In the life of the soul there is no substitute for direct knowledge. The spiritual journey unfolds in and through our direct personal experiences that is fueled by the soul’s longing. As human beings our longing both to know and to be known is infinite. A challenge for us is the discovery that even if we know ourselves or another directly, the longing remains.
And as you adore the people adoring the blessed sacrament around you, you ponder how very many different circumstances brought them here and how many very different experiences they may be having right now.
The laws we have are products of a particular group, not universal truths. The question then becomes: who gets to say what? White land-owning founding fathers? Hateful white nationalist? The majority? A greasy wheel minority? In a sense, every rule or law arises out of a specific context, a given historical situation.
In June, United Methodist Church delegates voted to repeal its church’s long-held exclusionary stance of its LGBTQ+ Methodists- in church doctrine, polity, and social standing. The news was received with mixed feelings – cheers and tears.
Whenever churches focus too much time and energy on church membership, attendance, budget, and endowment, over time, they lose their way. Churches would be better off focusing on the realization of the church’s mission statement, which has to do with their sense of identity and purpose as communities of faith.
After growing up in a Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christian tradition, I have come to identify as a Progressive Christian. I’ve noticed that the term has a lot of different meanings to different people, which makes sense given that relatively few of us started as Progressive Christians. For many of us, Progressive Christianity is like the place we we came to as we escaped from somewhere else. The word “camp” is fitting:. I don’t think of Progressive Christianity as a destination, but rather an ongoing process.
There is not much in this world that I would call a miracle, but the world itself definitely is. It’s existence and ability to support and sustain the life that it has is simply improbable. How dare humanity so go about to indifferently as we are destroying a miracle.
For our entire existence, humans have lived with two realities: the religion of empire and the religion of creation. The religion of empire is a kingdom, ruled through the lens of Individualism and fueled by the fear of scarcity. The religion of creation is a kin-dom, ruled through the lens of relatedness and fueled by the generosity that is love.
Christianity doesn’t exist. Christianity has never existed. These might seem like radical statements, but they are objectively true. For the past 2,000 years, there has never been a singular, united, global religion called “Christianity,” but rather millions of variations of a spirituality rooted in the person of Jesus that most scholars now refer to as “Christianities.”
For decades, the United Methodist Church has been a notable outlier. With 7 million members in the U.S., the UMC is the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination and is by all accounts quite liberal and progressive on most matters – except for the matters concerning homosexuality.