Musings

Next Steps for Progressive Christianity

Dear Friends:

In the last four years, the number of “unique hits” on the website of The Center for Progressive Christianity, www.tcpc.org, has more than tripled, up to about 38,000 per month.  Much of this growth in interest happened virtually overnight, right after the 2004 presidential election, when the country woke up to the enormous political influence of the religious right.  Millions of people have been seeking an alternative to chauvinistic, dogmatic, narrow-minded Christianity ever since.

For over six years I have served on TCPC’s national executive council, and I have witnessed the growth of progressive Christianity in spirit and in numbers.  Our organization has been the primary portal for this movement for over a decade.  Our founder, Jim Adams, retired rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, rightly can be credited with defining and popularizing “progressive Christianity” as a fresh form of the faith, through TCPC.  Operating on a financial shoestring, with a global network of volunteers, we have been remarkably effective at promoting and extending this movement.

We’re now at a turning point. Much more is being asked of us than ever before.  We need your help to respond effectively to the needs of the progressive Christian movement.

Many new groups have emerged in the movement just in the past two years, taking on challenges with gusto and creativity. CrossWalkAmerica just completed a walk across the country to promote open-minded, open-hearted faith in the “heartland”.  Living the Questions is producing high-quality adult education resources for people seeking pluralistic, inclusive expressions of the faith.  The Beatitudes Society is encouraging the next generation of socially-conscious seminarians, providing them with justice-and-peace oriented internships.  Social Redemption, Faith in Public Life, Christian Alliance for Progress, Faithful America, CrossLeft, and the Institute for Progressive Christianity have emerged to address the social and political implications of the gospel.  Authors like Diana Butler Bass, Hal Taussig, Eric Elnes, and others are rising up to take their places alongside early seminal thinkers in our movement such as Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong.  An old magazine, Zion’s Herald, has just renamed itself The Progressive Christian, and promises to be a significant source of inspiration.  Pacific School of Religion now explicitly identifies itself as a progressive Christian seminary, and just started a rich new website with theological reflections, Progressive Christian Witness.  And there are more groups emerging.

These people and organizations turn to The Center for Progressive Christianity for leadership.  TCPC’s events around the US, our international presence through closely related groups in English-speaking countries, our extensive web-based resources, publications, and links, and our nearly 300 affiliated churches and thousands of affiliated individuals make our organization the central hub of the progressive Christian movement.

A few years ago, we could respond effectively to the needs of the movement with our team of volunteers, a part-time paid “webmistress”, and annual budget of about $60,000.  But things have changed.  The greatly increased expectations that the movement makes of us are beyond our capacity to meet.

We aim to expand greatly the scope of our curricula, publications, links, and resources available on our website (which underwent a major upgrade this past year).  We aim to promote vigorously the ingenious, committed efforts of the other organizations in the movement, and help them coordinate their work.  We aim to increase the number of our affiliated churches by an order of magnitude, so that seekers of progressive Christianity can find congregations where they will be welcomed, all over America.  We aim to hold many more regional events around the country each year, where people can meet each other and discover great new ideas and practices.  We aim to create small groups and regional associations all over the US, to deepen and spread the grassroots of our movement.  We aim to widen the current opening in the culture toward pluralistic, compassionate, non-literalistic Christianity, and make our movement much more visible to the general public.  We aim to help churches grow, through local and national media campaigns that highlight their progressive identity.

It’s going to take a lot of hard work, and it’s also going to take a lot of money. 

I won’t make a habit of asking for donations in my “Musings” blog!  But right now, I don’t hesitate to ask you to make a generous financial contribution to The Center for Progressive Christianity (4916 Pt. Fosdick Dr NW #148, Gig Harbor, WA 98335, or donate online at www.tcpc.org).  We are a small, lean outfit, and that means that your gift will make a significant difference in our work.  Please contact me if you would like details about TCPC’s finances and plans.

Just as important as your money donation will be your willingness to give time and energy to TCPC.  This can take many forms; give me a call at 415-847-8997 and I can share with you some ways that you can help right now.  As the head of our TCPC fundraising committee, I am seeking people around the US who would be willing to open their homes for gatherings of potential donors, to share the story of our organization and the wider movement.  If you would be willing to help in this important way, please email or call me.  Or call our board President, Fred Plumer, at 253-303-0022.

At this time of Thanksgiving, I am brimming with gratitude that Christianity in America is turning toward compassion and inclusion, one step at a time.  You, dear readers of “Musings”, are the ones taking these positive steps in your communities and churches.  I’m thankful to walk this path with you!

Every blessing,

Jim Burklo

 

 

 

 

 

Slowing Down for the Soul

(This will appear this month in my weekly Saturday column, "Sacred Space", in the Marin Independent Journal newspaper, www.marinij.com.)

