Speaking of a need for a Reformation makes me question whether the time has arrived for a new religious order that is in fact not tied to a particular religion but is a Spiritual Order, one that might help people of various religious faiths and none to gather around a common value and focus. I think our times call for a focus on the sacredness of the Earth and all her creatures. Therefore I propose a new order called “The Order of the Sacred Earth.” Its members may come from any and all life-styles, married, single, celibate, gay, straight and from any and all occupations so long as their work mirrored the values of honoring and supporting the Earth and her creatures. Blue collar and white collar workers would be welcomed. People of all religious traditions and none would be welcome.
It’s been four years since I decided to publicly identify as an atheist. After the manner of time’s calming influence upon things about which we were once so passionate, my perspective on the wisdom of the decision has altered. And as we so often do, I revisit that decision from time to time and wonder if, given the opportunity to relive those days, I would make it again.
About ten years ago, I attended a two day conference that garnered a lot of anticipation and excitement about the topics, which were: a new way of communicating our religious beliefs and the discussion of postmodern theology. Near the end of the conference, I was ready for it to be over. It had been a good conference. The keynote speakers were well respected and leaders in their fields. But I was done.
Right after Easter in 2015, I arrived at church as a fellow staff member was going out the door saying, “I’m going to get a picture of one of the banners.” “What banners?!” I’d come in the back way to town and hadn’t seen that down the main street of Fountain Hills, eight churches had posted large identical banners overnight: “Progressive” Christianity: Fact or Fiction?”
As a progressive Christian pastor and author I frequently receive critical pushback from conservative and fundamentalist Christians who adamantly declare that the only way to experience salvation is by giving intellectual assent to certain specific truth claims about the life of Jesus. Scratch that, they don’t generally care about his life, their focus is primarily upon Jesus’ death and his resurrection. Their message boils down to “Unless you believe that Jesus died for your sins and that he physically rose from the grave, you are a heretic, and will go to hell when you die.”
Churches are dying at an alarming rate. Every year more than 4000 churches close their doors for good and more than 2,765,000 people leave the church each year.
Yet we, the Church, insist on doing the same thing over and over again and somehow expecting different results. When confronted with change we tend to insist that “it has always been done that way,” as if history is an acceptable excuse for continuing down our path to demise.
Throughout his poignant and moving book, “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts”, the Vancouver physician, Gabor Maté, offers heartrending accounts of the existential devastation wrought on the fabric of our personal being by the effects of addiction. One particularly graphic description strikes at the core of the human struggle.
Bishop Spong’s reputation for expressing unapologetic, sometimes blunt, theological opinions is long-established. While some have accused him of being overbearing or egotistical, others have depended on him for a firm defense of a particular spot on the theological spectrum.
I first learned of Bishop Spong’s prophetic work and his work with the Jesus seminar over 34 years ago while I was still a Dominican priest working in the Chicago area. To hear of an Episcopal bishop who was approaching the Scriptures with a critical sense of questioning and scholarship and who was supporting gay rights and women’s rights was, needless to say, a breath of fresh air. When Bishop Spong invited me out to Newark to lead a day retreat with his clergy I was pleased to be invited and I recall my opening line to him when I entered his car at the airport: “We heretics need to stick together,” I said. I don’t recall his demurring in any way. Following my day-long presentation (which included circle dancing and I was pleased to see a Bishop participating in such), Bishop Spong said to me: “Usually people leave at lunch time as they are allowed to do but this day was so exciting everyone stayed until the end.”
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.