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An Adventure in Church Building in Springfield, Missouri
Springfield is Missouri’s third largest city. Its approximately 160,000 people occupy space in the southwestern part of that state, where this city serves as the county seat of Greene County. Tradition, not fully documented, suggests that it got its name from an early settler, named James Wilson, who offered whiskey to anyone who would vote to name it after his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. Originally this part of Missouri was the heart of Native American land with members of the Delaware, Kickapoo and Cherokee tribes roaming, hunting and living in the area. The “Trail of Tears,” the forced relocation of Native Americans from the southern United States, passed through Springfield and the first transcontinental highway, the famous “Route 66” originated there.
Southern Missouri was also a bloody battlefield in the pre-Civil War days as both North and South battled to tilt this state to its side of that conflict. Today, Missouri remains politically a battleground state, neither red nor blue. It is still the “show me” state, having produced the American president who most epitomized it, the man from Independence, Harry Truman.
In 1906, in Springfield, three black men being held in the city jail were lynched. A gang of vigilantes broke into the jail, removed the prisoners and hanged them in a public square. Like so many lynchings, later data revealed that those three men were not guilty of the crimes of which the mob accused them. This episode nonetheless caused a general exodus of black people from the area. The last census reveals that the racial makeup of Springfield is 89% white, 4.1% black, 3.7% Latino and about 1% Native American.
Springfield is a heartland city in a heartland state and as such, it reflects the Evangelical, Pentecostal, Protestant religion of the heartland. It is the national headquarters of a denomination called “The Assemblies of God,” which once counted Jimmy Swaggart among its stars! The four key doctrines of the Assemblies of God are baptism in the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, the inerrancy of scriptures and the literal second coming of Jesus. The theological school that trains Assembly of God preachers is also located here. Mainline churches are present, but the numbers of worshipers are far greater in the independent and Pentecostal-type congregations. While Southern Baptist churches are plentiful, they too lean in a Pentecostal-fundamentalist direction. Springfield, Missouri would not seem to be fertile ground in which to plant a progressive, liberal, scholarship-oriented Christian congregation. Yet that is what Roger Ray, who holds both a master’s degree and a doctor’s degree in divinity from Vanderbilt University, has done.
The first hint I had of this man’s existence came while reading an article in “The Fourth R,” the theological journal of the Jesus Seminar, and in my opinion, the best theological journal in America. The article was entitled: Starting a Church That Even I Would Attend. This article appeared about a year ago and it both intrigued and charmed me. When I received an invitation to lead a conference on Progressive Christianity, which was to be hosted by this church, but which anticipated drawing participants from as far away as 500 miles, I was even more intrigued. I was to be joined in the leadership of this conference by one of the preeminent scholars of the Jesus Seminar, Dr. Charles Hedrick, a retired professor of religion at Missouri State University and, via a Skype hookup, with another retired, world class biblical scholar, Dr. David Trobisch, who taught at both Yale Divinity School and the Bangor Theological Seminary. Both of these men, I discovered, had a long-time relationship with this church.
The conference was held over a Friday and Saturday in July, attracting a huge, regional gathering that filled its space to capacity. That conference opened my eyes to two major truths. There is, first, enormous hunger in the heartland of America for an understanding of Christianity that has intellectual integrity and, second, most people who think outside the fundamentalist or Pentecostal box feel that they are alone because the cultural majority voice arising from this heartland religion is so loud. The Community Christian Church of Springfield, Missouri, however, was founded to be different and part of its ministry is to link those, who feel alone into a dynamic community that also provides a resource for the entire region.
Roger Ray is an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ tradition. He is both an imposing personality and a large man physically. He got the Van Heusen shirt company to make shirts for him in white, black and blue with the church logo on the front pocket. This unique “clerical garb” is widely recognized in the community. He asked me to lecture in one of them. I did, but the shirt had a nineteen inch neck and a thirty-six inch sleeve so that on me it looked more like a hospital operating gown than a shirt, but I loved it!
