Putting the Shark Back in the Ocean: Restoring the Sacred. Reclaiming Jesus. Reforming the Church.

Bluntly speaking, American Christianity has jumped the shark.* It has been co-opted, hijacked, and derailed.

There are exceptions, but for the most part, the way of following Jesus in the U.S. has become reduced to an overly personalized, private state of mind that involves individuals giving intellectual assent to certain truth claims – believing X, Y, and Z about Jesus and God – instead of a state of mind and a collective way of being that is about becoming less anxious, more serene, more mindful, and more composed and intentional in our actions and way of being. This American form of Christianity still involves living in fear instead of living in faith. It’s why many American Christians own guns and give their blessings to having a national military that has a full time standing army stationed at some 800 bases around the globe, and an obscenely overfunded Defense budget that is more than the next 8 nations spend on theirs – combined.

This privatistic and dogmatic – “I believe the right things about God and Jesus – and that’s all that matters” form of Christianity is a corruption of the faith that renders the religion impotent and results in moral quietude (save for certain pet items, namely scapegoating homosexuality and abortion) and poor stewardship of the Earth – which is resulting in environmental destruction. It’s repulsive and it’s no wonder that the fastest growing religion in America is what Bishop Spong calls “the Church Alumni Association.”

I’m a Christian. But I probably shouldn’t be. If you’re a young or middle-aged adult in America, you probably shouldn’t be either. The odds are increasingly against it. Few friends who went to high school or college with me, and even fewer of my more recent friends and acquaintances, identify themselves as being Christian. Many of my peers who were raised in the Church have shifted away from Christianity toward other religions — or increasingly, to no religion.

A few years ago, the Barna Research Group conducted a study of young people asking them what they think of when they hear the word “Christian.” The top three answers were, “anti-gay,” “exclusive,” and “judgmental.”

If that’s what Christianity were all about, I wouldn’t want any part of it either.

Happily, it isn’t. Over the past 20 years, there has been a growing movement to reclaim Christianity from those who’ve distorted it into something that Jesus and his earliest followers wouldn’t easily recognize — conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism. The movement has emerged on two fronts, roughly simultaneously. One wing comes from the mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches that, due to the shift from modern era mindsets into postmodern ones, have shifted from liberal theology to “progressive” Christianity. The other wing comes from young people within the Evangelical communities who are questioning and redefining their tradition and is known as “emergent” Christianity. Combined, these movements are a new Reformation.

The late, “emergence” scholar Dr. Phyllis Tickle asserts that every 500 years, Christianity has experienced such renewal movements. We’re due for another one — and it’s happening now. Emergent Christian pastor and author Doug Pagitt suggests that human society is now entering the “Inventive Age” and this correlates with reformation in the religious realms.
 
I’m part of this reformation and everyone who is reading this newsletter is as well. As a proponent of progressive Christianity I’ve come to question some of the things that have been written about it. The description of progressive Christianity on the website Religioustolerance.org conveys several misnomers. It begins by stating, “progressive Christianity represents the most liberal wing of Christianity, just as fundamentalist Christianity is the most conservative.” I challenge that statement in two ways. Progressive Christianity is influenced by a post-modern mindset and liberal Christianity is a product of the modern era. Progressive Christianity is a post-liberal phenomenon.

Moreover, people are increasingly not seeking to be convinced by logical or rhetorical evidence in order to come to Christ. They sense that faith isn’t something that one comes to through debate, data, or arguments. Instead, they realize that faith comes by noticing the lives of people who have faith and then living into it themselves. Today’s generations embrace a more nuanced, experiential, paradoxical, mystical, and relational approach to faith and spirituality. We like it relevant, down-to-earth, and real. This is arguably a similar approach that the early Christians experienced and understood. What’s referred to as “progressive Christianity” isn’t really new. It’s a reformation of the Church to its earlier, pre-modernist and pre-Constantinian roots. Rather than focusing on exclusion, judging, and damning, progressive Christians reclaim our original values of inclusion, grace, acceptance, and unconditional love. In reality, it is progressive Christianity that is conservative — conserving what made Christianity such a beautiful gift to the world in the first place.

