-----Original Message----- From: Progressing Spirit <contact@progressingspirit.com> To: elliestock <elliestock@aol.com> Sent: Thu, Jun 20, 2019 04:00 AM Subject: Looking, Leaning, and Leading Forward #yiv5913300782 p{ margin:10px 0;padding:0;} #yiv5913300782 table{ border-collapse:collapse;} #yiv5913300782 h1, #yiv5913300782 h2, #yiv5913300782 h3, #yiv5913300782 h4, #yiv5913300782 h5, #yiv5913300782 h6{ display:block;margin:0;padding:0;} #yiv5913300782 img, #yiv5913300782 a img{ border:0;height:auto;outline:none;text-decoration:none;} #yiv5913300782 body, #yiv5913300782 #yiv5913300782bodyTable, #yiv5913300782 #yiv5913300782bodyCell{ min-height:100%;margin:0;padding:0;width:100%;} #yiv5913300782 .yiv5913300782mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important;} #yiv5913300782 #yiv5913300782outlook a{ padding:0;} #yiv5913300782 img{ } #yiv5913300782 table{ } #yiv5913300782 .yiv5913300782ReadMsgBody{ width:100%;} #yiv5913300782 .yiv5913300782ExternalClass{ width:100%;} #yiv5913300782 p, 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.yiv5913300782mcnTextContent p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5913300782 #yiv5913300782templateBody .yiv5913300782mcnTextContent, #yiv5913300782 #yiv5913300782templateBody .yiv5913300782mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv5913300782 #yiv5913300782templateFooter .yiv5913300782mcnTextContent, #yiv5913300782 #yiv5913300782templateFooter .yiv5913300782mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } In this third column, I’d like to share a bit about what I see and hope for progressive Christianity looking forward. | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Looking, Leaning, and Leading Forward | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Brian D. McLaren June 20, 2019 [In two previous columns: How I Got Here and  What Am I Now?, I shared a bit about my own backstory and where I am now as a progressive Christian. In this third column, I’d like to share a bit about what I see and hope for progressive Christianity looking forward.] In my 2016 book, The Great Spiritual Migration, I explained the ambivalence I feel when people ask me what I think is ahead for the Christian church in the West in general and America in particular. On the one hand, it’s natural for people who care about Christian faith to want to sort through the welter of statistics and get some sense of trendlines and forecasts. On the other hand, I think we humans have a bias to complacency, and we often use trendlines and forecasts to reinforce that bias. For example, if I tell people that I am hopeful regarding the future, I inadvertently reassure them that everything is going to be fine, which gives them permission to remain complacent.  But if I tell them that I am deeply concerned, maybe even pessimistic, they interpret that bad news to mean that it’s too late for change, which gives them permission to give up and … remain complacent.  And here’s the thing, that complacency easily becomes the deciding factor that leads to less desirable outcomes. Complacent progressive Christians will not thrive, especially when their conservative and regressive counterparts are energized, active, unified, and organized.  I think in recent decades, progressive Christians have had a success hangover, and this success hangover has made complacency such an appealing temptation. What do I mean by success hangover? The progressive movements of the 60’s and 70’s began to bring women and LGBTQ persons into leadership (although both groups are still a long way from equality and equity), got racism and white supremacy on our radar (although we’re still such a long way from equality and equity in this regard too), made the environment a valid spiritual concern (although, once again, we have so far to go), and brought the vision of social gospel and liberation theologians to more people in the pews (again, that was only a beginning). Many mainline Protestant institutions welcomed these gains, and as a result, trust among progressive Christians in their institutions remained strong. Meanwhile, a counter-movement took shape in the late 70’s and has organized and grown for a full generation now. Sadly, many progressive Christians have been passive, complaining about the gains of this conservative resurgence, but failing to out-organize and out-energize it. The rise of Trumpism has begun to awaken some progressive Christians (although many still remain un-activated, preferring endless study and opinion-rendering to organizing and movement-building). But the pull back to complacency is strong, as evidenced in statements like “This is conservatism’s last gasp,” or “We’re dying, but they are too,” or “I hope our denominational leaders solve this,” or “I hope the church lasts long enough to pay my pension and host my funeral.” That’s why I think asking the wrong question in the wrong way actually helps determine a depressing answer to the question. A far better question, for me, is what vision of a desirable