God for us, we call you Father. God alongside us, we call you Jesus. God within us, we call you Holy Spirit. —Richard Rohr

For Richard Rohr, the Trinity provides the foundation of a benevolent universe. Here Richard reflects on the meaning of “Father” in Trinitarian theology:

God for us is my understanding of, and code word for, the Father. It tells us that reality is foundationally benevolent. Reality is on our side. It’s not a scary universe. It tells us that God, like a good father, is for us and is protective of us. You can just as easily call God Mother, or Inherent Goodness, or Primal Love. God within us is my code word for the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is that inner aliveness that heals people and awakens them from their wounds. I often call the Spirit an interior homing device. For all our stupidity and mistakes, we have a deep internal intuition that we are children of God. It’s called the divine indwelling.

I understand Jesus as God alongside us. Jesus is the accompanying God who walks with us, especially through the mystery of death and resurrection. The paschal mystery is the summary of all of Jesus’ teaching and experience. Jesus is the manifest one who comes forth from the unmanifest and reveals the divine pattern. The pattern that Jesus the manifest one reveals is that the divine pattern is loss and renewal, death and resurrection. There is no other way. We dare not try to define any universe where there is no death and where there is no loss.

Unfortunately, very few people really want to believe in the paschal mystery. By and large, what human beings want is resurrection without death, answers without doubt, the conclusion without the process. We don’t like Jesus in this sense, leading us through this mystery.

When trust in God as Father is missing, there is a foundational scariness and insecurity to our experience of reality. In that sense, we could say that we are living in a world without the Father. It’s not a safe universe. It’s not a benevolent universe. We think there is an enemy behind every rock and that we’ve got to protect our lives at all costs because no one else will. It’s all on us. It’s understandable why people get so paranoid and preoccupied with security systems of every form and shape. When we don’t know God as the One who most desires our goodness, safety, and growth, there is no underlying “okayness” to the world and to our own lives. There’s no sense that reality is on our side, so we of course try to save ourselves.

Engaging with this mystery of the Trinity leads us into a desperate and dangerous love affair with God. It’s a love affair that’s always going on inside of us, almost in spite of us, and all we can do is start saying yes and start recognizing and honoring it.

_____________________________

Sarah Young

Your longing for heaven is an extension of your longing for Me. The hope of heaven is meant to strengthen you with wonderous joy. Hope is not wishful thinking. Hope of heaven keeps you spiritual alive during dark times. This hope leads us to surrender, connection and gives us the ability to live out of that.

Romans 8:23-25 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope.

Hebrews 6:18-19 18 So God has given both his promise and his oath. These two things are unchangeable because it is impossible for God to lie. Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. 19 This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.

Romans 15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” 

Evolution: God’s Love in Action 

Franciscan sister and scientist Ilia Delio finds evidence for a benevolent universe in evolutionary change driven by love:

To say “God is love” is to say that the name God refers to the divine energy of love that is dynamic, relational, personal, and unitive. God does what God is—love. Rather than seeing God as a separate being over the world, we can say that love-energy is the stuff of existence. . . . Where there is energy of attraction, union, generativity, and life, there is God. . . .

God is the name of personal divine love emerging in evolution, as consciousness complexifies and persons unite: “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). Evolution reveals a newness to God because love is always expressing itself in new patterns of relationships. . . . The dynamic fountain fullness of divine love means forever the newness of world; God is ever newness in love, and thus the world is ever new as well. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said that “you cannot step into the same river twice,” meaning change is inherent to life; every act bears an essential newness. . . . Divine love is not a river of stagnant water but a fountain fullness of overflowing love, love that is forever awakening to new life. [1]

Delio seeks to reconcile a good and loving God with the ever-present suffering in the world: 

There is no doubt that suffering and violence abound in the crevices of life, but suffering is not a punishment of a vengeful God. God does not abandon us; we abandon God by . . . running after little gods. God lives deep within us, as the center of love, but we are often [dismissive of] this inner center and drawn by the little gods of power, success, status, and wealth, everything we create for ourselves. . . . The theodicy question is not why God allows bad things to happen to good people but why we abandon God in the face of suffering. If God is love, then our only real hope is in God, because hope is the openness of love to infinite possibilities and new life. . . . This God of love appears in Jesus of Nazareth, a God who gets radically involved in the messiness of the world to be God for us. . . .