Dr. Ray founded this church in 2008 with a clear vision. He wanted a church that was committed to social justice. He did not want just to reflect the values of his culture, but to be in dialogue and even conflict with all prevailing attitudes that serve to dehumanize anyone on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation or social status. He wanted a church that “studies, embraces and embodies an academic and historical view of Jesus,” one that would also be willing to look, both appreciatively and critically, at Mohammad, Moses, the Buddha, Confucius and Zoroaster. For about 20 years, he had, as he says: “played around the edges of the Jesus Seminar.” He shared in the general despair of many Seminar members that, despite their work, institutional Christianity is still largely mired in pre-modern images of a supernatural, theistically understood deity. It is still trapped in the theology of the fourth century Council of Nicaea. It still parrots substitutionary theories of the atonement (Jesus died for my sins!) and the behavior-controlling promise of heaven’s reward and hell’s punishment. Ultimately, Roger Ray found these institutional expressions of Christianity more than he could abide and so he left ordained ministry for work in relief agencies, as well as teaching and writing. He continued to drop in on different churches from time to time, only as he says, “to have my resolve to stay away strengthened.” Churches for him continued to speak dated theological and biblical nonsense. Yet he still missed some of the things that he believed a church could provide: a sense of community, a place where ideas could be exchanged and challenged and where thoughts about evolving faith and religious practices could be shared. A book group met some of those needs for him at least for a while.
Ultimately, it was a member of his book club who suggested that they start a church of their own. The idea did not meet with much enthusiasm. They did not know how to think about church except in terms of their previous church experiences. They wanted nothing more to do with hymns that exhorted them to be “washed in the blood of Jesus!”; liturgies that shredded their human dignity, telling them they were not worthy to gather up the crumbs under God’s table; baptismal services that proclaimed that this sacrament cleansed them from their original sin, and a Eucharist that invited them to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus! These images blinded them to the possibilities of the future. The idea of starting a new church, however, lingered and after months of prodding, Roger Ray accepted the responsibility of being a founding pastor. They started in a funeral home. After three months, they had 50 interested people and moved to leased space in a conference center. A year later, they bought a small church building and after two years, they chartered a church with 200 original members. One year later they launched YouTube and iTunes channels and have now gathered a weekly following of between 1000-2000 viewers. When issues are hot that total has risen as high as 3000. They are currently meeting with an architect to draw up expansion plans. They have become a regional force for a new understanding of Christianity.
They credit their success to a number of things. Roger writes a weekly opinion piece in the local newspaper. His ideas on Jesus and religious practices have found their way into that column and this creates a community buzz. With boldness and audacity they make no attempt to be “all things to all people” or to keep everybody happy. They inevitably threaten some security-seeking believers. They target those who want something different, something that has intellectual integrity. They make their prophetic witness quite public, always willing to be controversial on the side of the poor, the dispossessed and the victims of any human prejudice. This church serves 250 meals a week to the homeless poor of Springfield. They ship 2000 pairs of shoes a year to the children of Nicaragua. They began to hire university professors from nearby Missouri State University to teach Sunday morning classes in the areas of their expertise that were relevant to religion, the environment or to social justice. They constantly keep their name before the city’s population through letters to the editor, the local NPR radio station, direct mail and planned congregational visibility at public events. Recently they leased an electric car, a “Volt,” and painted it as an advertisement for both their church and their website. There are few “Volts” in Springfield. They readily acknowledge that they had three or four “angels,” who put up the money necessary to get this project off the ground. Finally, but I think most importantly, they did not seek to abandon their Christian identity, but rather to broaden it. They call themselves the Community Christian Church and they live out, for those who care to notice, a Christianity that is open to all, non-imperialistic, intellectually engaged and spiritually attuned.
It was a thrilling experience for me to be there. I’ve already signed up to go back again in 2014. I invite you to visit their website @www.spfccc.org, or to contact Dr. Ray in person at revdrray(a)aol.com.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
James Penn, a classical singer from Australia, writes:
Question:
I have heard you say in an interview that you believe in the Kingdom of Heaven. Do you still?
Answer:
Dear James,
If, by the Kingdom of Heaven, you mean life beyond this life, my answer is yes, but I hasten to add that I would need the time to define what I mean by that. I do not believe in a place of reward or punishment. I do not see God as a judge. I do not believe that this life is just a preparation for the next. I do believe that God is real and that this reality is beyond all of my limits, but not beyond my ability to engage.
I tried to spell out this message more fully in a 2009 book entitled: Eternal Life: A New vision- Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell. That book took about 250 pages. If you are able to read that book you will at least know how I try to address the issue.
I am still quite content with the conclusions I reached in that book.
John Shelby Spong
Announcements
Many of you have asked for this video of Bishop Spong from Chautauqua, NY in 2012 on Recasting the Christ Story. Enjoy!
