Loving interpretation of the Bible imitates Jesus’s interpretation of the Bible. Jesus was a Jewish rabbi interpreting Jewish Scriptures for his fellow Jews. In respect of his Judaism, I have attempted to avoid supersessionism in this book. Supersessionism is the belief that Christianity has superseded (surpassed, supplanted, or replaced) Judaism in its covenant with God. It is a form of triumphalism, an assertion that “God likes my religion better than your religion.”

One thousand five hundred years of persecution, pogroms, and genocide by Christians against Jews should liberate Christians from any moral triumphalism, and liberation from moral triumphalism should liberate us from theological triumphalism. One symptom of triumphalism, reaching back to the second century CE, is the use of the terms Old Testament and New Testament, which imply that God’s covenant with the Jews (the “Old” Testament) has been replaced by God’s covenant with the Christians (the “New” Testament).

Despite this implication, the church’s attitude toward the Jews’ “Old” Testament was always ambivalent. On the one hand, the church implied that the Jewish covenant had been superseded. On the other hand, the church utilized it extensively in practice, as had Jesus.

Since we are celebrating Jesus’s Judaism, we are also going to celebrate his use of Jewish Scripture. To avoid insinuating that God’s covenant with the Jews is abrogated, replaced, or superseded, in this series of essays I have referred to the “Old” Testament as “the Hebrew Bible,” “the Jewish Scriptures,” and “the Torah.” I have referred to the “New” Testament as “the Newer Testament” and “Christian Scriptures,” in keeping with the practice of many contemporary Bible scholars. The term Newer Testament is more accurate and less supersessionist, since it only implies that the Christian scriptures are more recent, not more inspired. It also symbolizes Christian repentance for 1,500 years of often murderous anti-Judaism. What we do to the least of these, we do to Christ, Chagall reminds us.

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The church wrote the Newer Testament. We can now comment on the placement of this topic in our series of essays. I am posting about the Bible after I posted about the church, because the church wrote the Newer Testament. That is why the word church (Greek: ekklēsia) occurs 114 times, in various forms, in the Christian scriptures.

The church also decided to include the Hebrew Scriptures in its canon (a canon is an accepted list of authoritative writings). This decision was not a foregone conclusion: some early theologians wanted only the Newer Testament to be deemed authoritative, dismissing the Hebrew Scriptures as the archaic revelation of a lesser god. Other theologians, noting Jesus’s extensive reliance on the Hebrew Scriptures, wanted to include them in the authoritative canon. This faction won the debate.

The authors of the Newer Testament wrote in much the same way as contemporary Christian authors. They studied Scripture, practiced charity, gathered stories, collected teachings, shared liturgy, read philosophy, debated theology, worshiped regularly, reasoned rigorously, and wrote creatively. They weren’t depersonalized automata transmitting words dictated to them by the Holy Spirit. They were human beings, inspired by Sophia, discipled to Jesus, and falling newly in love with Abba.

If human authors authored the Newer Testament, indeed the whole Bible, then what is the source of its authority? I would argue that it is agape—love of God and love of neighbor. Hence those authors, and the scriptures themselves, are most inspired when they are most loving—as are we all. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 245-246)

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Science and religion need not conflict. I teach a course on science and religion, and we always discuss Darwin’s theory of evolution in class. One semester I was explaining the history of Darwinism and its conflict with those churches that insist on a literal interpretation of Genesis. I also covered those churches that accept Darwin’s theory as a scientific advance, grateful for the powers of observation and reason that God has gifted us.

A student in the back of class was staring at me wide-eyed throughout the lecture. Later, in conversation, I discovered she had been raised in a fundamentalist church that preached biblical infallibilism, aka biblical inerrantism—the belief that there can be no mistakes or errors in the Bible. They disavowed Darwin’s theory of evolution and insisted on young earth creationism, concluding that Adam and Eve were historical figures, created from scratch, and that the world was about seven thousand years old.

To the members of this church, Genesis was more accurate than any humanly written science textbook because it was the divinely written word of God, utterly reliable in all fields of human knowledge, including science and history. As the word of God, it couldn’t be wrong and anything that disagreed with it couldn’t be right. For this community, to reject a literal interpretation of Genesis due to “scientific discoveries” was the height of arrogance, a preference for human reason over against faith in God. To make things worse, her church taught that Darwin’s theory of evolution inevitably led to atheism, eugenics, and ultimately, Nazism, since it assumed cutthroat competition between all parties.

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Ironically, my student was a biology major. Biological science considers Darwin’s theory of evolution to be foundational for understanding all the subdisciplines within that field. During her college studies, as the overwhelming evidence for evolution became apparent, she began to believe that she was an atheist because Darwinism was incompatible with Christian faith. She was being forced to choose between her intellect and God, and her intellect was winning.

God is love, and God wants scripture to be interpreted lovingly. This lecture was the first time she had learned of Christians who accepted evolution and followed Jesus. She saw that deep faith was compatible with intellectual integrity. She was not, by predilection, an atheist. She trusted God, but didn’t have a concept of God that she could trust. During class, her face expressed the dawning realization that she could be both a Christian and a scientist, in good conscience, without compartmentalization.

In the essays that follow, we will discuss the Bible and its interpretation. What we understand the Bible to be, and how we interpret it, can draw people into faith or drive them out of faith. Currently, more people are being driven out than drawn in. In response, we will propose an understanding and interpretation of the Bible that accords with how Jesus read his own Bible—agapically, as an expression of the universal, unconditional, celebratory love of God for all. And we will conclude that Christians should read the Bible—including the Newer Testament—like Christ did, as agapically as possible. Because only love heals. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 243–245)

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If your church’s leaders are trying to control you, then leave. Many churches are systems of control that cause great pain. Today, some therapists are specializing in Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), trying to heal the psychic scars produced by churches that castigate questioning members and hold the threat of hell over all.

The leaders of these churches have abandoned their call, having been seduced by the lure of power over, when Christ taught us service of. This essay is about what a church can be when the community truly loves Abba, follows Jesus, and listens to Sophia. This essay is about Trinitarian love.

Christianity exists to share the love of God with the world. Ideally, church is where the ultimate truth of the universe—divine love— is granted physical, temporal expression. It is where love is enacted as consistently as possible, felt as deeply as possible, and thought as thoroughly as possible.

In reality, the church always fails to express love perfectly; it is always broken. But, when a church is truly trying to express the love of God, it fails within grace, aware that God forgives before failure occurs. And through this grace, it is always mending, both itself and the world.

Jesus tells his disciples that they are “the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14), and many times they have been, building orphanages and hospitals, caring for the wounded, making peace, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, and comforting the bereaved. At other times, the church has been darkness, worsening the world it was meant to better, lashing out against those it deems infidel.

Too frequently, as noted above, the church harms its own. Anyone who has been betrayed by a friend or family member knows that love is dangerous, and anyone betrayed by their community knows that trust is dangerous. As Jesus discovered in his relationship to Judas, vulnerability risks betrayal. But the alternative, the security of self-seclusion, misses the mark by denying life. Recognizing this truth, the saints persevere (Revelation 14:12), striving to embody the unity of the Trinity in the unity of the church, which then builds unity on earth.

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The struggle will always encounter hypocrisy. Faith does not guarantee success in this endeavor, nor does it close the gap between human brokenness and the fullness of God. But just as our love is not complete, our failure will not be complete either, and much beauty arises along the way. The Holy Spirit Sophia promises us that God will complete what God has begun. Given the power of Sophia’s activity, the only churches that can’t mend are those that don’t admit they’re broken. Sadly, many don’t.

One person who suffered disillusionment with the church was a young Presbyterian pastor in eastern North Carolina in 1964. Reverend Clement A. Sydnor III, my father, was disappointed to learn that the Beulaville Junior Chamber of Commerce sponsored the Duplin County Agricultural Fair, which oddly had no animals on display. But they did offer “girlie shows,” which were quite a lucrative draw. Many years later, my father told me what these girlie shows entailed. They were not risque southern vaudeville; they were perverse and degrading.

My father and four other local pastors began pressing the Junior Chamber of Commerce to stop the girlie shows, and their campaign gathered some momentum. But he was surprised to get pushback from a leading elder in his church, who was also a leading businessman in the community. This parishioner initiated a community-wide controversy, sending slanderous letters about my father to various institutions.

In the Presbyterian denomination, when there is significant conflict between a pastor and a prominent church member, the presbytery (local governing body) will step in to resolve the matter. My father was surprised by the tepid response of the presbytery, which seemed indifferent to the girlie shows and a bit frustrated that a young pastor had created needless headaches by confronting a long-established churchman. Many other young pastors in the presbytery were having similar problems and felt bereft of institutional support.

Writing to one of his former professors in seminary, my father explained:

As you know, this is predominantly a presbytery of young ministers. The young ministers are getting tired and irritated at the little support and guidance the presbytery as a whole is giving. The turnover is rapid because of this and it will increase in the next two years. . . . If one of us young ministers take something like this to presbytery and bring it up on the floor, we are looked upon with a kind of sympathy because we are young with the zeal of a prophet and pretty soon we will metamorphose into the kind of apostles that all ministers should be—so argue the older and stronger voices of presbytery. The most advice I can get is on how a young minister can be an old minister in one easy step. It is as if God has no use for the prophetic zeal of a young minister and is only tolerating him until he becomes older and wiser. . . . As you can see, I’m pretty disgusted with advice on how to be old at heart, with advice on how not to rock the boat and make waves, and with rolling merrily on to hell.

At the age of twenty-seven, my father left that pastorate and went to Mount Horeb Presbyterian Church in the Shenandoah Valley, where he had a much better experience. Still, after five years there, he was sufficiently disillusioned to leave ministry, earning a doctorate in education and working with the state of Virginia to prevent juvenile delinquency.

The struggle will always produce moral beauty. He returned to pastoral ministry twelve years later, with his eyes wide open, and pastored several more churches over the next twenty years. These ministries also had their ups and downs, but he loved his calling, and little miracles happened.

A family came to his church one Advent season, inquiring about membership. They had a pleasant young son and a vivacious younger daughter with Down’s syndrome. They had been regular attendees at a larger, nearby church, but their daughter had been left out of the Christmas pageant, whose director apparently prioritized dramatic perfection over all-embracing celebration. My dad was appalled, and the girl was immediately named Mary in Bow Creek’s pageant, to the family and the church’s great joy.