To have faith in a God of unconditional love is to realize how intimately close God is. So close we forget God’s presence. In his own day Jesus was immersed in a violent culture, a culture of conflict and anxiety. But he also knew of the deeper truth hidden beneath the surface of human judgment, namely that this broken, anxious world is oozing with God. He asked us to have faith, to believe that the reign of God is among us and within us. [2]

Is the Universe on Our Side? 

Father Richard Rohr describes three different worldviews people adhere to:  

Underneath the religious or belief systems we hold, there are often three possible worldviews: The universe is against us, the universe is for us, or the universe is neutral. 

The latter says that reality is indifferent. There is no God against us or for us; we’re basically on our own in the universe. Many good and even religious people subscribe to this worldview. Life has sadly convinced them that there probably is a God, and God might even be just and good, but this God is not actively involved in our lives or history. We can go through all the rites and services, follow all the rules, but if the grace of God hasn’t deeply touched us—which is the full meaning of conversion—we will have no meaningful awareness of the divine.  

That’s the malaise of much of Western Christianity today. Many people keep up the external observance of reliance upon God, but underneath depend only on themselves. “Nothing’s going to happen unless I make it happen,” such people say to themselves. There is no active trust in the presence or the reality of God, or that God makes any real difference. This form of secularism is insidious because we can’t get at it. All the right words and ideas are there, but there is a foundational sense of an indifferent universe and an indifferent, distant God.  

If someone stays in an indifferent universe for long, they usually move to the second worldview where reality is perceived as hostile, destructive, or judgmental. Not only is God not involved but God has to be appeased. For such people God is somehow actively against humanity: watching us, judging us, critiquing us, and certainly not on our side. Many Christians claim they don’t believe that, but it’s clear that they do from the fearful way they live.  

The third worldview can only be given by grace, though it has a great head start with a loving and merciful family system. In this group the universe is not against us, nor is it sitting out there indifferent. Somehow, it’s on our side! Reality can be trusted. We don’t need to pull all the right strings or push all the right buttons. Grace is everywhere. It’s good to be here. Life is perhaps difficult, but it is still good and trustworthy at the core.  

Until we meet a benevolent God and a benevolent universe, until we realize that the foundation of all is love, we will not be at home in this world. That meeting of God, that understanding experience, cannot be communicated by words. It is a gift given through encounter with Spirit. Its inherent character is best described by three overlapping characteristics: faith, hope, and love. When we experience those virtues, allow them to transform us, and are able pass them on, we are participating in the very life of God.  

Foundational Trust 

Father Richard shares how faith, hope, and love allow our participation in the benevolent nature of the universe:

From the very beginning, faith, hope, and love are planted deep within our nature—indeed they are our very nature as children of God (Romans 5:1–5, 8:14–17). Yet we have to awaken, allow, and advance this core identity by saying a conscious yes to it and drawing upon it as a reliable and Absolute Source.

Our “yes” to such implanted faith, hope, and love plays a crucial role in the divine equation. Human freedom matters. We matter. We have to choose to trust reality and even our physicality, which is finally to trust ourselves. How can people who do not trust themselves know how to trust anyone or anything at all? Trust, like love, is of one piece.

In the practical order, we find our Original Goodness, the image of God that we are, when we can discover and own the faith, hope, and love deeply planted within us:

A trust in inner coherence itself. “It all means something!” (Faith)
A trust that this coherence is positive and going somewhere good. (Hope)
A trust that this coherence includes me and even defines me. (Love)

This is the soul’s foundation. That we are capable of such trust and surrender is the objective basis for human goodness and holiness. It almost needs to be chosen again day by day, lest we slide toward cynicism, victim playing and making, or self-pity. No philosophy or government, no law or reason, can fully promise or offer us this attitude, but the gospel can and does. Healthy religion shares a compelling and attractive foundation for human goodness and dignity and shows us ways to build on that benevolent foundation.