Before she administers an injection to one of her young patients, Luanne Linnard-Palmer closes her eyes, pauses, and silently prays. 

She learned a lot about prayer for and with the sick when she lived with her grandmother, a committed Christian Scientist.  “She spent much of her time offering spiritual counsel to other Christian Scientists who were ill, and prayed with them,” says Luanne.  “In her home she would not allow anything negative to be said.”  It was a prohibition she maintained even when her beloved granddaughter became a hospital nurse.  “I knew it broke her heart, but when I lived with her during my first job out of nursing school, she never criticized me.”

Her grandmother imparted a special sensitivity to Luanne.  Twelve years ago, she was treating a four-year-old child who suffered from sickle-cell anemia.  His parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Their faith prohibited them from receiving blood transfusions, which are a vital therapy for the child’s condition.  Elders from their church met with the parents, counseling them to refuse the life-saving treatment for the child.  The doctors had little respect for the parents’ religious scruples, and since they were in a hurry to do the transfusion, they got court orders for temporary guardianship so they could give the child the transfusion.  The child’s mother came up to Luanne, the attending nurse, and said “You have damned my son’s soul to hell!”

That incident so disturbed her that, on the spot, Luanne committed herself to educate medical professionals about ways to be sensitive to families who, for religious or cultural reasons, refuse vital treatments for their children who are seriously ill.   Her conviction led her to write her new book, “When Parents Say No:  Religious and Cultural Influences on Pediatric Healthcare Treatment”.

In addition to her work as a pediatric nurse at California Pacific Hospital in San Francisco, Luanne teaches nursing at Dominican University in San Rafael. “I want medical professionals to slow down, get a feel for the way patients and their families see things.  What do they need?  Prayer?  Respect for their traditions? Time to consult their clergy?  Offering these things develops trust and results in better clinical outcomes.”

In her book, she tells the heart-rending stories of children and their families who have struggled with the contradiction of treatments that could save life but violate spiritual convictions.  She writes that legal interventions are sometimes needed to ensure that life-saving treatments are carried out.  But she urges restraint and respect for the sake of the young patients, their families, and their cherished beliefs.   

Luanne is a member of the vestry of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Rafael.  She is especially grateful for the special liturgy her congregation offers for children, including her own six and nine year old kids.  Luanne is also an accomplished harpist.  It’s further evidence of her desire to bring heaven closer to earth, as she brings a bit of divine grace to the intense and fraught environment of the hospital pediatric ward.

Breaking Up the Party

"For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." (St. Paul, Ephesians 6: 12)

The Bible recognizes that there is such a thing as corporate immorality, not just the immorality of individuals.  A current example in our time is Enron, a corporation that went feral and ruined many individual lives in the process.  We have laws that apply to corporate wrongdoing, just as we have other laws that regulate the behavior of individuals.  Likewise, the criminal gang brings pressure to bear on its individual gangsters to contribute to it and do its bidding.  Federal law criminalizes participation in gangs, enabling the law to attack the structure of the mob itself.

As voters, we have the same authority.  We can break up a corrupt organization, and not just punish its corrupt individual members, through the power of the ballot.

Lots of us like to think we vote for the best man or woman for the job on election day.  Lots of us are disgusted with partisan politics, and that's understandable. We’d rather just focus on individuals instead.  More and more of us are registering as independents, avoiding party affiliation.  But almost all the politicians on the ballot are members of strongly organized political parties.  The parties extract loyalty from them and deliver rewards to them in return.

When one or another political party falls on challenging times, their politicians tend to disavow their allegiance, and claim to be independently-minded, voting only for their constituents’ interests. But it’s always a ruse.  Both parties continue to employ elaborate mechanisms of extracting money and votes from their politicians. Both parties have lives of their own which have great influence on their member politicians, binding them together in very significant ways.

Some kind of "party system" is required, I believe, in order for a democracy to function.  Otherwise, the legislative process becomes hopelessly bogged down with the conflicting interests of individual politicians. Political parties are always vulnerable to becoming deeply corrupted, so eternal vigilance is required of the voters.  It's a messy affair, but it surely beats the alternative of dictatorship!

There’s always a certain amount of corruption present in politics. But when that corruption has become rampant, when a political party has become structured in such a way as to perpetuate its malfeasance, then the voters need to act decisively to break it up.  In such a situation, voters need to consider party affiliation as a critical factor in making their choices, because the stakes go far beyond choices about individual candidates.  Voting against a deeply corrupted political party may entail the rejection of decent individual candidates within it. But the party must be shaken to the core, perhaps even to the point of collapse, in order for its corrupt structure to be eliminated.

When we vote, we aren’t just contending with flesh-and-blood politicians. We’re also contending with powers that transcend any of the individuals who are part of them, powers that often strive to remain unseen. Through informed insight, we can perceive and address these forces as we mark our ballots in November.