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That was one of the best Christmas Eve services ever. It was an imperfect church with an imperfect congregation and imperfect pastor, but they worked hard to love like God. And sometimes they hit the mark perfectly, creating the little miracles that sustain us. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 240–242)

An open table signifies universal salvation. Religious ritual either works or it dies. One criterion of effectiveness is the ritual’s ability to transform our interaction with the non-ritualized world. If the ritual causes us to interpret and act in ordinary time in accordance with the values expressed in ritual time, then the ritual has succeeded. If the ritual produces no change in our feeling or behavior outside of ritual time, then the ritual has failed.

Although ritual practice is introverted, focused on its own space and time, the effect of the ritual practice is extroverted, spilling into and changing everyday space and time. In other words, ritual creates in the present, ritualized space-time what we will strive to create in the future, universal space-time. It enacts a vision of reality and impels action toward that vision.

The Christian vision of reality is the kingdom of God as preached by Jesus and anticipated by the Lord’s Supper. The Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist, remembers, repeats, and anticipates the communion of saints experienced at table in the presence of Jesus, a communion that will be perfected in the kingdom. By doing so, it breaks down the boundaries between past, present, and future, remembering the past into the present, a present that anticipates our future gathering in the full presence of God. At the same time, it breaks down the boundaries between locales, so we gather at the Jerusalem table of Jesus, the local table of our church, and the future table of the new creation. It unites the work of the divine persons, as we are invited by the same Savior, pervaded by the same Spirit, and giving thanks to the same Creator, thereby communing with the same Trinity.

The invitation to communion is an invitation to community. Since communion is universal, one reality sustained by one God, the community of the table is universal, one gathering at one feast. An exclusive ritual cannot express inclusive love. Jesus’s teachings and Sophia’s intimations both commend a church without boundaries, an “us” without a “them” that fulfills the intentions of Abba.

In Jesus’s day, those who would pollute a table, those who were to be excluded from table fellowship, were the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind, so Jesus says: “When you have a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed” (Luke 14:13–14a). Who are the outcasts today, with whom we would not share a meal? At table, we should exclude only those whom Jesus would exclude, but Jesus included Thomas who would doubt him, Peter who would deny him, and Judas who would betray him. We conclude that Jesus would exclude no one, as do we. The table must be open.

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Sadly, most invitations to the communion table are exclusive, limiting participation to baptized Christians, or baptized Christians who have been confirmed in their specific faith, or baptized Christians who have been confirmed in their specific faith and are currently in good standing with the church. Religious authorities frequently enforce this limited participation.

Ironically, the authorities of Jesus’s day denied the Holy Spirit within him, accusing him of possession by Beelzebul instead, and would have shunned him from table (Mark 3:22). It follows that, in our own day, if we deny communion to some, we risk denying communion to Christ.

Changing ritual is good for the soul. If communion is open to all, then it is open to children. At Grace Community Boston, as soon as a child can digest solid food, they are welcome to be brought forward for communion. This development, which was natural and spontaneous, demanded that we discuss the imagery used for communion. We needed to engage and alter tradition according to our norm: the agapic love of God.

Such breaking with tradition is traditional. As Tom Driver notes, rituals change through history. They are created in times and places according to the need of those times and places; as needs change rituals change. A new world will need new rituals, and any community moving toward the kingdom of God strides toward a new world.

Children tend to think literally. The capacity for metaphorical thought develops with age and life experience. Since we were serving communion to very young children, we became concerned that their literal interpretation of eucharistic imagery regarding the body and blood of Christ would make them think that we were all, literally, cannibals.

To investigate, we asked our parishioners what they remembered about communion from their childhood. The results disturbed us. The body-and-blood language had conjured some gruesome imagery: one parishioner thought that her church had Christ’s corpse in the back room, behind the apse, and from this corpse carved up the body and drained out the blood for each week’s service. Others had similar memories and were convinced that they were eating and drinking (or their parents were) the literal flesh and blood of Jesus. And they remembered being, let us say, discomfited by this regular occurrence.

All good theology is pastoral theology, so we were more than willing to adapt tradition to this pastoral discovery. While celebrating communion, we began to avoid body-and-blood imagery, emphasizing instead remembrance of Jesus’s absolute ethical courage, the presence of Christ among us through table fellowship, and the promised banquet at which all will be filled. Like the early church, and like many contemporary emergent churches, communion became similar to an agape meal or love feast—we replaced wafers with large chunks of fresh-baked bread and goblets of grape juice. Our invitation to table is open, and we have served Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics, humanists, and Jews. Utilizing pastorally revised yet biblically grounded language, we began referring to the elements as the “bread of heaven” (John 6:51) and “cup of salvation” (Psalm 116:13; see also 1 Corinthians 10:16). Children partake joyfully and see nothing spooky about the experience.

Change is difficult. But after a good change, you don’t want to go back to the way things were; you’re thankful to have moved on. After the Exodus, the Israelites did not want to go back to Egypt. After encountering Jesus’s new way, his followers did not want to go back to their old ways.

After removing body and blood language from communion, and replacing it with bread of heaven and cup of salvation language, no one in our church wants to go back. We sacrificed the familiar for the unfamiliar, and are the better for it. The future invites. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 237–240)

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For further reading, please see:

Driver, Tom F. “Transformation: The Magic of Ritual.” In Readings in Ritual Studies, edited by Ronald L. Grimes, 170–87. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Edmondson, Stephen. “Opening the Table: The Body of Christ and God’s Prodigal Grace.” Anglican Theological Review 91 (2009) 224–37.

Jennings, Theodore W. “On Ritual Knowledge.” In Readings in Ritual Studies, edited by Ronald L. Grimes, 324–34. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

King, Ursula. Women and Spirituality: Voices of Protest and Promise. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

Baptism celebrates life itself as sacred. All rituals overflow language, including the language of ritual. Despite ritual’s resistance to the imperium of words, theology matters. Ritual may not be reducible to theological content, and it may not be translatable into language, but ritual still has cognitive content that language can suggest but not capture. That cognitive content will vary according to the participant, both in depth and meaning: bad interpretations produce impoverished ritual experience, while good interpretations produce enriched ritual experience.

And some interpretations of rituals are just plain old inadequate. My wife and I pastored a local Protestant church for many years. Since it was very much a local church, we ended up baptizing, marrying, and burying many Protestants, practicing or not, in the local community. (In pastoral parlance, we hatched them, matched them, and dispatched them.) Funerals were rarely problematic, but baptisms could get sketchy since, for many of the nonpracticing Protestants, they seemed to be more public performance than sacred rite, more about the after-party than the congregational commitment.

We would meet with parents prior to a child’s baptism, talk about the sacrament, and ask what it meant to the parents and extended family. We got a variety of answers, most of which were theologically subpar. Among the most common were: we need to baptize him now, before he gets too old and it looks funny; it’s not that big a deal to us, but his grandparents want him baptized; we haven’t had a family reunion in a while, and baptisms are more fun than funerals; I’m not sure if I believe this, but my great aunt is concerned that if he dies without being baptized he’ll go to hell.

Rarely did parents tell us that they wanted to raise their child in the love of God, and they wanted the help of a community in doing so, and baptism would seal that covenant.

At this point Abby or I would have a conversation with the parents. We would talk about baptism and what it means: In the sacrament of baptism, we utilize the everyday element of water to mark the holiness of life, thereby reminding ourselves of the sanctity of both. In baptism, the Holy Spirit Sophia proclaims that this child is predestined to God’s gracious covenant; they are beloved before being capable of love. The congregation, as priests of God to the child, promise to raise the child within the divine love, supporting the child unconditionally as they negotiate a highly conditional world. Thus, baptism begins a journey for all, in the hope that our faith will continue and deepen throughout life, in a community whose purpose, among many, is to discover and enjoy our shared humanity.

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Baptism is by the community into the community. Such is our theology of baptism, but other communities have different theologies. This divergence came to a head in the archdiocese of Phoenix, where for over twenty years Rev. Andres Arango baptized children by saying, “We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The prescribed formula is “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

This change in wording caused quite a kerfuffle. The local bishop, Thomas Olmsted, advised parishioners, “If you were baptized using the wrong words, that means your baptism is invalid, and you are not baptized. . . . The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes.” He went on to advise those invalidly baptized by Rev. Arango not to take communion until they had been validly baptized, although he did comfort them, “We can be assured that all who approached God, our Father, in good faith to receive the sacraments did not walk away empty-handed.”

Rev. Arango was not the first priest to baptize saying “we” instead of “I.” Among some quarters of the Roman Catholic priesthood, a preference had arisen for communitarian liturgy that engaged the whole congregation rather than emphasizing the activity of the priest alone. Enough priests were doing so that the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a prohibition against such communitarian liturgy in June 2020, declaring such baptisms invalid.

Earlier, some priests had adapted the baptismal liturgy, baptizing in the name of the Creator, Liberator, and Sustainer, or Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, rather than Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Theirs was an attempt to use gender-neutral language for God instead of exclusively masculine language for God, an innovation that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared invalid in February 2008.

The theology we are developing here dovetails with the communitarian language of Rev. Arango as well as the gender-neutral language of the other priestly reformers. The primary purpose of ritual is pastoral—to care for persons in their journey through life. Since pastoral needs change with pastoral circumstances, the performance of ritual need not hew closely to any preexisting pattern. We must adapt rituals over time, because the patriarchal formulations of yesteryear may ring oppressive in our egalitarian, universalist minds.

Moreover, the agapic love communicated by the ritual, not the precise wording, makes it effective. We don’t have to “get it right,” but we hope that it “works,” as does medicine on a disease. The feelings a ritual produces, the understanding it confers, and the activity it encourages render the ritual successful or unsuccessful. Therefore, the best rituals are indeed communitarian expressions of existential solidarity. These rituals recognize our fundamental unity within a creative power coursing through the universe, whose greatest desire is to accompany us.

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Religious ritual should communicate equality. Because nonbinary persons, women, and men are all equally made in the image of God, hence equally divine, liturgical language should be gender-neutral or gender-inclusive. Exclusively masculine language for God ratifies patriarchy and resists the divinely intended equality. Recognizing that the Bible uses primarily masculine language for God, the church must emphasize those texts that use feminine language for God, thereby advancing feminism—the belief that all genders are equal in talents, rights, and responsibilities. It must also emphasize those texts that refer to a gender-transcendent God, thereby explicitly including nonbinary persons within the divine image.

Such inclusiveness is not a dream or even a plan; it is happening already, in many churches around the world. At Grace Community Boston, utilizing the innovation of Rev. James F. Kay for Riverside Church, we baptize “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; one God, Mother of us all.” We begin the Lord’s Prayer with “Our Beloved, who art in heaven . . .” And we conceptualize Sophia the Holy Spirit as female in story, liturgy, and song, providing all genders with a feminine divine. Christian theology need not be patriarchal, and Christian liturgy need not be patriarchal. Both can be egalitarian, and they are becoming so, thank God. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 234–237)

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For further reading, please see:

Lines, Caleb J. Awakened: A 52-Week Progressive Christian Devotional. Des Peres, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2024.

Miralles, Antonio. “A New Response of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the Validity of Baptism.” Vatican, Feb. 1, 2008. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20080201_validity-baptism-miralles_en.html.

Religious ritual is not magic or superstition. All religions practice rituals, but religions interpret their rituals differently. Some offer “magical” interpretations of the ritual as a supernatural technology that produces material outcomes: “If we just pray hard enough, she’ll be healed.” Other religions interpret rituals as meaning-making activities, superimposed on life to create order from chaos. If life appears random, we can provide some order to it with periodic observances.

In our account, religious rituals are not magic, nor are they meaning-making activities. Instead, they are meaning-accessing activities. Religious rituals access a preexisting meaning woven into the universe. Because they access the sacred, they are sacraments: portals through which the grace that lies within the cosmos flows into our everyday lives.

Religious ritual confirms the basic sacramentality of the cosmos, reminding us that everything is holy. Due to this universal holiness, awe is the most legitimate attitude toward life and gratitude its most natural fruit. To feel a sacrament is to feel awe and become grateful, because the sacrament celebrates what we overlook in our distractedness—the intrinsic beauty of life, the sacredness of matter, and the importance of each person.

Sacramental celebration brings existential healing to a despondent world. Life is stunningly beautiful and intensely difficult, with the ever-present possibility of intense suffering and great joy. We are material beings in a material universe through which courses Infinite Spirit. We are fully embodied and fully ensouled; our physicality entails risk, while our spirituality entails passion. Embracing the intensity of life, faith celebrates this unification of body and soul, a unification that heightens experience, deepens awareness, and unceasingly generates more.

We need grace to bear that more. Recognizing this need, sacraments use the constituents of the universe—space, time, energy, and matter—as channels of divine encouragement. Such material sacraments reveal material existence to be holy: matter manifests spirit, and spirit reveals matter to be more lively than common sense alone could explain.

As argued above, religious ritual is not harmful superstition, outdated magic, or pre-scientific technology. Religious ritual is a medium of the sacred with transformative power. Indeed, this power may be so transformative that it seems magical, working wonders in our interpretation of life.

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Spiritual transformation bequeaths reliable knowledge. We think differently, feel differently, and act differently after transformation. By way of consequence, religious ritual is a powerful way of acquiring sound knowledge about human existence in a sacred cosmos. It reminds us what we should never forget—that we are sacred, life is a gift, and more beauty of every sort is forever available to us.

Such knowledge cannot be proven or disproven. It can only be felt, and felt to enrich. The knowledge that ritual confers is not discursive: it cannot be conveyed by language or translated into language, because it is first and finally embodied. The reduction of this embodied knowledge to language, even when necessary, will distort and attenuate it. (I am distorting and attenuating your ritual knowledge right now, for which I apologize.)

Ritual knowledge must remain what it is—directly experienced, distinctly embodied, and resolutely unlanguaged. Participating in religious ritual may lead thought from reason to rumination, and theologians may even translate ritual experience into doctrinal concepts, but all religious ritual resists intellectual mastery, because ritual exceeds cognition, just as reality exceeds system. Life is always more than we can think. If we reduce life to understanding, then we shall have impoverished ourselves. God grants more, and some of that more God grants through ritual. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 233-234)

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For further reading, please see:

Driver, Tom F. “Transformation: The Magic of Ritual.” In Readings in Ritual Studies, edited by Ronald L. Grimes, 170–87. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Jennings, Theodore W. “On Ritual Knowledge.” In Readings in Ritual Studies, edited by Ronald L. Grimes, 324–34. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Agape is dangerous. In previous blogs, we have argued that God is vulnerable to us and that we, made in the image of God, should be vulnerable to one another. Having counseled such dangerous vulnerability, we should now consider the real possibility of trauma.

Caregivers of traumatized persons run the risk of developing vicarious or secondary traumatization. With vicarious traumatization, the caregiver internalizes the trauma of the cared for and begins to manifest symptoms of the patient’s trauma. Vicarious traumatization can produce profound psychiatric disturbances—depression, anxiety, insomnia, etc.

We find ourselves in a trying situation: Only love can heal a traumatized world, yet love risks trauma itself. Is love worth the risk?

I suffered from vicarious traumatization when I worked as a chaplain in a psychiatric hospital for a year. I counseled patients, led Bible studies and worship services, and prayed and talked with whomever needed company. To do my job and get to know them better, I read their charts and became acquainted with the horrible suffering so many of them had experienced in childhood, sometimes in utero. Since I was on a ward for patients accused of crimes but found not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI), I knew that most of them would never be released from the hospital. (On average, people found NGRI for a crime spend more time incarcerated than people found guilty of similar crimes.)

After a few months of this chaplaincy, I was watching a movie at home with my wife when I broke down weeping uncontrollably, for no apparent reason. Nell was sad, but it wasn’t that sad. In the end, my disturbance was relatively slight and my psyche normalized with time, counseling, and professional maturity. I learned to be compassionate with my patients without internalizing their experiences, present to them without absorbing them.

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Shall we break? Nevertheless, my temporary disturbance raises crucial questions: Should a clinician for the traumatized deliberately restrict their vulnerability to protect themselves from the danger of secondary traumatization? Is self-protection a necessary strategy for successful caregiving? If so, then this agenda seems at odds with the theology presented here. God is Trinity, three persons united through agapic love into one divine community. God is interpersonal vulnerability, in whose image we are made. How dangerous is it to fulfill this image in a traumatized and traumatizing world?

Expressing this vulnerability and fulfilling that image, Christ did not protect himself from incarnation but joined us in our lives, at great cost. Likewise, caregivers who enter their patients’ lives may suffer. If caregivers do not protect themselves, then the resulting psychiatric disturbance might disturb the healthy relationships they do have, as well as impede their ability to care for the traumatized. Or, they might start weeping uncontrollably during somewhat sad movies.

How far should a disciple of Christ follow Christ? We live in networks of relationships, with loyalties to family and duties at work and responsibilities to community. We must strike a balance.

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Jesus had two loyalties, to God and humankind, and those were absolute. We may live in the imitation of Christ, but we are not Christ. Even our call to love dangerously demands critical application, self-awareness, and an acceptance of ambiguity. We have different abilities and different vocations, all of which serve the Kingdom. And there are many we are called to love, including ourselves, because God loves us all. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 232-233)

People need community to heal. Jesus did not rise from the dead; Jesus was raised from the dead by the power of Trinitarian love. Christ relied on others to conquer suffering, as must we.

When Christ was raised from the dead, this raising did not erase the past: Jesus rose with his wounds, which were as real as their healing. If we trust God to heal, then we need not deny our wounds. Acceptance of their reality produces openness to their power, a power that is released in communities of wounded healers.

Wounded healers heal others’ wounds through their own. In every such act of communal healing, God intimates the new creation—God is felt in healing, which is a foretaste of the Kingdom. Those receptive to such intimations will naturally gather to express God’s grace to one another, to heal one another.

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During times of great trial, people of faith experience God, and God-centered communities, as helpful. They experience the Creator as loving, even as they experience the creation as enigmatic—beautiful yet tragic, alive yet deadly, providential yet threatening. They choose to live within this paradox because the inhabitation of paradox, the ability to sit peacefully with unanswered questions, offers the most life.

We can’t be omnipresent, but we can be reliably present. Powerful, healing community requires interpersonal loyalty, and interpersonal loyalty requires being there for each other. People derive comfort, support, and strength from church (or mosque or synagogue or temple), but these benefits depend on regular engagement. Sometimes, people just go to church as needed; hard weeks are followed by church on Sunday, drawing strength from community, and easy weeks are the weeks to take off, because ease fosters the illusion of self-sufficiency.

This irregularity may suit the individual, but it doesn’t help the community. If we are truly connected, which we truly are, then on bad weeks we should attend church because we need community, and on good weeks we should attend church because community needs us.

Paul and Kay Williams, beloved members of a church we served, were church shopping. But they weren’t looking for a church that would meet their needs. They were looking for a church that needed them, because they felt that was where they could best serve God. They had realized that, as mentioned in a previous post, every participant in church is a priest, a minister of God, to every other member in a church. The pastor alone is insufficient due to simple time limitations as well as limited life experience.

On the Sunday when someone who has lost their job goes to church, they will need other people who have lost their jobs to support them. Parents who are struggling with a child will need other parents, who have struggled with their children, to support them. Those who are grieving need to be loved through their grief, comforted in the truth that grief is a universal experience.

We bear one another’s burdens and carry one another’s crosses because community lightens misfortune. And the best way to support one another is to be there for one another, to attend regularly and live openly. Because we can get through things together that we never could alone. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 231-232)

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For further reading, please see:

Nouwen, Henri. Henri Nouwen: Writings Selected. Edited by Robert A. Jonas. Modern Spiritual Masters. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998.

Nouwen, Henri. The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society. New York: Crown, 2013.

Being prayed for is different from not being prayed for. When my father was having quintuple bypass surgery at the age of sixty-three, I told many people about it and generally got one of two responses: “I’ll be thinking about you” or “I’ll be praying for you.” One parishioner, Cay Youngdahl, who was very much a person of prayer, asked me the specific day and time of the surgery. As I told her, she wrote the details down in her calendar and reassured me, “I’ll be praying for your dad.”

I’m not sure what those prayers did, if they steadied the surgeon’s scalpel or strengthened my father’s spirits, but they calmed my soul. Through prayers of intercession, people entered my world of concern. They did not leave me stranded or alone; instead, they provided the comfort of community and promised me that, no matter what, they would remain. Under no circumstances, no matter how trying, would I be ghosted.

God for us inspires the church in which we are for each other, and prayers of petition express this persevering loyalty. Prayer tends to people in a world that is inattentive. Prayer allows us to be intimately present to one another through God, and this presence, in an age of distraction, changes things. It deepens our awareness of one another, thereby revealing our basic unity. It momentarily allows the self to forget the self and all its preoccupations, jettisoning personal anxieties from the center of the universe to the edge, where they belong. Prayer reminds us that the self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel, shifting our disposition from self-consciousness to self-surrender. There, the quieted soul can finally hear God’s assurance, “You are my beloved.”

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Living in a universe that is prayed. Prayer expresses our gratitude toward God for the mystery within which we live, which none of us earned yet all of us received. It arises naturally from our astonishment at the inconceivable surprise of living, from our gratitude for being present within the unfolding of time. As gratitude, prayer participates in a boundaryless God who celebrates the whole and wants us to as well. In this conception, prayer is more like singing than asking, a joy we are swept into rather than a duty we practice.

Prayer comes naturally to some people but is a struggle for others. And that’s okay. An inability to sit and speak with God is not a spiritual weakness; God gives different spiritual gifts to different people so we can fulfill different roles in God’s community. Prayer is a spiritual gift, but other spiritual gifts can become prayer, and prayer alone is never a substitute for action. When Joan Cheever was fined for feeding the homeless in San Antonio, she explained, “This is how I pray. I pray when I cook. I pray when I serve.” Prayer is not a substitute for action; it is our motivation to action, and all action toward the kingdom is prayer. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 230-231)

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For further reading, please see:

Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Moral grandeur and spiritual audacity: essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996.

Stillspeaking Writers’ Group. God Is Still Speaking. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2024.

Jesus models embrace, not purity. Purity culture creates insiders and outsiders, manufactures shame and self-righteousness, and separates us from one another. Purity culture is not of God. We know this, because Jesus didn’t practice it. Jesus practiced embrace of all those whom purity despised—lepers, tax collectors, the disabled, endangered women, remarried women, Samaritans, Canaanites, et al. In so doing, Jesus reveals the nature of God.

God holds the world in being by holding the world to God. God is embrace, and Jesus is God’s embrace of the world, an embrace that the church should continue today. The church does not preach to the world from afar, in a state of pristine purity. The church practices embrace. Embrace is intimacy without absorption, nearness that preserves relatedness. Embrace is love.

Practicing embrace in a divided world renders the church countercultural. When humanity has accustomed itself to inhumanity and deemed its inhumanity normal, then the church must behave in an abnormal way. Due to the difficulty of this mission, the temptation to mainstream accommodation will always be there.

Love necessitates resistance. Jesus warns that the mainstream leads to a desert. Our call is to preach agape. Preaching the universal, unconditional love of God is a pastoral response to ungodly cultural forces. These powers and principalities tell us we are not good enough, not pretty enough, not muscular enough, not smart enough, not anything enough, but that we can become enough if we buy this product or go to this restaurant or drive this car or live in this house. These forces have a hierarchical, comparative, personality-destabilizing metaphysic that they want to inscribe on our psyches.

The church must actively contest this inscription with an agapic metaphysic, revealing the cosmos to be grounded in love. In so doing, the church will practice the “subversive repetition” described by Judith Butler, which undercuts the repetitions of power, those ceaselessly repeated claims that disfigure our consciousness for the benefit of others.

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What identity do we want our children to have? Within what culture will we raise our children? What repetitions will they hear? They should be told—persistently, repeatedly, ceaselessly—that they are the children of God, basking in the universal, unconditional love of God for all, a love from which they cannot separate themselves. All of us, including our children, need this assurance, which consumer culture denies us.

Wisdom loves. If the church fails to prophesy, then it fails to love: “Do not be afraid, but speak and do not be silent, for I am with you” (Acts 18:9–10a). The church is gifted with Sophia, the Holy Spirit, who serves as our interlocutor with history and culture. She is the trusted counsel guiding us from personal misery to collective flourishing. The church’s call is to attend to her counsel, thereby materializing her wisdom in word and deed, until “wisdom is vindicated by her children” (Luke 7:35).

Wisdom is consciousness of unity, while ignorance subscribes to separation. But consciousness of unity cannot arise in isolation, and pride separates us from one another, so the Bible advises us to “be not wise in thine own eyes” (Proverbs 3:7 KJV). This admonition applies to both individuals and the church itself. God has made foolish the wisdom of the world, cynicism that masquerades as worldliness. This wisdom cannot know God, because to know God is to know our need for each other. Vanity is proud of its knowledge, but wisdom recognizes what it does not know. Therefore, the church must seek truth in others, with others, and for others, including other religions, in an attempt to develop a common wisdom that will be validated by the flourishing it creates. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 228-230)

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For further reading, please see:

Butler, Judith. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge, 1990.

Welcher, Rachel Joy. Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality. Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2020.

Any church that follows Jesus must work with the poor to liberate the poor. The church is as committed to Christ as it is to the poor. Jesus’s identification with the poor is absolute: “The truth is, every time you aided the least of my siblings, you aided me” (Matthew 25:40). Despite this statement, the church has more often tried to convert the poor than convert itself to the poor. It has preferred allying with the powerful who are rich in resources, to the neglect of the powerless who are poor in resources.

Jesus was powerless and poor in resources. This status enables him to see society the way God sees it, as basic equality distorted by an illusion of rank. We separate ourselves from one another so that we can exploit with indifference. This separation creates injustice: social stratifications that do not cohere with our universal status as children of God. Some social stratification is inevitable, but for certain persons to starve while others waste, for some to live in palaces while others are homeless, for some to consume needless “medical” care while others die from lack of basic medical care, is unholy.

Psychologists and sociologists have accumulated evidence that the rich practice emotional distancing techniques in their relation to the poor. This distancing plays out at crosswalks, for example, where expensive cars are less likely to yield to pedestrians than inexpensive cars. By blaming the poor for their situation (“poor people are poor because they’re lazy”), the rich justify their lack of compassion.

The Christian tradition calls this practice sin. Sin justifies its refusal to love by cultivating separation, then justifies separation by disparaging the objects of its indifference. Sin scorns for the sake of convenience, refusing to see itself in others or others in itself. Sin dehumanizes itself by dehumanizing others, forgetting that others are the sacred mirror in which we see ourselves.

Distorting our perception for self-advantage distorts our self-perception, turning ourselves into idols. Either everyone is cherished, or no one is. Recognizing this truth, the church sees Christ where society sees no one, loving those who have lost the game of success or can’t even play it. Through this love we free ourselves from the harsh gaze of judgment, so we can see and be seen with the merciful eyes of God. For this reason Jesus teaches, “Blessed are those who show mercy, for they will be shown mercy” (Matthew 5:7).

While we work for justice, we must practice charity. The practice of charity is a legitimate response to social suffering, but it can also deceive. Being charitable feels good. Some people profit from social suffering by exploiting labor, underpaying workers, denying benefits, and demanding unethical behavior of their employees. Then, these same people get to help the poor, whose situation they created, by practicing charity. They get to be bad but feel good, ensconcing themselves in pretentious self-satisfaction.

Because we cannot create a utopia, charity will always be necessary, but it must be practiced alongside social criticism. Charity must ask, “Why is this charity needed? Instead of feeding the hungry, could we eliminate hunger?” Charity must actively seek to be replaced by justice, the very same justice that Jesus envisioned in the kingdom of God.

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In their liberating, healing ministry, churches co-create the kingdom of God with God. Each local church is an incubator of the kingdom of God, where we gather to imagine and enact what the world should be like. We do so freely, in the confidence that God lets us be us and lets the world be the world, so that both can offer surprise to divinity. Without freedom there is no community, only coercion and control. Hence, coercive power is expelled from the triune Godhead, and all church doctrines that thirst for power over are lies.

God is love, which acts upon us in the same way that the beauty of a painting or the magnificence of a symphony acts upon us; that is, by acting with us, not against us; by fulfilling us, not restricting us.

By co-creating the future with God, we feel the truth of Jesus’s assurance that “the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21), a latent presence among the powers and principalities of the world. The kingdom of God is ahead of us as the goal of human progress and among us as we work toward that goal, dealing fairly with one another and working for the universal well-being that God intends.

The Christian tradition teaches that God is unifying love, and the Christian church strives to express the unifying power of God as Abba imagines it, Jesus defines it, and Sophia inspires it. Therefore, to paraphrase Paul, if the church speaks in the tongues of humans and of angels but does not have love, it is a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if the church has prophetic powers and understands all mysteries and all knowledge and if the church has all faith so as to move mountains but does not have love, it is nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1–2).

God loves people, not the church. And God has a special preference for the powerless: the widow, orphan, immigrant, and indigent (Psalm 68:5, Deuteronomy 10:18, etc.) . Having confused themselves with the kingdom, and the kingdom with themselves, too many churches become committed to self-preservation even when they are no longer involved in kingdom creation. But a church committed to itself can no longer be committed to God, as we have seen: sexual abuse cases are kept quiet and the abuser is sent elsewhere to abuse again, while the abused are shamed and silenced.

The manufacture, concealment, and perpetuation of suffering by an institution created to disseminate the love of God constitutes apostasy. The Church of the Healer must commit itself to healing, in every way, but most importantly, in humility. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 226-228)

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For further reading, please see:

Felten, David, Jeff Procter-Murphy. Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2012.

Epperly, Bruce. A New Pentecost for Progressive Christians. Florida: Energion, 2025.

Let all gender debates be ruled by kindness. Gender identity is an aspect of human sexuality as inflammatory as it is misunderstood. Transgender and nonbinary persons tell stories of suffering; people comfortable with their assigned gender are confused as to why anyone would be uncomfortable with it. For people of faith, scripture offers little direct guidance; tradition offers almost none. In the meantime, lives are being lost. Here, I will argue for the full celebration of transgender and nonbinary persons in the church—for their ordination as ministers, for celebrating their love through marriage, and for accompanying them as they transition to their most authentic gender identity.

Genitalia don’t determine someone’s “God-given sexuality”. Science says that people are born with an array of neurological genders and genitalia, sometimes congruent, sometimes not. Current research suggests that humans are born hard-wired for an array of gender identities. “Male” brains and “female” brains and “transgender” brains and “nonbinary” brains are not standard issue. They are words that we apply to a field of neurological structures that generate a host of gender experiences. Their place in that field is already influenced in utero, partly through exposure to the hormones testosterone and estradiol. Most of the time, those hormones produce a brain that corresponds to the body’s genitalia, but sometimes it doesn’t. What should we do when someone is born with male genitalia but a female-ish brain? Or female genitalia but a male-ish brain? How should we then determine their gender identity?

Currently, there are two practices in this situation. One group demands that gender identity conform to genital identity, no matter what the person says. Even if the boy says he feels like a girl, their family tells them no—they have a penis, they must be a boy, because that’s their “God-given sexual identity”. Here, “God-given sexual identity” is shorthand for “what we can most easily see” and “what we can easily understand” and “what is familiar to us” and “what we have always thought” and “what doesn’t confuse us”. The other group waits for the child to grow up and tell them what the child’s gender identity is. This group feels that the best person to know someone’s gender identity is the person themself because, well, they’re that person.