Being created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27) gives everyone an equal and inherent dignity. However, in every age and culture, we have seen regressions toward racism, sexism, homophobia, militarism, ableism, and classism. This pattern tells me that unless we see dignity as being given universally, objectively, and from the beginning by God, we humans will constantly think it is up to us to decide. But our tragic history demonstrates that one group cannot be trusted to portion out worthiness and dignity to another. Our criteria tend to be self-referential and thus highly prejudiced, and the powerless and disadvantaged always lose out.

For the planet and for all living beings to move forward, we can rely on nothing less than an inherent original goodness and a universally shared dignity. Only then can we build, because the foundation is strong, and is itself good. Surely this is what Jesus meant when he told us to “dig and dig deep, and build your house on rock” (Luke 6:48). When we start with a positive vision, a resounding yes, we are more likely to proceed with generosity and hope, and we have a much greater chance of ending with an even bigger yes, which we would call “resurrection.”

Richard reminds us that believing “in” Jesus really means participating in the faith of Jesus:

Many scholars over the years have pointed out that what is usually translated in Paul’s letters as “faith in Christ” would be more accurately translated as “the faith of Christ.” It’s more than a change of prepositions. It means we are all participating in the faith journey that Jesus has already walked. We are forever carried inside of the “Corporate Personality” that Christ always is for Paul (check out 1 Corinthians 12:12–31 for starters). That’s a very different understanding of faith than most Christians consider.

Most Christians think having faith means “to believe in Jesus.” But “to share in the faith of Jesus” is a much richer concept. It is not so much an invitation as it is a cosmic declaration about the very shape of reality. By myself, I don’t know how to have faith in God, but once we know that Jesus is the corporate stand-in for everybody, we know we have already been taken on the ride through death and back to life. All we can do now is make what is objectively true fully conscious in ourselves. We are all participating in Jesus’ faith walk with varying degrees of resistance and consent.

Father Richard reminds us that having faith is not something that we have to do on our own:

Remember, it’s God in us that loves God. We on our own don’t really know how to love God. It’s Christ in us that recognizes Christ. It’s the Holy Spirit, whose temple we are (see 1 Corinthians 3:16), that responds to the Holy Spirit. Like recognizes like. That’s why all true cognition is really recognition (“re-cognition” or knowing something again). Only insofar as we have surrendered to Christ and allowed the Christ in us to come to fullness can we love Christ.

“Faith” is not an affirmation of a creed, an intellectual acceptance of God, or believing certain doctrines to be true or orthodox (although those things might well be good). Yet many Christians have whittled faith down to that. Such faith does not usually change our heart or our lifestyle. I’m convinced that much modern atheism is a result of such a heady and ineffective definition of faith. We defined faith intellectually, so people came up with intellectual arguments against it and then said, “I don’t believe in God.”

Both Jesus’ and Paul’s notion of faith is much better translated as foundational confidence or trust that God cares about what is happening right now. This is clearly the quality that Jesus fully represents and then praises in other people.

God refuses to be known intellectually. God can only be loved and known in the act of love; God can only be experienced in communion. This is why Jesus “commands” us to move toward love and fully abide there. Love is like a living organism, an active force-field upon which we can rely, from which we can draw, and we can allow to pass through us.

_________________________________________

Sarah Young

Your needs and My riches are the perfectly fit. I carefully crafted your longings and feelings of incompleteness to point to Me.

Do not try to bury these feelings; take note and surrender, connect and live out of that. Come to Me in all your neediness and find completeness in Me.

Philippians 4:19 “But my God shall supply all your need, according to his riches in glory, by Christ Iesus.”

Colossians 2:2-3 My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ,

Psalm 84:11-12 For the Lord God is a sun and shield; he bestows favor and honor. No good thing does the Lord withhold

Holy Bewilderment

Author Debie Thomas finds a worthy model of “holy bewilderment” in the faith of Mary, revealed at the Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38):

The second line I appreciate in the Annunciation story describes Mary’s confusion: “But she was much perplexed.”. . .

It is not that the Annunciation leads her out of doubt and into faith; it is that her encounter with the angel leads her out of certainty and into holy bewilderment. Out of familiar spiritual territory and into a lifetime of pondering, wondering, questioning, and wrestling. She was much perplexed. Or, as she puts it to Gabriel: “How can this be?”

