A Manifesto for Christian Rebels and Ex-Vangelicals

 A very quick post today: I wrote this text after yesterday's reflection regarding spirituality and sexuality (which you can read here), and was inspired just now as I was reading the introduction to Georg Feuerstein's book Enlightened Sexuality: Essays on Body-Positive Spirituality, which I'm already loving and will probably seek a physical copy of. Here is what I wrote:

Yes! We urgently need a new Christian spirituality that carries the Gospel of Christ today, where the Kingdom of God is found here and now! And what I see is a vision that is body-positive and corporeal, present, sensual, creative, erotic, intimate, passionate! Romantic! (Even Artistic!) That values Agape love in the here and now, that values and celebrates individual experience, that accepts all bodies and all genders as they are and will be, that teaches Love, Compassion and Eros across all forms of sexualities and relationships. That defends individual autonomy and nourishes self-expression. That follows and teaches the many paths of wisdom, and is at home in both times of abundance and of austerity, in both healthy indulgence and abnegation, that finds richness in simplicity and is both humbled and delighted in the face of nuance and complexity, which are all together essential parts of the human experience. A Christianity that celebrates and edifies all human passions, while carefully tending to the deep longing for God they all point towards. A faith that loves the deviants and the outcasts and the downtrodden, that is true to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. That is vocal and ferocious about any kind of tyranny or oppression, while also being always ready to forgive, and work together with those who perpetrated wrongdoing in the past. We urgently need a church that is communal and anti-capitalist. That values land and neighbor, and shared experience and honest work. That looks toward the future with optimism, that celebrates the economies of the local and the regional, that communes with nature and is grateful before all circumstances. That proclaims universal salvation, universal forgiveness for transgressions, that offers truth and reconciliation across all parties, across all circumstances.

This is the life in Christ that I've been given, and this is the kind of rebellion I proclaim for us today, who like me are thirsty for Life and Spirit! Amen and amen and amen for all eternity.

(Add to this that I had this song humming in the back of my mind as I wrote this:)

Again, see you sometime soon!

 

Edit: Changed some of the wording to better fit what I intended to say, on June 5th, 2024.