future would motivate the progressive Christians of today to abandon complacency and maximize our time, intelligence, money, and energy to build a spiritual movement to bring that desired vision to full fruition. So here’s my “elevator speech” for a vision of the future. (This better be at least a seven-story building so I’ll have time to get the whole speech out before the elevator doors open.) 1. An ecological civilization:  It’s not that our churches are a problem and all other institutions are working OK. (Watched the news lately?) Virtually every institution in our society was developed to serve an extractive, exploitive, militaristic economy that now threatens our survival. Saving those institutions in their present form simply serves to prop up the present suicidal system. Our challenge in the years ahead (starting, like, yesterday) is to thread the needle … to let institutions reach a sufficient level of disequilibrium (and in some cases, full collapse) to be re-tooled or resurrected, without falling into complete chaos (a bigger danger, I fear, than most of us realize). We have to envision a whole new era of human civilization that lives within ecological (i.e. God-given) limits (remember the tree of destructive knowledge in the garden of Eden story?). And we have to envision churches that proclaim that vision, because a vision of genuine harmony among people, within people, with creation, and with God is, very literally, what Jesus meant when he said “the kingdom of God.” Were he here today, I imagine he would proclaim, “the eco-civilization of God.” This vision is not simply of a better church. It’s a vision of a better world. 2. Revolutionized and realigned local congregations: With such a vision to live into, our congregations would be revolutionized. There would not be one Sunday of “ordinary time,” in the sense that every Sunday we would have explicit, urgent goals in mind, seeking to bring our people along and spiritually activate them to activate others. I often say in my public speaking that fundamentalists are clear and certain about what they stand for, and mainline Christians are clear and certain of one thing only: that they are not fundamentalists. Many of our churches survive by ambiguity alone. By remaining utterly unclear about God, Jesus, gospel, mission, spirituality, and purpose, we hold people together for a weekly ritual of lightweight belonging. That would change. We would need new clarity about God as the creative and personal love by whom, through whom, and in whom we are connected to one another and all creation. We would need new clarity about Jesus, as the revolutionary leader who proclaimed the earth-saving gospel of the new civilization of God that is, indeed, still at hand and still within reach. We would need new clarity about our mission of joining God in the healing and restoring of the world. We would need new clarity about the absolute necessity of spiritual practices and a spiritual life that helps us become catalytic people. And we would align everything — absolutely everything — with that urgent, life-and-death purpose. No liturgy, polity, policy, or asset would be off limits in this radical realignment. 3. Streamlined and interdependent denominations: Denominations organized for individual self-preservation are expensive and slow-moving. Denominations organized for interdependent mission are expensive (in a very different way) and agile. In order to help bring to birth the next phase of the “new civilization of God” that the Spirit is hovering over the current chaos to create, we need to envision, not the abolishment of denominations, but the abolishment of denominationalism, i.e. denominations that exist for their own perpetuation. Imagine if the heads of communions spent forty to eighty percent of their time in collaboration, not as bureaucratic managers but as collaborative strategists. Imagine if leaders of mid-level judicatories became, instead, regional movement leaders, announcing a new kind of Christianity characterized by justice, generosity, and a commitment to the common good. 4. Creative difference and constructive division: Progressive Protestant and Catholic Christians need to end our denial (or recover from the “success hangover” I mentioned earlier). We are no longer mainline or mainstream. Our choice going forward is between being sub-cultural (a nostalgic remnant of some bygone era) or counter-cultural (visionary agents of a new day). Right-wing Evangelicals and Charismatics and right-wing Catholics have forged an effective forty-year alliance. They’ve made a deal with deal-maker Trump, the Republican Party, much of corporate America, and the weapons-industrial-complex (symbolized by the NRA) to create an alternative power structure that possesses abundant zeal, wealth, and weapons. They have a win-lose vision that is nationalistic, patriarchal, militaristic, white-supremacist, environmentally exploitative, and economically inequitable, and they are in charge, so deeply in charge that no