Like Mary, I was raised with a fairly precise and comprehensive picture of who God is and how God operates in the world. If anyone had asked me to describe God when I was fifteen, twenty, or thirty years old, I would have rattled off a list of divine attributes as readily as a kindergartner recites the alphabet: “God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. God is Three and God is One. God is holy, perfect, loving, righteous, merciful, just, and sovereign.”. . .

What an interesting shock reality has been. Who knew that my life with God would actually be one long goodbye? That to know God is to unknow God?  To shed my neat conceptions of the divine like so many old snakeskins and emerge into the world bare, vulnerable, and new, again and again?

This, of course, is what Mary has to do in the aftermath of Gabriel’s announcement. She has to consent to evolve. To wonder. To stretch. She has to learn that faith and doubt are not opposites—that beyond all the easy platitudes and pieties of religion, we serve a God who dwells in mystery. If we agree to embark on a journey with this God, we will face periods of bewilderment.

But this frightens us, so we compartmentalize our spiritual lives, trying to hold our relationships with God at a sanitized remove from our actual circumstances. We don’t realize that such efforts leave us with a faith that’s rigid, inflexible, and stale. In his wise and beautiful memoir, My Bright Abyss, poet Christian Wiman writes,

Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life. [1]

In other words, it’s when our inherited beliefs collide with the messy circumstances of our lives that we go from a two-dimensional faith to one that is vibrant and textured.

This Advent season, Father Richard writes of how we grow in faith by letting go of our need for certainty:

The major heresy of the Western churches is that they have largely turned the very meaning of faith into its exact opposite. True faith involves not knowing and even not needing to know, but we made faith demanding to know and insisting that we do know! The original sin, brilliantly described, warned us against this temptation at the very beginning.

We hear our story of humanity’s original sin in Genesis 2. But this sin, as we’ve called it, really doesn’t look like a sin at all. In fact, wanting knowledge feels like virtue. Haven’t you ever wondered about that? “You may indeed eat of all of the trees in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat” (Genesis 2:16–17). Why would that be a sin? It sounds like a good thing!

In seminary, we called it moral theology. We ate bushels from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, trying to decide who was good and who was bad. On other levels, our knowledge unfortunately refined and even created the very judgmental mind that Jesus strictly warned us against (see Matthew 7:1–2).

When we lead off with our judgments, love will seldom happen. Religion is almost always corrupted when the mind, which needs to make moral judgments about everything, is the master instead of the servant.

Some would think that is the whole meaning of Christianity: to be able to decide who’s going to heaven and who isn’t, who is holy and who is unholy. This is much more a search for control than it is a search for truth, love, or God. It has to do with ego, which needs to pigeonhole everything to give itself that sense of “I know” and “I am in control.”

I guess God knew that religion would take this direction. So, God said, “Don’t do it. Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” God is trying to keep us from a lust for certitude, an undue need for explanation, resolution, and answers. Frankly, these things make biblical faith impossible.

It seems that God is asking humanity to live inside of a cosmic humility. In that holding pattern, instead of insisting on dividing reality into the good and the bad, we bear the ambiguity, the inconsistencies, and the brokenness of all things. It is our ultimate act of solidarity with humanity and with the world.

When we are allowed to name certain individuals as “bad,” persecution, scapegoating, and violence almost always follow. When we too easily presume that we are one of the “good” people, we largely live in illusion and prejudice. I say this as a religious person, but religion has been the justification of much of the violence in human history. God wanted to undercut that very violence at the beginning.

An Evolving Faith

Pastor and author Molly Baskette describes how Jesus lived from a place of growth and inclusion instead of certainty and scapegoating, and calls us to do the same:

All claims to the contrary, Jesus did not preach from a place of rigid binaries and judgments but from a place of continual becoming. He befriended outcasts and lived on the margins of society while staying in relationship with wealthy and powerful people, some of whom became patrons and disciples. He lived in a patriarchal society, but let women correct him and expand his understanding of his mission. Innocent of the trumped-up charges, he allowed himself to be murdered by state violence to expose the injustice of that violence. He asked us to love our enemies, and to bless those who curse us [Luke 6:27–28]. He warned that those who lived by the sword would die by it [Matthew 26:52].

