Four years ago last month, Michael Brown was shot and lay dead on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. After spending my adult life immersed in urban education and cross-cultural relationships, I fancied myself a pretty racially aware White man. But Ferguson and the four years since have been an ongoing summons to me to deepen my learning and action around racial justice.

The Black Lives Matter movement, and the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, and others have confronted us with a challenge: we have still not reckoned with the legacy and impact of hundreds of years of chattel slavery in America. Majority culture, in particular, hasn’t come to terms with a historical habit of diminishing the humanity of people of African descent.

Frederick Ware, author of the excellent and accessible African-American Theology, writes in his chapter on nature and science about Black theologians’ and ethicists’ understandings of this reduction of the Black body.

“In the case of African Americans, their history is framed within the context of the struggle to be human…. The moral and religious crisis of chattel slavery and the racial injustices that followed after it were rooted in a body-soul dualism that depicted Blacks as either ‘soulless bodies’ or ‘bodiless souls.’ (189-190)

A soulless body would be a sub-human, a commodity: a body suitable for labor, or entertainment, or imprisonment, but fundamentally both other and lesser. This body would supposedly hold lower capacity for genius or spiritual uplift, and so be less worthy of protection or dignity. This construct would allow a White human to claim ownership of a Black human. It would allow a public to disproportionately fear and imprison Black men as well, or to honor the athleticism of a Black man while diminishing his intellect or off-court achievements.

A bodiless soul would be a person of moral or spiritual value who is only granted that value by ignoring or reducing their embodied existence. A bodiless soul might sound initially less degrading, but it is perhaps equally dehumanizing. It is appreciating the wisdom or care-giving of a Black woman without any interest or acknowledgement in her own children or health. It is warm feeling for a Black artist or preacher, as long as his message is reduced to inspirational quotations, tamed of demands for justice or change.

Bodiless souls and soulless bodies – how diminishing. How did we get here? And how to we get past this?

The long history of White supremacy and racism, rooted in greed and colonialism, is often and well told. Europeans and their American colonizers, eager for economic prosperity, seize lands that they are eager to cultivate and commodify. In a desire to decrease costs and increase profits, they transform the ancient practice of human slavery into chattel slavery. They make peace with their crime through the social construct of race – conjuring up whiteness, inventing blackness.

There’s a spiritual and theological story behind all this, though, that isn’t as often told and examined and then abandoned. It’s the story of disembodied faith.

Disembodied faith separates matters of the spirit from grounded, physical experience. Rooted in Greek philosophy’s matter-spirit dualism, disembodied faith views the human soul and intellect as spiritual and the body’s appetites as carnal. It hopes for the redemption of an invisible human spirit while assuming the destruction of the visible world. It prizes prayer and virtue and explicitly religious culture while ignoring or despising ordinary physical existence and justice and the majority of human endeavors.  

Disembodied faith also treats people as bodiless souls. Under disembodied faith, a person’s work and longings and sex and heartbreak aren’t particularly important. What matters is their assent to doctrine, their conversion, and their religious life and character that should follow. This type of faith doesn’t match the testimony of our own human experience that all things matter, that life in our bodies can’t be separated from the life of the soul or the life of the mind.

Disembodied faith also makes it easier to see ourselves or others as soulless bodies. My children have often asked me where in the body we can find the human soul or human spirit. And the answer, of course, on purely material terms, is nowhere. A faith that is only concerned with the salvation of the one part of our being we can’t locate or measure has come to seem irrelevant in our times and is easy to abandon.

By contrast, an embodied faith helps us value and nurture all parts of the human self – ourselves, and everybody else. An embodied faith doesn’t draw false dichotomies between physical and spiritual concerns, body and soul. An embodied faith gives us permission to value, demands we value, the respect and care of all people’s bodies, even as it respects and values the less visible life of the heart and the spirit.

by John Peteet, MD

I’ve always been fascinated by looking at things from different angles, trying to see what is really going on. I’m not sure why – maybe it comes from childhood growing up in the 60s in Atlanta where we experienced so many contradictions. There were the water fountains labeled white and colored in a culture that was supposed to be Christian, and there were the inspiring but odd people we knew from church (like characters from Flannery O’Connor’s short stories), and there was deep, unresolved ambivalence about the Civil War which my mother heard about from her grandfather who served in the Confederacy.