single election will be a solution. Progressive Christians have to have the courage to say, “No. We are different. That is not us. We will not comply. We will not only resist, we will organize and build generations of spiritual activists for a better win-win vision, a vision for the common good that will in the long run benefit even our antagonists.” The word division obviously has negative connotations. But at its root, it means “different vision,” and we need to be confident and clear enough about our vision that we’re not afraid to be rejected and even persecuted for it. 5. A massive promotion for everyone, with massive re-invention to support the promotion. I am not joking when I say that we need to give everyone a promotion. First, we need to promote our members from consumers of religious goods and services to spiritual activists who bring our message and vision to their homes, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, political and economic systems, and social networks. Not only that, but we’ll rediscover the joy and proper meaning of “the e-word” (evangelism), deploying every spiritual activist as a community organizer and recruiter, inviting people into God’s new ecological civilization and economy of revolutionary love.  Then, we need to promote our local pastors to quasi-bishops and seminary professors who are training member-ministers for their work as spiritual activists. They will stop simply teaching and instead train people to train others. They will stop simply curating a weekly worship event and instead gather people for a weekly (or monthly, or whatever) empowerment event to build momentum for a spiritual revolution, not just 52 times a year, but 365 days a year. The gravity pulling them back into conventional pastoral roles will be strong, and frankly, many will not be able to manage the change. That’s OK. We’re on the cusp of a massive turnover in professional ministry as the baby boom generation retires. We just have to be sure that we recruit as few younger leaders as possible to fill conventional roles and as many as possible to pioneer the new role.  Seminaries will go through a revolutionary promotion as well. Instead of training people for conventional pastoral roles through conventional curriculums and accredited programs, they (or some of them) will become training centers for this new vision. Many seminaries, congregations, and denominational offices will, no doubt, divest of current properties and assets that were bought and developed for an old model and the dying era. Those assets can be redeployed for the new context. Then, regional and national denominational leaders will be promoted to the role of movement leaders, collaborating for the common good, building deep relationships first with their Christian counterparts and then with their multi-faith counterparts, working together to build a trans-denominational and multi-faith spiritual movement for justice, joy, ecological restoration, and peace in the Holy Spirit. By the way, the promotion includes all the people in the community who do not currently participate in the church. They become the new congregation, and they are seen as the beneficiaries of the vitality and vision of the collaborating congregations. 6. A creative collaborative mindset and skill-set I once met a Methodist minister who successfully ran for congress. After serving her term, she told me, “Conservatives can unite around a lie, but progressive can’t unite around the truth.” I think she spoke a sobering truth. For reasons I hope to explain in my upcoming book, “Faith After Doubt,” progressives of recent decades have been stuck in a critical, suspicious, and deconstructive stage of immature progressivism. In that stage, there is constant virtue-signaling and posturing as “moral progressive than thou,” with people constantly checking one all kinds of progressive purity tests. Beyond that necessary but insufficient stage, there is a broader and deeper mindset, enriched by contemplative and non-dual practices, that will develop the skill-set to walk and work together. May that day come quickly. 7. A bold announcement Once momentum is building in the previous six ways, it will be time to announce that something new is present, a new kind of church, a new kind of Christianity, a new understanding of God, gospel, and everything everywhere. This announcement needs to be local and regional, bubbling up simultaneously in rural areas, small towns, and big cities. Once this new kind of Christianity is being modeled anywhere, it can spread everywhere.  The necessary conditions for this vision to be born are in place more than ever, I think. A vibrant and integrative progressive Christian theology is taking shape, more and more leaders know that the future will not be a revival or continuation of the past, people are rediscovering vital spiritual practices, and nostalgia for some supposed golden age is being replaced with a sense of urgency and opportunity. Things may be getting bad enough, finally, that they are ready to get better.  