The churches I’ve served strive to follow Jesus in this “third way”: neither returning evil for evil nor caving in to it. Our God does not hate all the same people we do, nor does our God particularly want us to be rich or admired. Our faith, frail as it is sometimes, is also flexible. It is self-correcting as we have profound encounters with people who are different from us and are exposed to new experiences and ideas. If we are willing to be humble, we can continuously root out our own biases, the weeds of white supremacy that are deeply seeded into the soil of our culture, religion, and country.

Staying in the liminal place of holy uncertainty is deeply uncomfortable. But certainty in the life of faith doesn’t serve us well. At some point, the idea or theology or God-image we have adopted may become provably false. Then we’ll have to decide to double down on it or abandon it, which may feel like abandoning God or faith altogether, and leave us entirely unmoored. [1]

For Father Richard, evolutionary thinking and faith are inherently linked: 

Evolutionary thinking is, for me, the very core concept of faith, where we trust that God alone steers this mysterious universe, where there is clearly much hidden from us and much still before us—and where “eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and the human heart has not conceived, what God has prepared for those who love God” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Evolutionary thinking is contemplative thinking. It leaves the full field of the future in God’s hands and agrees to humbly hold the present with what it only tentatively knows for sure. Evolutionary thinking agrees to knowing and not knowing simultaneously. It sends us on a trajectory, where the ride is itself the destination, and the goal is never clearly in sight. To stay on the ride, to trust the trajectory, to know it is moving, and moving somewhere always better, is just another way to describe faith. We are all in evolution all the time, it seems to me. [2]

During The Future of Christianity online summit, Father Richard spoke about discovering wisdom for Christianity’s future through the inspiration of those who led courageous lives in Christianity’s past:

One of the things that the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) taught us in the religious orders, and this was certainly from the Holy Spirit, is that we were each to go back to our founders and say, “What did Catherine McAuley found the Sisters of Mercy for? What did Francis form the Franciscans for? What did Ignatius do with the Jesuits?”. . . 

So as much as we experienced a renewal in scripture [in Vatican II, asking] “What did Jesus really teach?,” we were simultaneously doing the same thing—in our case with Francis of Assisi. We’re an alternative orthodoxy. We’re quite eager to remain in the Catholic or universal church, but some of the things it does are not very universal, not very Catholic at all! And that has shaken us to our foundations. So it did for me, too. We were founded by a prophet, Francis, who wasn’t the usual pious saint, but he didn’t accuse the system of being inferior. He just went out and did it better. That’s still one of our CAC principles: “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.”

I was in Rome a couple of months ago, as some of you know, to visit the Holy Father [Pope Francis]. We took a little side trip to the church of Saint John Lateran; that’s where the pope lived in the thirteenth century. St. Peter’s wasn’t built yet. Out in the courtyard, there’s this marvelous, rather large set of statues, and it’s Francis in the thirteenth century approaching this top-heavy Roman church. He’s smiling, and his hand is raised in blessing, but it’s also raised in confrontation. That’s the history we’ve all been dealing with. How do we return to our sources, and discover that almost all our sources were critical of [their current] Roman Catholicism? . . .

It was such good news! That all the legalism and ritualism I had been taught really weren’t Franciscan at all. For example, I know you, even at the Center, call me “Father Richard,” but Francis didn’t want us to be fathers. He rejected any title of domination over another person. We were all to be called brothers, in Latin fratres, or friars in English. So we were friars, not monks. Our job was not to be priests, but to live among the people as brothers. Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as Francis dies, they’re laying hands on us, and we’re getting happily ordained as priests. Even when I was ordained in 1970, I didn’t fully know that history. I’m not saying those people weren’t sincere. Many of them are holier than I am. But it wasn’t Franciscanism.

_____________________________________

Sarah Young

I have loved you with an everlasting love, since before you were born…..and beyond the grave. Be still in my presence, surrender, connect and feel the certainty of My loving presence.

Devote time to developing your friendship with Me and live out of that.

Jeremiah 3 1:3
“If a man divorces his wife and she leaves him to marry another, can he ever return to her? Would not such a land be completely defiled? But you have played the harlot with many lovers–and you would return to Me?”

Lamentations 3:22-26
It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. 23 They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.

The Prophetic Future

Episcopal priest Nontombi Naomi Tutu finds a vision for the future of Christianity in the wisdom of the Hebrew prophet Amos.

When God calls Amos from his fairly stable life, Amos realizes that he is called to be in conflict with the prevailing wisdom and power structure of his day. Yet, he knows that he is called not simply to upbraid the people of Israel but to remind them who their God is and who they are called to be. . . . This is a people who have pledged themselves and their descendants to be in a covenantal relationship with God. The covenant is not about feast days or offering sacrifices to God; it is about how they are to live as a people in the world. They are meant to model a new way of being in community and to show that worshipping God is about every aspect of their lives.

Worship of God is . . . all about how we treat our neighbor, how we deal with the less fortunate, what we do to or for the widow and orphan, and how we treat the stranger in our midst. Amos tries . . . to make it clear to God’s people that the God who created and loves them, expects that their belief in God will challenge them to live lives that mirror God’s love. . . .

It is harder to see this Amos Christianity in the world, but I know it is there and I believe this is actually the more dominant story of Christianity. It is more hidden because it is not flashy or seeking attention. . . . I have seen it in the small parish of St. Thomas, Kagiso, South Africa. When we visited some years ago, the rector at the time, Xolani Dlwati, told us, “We do not do outreach. Everything we do is worship.” This congregation, comprised of predominantly poor families, fed lunch to children in the neighborhood school; bought school books, shoes, and uniforms for children in the community; stood as guardians for families of child-headed households; and made sure that those dying from AIDS had their homes cleaned, were eating healthy food, and knew they were loved. There was no fancy church sanctuary, no glamorous life for the rector, just worship of God that showed, through their caring, what Christianity is all about. . . .

Our faith has never been about those who are most popular and those who preach prosperity. It has been about the communities faithfully modeling a way of being in the world, of being in relationship with each other and with the prisoner and the hungry. It has been about voices reminding us that living God’s love looks like our daily experiences. It has been about Amos, standing up to the establishment in the name of God and in the name of justice. So, I believe that the future of Christianity is indeed its past and present. It is Amos. It is us.

The Living Church

CAC teacher Rev. Dr. Barbara Holmes finds hope in the innovative, Spirit-empowered resilience of the Black church in the United States. In CAC’s recent webcast, The Future of Christianity, she reflected:  

The contemplative movement—which is now finding roots in BIPOC [1] congregations and African-American traditional denominations—is growing, and I’m watching more and more people turn away from an entertainment-focused worship style and leaning more toward a growth that is internal rather than external. One of the reasons that the Black church has focused so much on music and exhortation is because in order to survive or to remain Christian, we had to look beyond the tenets of Christianity to the mystical. We had to be able to transcend, and the transcendence comes when you are singing a song that reaches a place that words can’t.

I was in church last Sunday, and we go to a very tiny little church on purpose, because I’m always looking for places where there’s a breakthrough of the presence of the Divine. I’m not so interested in articulate sermons. And they started singing a song “God Did It Suddenly”—this is before the preacher even took the pulpit—but suddenly there was this moment where everything changed: “God changed the way I walk, the way I talk, changed my attitude, and God did it suddenly.” It’s that understanding—that God can enter in, no matter how devious the Christian tenets have become with regard to race, and suddenly change everything, can change the hearts of your enemies, can make you strong enough to be able to stand, can give you power and can give you strength.

The other thing that made us stay Christian, I think, is that we read the Bible differently, thank God. We saw Jesus walking on water and acting like a shaman. We know shamans. We saw the walls of Jericho fall from walking. And we knew that this God that allowed us to be transported in chains from Africa was the God who could also free us. So we weren’t listening to what they told us Christianity was; we had an understanding of Christianity rooted in our own African understandings.

In Holmes’s experience, leadership and ministry didn’t come from official ordination, but from the movement of the Holy Spirit among the people:

You always knew who had the gifts, ’cause they couldn’t fake it. If in their presence folks got healed, that was a healer. If they could walk up to you and tell you what your life had been and what was going to happen tomorrow, that was a discerner. And so there are all these gifted people around but they didn’t have any power within church structures, which made people like me realize that the real power was not in the structure of the church, but in the living church. The gifted prophets in our midst.