Metaphorically, progressive and emergent Christianities are trees that have been growing parallel to each other — largely without much awareness or inter-action. It may be fair to say that progressive Christians are more unanimously pro-LGBTQI while emergents are of mixed minds on those matters. However, we’re now in a “mash-up” culture where the lines are increasingly being blurred and emergent Christian writers Brian McLaren and Rob Bell are now identifying as a progressive Christians.

Unlike the dated description from ReligiousTolerance.org (“they are not particularly vocal about their beliefs”) progressive Christians are increasingly overt and vocal. We are boldly reforming Christianity for the 21st Century.

One area that we would do well to give special attention to is the need to reclaim the heart of the faith – direct mystic encounter with the Divine; felt connection with Source/God; prayerful relationship with the Cosmic Christ; and a deep trust in the Way, teachings, and example of Jesus.

I contend that too many progressive Christians still have some of their toes dipped into the pond of the modern era’s liberal Christianity. We’re still too overly enamored with science and too quick to defer to scientists with the last word. We spend too much time trying to “explain the miracle stories of Jesus” via science instead of letting simply allowing them to be what they are – challenging and inspiring stories that invite us to adopt a different way of thinking, a more Godly perspective, and to reorient ourselves from thinking that it’s all up to us in life and that there really isn’t a God – or at least not one who can do much of anything.

Not a few of us who identify as progressive Christians are actually Deists or practical atheists. I was one of them. For the past 5 years, I gave God the silent treatment by only engaging in centering prayer and avoiding praying “to” God. That all changed this past summer where I experienced a mystical sense of God yearning for me to be real and present – really – once again while on a retreat on the Island of Lindisfarne. I’ve since been re-exploring my actual relationship with God – and feeling God’s love (redundant – as God is love) again in ways that I had been shunning and eschewing. That “Dear Me, it’s only me here” way of being misses the heart and the depths of our faith and is ultimately unsustainable and unsatisfying. Ironically, the field of science has been evolving more toward embracing the spiritual and/or mystic – and yet, certain quarters within progressive Christianity have been resistant to doing this. It’s more than ironic, it’s tragic as that should be our strength.

One way forward is to help inform people about the merits of panentheism and process theology – schools of thought that help restore a sense of God being fully transcendent from all Creation as well as being fully immanent within all Creation. Those approaches help us to sense that there is a God who cares for us – and yet who cannot intervene in the Superman-like ways of conventional/supernatural theism. God still has agency but God’s power is persuasive instead of being coercive. As such, we need to shed notions of omnipotence, and instead simply trust that God is at work more in the realms of the energetic and the subtle – frequently involving how we think, feel, and decide to act.

But the reformation that is needed needs to involve more than just adopting new mind-sets and schools of thought. It’s more than taking on new ways of thinking. What’s also needed is transformation in our ways of feeling. Our hearts need to change.

We would do well to re-explore the ways and insights of mysticism – including learning from the great mystics who have been part of our Christian tradition since the start. The author of the Gospel of John attributes these prayerful words to Jesus:

Whether or not the historic Jesus actually said those words, we would all do well to seek to have that sort of intimate connection with Divinity such that we might experience at-one-ment, true communion, and deep awareness of our inter-connectedness with all that is. These sorts of heart-felt transformations invite us into mature spirituality, holiness, and sanctification.

Growing into this more mature state of being may involve delving into the time tested spiritual practices of centering prayer, petitionary prayer (knowing that we’ll be actively involved in any answering of such prayers), lectio divina, labyrinth walking, spiritual journaling, paying attention to dreams, working with spiritual directors, enneagram work, etc., – as well as exploring spiritual practices from outside of the Judeo-Christian family tree. It is this work of “going inward” that allows us to effectively engage with a challenged world that is rife with injustice – with compassion, integrity, authenticity, sustainability, and love.

We need to maintain our commitment to intellect, the insights of contemporary science, and holding our truth claims loosely — as well as to embrace and nurture our innate connection to Source, Spirit, and Mystery.

This is not an optional or peripheral matter. It’s a matter of life or death – for ourselves, to the faith that we care about, and frankly, to the planet. Over half of the world’s population are Christians – and the more of us who come around to an approach to our faith that bears fruit in caring about the Earth, and provides us with satisfying connection to Source and Spirit that sustains us and our pursuits of social justice – the better off we all will be.

The New Reformation matters.

~Roger Wolsey

Read online here 

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”

What do you make of the Season of Lent? How should the Christian Church observe it?

Dear Carole,

The season of Lent is traditionally understood to be a time for reflection, contrition, and consideration of the sacrifice Jesus undertook for our sins. It has been, as you know, traditionally recognized for the forty days leading up to Easter. Preceded by Shrove Tuesday, upon which Christians are to prepare to confess their sins, Lent is entered into as a holy season of penitence.

Of course, all that is contingent upon a belief in the atonement theory of the crucifixion by which we accept that Jesus died to save us from our sins and bring us into eternal relationship with the divine being, God. If our belief in that story has cracks in it, the idea of Lent can become nonsensical. Why would we need to be penitential if we are considering the death of a man who didn’t die for our sins? Or if we didn’t believe in the idea of sin as it was constructed in the early centuries of Christianity? Why would we consider an act of contrition the appropriate response to an act of barbarity and violence?

The seasons of the Christian year and the festivals and traditions that are celebrated within them are usually based upon doctrinal or theological premises that may be difficult to discern at first blush. Communion often feels like a beautiful, communal meal. The doctrinal assertions that undergird it, however, are considerably different than many assume. Similarly, Lent can be thought of as a meaningful time for reflection and the consideration of love, justice, and kindness when the doctrinal beliefs upon which it is built no longer synch with contemporary understandings elicited through the study of the historical Jesus or the evolution of the idea of God.

If our understandings have shifted and we no longer believe that Jesus died for our sins, something I do not believe, does that mean, however, that we should give up on the idea of Lent? I do not think so. Sometimes setting aside a period of time for intentional reflection on life, on love, and on the things that flow from the often challenging intersection of those two things, can be a very important discipline to undertake, particularly in the busy craziness of twenty-first century Western society.

And so I invite you to undertake a course of reflection and study if that is your wont and to set aside a prescribed period in which to do it. Forty days feels good to me. And giving something up for Lent, an idea that is built on the practice of fasting, again, an act of penitence, can be worked in, if you like, by way of breaking a bad habit, or building up a good one.

As with other ecclesial practices and understandings, however, I invite you to leave behind the exclusively Christian word associated with it: Lent. To hold onto it continues to overshadow your period of reflection with a bleak and dangerous interpretation of a tragic story. I am not suggesting that you deny others their right to use the word or to critique them for it. My thought is simply that you practice without it and see if it feels okay for you. You don’t need the doctrinal interpretation to reap the benefits of reflection and a sabbatical time away from the daily grind. And I would be willing to bet that if you share the news of your intentional forty-day practice with someone who is not involved in church – someone at work or a family member – they will be far more likely to want to know what it is you’re doing and why.

If you’re at a loss as to what you would do if you weren’t self-flagellating, here are some ideas. Think about what one or another of them would elicit in and from you. Would it make your life or the life of another more beautiful? If so, it is certainly worth trying. But the list is simply to stir your own imagination and see what you might undertake against the backdrop of your own life. Consider, make a pledge to yourself, and, if you can, keep track of how to feel as you move through your time.

• Use one of Barbara Frederickson’s 15 minute Love 2.0 Meditations each day.

• Sign up for a poetry blog and read a new poem every morning when you get up and the same one every evening before retiring. Better yet, write a new poem every day!

• Tape West Hill United’s words of commitment, As I Live, up next to your bathroom mirror. In the morning, consider how they can affect your day positively; in the evening, acknowledge what you might have done better and celebrate the good you made happen.

• Write a thank you note to someone every day. Like that person down the street who you don’t know but who gifts the community each year with a beautiful garden or Christmas light display.

• Think of a charity you’d like to support. Every day, place an amount of money you’d like to contribute to it and a note to explaining why you want to support it (yes, a different one each day!). Read the notes when you’re done and, if you feel like it, send them in an envelope with your cheque.

• Subscribe to the daily TED talk and learn something new every day. Follow up on stuff that really intrigues you.

Break the mold that Lent has been and release the new you that you’ve not yet met! And don’t forget to celebrate you while you do it!

~ Gretta Vosper

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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.

 

On March 10th and 11th The Marcus J. Borg Foundation will celebrate a new collection of writings by Marcus Borg, Days of Awe and Wonder in Portland OR.

On the evening of March 11th, Marc’s birthday anniversary, we will have a fundraising dinner at the Heathman Hotel ...

Click here for more information and to register...