I’ve Seen The Devil

For several months I haven’t had much to do with religion. While I’ve retained my personal faith in God as I understand him expressed through Christ – I haven’t been to church in ages, haven’t read my bible in longer and don’t remember the last time I said a prayer. I’ve been busy trying to make ends meet, provide for my family and pursue my own personal interests. But the events of last weekend in Virginia have brought a whole flood of religious thoughts back to mind. I’ve always had trouble seeing the relevance of faith in the banality of daily life – but it’s also always been the lens through which I see the big picture. You could say that I’ve got a far-sighted faith. Because I don’t see good and evil in so many little things, it was easy to pay no mind to questions of faith for a long time. But then a very big display of pure evil reared its ugly head and all of a sudden I’ve got religion again. I’ve seen the Devil, and he woke me up.

 

I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t healthy spirituality, but it’s where I’m at on this journey and I can’t ignore it now. The notion that any person, much less an entire group of people, is less a child of God than me is disgusting. It is wicked. It is satanic. It baffles my mind that thousands of people can march in the streets wearing hoods or carrying flags emblazoned with swastikas on Saturday then go to church on Sunday. How has the Christian faith gotten this so entirely wrong? How can a faith spend so much time insisting on the timeline of creation and miss the reality that every single person who has ever drawn a breath, regardless of their skin colour, language, culture, religion, sexual orientation, or gender is equally a child of God? How can white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or any other prejudice exist in a person who has been taught that the image of God is imprinted in our DNA? These thoughts are incompatible.

 

Worse still, how can anyone who claims to follow a man who said: “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” then use violence and intimidation to advance those wicked beliefs? The dominionism on display is not of Christ. Some have suggested to me that I need not concern myself with these goings-on because they are in another country, and the majority of the perpetrators are of a different Christian tradition than my own. But I can’t accept that. First of all, what happened in Virginia was not an isolated incident. Events like that, though often not to that scale, take place across North America all the time. The Klansmen who marched are not limited to a few states south of the Mason-Dixon line, they are not even limited to the United States. Earlier this year KKK literature was distributed right here in my town, an hour east of Vancouver, British Columbia. This weekend there is to be a rally of this same collection of evil in Vancouver. It’s not a far-away problem.

 

It’s a white problem. It’s a power problem. It’s a privilege problem. Of course, not all white people hold these views. In fact, I imagine that an exceptionally small minority of us do. But in precisely the same way we expect all Muslims to speak out against terrorists like ISIS and Al Qaeda (they do), and in precisely the same way we expect leaders of African American communities to speak out against drugs and gang violence in their communities (they do); white people have a responsibility to speak out against the evil and the terrorism in our communities. So I am. I’m a deeply flawed man, and a terrible example of what a Christ-follower should look like, but in humility, I beg you, my white Christian brothers and sisters: stand up, speak up, take action. Hate has no place in our communities and our churches. This is not the time to sit on the sidelines, to twiddle thumbs, or to shake heads. This is the time to be men and women of exceptional strength and character and oppose those who would fight for a satanic notion of white supremacy.

 

This is precisely one of those moments that Jesus talked about when he said that the King would divide the sheep from the goats. We will be called to account for what we did when our brothers and sisters were being oppressed. There are a great many things that I will hang my head and tearfully ask God to forgive me for on that day, but I know that sitting in silence at this moment cannot be among them. The devil is on full display through the ideology of white supremacy, for God’s sake rise up against him.

 

Thus says the Lord: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.

#MyChurchToo

Last week was a defeat for many of us in the Adventist Church. Many hoped that we’d see the Holy Spirit move on the hearts of delegates at the GC session and give a powerful endorsement to the work hundreds of Godly women are already doing as pastors and encourage even more to follow God’s call down a difficult path. That didn’t happen. Beyond the vote on women’s ordination, there were other votes at this session that have had the effect of turning our church in the direction of fundamentalism.

One which truly concerns me is that we felt the need to reword the church’s official statement on creation to exclude anything but a young-earth position. This bothers me because I am one of many who believe that God created the world, but not in 6 literal days 6000 years ago. Now I know what the official stance my church is, and I know my understanding is at odds with that position. It’s not my disagreement with those positions which bothers me most. I’ve known I was at odds with the church on those issues for years. What worries me is the trend we seem to be following toward exclusive space and shutting off debate. We seem to be moving in the direction of fundamentalism where there is no room for diversity of thought, where our faith is an all or nothing package, and where the slightest hint of dissent is met with the full force of the official position of the church. This is what truly worries me.

Fundamentalism is dangerous. It stifles reason, it shuts up creativity and it looks nothing like love. God himself welcomes reason, you can find a proof text and a pattern for it. God gave us the ability to create and the scriptures tell us to sing a new song. And Jesus said that it is by our love for one another that we shall be recognized. For those reasons I am prepared to call fundamentalism false teaching. I humbly submit that those of us of conscience need to take a respectful, loving and firm stand to reclaim our church from this darkness.

We won’t accomplish this goal with the same tactics used to get us where we’ve come. But I believe, I have hope, that if we stand together firm in our faith – that we can bring the warm smile of Jesus back into our church. Part of this means speaking out. I drained my cell-phone battery twice the day of the ordination debate keeping up with twitter – there are more than enough of us, young and old, who are concerned about our church and want to see it have more of the character of Christ. We need to continue to make our voices heard. It means working together. We need more collaboration between the big-tent Adventists, we need to support one another and we need to get to know one another. We need to rally behind the public voices that speak our language! There are 10 Doug Batchelors for every Herb Montgomery – so let’s get behind the public figures who speak our language so our understanding of Adventism gets a fair hearing! We also need to understand that success isn’t about shutting the others up. It’s not about telling them to go away, but making room for people from all perspectives to call this faith their own.

Finally it bears mention that our efforts within the church cannot be focussed entirely on the church. We have a mission that is so much bigger than what happens within our walls. We must not neglect that. We cannot be so caught up in our internal business that we forget what the whole church is here for. There is a Kingdom of Heaven to be built and not just when Jesus comes back! So continue with the service you do for your community, continue with your efforts to spread the good news of Jesus’ love, continue with living lives that honour him. Let’s be twice as passionate about being the church as we are about fixing the church. There’s a time for both and we should do both – but it will prove the fundamentalists right if we focus exclusively on getting our way in church politics.
It’s going to take the love of Jesus and the patience of a saint to do all this – but we can take a loving stand and turn the line which has been drawn in the sand into an arrow which points to Christ. To finish the work Jesus gave the church we all have to be in this together. So I call on my sisters and brothers who have been disappointed by what’s happened last week to press together and double our efforts to make this church our home. Of course many will need more time to grieve the hurt, take it. But as we heal let’s grow stronger because this is our church too.

Disappointed, But Not Going Anywhere

My church is about to make a decision that I believe is wrong. Our denomination is meeting for its quinquennial (every 5 years) General Conference session and among many other things they will be voting on the ordination of women. Now I won’t bog you down with details (they are outlined quite well here) but the reality is that this is largely a symbolic vote which won’t directly or immediately change the status of the few hundred women we already have in ordained service. What it’s likely failure will do is give more fuel to the fire of those who oppose these Godly women and give those “leaders” who are threatened by them more pressure they can apply. On the other hand, as unlikely as it is, the passage of a vote endorsing women in pastoral ministry would also not likely create immediate openings in those parts of the world where the leadership is vehemently against them. What it could do, however, is lend the full throated support of a worldwide church to women doing an admirable work under conditions twice as hard as they are for any man.

Pastoral ministry looks pretty easy from the outside, especially if all you ever see of your pastor is the sermons on the weekend. You see the pastor take the pulpit and deliver a talk for anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes and think “that’s not so hard;” and, while I can’t speak for everyone, for me it isn’t. With 10-15 hours of prep anyone with the right personality for public speaking could do it. That’s the most public part of the job and it takes about a quarter of the week (assuming a roughly 40 hour work week…) to prepare. The rest of the time is the hard part. Spending hours pouring over information helping to develop strategies for ministries in your community, taking the time to mentor your lay leaders (or junior staff), counselling people with all sorts of different issues (who still call you even after you’ve made it clear that you’re beyond your expertise and recommended a professional) and mountains of administrative work – that’s what pastors really do. Meetings that go too long, visits that you’re constantly apologizing for not having had sooner, reading lists longer than your arm and cups of coffee with the people who you should be able to spend much more time with. And all of this is done under a degree of scrutiny usually reserved for elected officials. Pastoral ministry is not an easy job, and it’s even harder when a significant proportion of your congregation doesn’t think you should be doing it.

So a positive vote would be a good symbol to encourage those women who take up the mantle of ministry, and perhaps even settle the minds of those distressed by their ministry by lending the official blessing of the world church to their hard work. But barring a miracle, and those do still happen, the vote is going to go the other way. Over the last several days I’ve been giving thought to how I will respond to this, and other issues, being addressed at our General Conference. Particularly I’ve been discouraged by the way things have been going down. The tactics being employed by those opposed to progress have been dirty. It’d been an embarrassment to see how these people who are supposed to be leading a body of Christ had been acting like Judas. I’ve never been more discouraged as an Adventist than I am now – and when my suspicions are confirmed this afternoon I think I will hit the lowest point in my faith. The honest truth is looking at all this has made me want to quit.

More than being pushed out of youth ministry in the congregation where I grew up, more than being told that I would never be a pastor unless I toed the party line on every issue (my two particular issues were just made more fundamentalist at the same session that is about to deny our sisters), more than being told not to waste my time ministering to a particular ethnic group since they were lost already – I’m at the point where my soul is weary and I’m ready to call it quits.

But I won’t. Even though I want to, even though I am angry, even though I am greatly disappointed – I won’t quit. I won’t because that’s not going to help. I won’t because even though there are these serious flaws in the leadership at the top, I have a wonderful local church who I love. I won’t because if all of us who want progress leave – who will lead it (no matter how slow)? I won’t, because Jesus said that when we are compelled to walk a mile, walk two.
It’s going to be a hard journey, and it’ll take some time to get over the disappointment – but I will. It won’t happen today, and it might not even happen in 2020 when we get the next chance – but eventually even the most staunch traditionalists will not be able to deny God’s ordination on the women he’s called. We may never have room for a minister who believes that God created the world and accepts that it didn’t happen 10,000 years ago. It may be a very long time before the climate is such that another conference will hire a minister who openly supports the full acceptance and participation of LGBT church members. It may be my children who see the leadership that is willing to take chances on new ideas for serving our communities – but whether I see all the progress I envision or none of it – I’m going to be along for the ride, how else can I start a revolution?

Right and Wrong in the Post-Modern World

“Post-modern people don’t believe in right and wrong.”

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, or some variation of it. We don’t believe in moral absolutes, we live in a state of moral ambiguity, everything is just different perspectives… On and on the list goes. Well I want to set the record straight, because I’m getting tired of hearing this. I am a post-modern thinker, I am a millennial and I (along with the vast majority of other po-mo millennials I know) do believe in right and wrong. What I don’t believe, and what might be mistaken for ambiguous morality, is that the concepts of right and wrong are limited to my understanding thereof.

I don’t believe that any one person, any one organization or any one culture has a monopoly on right and wrong. I reject rigid, exclusive and judgemental definitions of right and wrong. But I still believe in right and wrong. The difference, as I see it, between the present and the former views of right and wrong is that my generation views right and wrong more in the humanitarian sense than the previous authoritarian sense. Put simply, we don’t believe that something is wrong just because someone says it is wrong – but because it causes harm. In the same way, we don’t consider something good simply because it is proclaimed to be good by our culture, but to be good something has to do good.

In traditional settings, personally I come across this most often in churches, this view puts me (and others) at odds with many of our dear elders. The view that right and wrong are defined by the benefit or harm caused as opposed to how we’ve traditionally interpreted our sacred texts is not popular among the leaders of most of these communities. I’ve been accused of not believing in sin and therefore not believing in the need for redemption. But believe me, if you don’t think I believe that there is evil in this world – you’re talking to me about the wrong subjects. If you want to see that I still believe in evil, ask me what I think of a culture that excuses rape by saying the boys will be boys and those girls asked for it. If you want to see that I believe in sin, talk to me about corporations that use slave labour in their supply chains and pay their workers so low that they still depend on social assistance all while making their CEOs and major shareholders billions. If you want to see that I still believe in wickedness, bring up the double standard in the justice that white people receive and that people of colour receive. Trust me, even from my post-modern point of view there is still plenty of sin in the world

So do you want in on a secret?

If you want to promote themes of redemption and salvation to my generation, don’t start by coming at us with how wretched we are and how desperately we need to be saved. Whether that’s true or not – it’s totally foreign to us. Introduce the idea of redemption by finding one of the many areas in this world that we can all see as needing it and involve us in the process. We want to build a better world, we want to right wrongs and we want to see a purpose in our lives. So come to us with those opportunities. Maybe along the way we’ll be exposed to our own evils and seek to change them, maybe all we’ll do is help make the world a better place. Traditional institutions like churches are losing young people on a daily basis, you’re not going to get us back by preaching louder, you’re not going to get us back by playing better music and you’re certainly not going to get us back by telling us that you think we lack any sense of morality. If you want to get us back there’s an example you might want to follow. I read about this guy who formed a small group (estimates vary between 11 and 70) that went around feeding the hungry, healing the sick, freeing the oppressed, fighting injustice and preaching love and mercy. That sounds like something I’d like to be a part of, and I can’t speak for an entire generation – but I have a feeling it would attract a lot more  of us than anything called religion today.

Love Her

So June is here, and as promised Kingdom Dialogues is coming off hiatus. Over the last few weeks I’ve had a number of thoughts about how to kick things off, all of them good thoughts worthy of discussion and better yet none of them terribly controversial. I even had notes ready and then the day comes to publish the first one and what is splashed all over facebook, twitter and the news? Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out. So much for opening without controversy.

Now it’s not going to come as a surprise to regular readers that I support Caitlyn. I’m happy for her and wish her all the best. But the honest truth is that I’m not terribly worried about her. Now please don’t assume that I think for a moment that I know what it’s like living in her skin, walking in her shoes or living a long life of discomfort as Bruce before making her transition. I don’t, I’ve never been there and I’m sure she’s had some very heavy times coming to terms with her identity. But she’s dealt with those heavy times in a place of privilege and in a social circle that has been publicly supportive. So while I am happy for Caitlyn and wish her well – her story brings back to mind the story of Leelah Alcorn and millions more whose names we don’t know who’s transgender experience ended by walking into traffic, hanging at the end of a rope or anything other than the cover of Vanity Fair.

You see, one of the biggest things I hear from those who wonder why I insist on talking about my support for the LGBT community is, in some form or another, why won’t somebody think of the children? It frustrates me to no end because I am thinking of the children. I am thinking of your children. Gay and lesbian youth face more bullying, have higher rates of depression, are overrepresented in the homeless population and ultimately they take their own lives at disturbingly high rates – and all of that is worse with transboys and transgirls. But there is hope, studies are beginning to show that the tides are turning. It seems that growing public acceptance of the queer community is leading to lower rates of bullying in schools which could mark a change in the other statistics too.

But we aren’t there yet. There is still a daily struggle for millions of people whose only “sin” was being born wired a little differently. Gay and lesbian people, especially young people, still face bullying and violence. Bisexual people still face nasty stereotypes. Transgender people still face a struggle over something as simple as feeling safe when they need to pee. Whatever your politics, whatever your theology, whatever your culture – we are all still human and as someone who values life I want to appeal to you respond with an abundance of love, mercy and grace to the LGBT people in your life.

When I talked to my wife this morning about what I was going to write she told me she’d be a terrible blogger because she would only have one thing to say about the news of Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out – love her.

And to that sincere mother from my old church who asked what she should tell her kids if they saw a gay couple in church, I finally have an answer worth giving you. If you are going to explain the sight of a same-sex couple to your kids you should say this: If that’s you 10 years from now, you’re still going to be part of my family and you’re still going to be welcome in this community.

As a last word – if anyone out there reading this is struggling with gender or sexuality issues please, don’t give in to the darkness. You are a beautiful person, I believe that you are the image of God and there are people out there who love you. Reach out and know that you are infinitely valuable and infinitely loved.

God Called, She’s Mad

So there’s an old joke that goes something like this.

One day in Rome the Pope is sitting in his study and a group of his closest cardinals burst through the door shaking and pale. The Pope sees their concern and asks them what’s wrong. They reply that God is on the phone. The Pope says “that’s wonderful, why are you so frightened?” The cardinals respond, “She’s mad.”

One of the basic tenets of humour is that you give your audience something unexpected, and the reason this joke works is because God is a ‘he’, right? Now when it’s a joke people laugh and move on. But what happens if you suggest that God is a she in a forum other than humour? Just ask Eliel Cruz, a writer who covers issues of faith and sexuality and a voice I strongly recommend listening to, about some of the responses to a piece he wrote in which he referred to God as she. Closer to home you could ask my wife (whose painting, photography and sketching can be found at http://kiamsaco.deviantart.com/) about the response to her posting of a quote on our church’s facebook page in which God was referred to in the feminine.

After talking to these people you can see that there are a range of responses, some incredibly positive – but many very, very negative. There is a very hostile attitude toward references to God in the feminine from traditional Christians. It’s a hostility I can, to a point, understand. After all the references to God as masculine are very obvious in scripture, while the references to God as feminine are fewer and often entirely obscured in English since our nouns don’t have a gender. Jesus was a man, he referred to his father, and the pronouns from Genesis to Revelation are masculine. We were brought up with the notion that God was a he. To this day my default pronoun for God, and that of most people with whom I speak, is still he; and I think that is rather harmless. The problem is not in picking a pronoun for God, that’s something language requires of us. The problem is when our picking of a pronoun warps our view of God.

You see, while we refer to God as he – God is not a man.

Jesus, who those of us with a Christian perspective pretty much have to agree has the best knowledge of who God is, says very clearly that God is spirit. Also we can go back to the very beginning and see that both male and female were created in God’s image. Beyond these fairly obvious readings that should bring us right out of the need for a debate of God’s sex, there are a large number of references to God as Mother in the Old Testament and in Hebrew there are a number of occasions where the word for God is grammatically feminine. This is not to say that God is a woman, God is spirit.

The problem as I see it is that we are, as always, trying to define the divine in human terms. We’ve got the whole thing backwards! We ascribe masculinity (or femininity) to God, when what we should be doing is finding the fingerprints of divinity in women and men. God doesn’t embody masculine or feminine traits – humans have the image of God in ourselves. God is perfection, we are the ones with traits and characteristics of it. She doesn’t have our traits, we have his.

Where our problem becomes an issue isn’t in a debate over which pronoun to use for God, both work and both are biblically appropriate. The problem is when we mistake our linguistic need for pronouns, for God being limited to our understanding of masculinity and femininity. When we insist that God is a man, we exclude many wonderful aspects of divinity that are expressed in typically feminine qualities. When we insist that God is man we exclude our mothers, wives, sisters and woman-friends from the image of God they deserve. When we insist that God is a man we limit our thinking of the powerful ministries godly women can and should perform. When we insist that God is a man we end up with the Mark Driscolls of the world.

We need to be able to see God in spirit and in truth, and we need to be able to see her image in her daughters as much as we see his image in his sons. We also need to be able to be free to change our approach. God as a father can be a beautiful and powerful image, but what about the child of an abusive father? Do we really want to insist that a person brought up by an evil man think of him every time they picture God? Even within our humanity – how much better off would we be if we could see God in our children when they exhibit qualities associated with the other sex? Instead of calling a boy who cries a sissy we affirmed him as sharing traits of God and told him that even Jesus wept?

God doesn’t have a sex, but she’s awesome and I’m glad to be her son.

The Church Of My Dreams Part 2

Last week I wrote a piece beginning to talk about the church I see in my dreams. I shared the notion that I believe that mutual love and a commitment to coming together in the service of others formed a better foundation for church community than agreement on theological principles. While stating that I do recognize that theology does play a role in anything like a church that we will have, so this week I’d like to share how I envision a church doing theology.

Participation not Preaching

I’m going to start with the part of this that is possibly hardest on me. You see, I like preaching. I like listening to a good preacher, I like the process of writing a sermon and I like standing up in front of a group of people and delivering that sermon. What’s more I’ve been told far too many times for my own good that I have a gift for it. Even people who don’t like what I have to say have given me compliments on how I said it. So it truly pains my ego to say this, since I have a gift for it and enjoy doing it; but preaching needs to go. This old notion of one man standing at the front behind a pulpit expounding with all the trappings of authority on what is correct needs to be quickly consigned to the history books. While it’s true that this form of communication can build a form of community I don’t think it’s a healthy one and I don’t think it’s either what existed or what was envisioned by Jesus and his apostles.

Instead, I see the communion table being more than just an object hauled out on a periodic basis for a ceremony a significant number of churchgoers are, according to the statistics, likely to avoid if they know it’s coming. I see the communion table being the centre of the church. I am far more comfortable with the idea of every person sitting around as equals, and having a dialogue with one another. Now I know my theory on this is “unique” but I don’t see communion as something rare and shrouded in mystery. On the contrary; there are plenty of elements from the passover feast that Jesus and the disciples were celebrating when he established communion that would have been uncommon. There are elements of the Seder that are eaten only with that meal, and I believe that if Jesus had wanted to establish a ritualised practice that used special elements he would have done that. Instead he took the only two elements of the meal that were common to every meal (and in most cultures of the time) and attached meaning to them. I think that Jesus was saying to those disciples, whenever you eat or drink, remember me. Therefore I think it is perfectly appropriate to share a meal every time we gather. Meals are where life is shared, and I believe that is what Jesus wanted to establish.

Who Can Sit at the Table

This is actually one of the most crucial questions facing church today, and it’s one to which I offer a simple (but not easy) answer. Anyone who comes. That’s right, I believe in a fully open practice of community and a discussion that involves anyone who wants to participate. If a person is willing to be part of a community that loves one another and serves their neighbours then they meet the religious requirements of my faith. How they come to the place of love and service and the way they view God aren’t reasons for division in my view. In fact, much the opposite, I hope and pray for diversity at the table. Adventist and Baptist, Protestant and Catholic, Christian and Muslim, Monotheist and Polytheist and even Atheist – I want all at the table. White and Black, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, straight and gay, male and female – I want all at the table and in an equal seat.

I desire this diverse table because I believe at a fundamental level that we are all one. My blood is no redder than another’s, my experience is no more valid than another’s, my faith is no more sacred than another’s. Now I know this position makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Going outside our boundaries always does. But I think that it’s only through genuine community and shared experience that we truly grow and it’s the only way for us to understand God. You see I value my faith, I never want to lose my faith, I believe that my faith has an incredible picture of God; but I do not believe for an instant that the succession of traditions that has led to my faith is the only path through history that God has revealed himself.

I’ll go into this in more detail in a future post, but in short I find that it paints a very petty picture of a God we call love to believe that there is only one line of chosen people throughout human history and all others are outside his grace. Yes I believe that God has revealed himself to my forefathers and foremothers, but I also believe that he has revealed himself to my Muslim friends’ forefathers and foremothers, to my Buddhist friends’ forefathers and foremothers and to my Pagan friends’ forefathers and foremothers. And I am secure enough in my own faith and identity to allow those friends to share their perspectives. I won’t become a Muslim, a Buddhist or a Pagan; but there is much I can learn from them. In the same way I have no expectation that these friends will convert to my religion; but I hope to be able to share the blessings I’ve received with them.

At the end of days I don’t believe that God is going to be checking membership cards, but judging hearts. And in my faith, the one after whom we are named said that it comes down to a question of love. So since all these people are capable of love all have a right to sit at the table, all have a right to contribute to the dialogue and I hope that all will give me the right to call myself their brother.

