Whenever I post an essay or Q&A from retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong my blog traffic nearly doubles. It says something about the interests and mood of my readers when the single most-read post this blog has published so far this year is Spong: Mr. Bush is a Public Embarrassment.
A multitude of people are disappointed, to say the least, by what they’ve been hearing these days from so-called Christians. For years now the loudest and most strident voices of the Christian church in America have been those of fundamentalists and evangelicals whose yearnings to be the holy hall monitors in a new American authoritarian theocracy have played into the hands of the Republican party as well as drowned out the voices of reason, rationality and inclusiveness that are as much a part of the American religious landscape.
I am not a Christian, altho I was baptised and raised Lutheran. Like so many other families in south Minneapolis, mine went to Mount Olivet, which for decades has been the largest Lutheran congregation in the US. When I married and had kids, my Lutheran-raised husband and I joined St. Andrew Lutheran, a young Eden Prairie congregation with aspirations of growing up to be another Mount Olivet, a goal it’s well on the way to achieving. When we joined in 1987 St. Andrew had about 1500 confirmed members, which made it a big church even then. The last time I saw the numbers, which is probably a couple of years ago now, that congregation total had grown to nearly 7,000 confirmed members–and if you factor in all the kids by including the baptised but not yet confirmed members, the total tops 10,000 — putting St. Andrew squarely in the “megachurch” bracket.
While my kids were very young, I remained a member at St. Andrew because I felt it was important for them to learn about Lutheranism — the church tradition of both sides of our family since the dawn of time. My advice to my sons has been: Go to your confirmation classes; learn something about the Christian church and the Lutheran denomination; be confirmed; and as you continue to grow and venture out into the world, learn about as many other spiritual belief systems as you can and make up your own minds.
That’s what I did, and it’s why I cannot call myself a Christian any longer.
Altho it took 30 years to admit it to myself, the fall-away confrontation between me and the Christian church actually happened when I was very young. It doesn’t take too many hours of listening to liturgies full of ‘Father’ this and ‘Son’ that and ‘His’ everything for a girl to learn that in the church there is only one gender that counts, and it ain’t hers. I have never been able to understand how any woman can fully buy into Christianity when she’s constantly reminded of how peripheral, how secondary, how less worthy, how less than human she is in the eyes of the church. Obviously, others don’t feel the same way, and more power to them, but as for me: I’m having none of it. Once the scales fall from my eyes, ain’t no way to glue ‘em back on again.
Having said all that, I remain a human being whose journey through life has a spiritual component. When I find someone whose expression of their own search for spiritual meaning resonates with me, and restores to me even one tiny iota of hope for the future of the human race, I hold that person close, and that’s why I cherish Spong.
Today the good Bishop writes an article about the recent activities of (who’d-a thunk they existed?) some real, live, progressive Christians:
[All boldfacing of text for emphasis is my doing]
September 13, 2006
Crosswalk America Arrives in Washington, DC
It began on April 16, 2006, following a sunrise service in Phoenix, Arizona. It ended on September 3, 2006, at a celebration in the Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, DC. Between those two dates, more than five million steps were taken, at least three pairs of shoes per person were worn out, over 2,500 miles were registered and 12 states were crossed. These fascinating facts constituted just a few of the dimensions of the journey undertaken and completed by a group of people, who called themselves “Crosswalk America.” The purpose of their walk was to lift up another face of Christianity that is quite different from the Christianity seen in the media today.
They walked to publicize something they called the ‘Phoenix Affirmations’ that involve these principles:
Christians must have an openness to other faiths
Christians must care for the earth and its ecosystem
Christians must value artistic _expression in all its forms
Christians must welcome and include all persons
Christians must oppose the co-mingling of Church and State
Christians must seek peace and end systemic poverty
Christians must promote the values of rest and recreation, prayer and reflection
Christians must embrace both faith and science
It was the hope of this group, who certainly put their bodies where their mouths were, to raise in the national awareness the presence of the progressive Christian movement throughout America. They were tired of having the Christian faith, to which each walker was deeply committed, constantly identified with the negativity of the anti-abortion movement and the anger of the anti-homosexual stance employed by so many who use the name Christian. They wanted to demonstrate that those who are committed to Christ would not set the citizens of this land against each other over differing religious beliefs and practices. Their desire was to turn the present course of Christianity in America away from its divisive pro-war, anti-female, anti-gay public face, where those who disagree are relegated to an emotional status somewhere between being excommunicated and burned at the stake,to a religion identified with the words ‘love’ and ‘inclusion.’
In every community entered across this nation, these walkers went to the local churches, identified themselves and shared their message. They worshiped in all kinds of settings, deliberately including the most fundamentalist. One was called ‘The Jesus Baptist Church’ in Springerville, Texas, that stated publicly their belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and the sinfulness of homosexuality, but they also worshiped in a Metropolitan Community Church in New Mexico, that was organized just for homosexual people who had been forced out of their churches by religious and biblical prejudice.
One town that was not eager to entertain the walkers had only very conservative churches, yet they found a welcome in that town from a group of people who, tired of the religious atmosphere in their own community, had formed a “House Church” that met every Sunday. In the Texas town of Bovina, less than 30 miles from the town of Hereford, the names of which indicate the dominance of the cattle industry in Texas, they discovered that their stance on inclusiveness was not nearly so offensive to the locals as the fact that three of the walkers were vegetarians!
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Posted: September 15th, 2006 under General, John Shelby Spong, Religion.
Comments: 11
       