So I was excited to go North to college for a fresh, less parochial perspective. It turned out that my school had its own troubling inconsistencies (like a required pledge not to drink, dance or attend movies), but there I was captured by a vision that “all truth is God’s truth” – meaning to me not only that all ways of understanding the world have something to contribute, but that God is in the search for what is really true, and owns it all.

I don’t remember getting much help integrating my work with a vision of God’s truth during medical school or residency, but in my 40 years since as an academic psychiatrist, I’ve felt a continued pull to discover God’s beautiful and good truth beyond our human attempts to approach problems by reducing them to categories we can manage. For example – there are the distinctions we make between body and mind (or spirit). Depressed patients will sometimes ask “Do I have a chemical imbalance or a lack of faith?” As mental health professionals we often think dualistically in terms of mental, or psychological explanations rather disconnected from existential, moral or spiritual realities.  And we often further subdivide the psychological into cognitive behavioral, psychodynamic, sociocultural explanatory frameworks. Of course when your favorite tool is a hammer, everything can look like a nail. I regularly see psychiatrists in training focus on the psychiatric diagnosis rather than what is bothering the person most: a loss of hope that their life could work. At the same time I also recognize God’s work in the transformation and recovery that patients experience, and in the experience of trainees who can begin to see the existential dimensions of despair, and the importance of spiritual responses to existential and moral distress.

As I look back, this search for an integrative vision of persons and of what they can be has been central to a lot of my teaching and writing. Some examples are researching and writing about the importance of spiritual care for patients with life threatening illness; helping teach courses on the world views of Freud and C.S. Lewis, on spirituality and healing in medicine, or on Religion/Spirituality and psychiatry; writing or editing books like Depression and the Soul, and The Soul of Medicine; thinking about the role of psychotherapy in promoting virtues (If one of the core values of psychiatry is promoting healthy functioning, what do we think defines health?); calling attention to the importance of spiritually sensitive, or integrated mental health treatment. A few times it’s been possible to call attention to what seem to me the insights of a Christian perspective.

Fragmentation is so much a part of our culture (not only the one of the South in transition where I grew up), our systems of medical and psychiatric care, and of our own psyches — mine included. It seems to me that we’re all given glimpses, but need a clearer vision of God’s beautiful truth that transcends our parochial, flawed attempts to understand and heal ourselves.

I love the way that Christians have been praying for this for centuries. I expect you’ll recognize the words of this hymn written around the year 1000:

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Dr. John Peteet is a member at Reservoir and a psychiatrist in Brookline, Massachusetts and is affiliated with multiple hospitals in the area, including Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Peteet is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School

by Steve Watson

Reservoir exists to help people connect with Jesus and flourish. We think the right church can be a good part of that happening, so we enjoy being a church that can help you discover more of the love of Jesus, the gift of community, and the joy of living. But we’re also aware that there’s a lot more to a flourishing life than church and that at any given time, church isn’t for everyone.

So each month, we’ll start sharing a few resources we’ve been enjoying and finding contribute to a flourishing life for us. This month’s top 5 is from me, but in the future, I hope to feature contributions from others in our community as well.