I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. – Jesus

The Church Of My Dreams Part 1

I have a dream; it’s about church. Yes, I really am that much of a nerd. But if you have a few minutes I’d like to tell you about it. If you read our earlier post you’ll know that despite the baggage that comes with it, I continue to identify as Christian. For all the flaws in my community it’s still mine and I value both my faith and the people with whom I share it. Now even if you’ve never been in your life, you likely know that Christians have a thing called church. Church is a concept that means different things to different people. For some it’s a building (let’s meet at the church), for some it’s an organization (Anglican Church), for others it’s a group of people (anytime you see the word in the Bible). 250,000 words in the English language and still…

Anyway, when I talk about church I generally mean the group of people. So how does this group of people come together, what makes a group a church? I grew up in an environment that (to oversimplify just a little) taught that it was agreement on theology that made us a church. I don’t really like that answer. If I’m being perfectly honest it’s probably because I’ve grown in a way that has caused me to challenge a few of the theological principles that hold my particular tribe of Christendom together, and since that was the instrument of unity I’m feeling left out. Why can’t we still be a church even though I disagree with some of the things the majority of the group believes? I still love the people, we still profess the same faith in Christ, I still want to accomplish the overall mission assigned to us.

Disagreement over theology seems a stupid reason to break up the band!

So what should hold us together? In my dreams, and one could argue there is a strong foundation in the Gospel for this position, a group of people who love one another is a great starting place. After we have that foundation of mutual love, I think a degree of agreement helps. But where I differ from many is over what we should agree. Where the church of my background suggests that theological agreement is the key, I think that agreement of purpose is a better place to start.

What’s the difference?

If we read the Gospels Jesus seems to be a pretty practical messiah. He healed the sick, he fed the hungry, he cast out demons, he raised the dead. Sure he also taught, but his teachings were less about the high-minded concepts discussed in the theology departments of Universities and Seminaries and more about what it means to love and be loved. I too think that the central theme of our group should be practical. We will still discuss ideas, and even engage in the foolishness of a group of mortals trying to describe the divine. But ideas don’t have to be the thing that holds us together.

If you’ve ever taken theology you’ve likely heard that one of the purposes of church is to provide a community setting for worship. I had one professor who made a point of instilling this idea into the heads of his students. To be fair to the good man, the class was called Worship. Now without getting too off topic and writing an essay on what worship is, been there, done that, got the B on my transcript, let’s say for the purposes of our discussion that, among other things, worship entails demonstrating our devotion to God. To that end I want to share a couple texts from scripture that have formed my thinking on what God wants in the way of service.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction,

Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.

There are other things, of course. But because of the way I read the Bible, from the character of God I understand as expressed through Jesus and the inspiration I experience from the Holy Spirit – service to my fellow human beings is service to God. When Jesus walked the streets of Palestine he wasn’t handing out books explaining a theory of what the Kingdom of Heaven could be; he was feeding the hungry and healing the sick at the same time as telling them that the Kingdom of Heaven was already in their midst. It’s actually a pretty ubiquitous message in the gospel. So from my point of view, worshipping God is more about doing good for the people around me and less about being right in my ideas about him.

This is actually great news, because the hungry person doesn’t care if I have good eschatology as long as I can make a good sandwich.

So I dream of a church in which people are brought together by a desire to do good for their neighbours. You might say, well that sounds like a service club more than a church. To that I’ll say two things. 1: Ok. If the worst thing you can say about my church is that we spend too much time serving people you’re not going to hurt my feelings. 2: It is still a spiritual endeavour, the love of Jesus is my motivation for desiring to do this. And love is also vital. The church of my dreams is a community bound by love, not bound by intellectual agreement. When I dream of church I see a group of people who would do anything for the person sitting next to them. They would consider it an honour to help their brother or sister, they would look for opportunities to do good and they would treasure the friendship of those in the community. Generosity, mercy and joy are all pervasive in the community I see when I dream.

Now don’t get me wrong, ideas and the discussion thereof still play an important role in the church of my dreams. But that discussion looks very different than what I see when I meet with churches on the weekend. We’ll save that for another post.

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another – Jesus