A forced gender binary makes a complicated issue simple, which always causes suffering. At this point, anyone limiting gender identity to genital identity, and forcing that into a binary, is ignoring a vast amount of medical literature. Gender is probably best understood as a complex consisting of at least eight different aspects: 1. Societally designated sex (what sex the individual is told they are). 2. Sexual genetic karyotype (female: XX or male: XY). 3. Gonadal sex. 4. Hormonal sex. 5. Sex of internal sexual organs. 6. Sex of external genitalia. 7. Neurological gender. 8. Subjective gender (inner experience of one’s gender). Although these gender differentiations are usually congruent, any combination of these sexual differentiations may occur. Currently, science cannot determine which of these aspects are “God-given” and which aren’t. Nor can theology, I would argue.

Approximately 1.7% of persons are born intersexed, with a mixture of male and female characteristics. Medical science has a long list of intersex conditions, such as Klinefelter Syndrome or Adrenal Hyperplasia. Such intersexed conditions complicate any simplistic binary. Disregarded by this simplification are the subject’s chromosomal sex, hormonal sex, sex of internal organs, neurophysiology, and subjective gender identity (internal experience of themselves), none of which will necessarily cohere with the sex of the genitals, none of which will necessarily fall into a neat binary.

Some people refuse to recognize the internal truth of transgender and nonbinary persons. When religiously motivated, these people sometimes insist that the binaries they impose are biblical: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27 NRSV). This passage accurately describes perhaps the majority of the human population. But what about that minority who do not fit into the categories, who lie on the continuum rather than at either end, or who unite both ends? Did God also create them?

God is invisible, but Christians acknowledge God. In many quarters, the invisibility of transgender and nonbinary persons’ neurophysiology, and personal gender experience, is grounds for its denial. We can see genitals, but we can’t see brains, so we prioritize genitals over brains, even though it’s the person’s brain (mostly) that determines their own experience of their own gender. What this says to transgender and nonbinary persons, essentially, is that they should not have been born into a gender minority. Leslie Feinberg describes her experience of such rejection: “We wish you were invisible; we don’t accept you. We wish you would simply go away, and we will pretend that you don’t exist. We will ostracize and marginalize you. We will deny you any rights because you are different and we hate you” (Feinberg, Transliberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, 52). Attitudes like this, often articulated by Christians, caused one transgendered person to wear a T-shirt saying: “Jesus hates me, this I know, for the Christians tell me so.”

Christians follow Christ, who included the excluded precisely because he celebrated all. Therefore, Christians should include the excluded and celebrate all. As followers of Jesus the Healer (who is also Jesus the Christ) this essay will abide by the principle that Christians are called to ameliorate human suffering rather than exacerbate it. As Christ healed, so Christians are called to heal (Luke 9:11). And in our interpretation of the Bible, Christians are called to carry the cross, not erect it (Luke 14.27).

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Gender identity is not produced by environment or upbringing. Here’s the proof. The argument that socialization (behavior and hormonal therapy) could determine or alter gender identity is subverted by the story of Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer. Bruce Reimer, as an infant, lost the totality of his penis to a botched electric circumcision. Phalloplasty (the construction of a new penis) was more experimental then than it is now, and was not even attempted. Instead, on the advice of Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University, Bruce’s parents, Ron and Janet, agreed to have Bruce undergo a sex change operation and hormone therapy, converting their little boy into a little girl. Throughout her childhood, with the most loving of intentions, Ron and Janet gave Brenda shots, dressed her in girls’ clothes, encouraged her to play as a girl, and totally – socially, surgically, and chemically, encouraged Brenda to identify with the female gender. In the meantime, John Money produced paper after paper commenting on the wonderful success of his experiment.

The problem was that Brenda Reimer felt like a boy, acted like a boy, and wanted to be a boy. She played with boys’ toys, built forts, had snowball fights, liked dumptrucks, wanted to be a Boy Scout instead of a Girl Scout, and played army. She avoided dolls, sewing machines, and the kitchen. She tried to urinate standing up. She was a tomboy, but unlike most of the tomboys, would never outgrow it. She wanted to shave like her father. The prospect of growing breasts terrified her. She was derided by her schoolmates as “butch” and “Cavewoman,” an insult to which she replied with punches. She was attracted to girls. As the girl grew older, and increasing hormones were needed to fully feminize her, she resisted more and more. When asked by her physician, “Don’t you want to be a woman?” Brenda just screamed, “No!”

At the age of fifteen, her father told her the truth: that she had been born a boy, that her penis had been burned off, that they had tried to raise her as a girl instead. She felt anger, disbelief, amazement – but primarily relief. Now she knew why she felt the way she did. Now she understood why she behaved the way she did. Now she knew why she wanted to be a boy, and that she should be a boy. She immediately demanded to be switched back, and was (Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl).

The above summary is offered only to establish that socialization and hormone therapy cannot change brain structure. Although one story is not scientifically conclusive, many scientific studies imply that the brain’s sexual differentiation is inelastic; we are born with a gender, not as a blank slate. Thus the theory that behavior changes neurophysiology falls flat. More importantly, this theory ignores the life stories of transsexuals. No one has ever claimed: “I was born with a boy’s genitalia and I really enjoyed being a boy and really identified with my boyishness, but when I got to be an adult I decided to spend $100,000 for gender-affirming surgery so that I could be rejected by my society, my family, and my church.” Instead, in every story, transgender identity simply arises, just like cis-gendered identity. Transgender and nonbinary persons tell stories much like Leslie Feinberg’s:

I didn’t want to be different. I longed to be everything grownups wanted, so they would love me. I followed their rules, tried my best to please. But there was something about me that made them knit their eyebrows and frown. No one ever offered me a name for what was wrong with me. That’s what made me afraid it was really bad. I only came to recognize its melody through its constant refrain: “Is it a boy or girl?” “I’m sick of people asking me if she’s a boy or a girl,” I overheard my mother complain to my father. “Everywhere I take her, people ask me.” I was ten years old. I was no longer a little kid and I didn’t have a sliver of cuteness to hide behind. The world’s patience with me was fraying, and it panicked me. When I was really small I thought I would do anything to change whatever was wrong with me. Now I didn’t want to change. I just wanted people to stop being mad all the time.

Transgender and nonbinary persons report their experience of gender identity as something they were born with, and not as something chosen. Many try, for many years, to choose that gender identity which is congruent with their genitalia. But neurophysiology and personal authenticity prevent such a choice and force them back into their true gender identity. How should Christians address this very painful issue?

Short answer: with love and acceptance that celebrates the person as they are. As disciples of Jesus the Healer (who is also Jesus the Christ), Christians are called to the vocation and discipline of relieving suffering. We are not called to worsen suffering. Yet often, accidentally, we do. The means to alleviate the suffering of transgender and nonbinary persons is to recognize the biological reality (not psychopathology) of their condition, and to support them in the decisions they make.

We are proposing a church that manifests God’s agapic love of all humankind. Jesus is called “the express image of God’s person” (Hebrews 1:3), yet he never condemns anyone for being born a certain way. Jesus responds only to the disposition of the person’s spirit and the ethics produced by that spirit. What he condemns is the spirit of compassionless legalism; what he embraces is the spirit of fearless generosity. And when Jesus seeks examples of faith, he finds them at the margins, not centers, of society: “He never refuses to love or accept anyone who came to him with a genuine desire to experience God’s presence and truth. He never tells people to go away and not bother him until they can find some way to be more socially acceptable (e.g., the thief on the cross, Luke 23:39-43)” (Sheridan, Crossing Over: Liberating the Transgendered Christian, 57).

Transgender and nonbinary persons have suffered and will continue to suffer from a society that fears the unusual and unknown, and from demagogues who feed those fears. A church in the image of Christ will not erect walls of painful exclusion, but will instead offer celebration and embrace. That celebration will ordain, marry, and accompany transgender and nonbinary persons as they seek to manifest their God-given authenticity. In doing so, the Church will best serve as the body of Christ and as the incarnation of the teachings of Jesus, who pleads: “Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

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For more reading, please see:

Dowd, Chris and Christiana Beardsley. Trans Affirming Churches: How to Celebrate Gender-Variant People and Their Loved Ones. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2020.

Feinberg, Leslie. Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.

Sheridan, Vanessa. Crossing Over: Liberating the Transgendered Christian. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001.

(Please note: this week’s essay will argue for the ordination of women. Next week’s will argue for the ordination of nonbinary and transgender persons.)

Churches should ordain all genders to leadership positions in the church. Patriarchy wastes the God-given talents of women. All genders should flourish within whatever vocation (calling) God has given them, including the vocation to pastoral ministry.

Regarding women specifically, the celebration of women’s gifts would be in keeping with the Bible, which deems both men and women to be made in the image of God, to love and be loved and celebrate love (Genesis 1:27). Although it was written during times of horrible misogyny and violence, the Bible still repeatedly records women’s leadership. Miriam was a prophet (Exodus 15:20) who led the exodus along with Moses and Aaron (Micah 6:4). God appointed the prophet Deborah as a judge, leader of the Israelites (Judges 4). When the priests Hilkiah, Ahikam, Achbor, Shaphan, and Asaiah needed help interpreting a newly discovered religious text, they consulted the prophet Huldah, wife of Shallum (2 Kings 22:14). Isaiah’s wife was likewise a prophet (Isaiah 8:3). And the prophet Joel predicted that the Holy Spirit would animate both men and women (Joel 2:28–29).

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Recognizing the powerful women hailed by his tradition, Jesus chose to celebrate and empower women. The Gospel of Luke records that Anna the prophet praised Jesus’s arrival at the temple as a boy, making her the third person (after Mary and Simeon) to recognize him as the Messiah (Luke 2:36–38). Once Jesus began his ministry, he defied patriarchy by including women among his disciples; he included among his followers Mary Magdalene, Joanna (the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza), Susanna, and many other women who supported Jesus with their own funds (Luke 8:1–3).

In the ancient world, women were rarely considered suitable for education, but Jesus invited them to learn (Luke 10:38–42). Matthew records only female disciples being present at the crucifixion (Matthew 27:55–56). Luke recounts that women were the first to discover Jesus’s resurrection, but when they told the male disciples, none but Peter believed (Luke 24:9–11). Women were Jesus’s most faithful disciples, perhaps because Jesus has no fragile male ego to defend.

The early church continued Jesus’s liberating praxis. Paul writes that, since all are one in Christ Jesus, there is no longer male and female (Galatians 3:28). He acknowledges that women can be prophets (1 Corinthians 11:5), an acknowledgement ratified in Acts, which deems Philip the evangelist to have four unmarried daughters with the gift of prophecy (Acts 21:8–9). Paul calls Phoebe a deacon of the church (Romans 16:1) and calls Junia an apostle (Romans 16:7). He refers to Euodia and Syntyche as his coworkers (Philippians 4:2–3), as well as Prisca, Mary, and Tryphosa (Romans 16:3–12).

One of the oldest Christian basilicas in Israel refers to “the Holy Mother Sophronia,” while its references to male and female deacons are almost equal in number. Scholars now call this basilica the “Church of the Deaconesses.”

Despite this evidence for the historical importance of women’s ministry, most churches do not ordain women. They give a variety of “reasons” for their refusal, but there are good reasons to ordain women, who can preach as well as men, perform sacraments as well as men, care for the sick as well as men, interpret the Bible as well as men, and lead as well as men. These “reasons” cannot justify the ongoing waste of talent and denial of call.

Tragically, people are so used to male priests and pastors that they have a hard time imagining otherwise. Given our unholy tendency to divinize the familiar and demonize the unfamiliar, the idea of women’s ordination offends many. Nevertheless, those denominations that ordain women generally attract more female than male pastors. The first church that my wife, Abby, and I pastored had a slew of female ministers before we came as co-pastors. When I gave my first sermon, a girl in the congregation exclaimed to her mother, “I didn’t know men could preach!”

That girl had never felt spiritually excluded, thank God. By ordaining women and using gender-balanced language for God, we assure girls that they, too, partake in divinity. We inform boys that girls are their spiritual equals and deserving of equally respectful treatment. We encourage women who have been marginalized by their spiritual traditions to feel centered. And we allow men, many of whom have or had emotionally distant relationships with their fathers, to have a closer relationship with their metaphorical Mother-God.

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The Reign of Love, toward which the church works, celebrates all difference as a gift from God that enriches reality. For the church, the many genders provide the many perspectives through which we see into the Holy, together. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 224-226)

For further reading, please see:

David, Ariel. “Byzantine Basilica with Graves of Female Ministers and Baffling Mass Burials Found in Israel.” Haaretz, Nov. 15, 2021. https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology.

Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. London: SCM, 1995.

Bad theology produces Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS). Alice Walker is a queer black woman who grew up in a homophobic, racist, misogynistic culture. But her faith empowered her to declare, “I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way.”

Alice Walker’s statement is an act of healing for herself and others. She was wounded by unholy forces that told her she was not enough, that she was inherently distorted because she was Black, female, and a lesbian. But she reclaimed her identity as a blessing, then shared that blessing with others, helping them to reclaim their own identities.

Tragically, many of the psychic wounds that people receive are from bad theology promulgated in churches. Bad theology threatens believers with this-worldly condemnation and next-worldly damnation, causing “religious trauma syndrome” (RTS)—fear, anxiety, hatred, and self-loathing.

This debilitating spirituality is produced by religious ideologies of control. High-control church leaders who want parishioners to be puppets teach that God is a puppeteer and that the leaders are the strings. To disobey is to malfunction. Fearful that freedom will cause people to stray from the straight and narrow path, authoritarian churches erect high walls along that path so parishioners can’t peek over the top and see other options for life.

Children should be nurtured not condemned. I had a friend in seminary who grew up in rural Texas in the 1980s. In the fifth grade he was at an all-male sleepover party with friends, and they all started looking at pictures of women in underwear in a Sears catalog. They went a few pages past the women’s section into the men’s section, which my friend was much more interested in. He noticed that no one else was interested in the pictures of men in underwear and realized that he was gay. His family went to a fundamentalist Baptist church, and the people there were (otherwise) very nice, but they taught that being gay was sick and sinful, so he thought that he was sick and sinful. He kept his orientation a secret, in shame.

I have another friend who was told as a child, by otherwise very nice people, that Jesus was coming back soon and would take all the Christians (Bible believing, born again) to heaven and send everyone else to hell. He went to bed every night in terror, praying for his non-Christian and semi-Christian friends.

And so it continues. Beautiful children are told that they are sinful in the eyes of God. Adolescents are made to feel guilty for the natural sexual drives developing within. Women are told that their gender is responsible for the fall of all “mankind,” being morally blamed even as they are linguistically excluded. Suffering church members are asked what they did to offend God to warrant this punishment. Patients on their deathbeds are questioned about their wrongdoings and offered expiation so they won’t go to hell. Bad theology obsesses over sin, guilt, purity, and damnation, turning an already difficult life into fully accomplished hell by anticipation.

Good theology produces flourishing. Faith reveals that women, men, trans, nonbinary, Black, Brown, White, Asian, able, disabled, rich, poor, middle-class persons and more are all equal. They are equally created by God, infinitely loved by God, and universally called to lives of meaning, purpose, and joy. Recognizing this truth, churches must model egalitarianism—equality in thought and practice—to the world.

Egalitarian community makes use of all members’ talents and places them in service of the common good. In contrast, patriarchal and heterosexist communities waste the talents of many members by denying them full access to leadership positions, limiting both personal and institutional flourishing.

As egalitarian, churches are also universalist—universally valuing all persons, inside and outside the church, especially those persons devalued by society. This universalism is the mission of the church. Since all are children of God and inseparable from one another, ethics becomes universalist—all are treated equally (Matthew 5:43–48). Since Abba is the divine mother who births all creation (Job 38:29; Isaiah 66:7; etc.), and no mother rejects her sinful child, salvation is universal (1 Timothy 2:3–4).

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In a lethally tribal world, universalism provides the church with a healing mission—resistance to fear, anger, and hatred through the ministry of faith, hope, and love. Assigning the church this mission, Jesus states that his followers should be kind to all, even as God makes it rain on the just and unjust (Matthew 5:45). Thus, the church does not prefer Christians to non-Christians, or men to women, or rich to poor. We are all permeated by implicit biases and tribal identities, but joining a church begins a journey of resistance to these traditional loyalties. Through this journey, we learn to value all persons, of every nationality, race, religion, class, orientation, and gender.

In allegiance to the cosmic God rather than our tribal god, the church replaces natural loyalties with a universal family. Jesus states, “Who is my mother? Who are my kin?” Then, pointing to the disciples, Jesus said, “This is my family. Whoever does the will of Abba God in heaven is my sibling and parent” (Matthew 12:48–50).

Following Jesus produces counter-cultural communities. Egalitarian, universalist churches practice social resurrection, defying accepted norms in witness to the universal God. In the late 1960s, Anne Moody and other civil rights activists tried to racially integrate southern churches. On the Sunday of one such action, White churches met the Black activists with armed policemen, paddy wagons, and dogs. A few Whites protested, saying that the Blacks should be let in, but they were outnumbered.

Having been rejected from several White churches, Anne and her friend went to pick up two activists who were trying to integrate an Episcopal church. When they got there, the friends were nowhere to be seen, so Anne got nervous. But after circling the church a few times, the thought occurred to her: “What if they got in?” Anne and her friend walked up the steps to the church, which were miraculously free of armed policemen and dogs. They entered the church, where worship had already started. Two ushers approached them, asking, “May we help you?” “Yes,” Anne said, “We would like to worship with you today.” “Will you sign the guest list, please, and we will show you to your seats,” said the White ushers. Anne and her friend were seated with the other two Black activists, and four Black women worshiped in an all-White church. Anne remembers, “When the services were over the minister invited us to visit again. He said it as if he meant it, and I began to have a little hope.”

That was a White church in a White supremacist culture hosting four Black women. Some churches immerse themselves in the gospel but absorb it no better than a rock absorbs water. Other churches immerse themselves in the gospel and absorb it like a sponge, recognizing that Abba loves all, that Jesus represents the agapic love of God, and that Sophia counsels love without boundaries. These churches practice the gospel to transform society, thereby revealing the universalism of God, rejecting the exclusivism of their society, and implementing Revelation’s vision of the saved community, which is a community of difference: “After that, I saw before me an immense crowd without number, from every nation, tribe, people, and language. They stood in front of the throne and the Lamb, dressed in long white robes and holding palm branches. And they cried out in a loud voice, ‘Salvation is of our God, who sits on the throne, and of the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:9).

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The Gospels relate Jesus’s radical inclusivity in his story of the prodigal son (inclusion of the sinful), his choice of a Samaritan as hero-protagonist (inclusion of the religious outsider), his decision to dine with Simon the leper (inclusion of the scripturally excluded), his decision to dine with Zacchaeus the tax collector (inclusion of the hated powerful), his decision to converse with the Canaanite woman (inclusion of the marginalized female), and his protection of the woman framed for adultery (inclusion of the socially expendable). In the imitation of Christ, inspired by the Spirit, we are given the vocation of enacting the Sustainer’s imagination. This activity is our meaning and purpose. Without it we are lost. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 221-224)

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For further reading, please see:

Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of Growing Up Poor and Black in the Rural South. New York: Random House, 2011.

Walker, Alice. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. New York: New Press, 2010.

Bad churches are inauthentic; good churches are authentic. The persons of the Trinity live in interpersonal freedom, never hiding any part of themselves. We are made in the image of the Trinity, for such honesty. Therefore, in faithful community we can express our deepest self authentically. If a church demands that we hide our self to be accepted, if a church creates an artificial standard and demands that we conform to it, then that church has stifled the image of God within us.

Because God is authentic community, and authenticity demands freedom, authentic churches are low social control groups. They don’t demand that you subordinate your self to an ideal. Instead, they nurture your ideal self, helping you bring it to full expression.

A low social control church respects members’ uniqueness, trusting that cohesion will emerge from diversity, as it does within God. Some churches deny the possibility of unity-in-diversity and become high social control groups, subjecting members to shame, shunning, denial of sacraments, and threats of damnation if they fail to be who the church wants them to be.

These churches demand that members subordinate their God-given uniqueness to a church-generated stereotype, hiding their authentic self within a conformist shell.

In high control churches, where members are opaque to one another, secrets are kept. But, as it is said, where there are secrets, there is shame.

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Authentic churches celebrate their LGBTQ+ members. In God-centered community, we must trust one another’s self-revelation. We must practice interpersonal honesty or, in philosophical language, intersubjectivity. For decades, most churches have denied the self-revelation of their gay and lesbian members. These members are telling their churches that they can find emotional intimacy only with members of the same sex, they are telling their churches that this disposition cannot be changed, and they are telling their churches that this disposition does not need to be changed, that they feel blessed in the loving relationships they are in.

At the same time, most churches are denying the self-revelation of their trans and nonbinary members, who are telling them that they do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth, that their interior experience is of the opposite gender, or both genders, or no gender, and that they need to live out that identity to live fully.

For decades, most churches have told these parishioners that their inner life is unnatural, or unbiblical, or diseased, or in need of repair. Most churches have told these members to conform their inner self to their outer appearance. In so doing, these churches refuse to see transgendered and nonbinary persons as God sees them: “God does not see as mortals see; mortals see outward appearances but God sees into the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7b).

The church’s rejection of their authentic selves causes horrific harm to trans and nonbinary persons. Nevertheless, they persist. They are risking themselves in repeated acts of vulnerability and self-disclosure, like unto God. They are coming out and suffering rejection, yet they continue to reveal themselves until the world sees them the way God sees them. The perseverance of these saints is changing minds, which is changing souls, creating a more grace-filled world.

Just as the disciples were allowed to see Jesus transfigured (Mark 9:2–8), LGBTQ+ self-revelation allows the world to see itself transfigured, liberated from fear and invited into celebration. This transfiguration is not an act of inclusion on the part of the excluders, with the excluded passively waiting at the gate. No, it is an ongoing act of conversion by the excluded, of the excluders, for the excluders, who continue to suffer behind walls of ignorance. This conversion is for all. Like God, it is for us; hence, for all of us.

For the trans community, external transition to their neurological birth gender is often accompanied by persecution—expulsion from home, loss of job, physical attacks, and worse. Despite this persecution, most record greater life satisfaction after choosing to express their internal gender identity.

To mark their transition, most trans persons change their name. Likewise, the Bible frequently renames persons when they undergo a profound change: Abram became Abraham, Sarai became Sarah (Genesis 17), Jacob becomes Israel (Genesis 32), Simon becomes Peter (Matthew 16), and Saul becomes Paul (Acts 13). Associates who reject the transitions of transgendered persons will sometimes express this rejection by “deadnaming” them—calling them by the name given at birth rather than their chosen name. Would these rejectionists also deadname Paul as Saul? Sarah as Sarai?

The Bible is about transformation: our potential for it, our call to it, and our invitation to celebrate it. Today we can fulfill that call by supporting LGBTQ+ rights and LGBTQ+ identity, until everyone can say, with Alice Walker, “I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way.” (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, page 219-221)

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For further reading, please see:

Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015.

Walker, Alice. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. New York: New Press, 2010.

We are made in the image of God, for authentic community. In previous essays, I have argued that the Trinity is three unique persons united through love into one divine community. Abba, Jesus, and Sophia are specific centers of consciousness, thought, and feeling; hence, each one is a subject— a self with a specific identity. An object is a thing without consciousness, thought, or feeling, while a subject is a person with consciousness, thought, and feeling.

The divine subjects differ from human subjects in their perfect love for, and openness to, one another. What they could hide, they always choose to share. Their subjectivity is transparent. Hence, they are not only subjective, they are intersubjective—perfectly open and lovingly transparent to one another. God is intersubjectivity itself. By way of consequence, individual uniqueness, and its contribution to the kaleidoscope of difference, is holy.

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To be known, we must know one another. Recognizing our own uniqueness, and our unique value, we desire to be seen. We want the depth of our subjectivity to be known, even if we don’t know it ourselves. We want to be acknowledged as a self who possesses a soul. We want to be perceived as consequential, not because we’re rich or famous, but because we are of inherent worth. Such co-celebration is what should happen in religious communities. The endeavor is sacred, and even partial achievement grants us a foretaste of the kingdom.

As gathering places for the people of God, churches should be places of transparency and intersubjectivity. Such openness, in a culture of acceptance, is healing in itself. We can think of participants in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting who begin by stating their name and their addiction to alcohol, always in full confidence of welcome.

Many churches claim to be so welcoming, yet they subtly coerce members into that church’s image of what a Christian looks like, encircling them in candy-coated barbed wire. Other churches are truly welcoming, encouraging participants to fully embody the unique image that God created them to be. These churches encourage authenticity, which is confident self-revelation, an external life lived in accord with one’s internal self. Such churches truly practice Paul’s instruction, “Accept one another as Christ accepted us, for the glory of God” (Romans 15:7). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, page 218)

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Radical honesty creates authentic community. Jesus is the great Amen of God, the Yes to life in all its agony and ecstasy. Following his example and empowered by the Spirit, the church also says yes to life, to both its joy and its suffering.

Suffering wants us to believe that we are alone, but love knows differently. For this reason, the church provides consolation. The word consolation derives from the Latin con or with, and solus or lonely. It means “to be with the lonely.” Consolation does not take away the pain, but it does lighten it, because pain coupled with loneliness is excruciating.

We suffer less when we suffer with others, and we suffer less when we suffer wisely, so we suffer best when we suffer in a wise community. A thirteen-year-old youth in our church lost a friend who was hit by a truck while riding her bicycle. The Sunday after the accident, the youth came to church and, as her fellow parishioners offered condolences, eventually began weeping.

Three matrons of the church, who had known her since she was born, stood up, surrounded her, and just comforted her—undistracted, undisturbed, and undismayed—until she was finished. Did they make her sadness go away? No. Did they explain why this tragedy happened? No. Did they let her know, without words, that life would continue, and become good again? Yes, because they believed in the power of community: “Bear one another’s burdens,” writes Paul, “and thus fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2).

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Backstage churches are authentic; frontstage churches are inauthentic. Our sharing of sorrows helps us to get real and live authentically, but such sharing occurs only in backstage churches. Backstage churches are different from frontstage churches. In frontstage churches, everyone puts their best foot forward, showing up well-dressed and clean and all put together. Many frontstage churches believe that God rewards religious virtue with health and wealth. God may test us, on occasion, but if we respond faithfully to the test, then God will reward us with even greater prosperity, as in the utterly shallow, prosaic conclusion to Job. These churches inevitably devolve into the hellhole of competitive virtue signaling, in which parishioners compete to see who can appear the most virtuous, hence the most blessed by God.

Worse, if a church believes that God sends suffering as a punishment for vice, then parishioners will have to hide their suffering from each other. We know a woman in a fundamentalist area of the country whose young daughter got cancer. She set up a website to raise money for medical bills and, being a person of faith, she asked for prayers on the website as well. Most comments were kind and supportive, but a large number speculated about how her family had sinned, causing God to punish them. Others suggested ways that they could get right with God so the cancer would go away, or even claimed that their use of modern medicine revealed a lack of faith. The mother had to edit her request for prayer, insisting that the cause of her daughter’s cancer was purely medical, and she informed visitors that any comments suggesting otherwise would be deleted.

The belief that human suffering is divine punishment for hidden sin produces frontstage churches and lonely churchgoers, a combination of words that should be oxymoronic. Likewise, the belief that prosperity is a reward for virtue produces pride: “My life is perfect, see how God has blessed me!” This boast is a misery-inducing lie, to oneself and everyone else. It arises from envious insecurity and sinks us deeper within it. It misrepresents God’s love as conditional and separates parishioners from one another.

Frontstage churches foster rivalry rather than grace and contest rather than community. “Therefore, let’s have no more lies. Speak truthfully to each other, for we are all members of one body,” admonishes Paul (Ephesians 4:25). Because we need to be known, because we need to be seen, we need to share ourselves with one another. In backstage churches, we allow each other to see the inevitable messiness of our lives. Acknowledging the universality of our struggles frees us from envy and recenters us in one another. Sharing life’s joys and worries allows us to be loved through both and to love others through both. This love is oxygen for the soul. Acceptance after self-revelation heals, while secrets eat at us like tapeworms. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 216-217)

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For further reading, please see:

Jurgen Moltmann. The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology. London: SCM Press, 1993.

Danielle Shroyer. Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.

In community, we fulfill the image of God within us. Writing about the social Trinity, Miroslav Volf argues: “Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion.” Such communion cannot express itself in solitary life, a private person worshiping a private deity alone. Instead, the divine communion draws us into human communion, into togetherness, into a community that practices love of God and love of neighbor.

To enter this type of community, a community modeled on the triune God, is an act of faith. Faith is not a moral accomplishment, or rigorous obedience to rigid rules, or stubborn adherence to propositions for which there is no evidence. Faith is openness to the most basic experiential truth of the universe, a way of being that is plumb with reality, the practice of which entails risk.

Jesus ascended to Abba so that the Holy Spirit Sophia, who had animated Jesus, could now animate his followers. Together, they would continue his ministry as the church. In church God is known not just in community, but as community, in the freedom of self-gift.

This concept of freedom as self-gift, self-revelation, and self-communication resists contemporary culture, in which people increasingly delay commitment to preserve what they deem to be freedom: the spontaneity of a life unencumbered by responsibility for others. Such delayed commitment can lessen the self that it seeks to indulge. Self-donation in relationships of mutuality and equality, and in communities of mutuality and equality, is self-fulfillment, not self-renunciation.

Good churches manifest agape—the universal, unconditional, egalitarian love of God. The function of church is to provide communities in which love can be equitably given, received, and shared with the world. (That is what good churches do. They don’t cause religious trauma by controlling their parishioners through fear.) This sacred exchange accesses a new realm of belonging—the domain of Sophia. Her Holy Spirit is a gratuitous energy that perpetually renews and transforms the community. Thus, the church experiences Sophia as ever heightening our quality of shared life.

The self finds itself only in community. Hence, to limit self-donation is to limit the self. This statement is not dogmatic; it is empirical and will be ratified by those willing to risk it. Paul writes, “If one member suffers, all the members suffer together with them; if one member is honored, all the members share their joy” (1 Corinthians 12:26). He believes this because “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another” (Romans 12:5 WEB).

The phrase “of one another” is one word in Greek, allēlōn (ah-LAY-loan). Allēlōn and its variations are used one hundred times in the Newer Testament, which repeatedly insists on our inseparability from one another. The church’s conviction that we are members of one another expresses itself in the doctrine of universal priesthood. Instead of a class of priests who mediate God to the laity, the church believes that there is only one High Priest, Jesus (Hebrews 4:14–16; 1 Timothy 2:5). The sole mediation of Jesus places all followers on the same spiritual plane. But it does not lower their status; it universally elevates their status to that of priest. For this reason, Bible passages refer to the fledgling church as a “holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5), “royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9), and “priests to God” (Revelation 1:6; Revelation 5:10).

In Trinitarian community, our neighbors are portals of God. In older religions, priests offered burnt sacrifices to God to garner goodwill for the people. In contrast, the followers of Jesus are universally empowered to offer sacrifices, but of a different sort: “Keep doing good works and sharing resources. These are the sacrifices that please God” (Hebrews 13:16).

During the Protestant Reformation, leaders such as Martin Luther and John Calvin institutionalized this priestly status by teaching and establishing the priesthood of all believers. While certain members of the faith may be educated for and ordained to professional ministry, this status does not elevate them over other believers; it only assigns them a specific role within the universal priesthood. Pastors minister through sermons and sacraments, while doctors have a ministry of healing, laborers have a ministry of building, educators have a ministry of teaching, carpenters have a ministry of making, etc. All ministries are equally legitimate, so their (only male, alas, in the time of the Reformation) practitioners had equal standing within the democratically governed church.

The priesthood of all believers does not mean that each believer is a priest unto themselves alone, with a direct, solo line to God. Unfortunately, this misinterpretation has achieved dominance in some denominations. Prayer and Bible study in isolation, unchecked by any Christian community, is a dangerous practice, encouraging individuals to confuse their personal spirituality with divine truth. All too often, this practice produces very harmful theology that overconfident enthusiasts propagate with prophetic zeal.

Instead, the priesthood of all believers implies that we are all mediators of God to one another. God is always fully present, absolutely attentive, and perfectly solicitous. This presence is what we finite beings receive from the infinite God and what we need most. We may not be present to each other—we may be distracted or disengaged—but God is always fully present to us.

In church, we try to make the divine presence real by being fully present to one another. Such presence poses a challenge in this era of technology, when every conversation can be interrupted and the screen always beckons, offering its anaesthesia. We are plagued by the absence of presence. We need to be tended to, and we need to tend, because tending manifests grace.

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Divine community is for the sacred now. This life-giving conception of the church denies that it is a waiting room for heaven. The function of the church is this-worldly, not next-worldly. God loves us here and now and wants us to thrive here and now, not delay our thriving into some distant future. Certainly, the afterlife is a true consolation for the bereaved, but not at the cost of this life. Because Abba loves us in this moment, Jesus’s message and Sophia’s counsel are both urgent: “After John’s arrest, Jesus appeared in Galilee proclaiming the Good News of God: ‘This is the time of fulfillment. The reign of God is at hand. Change your hearts and minds, and believe this Good News!’” (Mark 1:14–15).

To take on God’s way of being is not possible in isolation. We are spiritually interdependent. Recognizing this truth, Buddhism commends the sangha, Hinduism commends the ashram, Islam commends the ummah, Judaism commends the minyan, and Christianity commends the church. The religions recognize that inertia dooms privatistic faith. Individualist salvation, consumerist spirituality, and personalized piety are all deficient because we cannot realize divinized life in isolation. In response, religions create spiritual communities within which lamas, sadhus, imams, prophets, and rabbis—and fellow congregants—jar us out of complacency, from separation to union, through love. In all these institutions, we manifest God’s mode of existence by forming a spiritual family (Romans 8:29). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 213-216)

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For further reading, please see:

Boff, Leonardo. Trinity and Society. Translated by Paul Burns. 1988. Reprint. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005.

LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.

Volf, Miroslav. After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity. Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age (SACRA). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.

Small miracles happen here. When I was in seminary and needed to earn some extra money, I preached regularly at a small Presbyterian church in north Philadelphia. It was a dying White church in a largely Black neighborhood with at most twenty attendees on any given Sunday, mainly elderly. Still, they conjured religious beauty.

George (name changed for privacy) sang in the church’s small choir and performed most solos. As a boy, George had a physically abusive father. To escape the abuse, George joined the army, which sent him into combat in Vietnam. Returning home, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and spent years on the streets of Philadelphia in alcohol addiction. Through Alcoholics Anonymous he achieved sobriety, met a woman from the church, got married, and became a regular attendee.

Together, they never missed a Sunday. Although he was the church’s main soloist, George couldn’t sing. At the risk of being disrespectful, for which I apologize: George couldn’t carry a tune, and his voice was cracked by years of drinking and smoking. But George didn’t know this himself, and he never held back, praising God with full-throated gratitude. His cracked voice reminded the congregation that, in the words of Leonard Cohen, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

No one complained about the quality of the music. The music director kept asking him to sing, and the congregation kept listening, in respectful attention, grateful that he was in recovery, grateful that he had married, grateful that he had found redemption. Their joy in George’s joy overwhelmed any discomfort with the performance.

George’s years of alcoholism caught up with him, and he was hospitalized with cirrhosis of the liver. Only 10 percent of his liver was still functioning, his body was too weak for a transplant, and the doctors gave him a few months to live. George returned home, jaundiced and out of breath. Naturally, the music director called and asked him to sing a solo for the congregation, of his own choosing.

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George chose “How Great Thou Art.” We gathered one Sunday to watch a frail man, beaten by his father, scarred by war, and poisoned by alcohol, sing from his soul to the glory of God, in joyful rapture. Grace so flooded the sanctuary that, to our ears, he sounded like an angel. George died two weeks later, in the presence of his wife and members of the community.

Imperfect love is good enough. That was a good church. It is closed now. It wouldn’t have impressed anyone with its spreadsheets, attendance, or preaching, but it loved Abba, our Parent. Sophia, the Holy Spirit, was active there, flowing through the parishioners, from one to another, inspiring them to be like Jesus and love their neighbor through thick and thin.

Some churches promise earth-shattering miracles that defy natural law, but that church kept its eyes open for small miracles, the kind that we too easily overlook. Its openness to small miracles produced them—warmed hearts, settled spirits, and courage in the face of death.

Churches are supposed to practice the universal, unconditional, celebratory agape of God— the unifying love that is our source, our sustenance, and our destiny. This belief may appear idealized, or even naive, since churches can’t actually attain these heights. Imperfect persons form imperfect institutions that express the love of God imperfectly.

Nevertheless, even in our imperfection, unreachable ideals serve a function. The ideal transforms the real because it gifts us with discontent, spurring us out of complacency and into possibility. The ideal tells us where we are and where we should go. Then, the ideal serves as the mark by which we measure our progress.

Religious Trauma Syndrom is real. I write in full recognition that many people suffer from religious trauma syndrome (RTS), and that their RTS has been caused by very bad churches. Bad churches threaten their parishioners, even their youngest, with damnation for disobedience, censure for disagreement, shunning for leaving the faith, etc. Bad churches want control, and fear is their tool.

But there are good churches, too, whose practice is love. And the existence of bad churches doesn’t condemn the existence of good churches, any more than the existence of poison condemns the existence of medicine.

The perfectly loving church does not exist in any pure form. But any honest observer will recognize that there are many good churches of many different stripes that aspire to loving unity and do much good in the world. They seek to serve rather than control, foster rather than restrict, and heal rather than harm. And sometimes they work small miracles, which come to us like manna from heaven. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 211-213)

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For further reading, please see:

Campbell, Ted A. The Sky Is Falling, the Church Is Dying, and Other False Alarms. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015.

Oord, Thomas Jay, and Fuller, Tripp. God After Deconstruction. Idaho: SacraSage Press, 2024.

God is love that experiences hatred by others but remains love. If Jesus’s story ended with the crucifixion, it would be an abject tragedy: hate would have defeated love, suffering would have defeated joy, cruelty would have defeated mercy. All the powers of darkness would reign victorious on earth. Instead, God announces the divine decision for life over death through the resurrection:

On the first day of the week, at the first sign of dawn, the women came to the tomb bringing the spices they had prepared. They found the stone rolled back from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of Jesus. While they were still at a loss over what to think, two figures in dazzling garments stood beside them. Terrified, the women bowed to the ground. The two said to them, “Why do you search for the Living One among the dead? Jesus is not here; Christ has risen!” (Luke 24:1–5a)

Existential vitality demands experiential texture, and the choice of the living God is to be absolutely alive. Made in God’s image, we are offered God’s vitality. Since God elects life over death, joy over suffering, and hope over despair, the crucifixion must yield to the resurrection.

Crucifixion alone would repudiate the divine will. Crucifixion offends God, who responds by raising us to life, just as a mother lifts her infant to the breast (Isaiah 49:15). Human suffering invokes divine healing. So, Jesus was raised from the dead by love that defeats hatred.

His resurrection was not the act of an individual; it was communion celebrating itself and declaring victory over division. The crucifixion acknowledges that suffering is; the resurrection promises that joy will be. As the soul of the universe, God feels all that the universe feels, but unclouded by fear or despair, because God has ensured that every crucifixion will be defeated by its very own resurrection.

Julian of Norwich (c. 1343–c. 1416) was an English theologian and mystic. As a female in the Middle Ages, she knew suffering, having lived through the Black Death, Peasants’ Revolt, and a life-threatening illness. During this illness she received visions of Christ. In one vision, on the brink of death, Jesus assures her, “Since I have brought good out of the worst-ever evil, I want you to know by this; that I shall bring good out of all lesser evils, too.”

In this revelation to Julian, the crucifixion and resurrection are not distant historical events; they are the deep pattern within creation, an ever present promise that illness will yield to health, woundedness to healing, and death to life.

The incarnation, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection tell a sacred story. We have the freedom to live with the grain of the universe or against it. When choosing greed, hatred, and domination instead of generosity, love, and community, we choose against God and create suffering for ourselves and others.

The crucifixion exposes the ongoing horror of our choice against God. In the crucifixion, corrupt power believed that it could defeat divine truth. But the spirit of the universe could not be defeated by the spirit against the universe. Even Roman nails cannot tear the divine fabric.

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In our narrative, Christ became human as God always intended. From the moment that the Trinity conceives creation, Christ chooses to enter creation. The Artists must celebrate their art; the Playwrights must perform their play. Yet these Creatives are not smarmy, shallow romantics. Instead, they acknowledge our exposure to the soaring and searing spectrum of experience that they sustain. They know that we are susceptible to an inexhaustible range of events and their resultant feelings, yet they affirm the varieties of embodied experience by undergoing embodied experience.

Through his love of life, Jesus exemplifies the human call to enjoy God forever, a call that opens us to the world. Since God is loving everything into being at every moment, awareness of God broadens our love to all things at all times. To see what this love looks like, we look to Jesus who is all that a human can be.

Christ’s life is communion itself, while Christ’s preaching resists those forces that impede communion. Christ heals, restoring the soul’s communion with the body. Christ loves, exemplifying interpersonal communion. Christ preaches, demanding that society become communion. Christ includes, broadening our practice of communion. Christ speaks truth, those words that invite our minds into communion. And in preaching the kingdom of God Christ offers hope, which is communion with time.

Christ reveals the fundamental harmony from which we come, within which we live, and to which we will return. For this reason, he is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last (Revelation 22:13). For this reason, Jesus is our window onto God. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 44-146)

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For further reading, please see:

Julian of Norwich. In Love Enclosed: More Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich. Edited by Robert Llewelyn. Translated by Sheila Upjohn. 3rd ed. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004.

Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Contemporary Greek Theologians vol. 4. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.