1. This summer, two of my friends published an extraordinary book entitled Solus Jesus: A Theology of Resistance. Emily Swan and Ken Wilson are the co-pastors of Blue Ocean Faith, a Jesus-centered, fully inclusive church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Emily and Ken write theology, but it’s theology grounded in their lived experience and is both accessible and practical.Solus Jesus covers a lot of ground. The first section of the book argues for the validity of our human experience in matters of faith, describes what it’s like to follow Jesus as a living teacher, and argues that we are starting to experience large changes in Christianity that might help us flourish in the 21st century. The middle section of the book examines the implications of the anthropologist and critic Renee Girard on the significance of envy, rivalry, and scapegoating in all culture, including religious culture. Emily and Ken write movingly of their own experience being scapegoated and rejected by some church circles because of their coming out as a queer pastor and an ally.The final section of the book fleshes out a Jesus-centered, inclusive faith that is muscular enough to ground us and resist injustice.While Emily and Ken’s work is original, it’s also grounded in a long tradition of wise and brilliant writing and talk about God that comes from the margins of power, leaning into faith to resist their own diminishment. It’s a tradition they reference extensively.
2. The second resource is really a cluster of resources to help us in our thinking and conversations around race. Several friends recommended I read Austin Channing Brown’s memoir, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness. Many of my Black friends resonated with Brown’s journey of coming to love her own blackness. The book also exposes the limits of the supposed diversity of many of our institutions and calls us all to move out of and beyond whatever White supremacy we have internalized. A podcast I enjoyed that looks at some of the same topics from a different angle is Freedom Road Media’s interview of Reggie Wiliams by Lisa Sharon Harper. Williams is a scholar, but in this episode, entitled “Black Men’s Magic”, he quite gets quite personal. He explores historical constructs for Black manhood that have been oppressive to him and talks about ways he and others are experiencing the freedom and power and beauty of Black men.In my own Asian-White interracial household, a lot of our conversations about race this summer have been in reference to Asian and Asian-American pop culture. For us, it’s been the summer of Crazy Rich Asians, Awkwafina, and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Recently, in The New York Times, Kelly Marie Tran writes about her experience as the first woman of color to play a leading role in the Star Wars franchise. Her piece gets at the marginalization of Asian-Americans in pop culture and her own growing resistance. I came away excited to hear more from her.
3. One of the areas where flourishing can seem elusive is in our workplaces. We can wonder if we need to find a better line of work or maybe just give up on our desire to find meaning and purpose and happiness in our jobs. But what if how we think about our work can give us more joy and purpose, not matter what our work is. This is the premise of one of my favorite ever episodes from Shankar Vedantum of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast. This summer, they rebroadcast their episode “You 2.0: Dream Jobs.” It highlights psychlogist Amy Wrzesniewski’s work on how people can find satisfaction in their work through recasting their job in terms that are meaningful to them. Whether you’re a boss who wants a better culture in your workplace or a person who’s bored or restless in your current work, this is a great episode for you. I’ve found it really helpful in thinking about my own satisfaction at work.
4. I’ve read a lot of good novels recently, but one of the more intriguing was Roland Merullo’s The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama. The premise is that Pope Francis wants a break from being famous and wants a clandestine vacation as an ordinary person. His cousin and personal assistant is drafted to make plans. It just so happens that they escape from the spotlight together with the Dalai Lama and the assistant’s estranged wife and that both the Pope and Dalai Lama have some similar dreams and premonitions they are compelled to explore. On the one hand, this is a road trip novel, entirely fictitious. And yet most of the Pope’s and the Dalai Lama’s musings within are captured from real life interviews and speeches. I didn’t find Merullo’s anti-religious bent he steers things in especially satisfying, but the novel’s portrayal of two famous leaders’ ordinary spiritual lives is winsome and appealing.
5. Lastly, I’ll recommend an episode of a podcast that our group of churches puts out – the Blue Ocean Faith podcast. This summer’s episode with Erin Lane was compelling. Erin Lane is an author who has written about women’s experience in churches and about Christians’ desires to avoid churches altogether. She’s also been involved with the Center for Courage and Renewal, an institute interested in the intersections of faith, compassion, justice, and integrity, and associated with author Parker Palmer. Lane talks about all these things and more in a really fascinating conversation with our podcast hosts. Search “Blue Ocean Faith” in your podcast app.

I hope you enjoy some of these resources for your own flourishing life. If you have ideas for things we should include in future lists, send them to me at [email protected] with the subject “Top 5” in your message.

Seeking a God Within Reach

In my tradition’s sacred texts, one of the things that most sets God off is idolatry, the worship of things or persons that are not the one God. Abraham’s children developed religion and culture in an area where most people worshipped many gods. These gods were invisible spiritual beings governing the forces that most dominated their lives: rain, crops, children, and conflicts. Earlier human cultures were perhaps better in touch with just how terrifying life can be. Too much or too little rain, too few or too many children, the moods and ambitions of local rulers – life or death, poverty or flourishing rode on these things, all of which were absolutely out of your control. It’s no wonder you’d want to enlist some help from above.

In come the idols. Idols were physical images of invisible spiritual beings, representations you could venerate, and use to give focus to your prayers for help. They brought the spiritual close to you, right into your home.

Archaeological evidence seems to indicate that the practice of making and keeping idols was very common, not just in the surrounding Ancient Near East, but amongst Abraham’s children as well: the spiritual and sometimes biological ancestors of today’s Jews and Christians and Muslims. So the scriptures’ crusade against idols isn’t targeting surrounding nations so much as it is these children of Abraham. They voice a frustration on the part of a living God that people are so drawn to these idols – partly because they are rivals to people’s devotion, but largely because they simply do not work.

So perhaps the idolaters got some things wrong. At least according to the scriptures, they misunderstood the nature of God and sunk time and resources into spiritual practice that didn’t deliver what they were hoping for.

But I’m struck by what they got right as well. They wanted an experience of a divine being that didn’t just live beyond their reach. They wanted worship to engage their lived experience more than their theoretical understanding. And they wanted spirituality that could speak to their fears and actually help.

I’m pretty sympathetic to those wants and needs. Like yours, my world has its troubles. This past week, a friend told me he relapsed out of recovery and into addiction. Our president made me want to vomit. I thought about my three children in secondary school and how I’m not sure how in the world they’ll afford higher education. Two different friends reminded me that the human race isn’t doing all that great at ensuring the survival of our species. My own instinct in this is also to reach for something that offers more escape and distraction than it does presence and help.

I too want faith and practice that can make some sense out of this chaos, and build in me greater hope and courage in these times. If nothing else, I’d love to know that I’m not alone.

Like the idolaters, I want the divine brought close. I want a god in a body. 

The Embodiment of the Invisible God

And my tradition tells me that is just what I have. One of my favorite lines about Jesus comes from a first century letter, known by the city of the people who first read it. It says, “Jesus is the image of the invisible God.” Jesus is the “idol” we’ve been looking for, with the twist being both that he is the real deal and is also not made out of wood or stone. Jesus is God in a body, just like ours. So a faith that has anything to do with Jesus is going to also be embodied – holistic, engaged with the totality of human experience, reckoning with the specificity of our minds and bodies and cultures and communities.

The implications of this are manifold and stunning. But I’ll wrap up with three that I’ve been unpacking and enjoying and finding helpful myself

Embodied faith affirms the created good of all the material world, myself and all the people and things I love and hate included. Not only can I hope there was a personal spiritual force behind the big bang and evolution and however else all the elements combined to make blood, sweat, tears, and all the other stuff of my universe. But I can also trust that all of it is good enough, and interesting enough, and important enough to be worth an in-person visit and ongoing commitment from the God above, behind, and beneath it all. All of it, all of us, matters. And at some fundamental level, it’s all good.

Embodied faith also steers me toward flourishing relationships and grows my capacity for them as well. If people, let alone all other living and non-living things on earth, are of deep value, than I’m incentivized to act as if this is so. My neighbor, my child, my spouse, my brother, my enemy – they are all connected to me and they all matter. I want to live in love and at peace with them, whatever challenges that provokes. It also just so happens that God, on that embodied Jesus field trip, has given me access to all kinds of teaching and practice of love and compassion and truth telling and boundaries and more that might give me a shot at connecting well with others, and staying connected.  

And embodied faith tells me God is with me always, in all places and in all things. In all the chaos of my life circumstances, some of which I’m mentioned here, I think my deepest fear isn’t that it will be hard, but that I will be helpless and alone. God in a body says to me that God is close at hand, that God suffers and rejoices along with me in life, walking through it all in solidarity and in love.

Last month, I had a chance to share with a group of clergy about an aspect of my faith that helps inform contemporary social critique. The session was playfully titled, “A Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim Walk into an Empire.”

I’ve been interested in what faith in a time of empire looks like. Last summer, I preached a short series at Reservoir called Faith in a Time of Empire.

I’ve been thinking in particular about how the life and teaching of Jesus and writings of the early Jesus followers speak when we try to peel off some of the trappings of power that were mixed with them later.

I’ve been reading the work of Wes Howard-Brook, most recently Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected, 2nd-5th Centuries. It explores this dramatic shift in expression of faith over these four centuries. You start with a faith that emerged in the context of first century Palestinian Judaism, a faith that is deeply subversive to power and wealth, that has a victim of state execution at its center. But by the fifth century, you have a religion that was deeply embedded in the power structures of the Roman Empire, using state violence to stamp out theological enemies and promote its own dominance.

Christianity has a mixed to poor track record with power and Empire. And in this four century shift, Howard-Brook sees the origins of much of the worst power plays that would continue to plague Christian history: anti-Semitism, intolerance to theological diversity, acceptance of state violence to achieve supposedly moral ends, and a heaven-directed faith that promotes abuse of the earth and an anti-sexual, disembodied spirituality.

Howard-Brook’s insight is that it didn’t have to be this way. And that the violent, imperial, disembodied faith that so much of Christianity became isn’t true to its scriptural source materials, or is maybe just true to the worst parts of them.

Wes Howard-Brook’s big idea about the Bible is that the Hebrew scriptures which were included in the Christian Bible capture a thousand year tension between two different expressions of faith. He calls them “the religion of empire” and “the religion of creation.”

The religion of empire looks like any human triangle of power. In this case a powerful god demands service and loyalty. People worship God in urban temples, mediated through a priestly elite. The earth and its resources belong to the powerful, who extract from the land and extract from people to serve the interests of the most powerful, which are called the interests of the collective through propaganda. Enemies and others must conform or suffer violence.

By contrast, in the religion of creation, people worship God wherever God is to be found, which is anywhere on earth, and in human community that gathers in God’s name. The purpose of life is love and praise of God, with joy and gratitude for the abundant gift of life, expressed in right relationships with God, with fellow humans, and with all of creation. All the earth and its resources belong to God, so people are to treat all things as gifts to be treasured. Others are to be included, and enemies to be loved.

Howard-Brook argues that Jesus emphatically took sides in this debate, proclaiming and practicing the reign of God along the lines of this religion of creation.

You can see this throughout what Christians call the New Testament – in its radical ethic of love, in its recasting of “neighbor” to mean all of humanity, in its co-opting of Roman imperial language like “good news”, “Lord and Savior”, peace, and salvation. And throughout the teaching of Jesus as well.

I’ll give you one moment as a highlight, from the gospel of Mark.

Mark 12:13-17 (NRSV)

13 Then they sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said.

Right away I apologize for the anti-semitic tone this introduction has come to have. That’s truly shameful. But the point is that Jesus is entering a first century family debate about the right relationship to the power of the state.

14 And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? 15 Should we pay them, or should we not?” But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it.” 16 And they brought one. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.” 17 Jesus said to them, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were utterly amazed at him.

Jesus sees this Roman coin with the image of Ceasar on it, and says I have no need of that, no interest in that. Let the Romans have their coins. But let God have what is God’s.

This passage is fascinating to me, because it’s been used so differently. In the United States, for instance, during the Vietnam War, it was used both insist on draft compliance and to empower draft resistance. Because see: read through the religion of empire, this text says you need to give the state what it asks for and what rightfully belongs to it, which is just about everything, your life included. Give God worship and loyalty and religion, and do whatever the powers of the state ask you to do, including fight in their wars.

But read through the religion of creation, this text says something very different. It says to give to the state the stuff that the state has made – the state can have its money and its flags. Participate in the power structures of society at whatever minimum compliance level you need to – fine. But that which bears the image of God –which is all of humanity, each and every person – belongs only to God. Neither the state nor any other human power structure owns your body, your time, or your allegiance.

When I was sharing this with Kathleen Patron, an organizer from Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, it reminded her of a session she teaches in a training on organizing. She teaches that the world as it is is based on power, but the world as it should be is governed by love. Jesus-centered faith as I understand it invites me to push as deeply as possible into the world as it should be, a community of love, and to give only minimum consent to the world as it is, governed through power.

This fuels my social critique: to keep an eye out for the real purpose of corporate and national power, that invites my participation for my own good but is more often than not looking to use people and resources for the good of only a few. And it fuels my social engagement – to ask how people and institutions can use our power to advance systems of right relationships and economies of love.

by Steve Watson

I remember a few years ago, there was a study done by the Barna Group that asked young-ish Americans what words they associated with Christian faith. The top word was “anti-homosexual”. But also among the list of top words were “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “insensitive”. A substantial amount of people said they had negative views of Christians because of moral failures in leadership.

And I remember thinking — it seems like people are picking up on something unhealthy going on in some Christian groups. It doesn’t seem like folks who don’t go to church associate these church-goers with patience, gentleness, joy, or love. There’s definitely some deeply held beliefs at the root of a movement of people most known for being “judgmental” but whatever it is, it’s not healthy.

In spite of the bad rap from this collective group, it seems like there is such thing as healthy faith that is apparent to observers. There are certainly people we might call “heroes” of faith (Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu, Francis of Assisi). Their healthy faith was obvious to those around them. But I think each of us can connect with God in a way that is healthy and rich, and glows for those around us.

In weighing whether faith is unhealthy or healthy, I think these are 3 helpful questions.

1. Is it humble, or arrogant?

   It seems like every few hundred years, Christian people face an  issue of faith that is a matter of life and death. Church groups split because each side is 100% certain of their rightness on an issue (be it pacifism, infant baptism, different views on the book of Revelation), and are so confident that they are willing to stake community and friendship on it.

   But then, inevitably, after a little bit of time, that issue is no longer a dividing one. People may have changed their minds, decided they don’t care, or still hold a strong opinion as a matter of intellectual interest. But the idea that we wouldn’t be able to be in community over that issue? Unthinkable!

   Is that arrogant or what? To be willing to stake the unity and harmony of a community on one opinion about one thing? To not reserve even the possibility that the other side could be correct, or that (more likely) some mix of the two takes is correct? To not be able to simply say “I don’t know”? Unhealthy faith leaves no room for uncertainty, at the expense of all of us.

   When weighing faith it might be useful to ask: is this stream able to say “I don’t know”? Is it humble, or arrogant?

2. Is it based on unquestioned authority?

   It’s pretty normal in human groups for leaders to emerge. In healthy circumstances, good transparent leadership can provide efficiency. After all, different folks have different gifts. Some people have the ability to represent various interests, command attention, and make thoughtful decisions. But in unhealthy circumstances, the human tendency to pick leaders can lead to oppressive power structures that demand unquestioning submission.

   This has happened (and continues to happen) in many faith communities. The leadership structures that arise, if they are unhealthy, can end end up demanding faith based on the authority of the leadership. Truth is reasonable and attractive to thoughtful people. When faith leadership makes truth claims, they should offer reasons for teaching those things. If their reason is “because we have declared it”, that deserves a second look. Even the Bible provides reasons for faith.

   Given the tendency for humans to create and abuse authority, it’s probably helpful to weigh faith and ask: what is this based on? Thoughtful reasoning? Or “because I said so” reasoning?

3. Is it communal?

   Churches usually have a bunch of people in them. When we say healthy faith should be communal, we don’t just mean that there should be a bunch of people involved. There are plenty of unhealthy faith bodies made of multiple people.

   When we say that healthy faith is communal, we mean that faith helps people flourish when it enables connection and learning from others. The impulse to not question anything and totally conform to an arrogant authority is unhealthy, yes. But also unhealthy is the desire to protect ourselves from any influence from other human beings. Both of these things leave no room for authentic connection, friendship, discovery, and growth.

   So a final question you might try asking to weight faith is: is this communal? Does it prevent me from connecting with others and learning from them? Does it cut me off from connection with other people, and all the learning and growth that can come from that?

This is by no means an exhaustive list of signs of unhealthy faith, but instead a loose starting point. We’ve heard many stories of abusive faith traditions, or sometimes experienced that kind of faith tradition ourselves. But from our perspective, good trees bear good fruit! Faith deserves to be picked up occasionally to see if it’s a healthy fruit, or something you’d rather not eat.

Interested in talking these things through with some folks in a similar boat? Our free class, Seek, is something we offer periodically as a space to consider faith in a safe space. It runs on Sunday afternoons for 5 weeks, is discussion based, and includes a free lunch. Get more info here: