texts. Similarly, how psychiatrists, lawyers, social workers, and migrant workers read the Bible may differ rather markedly.

I, and quite a few other people I know, have had mystical experiences with the Divine, including God “talking to me” in my call experience. People will interpret what I just stated via their own biases, experiences, and prejudices, yet I highly doubt if many would suggest that I suffer from “neuro-psychiatric disorders.” Paul didn’t claim to be a prophet and neither do I. I do feel called to promote the way, teaching, and example of Jesus and to help the Church be the best it can be.

I wrote an essay for Progressing Spirit a few months ago that I think will help many progressive Christians who currently have less than glowing views of the apostle Paul soften their take on him and perhaps come around to embracing him as a valid and needed voice within the Christian lineage. See: “Paul: Friend or Foe?”

I hope these reflections have been helpful.~ Rev. Roger Wolsey

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Roger Wolsey, a United Methodist pastor, is author of Kissing Fish: Christianity for people who don’t like Christianity and blogs for Patheos as The Holy Kiss and serves on the Board of Directors of ProgressiveChristianity.Org. He values the Wesleyan approach to the faith and, as a certified spiritual director, he seeks to help others grow and mature. Roger served as Director of the Wesley Foundation campus ministry, University of Colorado for 14 years, and currently serves as the pastor of Fruita UMC in Colorado.  |

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|  Let me get right to the point: I believe that this year will be the best year ever for ProgressiveChristianity.org.
 
We've recently launched a podcast, are working on all new liturgical resources, will be releasing the 3rd year of our children's curriculum, and are in early stages of developing a video series on the key points of progressive Christianity. It's a lot for our little organization, but it is so exciting. And, we believe, much needed.
 
As I said, I believe this will be the best year ever for ProgressiveChristianity.org, but we cannot do it without your help. Let's make this the year that the progressive Christian voice is heard loud and clear.
 
We are a non-profit and rely on our members to support us. If you believe in what we are doing, the best way to do this is by contributing monthly as a sustaining donor, but we completely understand that is not the right path for some folks. So, you can also make a one-time donation to help keep this movement... well, moving. Thank you for all of your continued support. Together, we really are making a difference.
 
PEACE!

Rev. Mark Sandlin
Presiden, Co-Executive Director
 
* Another way to support us is to leave a bequest in your Will and/or Trust designating us a beneficiary.   |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited


“Think Different – Accept Uncertainty”

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
January 19, 2012I recently read Walter Isaacson’s provocative and fascinating biography of Steve Jobs, the founder of the Apple Corporation.  He was innovative, iconoclastic, weird and a genius.  He built his company not only into a successful giant, but made it the highest valued company in the entire world.  One of Steve Job’s secrets was that he was never willing to live inside the boundaries of the given.  He adopted as the motto of his company the words, “Think Different.”  I grant you that he would have been more grammatically correct if his words had been “Think 
Differently,” but things like that mattered very little to this man. Later he added the slogan “Accept Uncertainty.” The more I thought about Steve Jobs’ slogans, the more I yearned to make them the mottos of the Christian Church, though there is little evidence inside institutional Christianity today that any one would be responsive to either slogan.  Nonetheless that idea fed my theological fantasies and caused me to wonder what the Christian Church would look like if its members and leaders had the courage “to think different” and to “accept uncertainty.”The timeliness of this idea also intrigued me. If there ever was a moment in which Christianity needed to step outside the traditional theological formulas and speak in bold new accents, it is today.  Such exciting possibilities are, however, overwhelmingly resisted in religious circles where security, peace and the absence of either conflict or change are all regarded as virtues.  So I have decided to do a series of columns throughout the coming year through which I can invite Christians into a new kind of dialogue.  I want to speculate about what Christianity might actually evolve into if Christians had the courage to do things like Steve Jobs did, that is, not to let what is be the limits of what can be.  What would be different, for example, if we were able to free the Christ experience from the first century interpretation of that experience as we now have it in the New Testament?  Why do we continue to pretend that a first century interpretation is somehow going to embody truth for all ages?  What would Christianity look like if we were willing to separate the Christ experience from the fourth century’s interpretation of that experience as presently found in the creeds?  Why do we continue to pretend that fourth century words are adequate to be the bearers of ultimate truth for all time?  Recently I had a letter from a friend who wanted to start a book study group in her Methodist Church in Mississippi to be a meeting place for those who wanted to explore the edges of Christianity.  They wanted to read some of the boundary-breaking theologians. Her request was denied by her current minister.  It was his job, he said, to “defend the faith not to question it.”How can either the scriptures or the creeds be studied in any meaningful way if the assumption is that they are, in their present forms, identified with unchanging reality?  That dated attitude precludes the possibility of any different thinking from that of the first century in regard to the scriptures or the fourth century in regard to the creeds.  The world’s knowledge has, however, increased exponentially from that which marked the minds of people in New Testament times or those at the time the creeds were formed. No one today, for example, believes that demon possession is the cause of either mental illness or epilepsy, that Jesus could literally ascend into the sky of a three-tiered universe in which the planet earth was the center or that everything not understood in life had to be explained by an appeal to a supernatural miracle.  Modern Christian scholars no longer even debate the traditional claims made through a literal reciting of the creeds that the virgin birth is about biology or that the resurrection is about the physical resuscitation of a deceased body back into the life of this world.  If the only choices we have in dealing with either scripture or creed is to believe these words literally or not at all, then the future is bleak indeed.  We can either become “true believing fundamentalists” (and they come in both Protestant and Catholic varieties), or we can give up Christianity altogether as an ancient, but now irrelevant superstition and take our places as citizens of “the secular city.”  If we choose the former then we will watch Protestants protect themselves from change by claiming an inerrant Bible and Roman Catholics protect themselves from change by claiming an infallible Pope.  Both claims are preludes to death and both are today widely regarded as absurd.  If the latter alternative is adopted then the dying of Christianity will continue, but at accelerating speed until the Christian God takes a place in the museums of human antiquity along side other deceased deities like Baal, Marduk and the gods of the Olympus.Increasingly modern men and women can no longer live their lives within the boundaries set by the church.  Popular Christianity is today represented in the media in devastatingly negative terms.  We are the ones who are trying to protect our children from learning about evolution in public schools; we are the opponents of the feminist movement, battling to keep women outside equal rights to in all areas of their lives, including control over their reproductive abilities, and we are the ill-informed bearers of religious homophobia who continue to hold to prejudiced definitions that have long ago been dismissed in medical and scientific circles.  This characterization of Christianity is a major, but undeniable embarrassment to which few people will be drawn. “Think Different – Accept Uncertainty” provides us with a new alternative.When the insights of our space age became almost universally acknowledged as true in the educated world, the God we defined as dwelling above the sky, watching over us, answering our prayers and intervening supernaturally in human history became quite simply unimaginable.  Yet to listen to the words in most church liturgies one gets the impression that little has changed in how we understand the world since the high Middle Ages.  Most of the hymns we sing and the prayers we pray on Sunday mornings still reflect this theistic definition of God.  As believers we have somehow closed our minds to the reality that the planet earth is not the center of anything.  It rather revolves around a mid-sized star, our sun, which is located about two-thirds of the way toward the edge of our galaxy, called the Milky Way, in which there are about 200 billion other stars, most of them larger than our sun.  Beyond our single galaxy there are in the visible universe between100 billion and one trillion other galaxies, separated by distances that the human mind simply cannot fathom. So if people inside the church continue to define God in that familiar theistic pattern as an external being located somewhere above the sky and ready to come to our aid, they are engaging in little more than pious language that is untranslatable inside the bounds of current human knowledge.  The fact is, however, that traditional Christians seem to know of no other way to talk about God and have made no effort to “think different” in the 500 or so years since Copernicus first challenged our three-tiered mentality and construct. Is it any wonder that modern people who come to worship services have a glazed-over look before much time inside church has passed?  How would we worship, however, if we dared to “think different” or “accept uncertainty?”  Yet as obvious as this question is, anyone who asks it inside church walls on a Sunday morning would be considered quite controversial, even radical!  Someone will surely charge that person with being an atheist!In our world Newtonian laws are counted on to operate in mathematically precise ways until we reach the realm of the subatomic world on one side and the astrophysical world on the other.  There is, therefore, in Newton’s world no room for a God who lives above the sky and who operates on our lives with supernatural power. Yet we read of miracles in the Bible.  People continue to tell of sightings of the Virgin and even to make their way by the thousands to such religious shrines as Lourdes.  In popular culture a person like Tim Tebow, the former University of Florida and now Denver Broncos’ quarterback, kneels to give thanks to God for the victory of his team on the gridiron and sportscasters, citing six last minute victory drives that carried the Broncos into the National Football League playoffs, claim on national television to be “believers” though in what I am still not sure. Their belief seems not so much about Tebow’s prayer life as it is in Tebow’s strong will to win.  Does anyone really think that God intervenes in human history to help the Denver football team win because Tim Tebow is a convinced believer? If this power is real then why did God not intervene to stop the holocaust, to end slavery and segregation, to guide the hurricane away from New Orleans or to protect the Haitians from the earthquake? Does this not make God so trivial as to be unbelievable?  Yet if someone were to say in a church on a Sunday morning that there is no longer a supernatural deity above the sky, who answers our prayers, a deep and hostile response would be inevitable.  The gap between the knowledge by which we live and the faith we continue to practice is vast.  Our unwillingness to part with these woefully inadequate concepts continues primarily because we know no others and we fear the bottomless pit of nothingness far more than we are embarrassed by continuing to parrot unbelievable mantras as if they were still capable of being held by any thinking citizen of the 21st century.  No one appears willing or eager to “think different” or to “accept uncertainty.”There is no chance that human thought is going to turn away from the demonstrated wisdom of Copernicus, Galileo or Isaac Newton. If there is no other way to envision the holy, the God of yesterday will simply die. That is why it is so imperative that those of us who love the Christian faith be willing to “think different” and “accept uncertainty.”How can we learn to think as Christians outside the theological boxes of antiquity?  It begins I believe by dismissing “theism” as an adequate definition of God and to recognize that the opposite of theism is not “atheism.” Can we do that? Will people still experience God in the definitions that emerge beyond theism?  Time alone will tell, but for now just let these questions resonate. To them we will return.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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