I just returned from the French Alps, where we celebrated the wedding of my wife’s son and his bride.  It was a week-long party, culminating in a beautiful ceremony, in which I was honored to be asked to officiate, with Mont Blanc as the backdrop.  In breaks from the festivities in the charming mountain village of Megève, I found myself drawn to a little 16th-century chapel next to the onion-domed church in the center of town.  There, I joined a handful of people gathered to adore the blessed sacrament, housed on the altar in a golden sunburst monstrance with a mirror in its cen ..read more

When I was a student at Union Seminary [1963-6], two main types of ethical analysis were prevalent. One was a contextual ethic championed by Paul Lehmann, the other an ethic of “middle axioms” promulgated by John Bennett and Roger Shinn. Everyone agreed that one could not simply apply abstract law to everyday ethical questions without in-depth analysis. But although the latter argued that whereas legalism was not a valid approach to the questions of life, they did argue that we do, nevertheless, need some structure in life, such as peace, justice, and order. These middle axioms made it possibl ..read more

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.  “We have been Methodists since 1917 in the oldest black section of Houston,” Harold Cox, an openly African American gay male of Boston, shared with me.   “I’m sad because the United Methodist Church is my family’s business.”  Cox comes from a supportive and long family line of Methodist ministers—three uncles and his father, who was the ..read more

  Over the past fifty-plus years, in general, traditional churches–both denominational and non-denominational–have been dying at an alarming rate.  Church growth experts across the spectrum have labored long and hard over the decades to find ways of stemming the decline, mostly without success.  Too often, the church has lost sight of its founding purpose and lost its way.  With this in mind, let’s look at a few examples of areas where the church needs to rethink its way forward.  Churches have become too concerned with numbers; e.g., church membership, church attenda ..read more

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 refuge camp 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. One of the challenges in defining the term is that conventional Christians … they ..read more

  The Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old. Humans have been a part of it for about 6 million years, but we have only been living in settlements together for about 10,000 years. As you might imagine, it was only well after humans started settlements that we started damaging the Earth in any significant way. It’s also interesting to note that no other creature that has ever existed has come anywhere close to doing the damage to the environment that humans have. A total of 4.5 billion years of life for planet Earth, and in less than .0002% of that time, humanity has massively put the li ..read more

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.  To be clear, birth and death are in both, and in her poem, “The Blue Heron,” (Saint) Mary Oliver honors the religion of creation by describing the hunting precision of the great bird that plucks multiple frogs from the lily pads, “t ..read more

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.” This, on the surface, might seem like splitting hairs over a label, but I’ve come to realize how important it is for progressive Christians to understand and extrapolate this detail for their communities and in public whenever ..read more

Over the past 45 years, numerous mainline Protestant denominations in the United States have come to adopt progressive stances regarding the ordination of LGBTQ clergy and authorizing ordained clergy to conduct wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples. Such denominations include: The Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church USA; The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America; the American Baptist Churches USA; the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ); and the Community of Christ. For decades, the United Methodist Church has been a notable outlier. With 7 million memb ..read more

“We have got our harpoon into the monster, but we must still take uncommon care, or else by a single flop of his tail, he will send us all to eternity.” -Abraham Lincoln on the Confederacy On April 15th, 1862, the Westernmost battle of the Civil War took place just North of Tucson, Arizona, at a place called Picacho Peak. Scouting for a larger force coming from California to run the Confederates out of Tucson, a dozen Union cavalry surprised a Confederate picket of 12 cavalry. A 90-minute skirmish broke out. Three Union soldiers were killed, two Confederates were wounded, and two Confederates ..read more