The one obstacle that I see is complacency, the temptation to yield to either pessimism or optimism rather than opt into a sense of empowerment.  If there is to be a hopeful future, not just for the church, but for the whole planet, it will depend on you and me becoming God’s collaborators, God’s agents, God’s embodiment to bring it to be. We can’t wait for someone else to fix things. Everything hangs on our faith, hope, and love ... our congregations, our networks, and our hearts, voices, and hands. This truly is a moment of great danger and ultimate opportunity, a time to look, lean, and lead forward.  ~ Brian D. McLaren Read online here About the Author Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is an Auburn Senior Fellow and a leader in the Convergence Network, through which he is developing an innovative training/mentoring program for pastors, church planters, and lay leaders called Convergence Leadership Project. He works closely with the Center for Progressive Renewal/Convergence, the Wild Goose Festival and the Fair Food Program‘s Faith Working Group. His most recent joint project is an illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story. Other recent books include: The Great Spiritual Migration, We Make the Road by Walking, and Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? (Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World). Brian has been active in networking and mentoring church planters and pastors since the mid 1980’s, and has assisted in the development of several new churches. He is a popular conference speaker and a frequent guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings – across the US and Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He has written for or contributed interviews to many periodicals, including Leadership, Sojourners, Tikkun, Worship Leader, and Conversations. A frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs, he has appeared on All Things Considered, Larry King Live, Nightline, On Being, and Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. His work has also been covered in Time, New York Times, Christianity Today, Christian Century, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, CNN.com, and many other print and online media. Brian is married to Grace, and they have four adult children and five grandchildren. His personal interests include wildlife and ecology, fly fishing and kayaking, music and songwriting, and literature. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer   Q: By Vicky How can I feel the presence of Jesus in my life? Every time I want to know Jesus, I suddenly start having doubts he ever existed.  A: By Rev. Irene Monroe   Dear Vicky, Evidence of the “Historical Jesus" has been debated for millennia. Doubts about Jesus’s existence can be seen by many hard-line Christian conservatives as a sign of apostasy- resulting, at best, in harsh condemnation, and, at worse, in excommunication. With the lack of reliable early sources, the anonymity of the scribes, each promoting their gospel spin, and records of how soon after Jesus’s crucifixion his life was documented, the search for the ‘Historical Jesus” will go on for many more millennia. However, early sources do indicate that Jesus lived in the 1st century C.E. in Palestine. Each of the four gospels consistently depicts the type of man Jesus was: he walked fiercely in the face of danger; he spoke truth to power, and he demanded justice.  I feel the presence of Jesus in the work of social justice that takes place out in the world, like at soup kitchens, battered women's shelters, and shelters for the homeless, to name a few. The foundation for my life’s work is the biblical mandate in Matthew 25:35-45 where Jesus said: “For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger, and you took me in… In truth I tell you, in so far as you failed  to do it for the least of these, however insignificant, you failed to  do it for me."  Social justice provides the foundation for a healthy and multicultural society which Jesus wanted.  Social Justice grows out of the sense that each person - regardless of their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and religious belief  - is of equal value which we read in John 4:1-42  about the Samaritan woman at the well . And, social justice challenges us with the demand and moral imperative that we must provide all people with equitable opportunities and rights that do not truncate their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, which would enable them to realize their full human potential, and capacity to participate in society.

From the depiction of Jesus in the Bible, we learn that Jesus who - hung out with the wrong people, healed at the wrong time, visited the wrong places, and said the wrong things - was about radical inclusion. The Gospels are replete with examples of Jesus listening to the voices of the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the dispossessed.

For me, the presence of Jesus is felt the most when our acts of social justice appropriately address the rights of the most disadvantaged in our society. Our job out in the world is to remember that our longing for the presence of Jesus is also inextricably tied to his biblical mandate in Matthew 25.  ~ Rev. Irene Monroe Read and share online here About the Author The Reverend Monroe is an ordained minister. She does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on WGBH (89.7 FM), a Boston member station of National Public Radio (NPR), that is now a podcast, and a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS (NECN). Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists (Boston) – Detour. Monroe’s a Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist. Her columns appear in cities across the country and in the U.K, Ireland, Canada. Monroe writes a column in the Boston home LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and Opinion pieces for the Boston Globe. Monroe stated that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. | | | | | | | | Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community! | | | | | | Join our FB community today! Spread the word, share with friends. Thanks! | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited   If Christianity Cannot Change, It Will Die Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong September 12, 2007 Christianity as a religion of certainty and control is dying. The signs of that death are present in the emptiness of the churches of Europe, in the decline of candidates for the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church, in the increasing obsession about issues of sexuality that bedevil church leaders, and in the rising secularization of our society. It is also seen, however, in the hysterical fundamentalism that marks conservative Evangelicals and Catholics alike in our world today. Fundamentalism is not a virtue; it is a sign of being out of touch with reality. Christianity is not dying because people are abandoning “revealed truth,” as conservatives like to argue, but because the three major concepts of what was once called “revealed” truth are no longer credible today. These three concepts are: Christianity’s definition of God, Christianity’s definition of human life and Christianity’s understanding of life after death. In this week’s column I want to examine each of these concepts. The traditional understanding of God has defined the deity as “a Being” supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere outside this world, understood after the analogy of a human parent and capable of acting in protective and miraculous ways. I call this “the theistic definition of God” and so deeply has it dominated Christian thought that one who cannot still believe in this theistic deity today is assumed to be “an atheist,” and thus is said to believe in no God at all. That accusation makes sense only if theism is the only way in which God can be conceptualized. I do not believe that this is the case. Theism is dying because the expansion of human understanding about the size of the universe, begun with Copernicus and aided by Einstein and the Hubble telescope, has destroyed what we once assumed to be the theistic God’s dwelling place above the sky. That has the effect of dislocating our theistic mentality in a total way. When Isaac Newton, some 50 years after Galileo, revealed to us the precise ways in which the laws of the universe operate, the arena in which our claims about miracles, magic and God’s ability to act on our behalf shrank perceptibly. The power of God to determine the weather patterns, so prominent in the biblical stories of Noah, Moses and Elijah, was destroyed by our knowledge about weather fronts, low pressure systems, El Nino winds and the ways in which tectonic plates collide far beneath the earth’s surface. The power of God to control behavior by dispensing sickness and health was destroyed by the rise of medical science and its understanding of both the causes and cures of sickness, none of which had anything to do with punishment for not offering proper sacrifices or not obeying the divinely inspired laws. As each new insight removed one more arena in which the theistic God was thought to operate, this God increasingly was reduced to impotence and had no more divine work to do. Thus God became quickly and frighteningly an almost irrelevant and fading presence in modern life. If there is no way to define our experience of God except in theistic language, then there is little hope for this God’s continued survival. Next Christianity defined human life as that which had been created perfect in God’s image at the dawn of history, but falling into sin by an act of willful disobedience. This idea meant that human beings were now theologically defined as lost and incapable of achieving salvation unless rescued by an external divine power. Salvation meant being restored to our pre-fallen status and the “savior” had to be seen as the emissary or even as the incarnation of the theistic deity. It was against this background that the story of Jesus has traditionally been told. In that narrative, the cross became the place where our salvation was procured by the death of Jesus. It was strange theology transforming God into a merciless judge, Jesus into the perpetual victim and you and me into being guilt ridden creatures. It was, however, so popular that the words “Jesus died for my sins” became the Protestant mantra and this understanding of the cross as the place of divine sacrifice came to be reenacted weekly in the Mass as the heart of Catholic worship. It was the work of Charles Darwin, now deeply affirmed by the discovery of DNA that links all life into one unfolding whole, that rendered this Christian understanding of the origins of human life to be obsolete at best, dead wrong at worst. Human beings have never possessed a perfection from which they could fall. Original sin is thus a theological hoax.  Click here to read full essay. ~  John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements   Beloved is a 4-Day Sacred Art, Movement, and Music Festival on the Oregon Coast. Beloved is a healing event, intended to experiment with new models for culture.  In the troubled times in which we live, people become divided against each other and can more easily feel isolated and separated from the Soul of the World. At Beloved, we become a sudden, mystical community where everyone can feel the touch of spirit while also deepening the soul of community.  READ ON... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |