Peter Meets a Liberal Christian with Balls

Last updated on: July 11, 2014 at 11:21 am by Peter Bishop

Peter Meets a Liberal Christian with Balls 2014-07-11T11:21:57-04:00 Peter Bishop

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Metaphorically, at least.

Yesterday, Cat and I drove to Boston to hear the annual Weed Memorial Lecture at Beacon Hill Friends Meeting. The speaker was Peggy Senger Parsons, the pastor of Freedom Friends Church in Salem, Oregon, and for the second time this spring I’ve met someone and think, If I’d known someone like that when I was 22, It’s possible I’d still be Christian.

I picked up a copy of FFC’s Faith and Practice while I was there. (For the non-Quakers in the audience, F&P; is sort of equivalent to a catechism or a Book of Common Prayer.) There’s a passage that she read aloud in response to a question from someone in the audience. I’m just going to quote it here for now. I’ll get much more in depth about what it means to me over the course of the summer as I write my spiritual journey.

We renounce the intolerance of religious fundamentalism in all its forms. Free Christians need only to live according to Gospel Order and hold up Christ, in order to fulfill The Great Commission. We believe that God calls human souls in more ways than we can imagine, and that God abides with anyone who seeks God in spirit and in truth, regardless of how they name God. We can and will make clear the truth and power that has been given to us, our Gospel path, but in no way do we think that we possess the whole, or only, truth. We prefer to live in relationship to the Truth. We believe it to be blasphemous for a human, or human group, to claim to hold the whole truth.

In our experience, Fundamentalism, which we define as asserting the absolute truth and completeness of one’s own beliefs and practices to the deliberate exclusion of possible truth in other beliefs and practices, often leads to pride, judgmentalism, strife, rancor, and in the extreme, to hatred and violence. We believe that religious fundamentalism is incompatible with holy living and grace, and we renounce it as sin.

It comes a bit late for me. I’ve found other paths to God, first as a Wiccan and Pagan, and more recently as a liberal, non-Christian Quaker. But it’s surprising how powerful I still find that renunciation. And how angry it makes me, even today, that no one anywhere in the Christian Church had the balls to say that in 1981.

The Spiritual Journey Begins…

Prologue I: Peter In Kenya
Prologue II: A Liberal Christian With Balls
Part I: A Refugee Looks Back
Part II: Leaving Home
Part III: Who Am I?
Part IV: Learning About Race and Gender
Part V: Watching My Students Drown
Part VI: Animal Bones

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