Contemporary church

If we love to sing, discuss, celebrate, reflect, hear and act with spirit and faith and meaning, church is a good place to do it!

Would you be part of a faith community if you weren’t expected to believe the impossible or become more than fully human? Progressive,  inclusive churches can be the centre and sacred space for special events and our day-to-day lives.

Many of us still enjoy traditional forms of worship, but we want and need a human-centered, inclusive and green theology.

Progressive , reconciling/inclusive and transitional churches can retain people of faith and attract people who wish to live meaningfully but – as Bishop John Shelby ‘Jack’ Spong puts it – don’t want to check their intellect at the door.

Liturgy: “the work of the people”

To keep faith communities alive, we need new lyrics, new affirmations, and new liturgy to replace the outdated concepts in many traditional hymns, prayers and litanies.

If we love to sing, discuss, celebrate, reflect, hear and act with spirit and faith and meaning, church is a good place to do it!

The inclusive faith community or progressive church can be a place of reintegration (regaining integrity), wholeness and holiness.  It challenges and inspires, helps us ask the questions to which we may not need to find answers, sets us on a journey or is sanctuary at journey’s end.

Celebrants can facilitate our special life events – naming ceremonies, civil unions and weddings, home blessings, funerals – without a religious or theological content. Yet if we still find value in our faith traditions and wholeness in a caring but non-judgemental community, the church can, and should, still be the centre of communal and spiritual life.

The conservative opinions of fundamentalist, evangelical, literal Bible reading Christians do not represent the views of all Christians. In social justice and political debates, especially, a spectrum of voices from Christian and faith communities needs to be heard.

Don’t give up on church!

Instead, transform it from within – read, discuss, disagree, explore, value difference, encourage participation… but keep creating sacred space in traditionally sacred places.