One Way?
CONSIDER SUPPORTING THE WORK OF LGBTQIA+ FAITH ACCESS. ALL OF MY WORK IS AVAILABLE FOR FREE, BUT YOUR GENEROSITY MAKES IT POSSIBLE TO CONTINUE. THANKS!Identifying my theological journey dates to my Catholic beginnings. I come from a long family tradition of faithful Catholics, and church goers. As a child I was dragged along with my grandmother who served as a Eucharistic minister in what is now known as Beaumont Hospital in Trenton, MI. At that time the hospital was known as Oakwood/Southshore Hospital. Every Sunday I would go with my grandmother to visit patients. While sitting in the room I would be with her as she offered them a spiritual moment. With my grandmother’s example of service to others I began to see the beauty of a life devoted to serving God and people.
As a child I watched my grandmother care for people across denominational lines. It was at this time of my life I began to grow roots of universal theological thought. This theological upbringing carried into my college years. When I began undergrad, I was meeting people of different backgrounds and cultural contexts. I started to see the merit and the value in other people’s belief systems and tried to find the common denominators in all theological thought. My education at Eastern Michigan University as well as my employment at the school taught me the wide reach of diversity and inclusion in all areas of life, including spirituality.
Near the end of my undergrad years, I had a deep and robust inclusive theology that helped me include all people in spiritual matters. This, however, began to quickly change as I began working at a megachurch. At the age of eighteen I was thrust into pastoral leadership in a church of thousands. This forced me to learn very quickly what was and wasn’t acceptable teaching within my church context. I was young and not very knowledgeable on the bible at that time yet was entrusted to give pastoral care to hundreds of people. I had to learn from my pastors and leaders within the church to teach me how to counsel and care for people as I had no previous training or education. It was in this church context where I was reprogrammed to teach people that there was only one way to God, and that was through Jesus. There was a sub-current as well in my training that demonized any denominational Christian thought. I was taught to viciously defend this non-denominational viewpoint and to cast out anyone who did not agree.
I served under this intense fundamental view of God for most of my adult life. It was all status quo until the COVID-19 pandemic closed all churches on earth. The year 2020 was a significant moment for me. The 2020 election opened my eyes to many things I needed to confront in my faith journey. During and after the election I witnessed many faith leaders, of whom I once trusted to teach me truth, fall for wild conspiracy theories. I struggled to reconcile the defense of a false narrative, and this included the faith they once boldly taught me to believe. The election and the murder of George Floyd began a lengthy deconstruction of my faith that found me asking difficult questions of myself and of God. These questions were based around my personal and spiritual struggles of my own life. I wrestled with how to answer these questions and how to defend what I was adopting again. The struggle of these questions helped me to unravel unhealthy and questionable theology that was no longer working for me.
Fast forwarding to today, I have been studying to be a hospital chaplain at The University of Michigan, and have been working in a progressive church in Royal Oak, MI. I am finding myself returning to a belief in God I once held before being a pastor. I have been invited once again to have an open heart to the vast nature of God. I am again able to
reconnect with my more universal theology. I have been returning to what I first loved about God. That love is a God who transcends culture, and religious systems. A God is one, who is in everything. My education has challenged me to let go of things that I once held dear. I have been challenged with the will to educate myself in new ways. I look forward to continuing my theological journey as an open book rather than a closed cannon.
THE TENSION OF CHANGE
I have faced countless trials in the last few years. Most of my trials are directly affected by the changing of my personal theology. My faith background was steeped in black-and-white thinking. It is nearly impossible for a megachurch pastor to hold an outwardly liberal view of theology without persecution or repercussions. My more progressive view of God directly led to me losing my job as a pastor. I began asking questions to challenge the binary thoughts of my fellow pastors and teams. When I began to seek bigger answers, and began to be public about those questions, my reputation took a major hit in the faith community. Quickly my reputation went from a respected church leader in the area to a disgraced and “deceived” person almost overnight. I have had to pay high prices for exploring my theology in the past. This exploration has cost me everything.
Once again, I stand at the edge of a theology shift. I continue to seek and understand a more universal view of God and Christianity. I have had fears about the possibilities of what it would cost me next. Time will only tell. As I have Wherever my theology goes in the coming years, I am confident that I will be willing to adjust my life to meet my ever-evolving theology.
THEOLOGY ON GOD
One of the most memorable illustrations I have heard about “knowing God” came from a pastor in Nashville, TN. Stan Mitchell the founding pastor of Gracepointe Church gave a talk about his dream of knowing God. The illustration pointed to how absurd it is to claim that God is knowable. In Stans dream, he was climbing a mountain with a group of people who all believed they were on the right part of the mountain. As this group of people reached what they believed to be the top peak, they lifted a flag on the rock and said “We did it! We got to the top of the mountain. We conquered it.” However, just as they were high fiving one another, the clouds around the mountain suddenly began to clear. It became obvious at that moment that the mountain went up infinitely into the sky. Once they realized they could never climb to the top, they noticed all around them, other groups, on different peaks with a flag proudly displayed.
Often many people climb up their side of the mountain and think it is the only way up. Once they reach a peak many put a flag down saying that they have it figured out. Many have claimed that their way of climbing and understanding the divine is the best proven path to knowing the God. It is important for us to understand that depending on where we are born, or who our guide is in the spiritual journey, can inform our understanding of God and give us a narrow “One path” view of a vast and creative God.
This illustration helped me to understand the freedom of exploring God. It helped to release me from the burden of needing to have the one and only answer to “who is God”. I have the freedom to come down from the peak theological understanding and find a new guide. I have the freedom to descend the hill and explore a new path. These revelations have allowed me to adopt what is called open and process theology. In the pursuit of accepting new processes of learning new theology: I have come to the realization that I am a Christian by vocation and tradition. I have come to peace with the fact that my faith system would be different had I grown up in a different part of the world. I would have adopted the foundations of faith from my family in any cultural context. This realization has given me the freedom to accept and learn from other faith systems in which I encounter.
PROVERBS 9:10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
The Christian tradition, in which I was born, teaches that understanding the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Trying to keep this scripture in mind has helped shape how I think about God. Understanding that fearing God in God's entirety, is the beginning of my exploration. Having this proverb as a guide, I have been able to remove fear as my end point, and placed awe and wonder at the start of my God experience. This change in where fear is placed, has opened my mind to a wider and more beautiful worldview, and a more complete picture of what little I can see of a divine God.
1 JOHN 4:18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.
Beginning with fear and letting love cast it out has helped me to open my heart to love others. Love has helped me drive out fear that was deeply ingrained in my mind from my fundamentalist roots. As John says, perfect love casts out fear. With 1 John and the Proverbs 9 in mind, I can confirm that fear is the beginning of wisdom. In this beautiful contrast between love and fear. I have found a way to further rid myself of absolutes. Finding my way out of fear through love, has helped draw out black and white thinking from my theology.
Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
This scripture has given me the freedom to accept all things as spiritual. Seeing inherent value in everything and everyone had helped me to see him in everything. Understanding that God spoke all things into existence has freed me to stop labeling things good and bad. My ability to see all things as created by God, has freed my mind to find the inherent value in all things. I have been able to see value in people who are caught in systems of oppression and failure. I can see the good of a creator in anything on earth now. Another example is seeing the value in someone else's beliefs or lack thereof is my understanding of all things and people being in and through God. This has helped me to hear good things even if I don’t always agree with what I am hearing. This type of theology helps me to sit in a room with somebody who has a vastly different outlook than me, and understand that they are good at their creation and basic level.