Courage to Ask the Question

In a recent webcast, CAC faculty joined together to discuss the future of Christianity. Brian McLaren opened the conversation: 

Our question that brings us together today is the question of the future of Christianity. This is a question that I have lived with really my whole adult life. I sensed it was part of my calling or vocation to live with and wrestle with this question.

And I think we should realize there are some people who would find it dangerous that we are even asking this question, because to raise the question of the future of Christianity suggests that the future might be different than the past or the present. And there are a lot of people who are very, very invested in making sure the future is exactly the same as the past or the present. And I think the question is also dangerous within each of us, depending on how we answer it. If we were to look at some positive trends and say, “Oh, the future of Christianity is bright! The future of Christianity is wonderful,” there’s a certain way that that kind of positive and even wishful thinking could then give us, inside of the privacy of our own minds, permission to say, “Everything’s going to be fine. I can return to my previously scheduled apathy and complacency.”

There’s another way of answering the question that says, “The future of Christianity is [bleak] and terrible and hopeless.” And we could succumb to a kind of despair or a cynicism that would allow us to say, “Nothing I can do about it. It will be what it will be. It’s out of my hands.” And that would allow us to return to our previously scheduled apathy and complacency.

But there’s another way of asking this question and engaging it with an open heart, an open imagination, an open mind. And that’s a way that leads to a sense of empowerment for us to be open to the ways that the future of Christianity could be influenced by what we know our story begins with: one person impacting twelve people who impacted several hundred more [and so on].

McLaren finds hope for Christianity’s future in viewing its past as an ever-evolving movement: 

For centuries, Christianity has presented itself as an “organized religion”—a change-averse institution . . . that protects and promotes a timeless system of beliefs that were handed down fully formed in the past. Yet Christianity’s actual history is a story of change and adaptation. We Christians have repeatedly adapted our message, methods, and mission to the contours of our time. What might happen if we understand the core Christian ethos as creative, constructive, and forward-leaning—as an “organizing religion” that challenges all institutions (including its own) to learn, grow, and mature toward a deepening, enduring vision of reconciliation with God, self, neighbor, enemy, and creation? [1]

In the End, a New Beginning

Even if our traditional religious architecture crumbles—physically or conceptually—even then God can raise something beautiful from the rubble.
—Brian McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration

In this talk on the church’s future, Richard Rohr encourages trust in the mystery of faith: 

It is no accident that the liturgy has the creed at its core, a statement of faith that repeats: I believe, I believe, I believe. Regardless of what it is, we must find our real belief system. What are we passionate and enthusiastic about? What are we filled with God about? Being reactionary against what’s wrong might excite people, but it does not convert anybody, does not transform anybody, and does not draw the soul. We all know what’s wrong, we all know what should be changed, but more change, no matter how progressive, will not bring about soul transformation in and of itself. Our call to change is now obviously much deeper.

Our faith also offers us a foundational belief that life is a succession of dyings and risings. At the center of the Eucharist, we proclaim, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.” [1] That is the saving pattern! It is not a mystery of faith; it is the mystery of faith. It will never change. But Western people, trained in the philosophy of progress and problem-solving, don’t really believe that anymore. We much more believe that we can overcome the paschal mystery. That we can create a family, a parish, a church, an institution, a country that will not have to go through the dying of things.

It’s not true! It’s not true that everything’s getting better and better. That fallacy is being taken away from us. But we can return to the pattern of our faith and the pattern of reality: that things die and things resurrect and both are good teachers. Christ must be recognized and welcomed in both places—in the dying of things, and in the ecstasy and the loveliness of things.

The way down always teaches us. We need times where the soul is broken and we need some place we can go and weep and mourn. But we must have healthy people there who don’t let us sink into that negativity as a way of life. As people of the church, we are called to be agents of transformation who witness and accompany change with the wisdom of the soul.

Jesus never told us to put our trust in the larger institutions of culture or even the church. That doesn’t mean they are bad or that we should abandon them, but we must recognize that they are also subject to the paschal mystery, the dying and the rising of all things. And I think we must be honest that we’re at the downside of the curve. All the indices suggest that we are at the end of the dominance of the United States, Western civilization, and even of Christianity. The question for us becomes: What will we do about it?