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The Great Open Dance
The Great Open Dance's Journal
The Great Open Dance's Journal
June 17, 2026
Jesus was powerless and poor in resources. This status enables him to see society the way God sees it, as basic equality distorted by an illusion of rank. We separate ourselves from one another so that we can exploit with indifference. This separation creates injustice: social stratifications that do not cohere with our universal status as children of God. Some social stratification is inevitable, but for certain persons to starve while others waste, for some to live in palaces while others are homeless, for some to consume needless “medical” care while others die from lack of basic medical care, is unholy.
Psychologists and sociologists have accumulated evidence that the rich practice emotional distancing techniques in their relation to the poor. This distancing plays out at crosswalks, for example, where expensive cars are less likely to yield to pedestrians than inexpensive cars. By blaming the poor for their situation (“poor people are poor because they’re lazy”), the rich justify their lack of compassion.
The Christian tradition calls this practice sin. Sin justifies its refusal to love by cultivating separation, then justifies separation by disparaging the objects of its indifference. Sin scorns for the sake of convenience, refusing to see itself in others or others in itself. Sin dehumanizes itself by dehumanizing others, forgetting that others are the sacred mirror in which we see ourselves.
Distorting our perception for self-advantage distorts our self-perception, turning ourselves into idols. Either everyone is cherished, or no one is. Recognizing this truth, the church sees Christ where society sees no one, loving those who have lost the game of success or can’t even play it. Through this love we free ourselves from the harsh gaze of judgment, so we can see and be seen with the merciful eyes of God. For this reason Jesus teaches, “Blessed are those who show mercy, for they will be shown mercy” (Matthew 5
).
While we work for justice, we must practice charity. The practice of charity is a legitimate response to social suffering, but it can also deceive. Being charitable feels good. Some people profit from social suffering by exploiting labor, underpaying workers, denying benefits, and demanding unethical behavior of their employees. Then, these same people get to help the poor, whose situation they created, by practicing charity. They get to be bad but feel good, ensconcing themselves in pretentious self-satisfaction.
Because we cannot create a utopia, charity will always be necessary, but it must be practiced alongside social criticism. Charity must ask, “Why is this charity needed? Instead of feeding the hungry, could we eliminate hunger?” Charity must actively seek to be replaced by justice, the very same justice that Jesus envisioned in the kingdom of God.
In their liberating, healing ministry, churches co-create the kingdom of God with God. Each local church is an incubator of the kingdom of God, where we gather to imagine and enact what the world should be like. We do so freely, in the confidence that God lets us be us and lets the world be the world, so that both can offer surprise to divinity. Without freedom there is no community, only coercion and control. Hence, coercive power is expelled from the triune Godhead, and all church doctrines that thirst for power over are lies.
God is love, which acts upon us in the same way that the beauty of a painting or the magnificence of a symphony acts upon us; that is, by acting with us, not against us; by fulfilling us, not restricting us.
By co-creating the future with God, we feel the truth of Jesus’s assurance that “the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21), a latent presence among the powers and principalities of the world. The kingdom of God is ahead of us as the goal of human progress and among us as we work toward that goal, dealing fairly with one another and working for the universal well-being that God intends.
The Christian tradition teaches that God is unifying love, and the Christian church strives to express the unifying power of God as Abba imagines it, Jesus defines it, and Sophia inspires it. Therefore, to paraphrase Paul, if the church speaks in the tongues of humans and of angels but does not have love, it is a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if the church has prophetic powers and understands all mysteries and all knowledge and if the church has all faith so as to move mountains but does not have love, it is nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1–2).
God loves people, not the church. And God has a special preference for the powerless: the widow, orphan, immigrant, and indigent (Psalm 68:5, Deuteronomy 10:18, etc.) . Having confused themselves with the kingdom, and the kingdom with themselves, too many churches become committed to self-preservation even when they are no longer involved in kingdom creation. But a church committed to itself can no longer be committed to God, as we have seen: sexual abuse cases are kept quiet and the abuser is sent elsewhere to abuse again, while the abused are shamed and silenced.
The manufacture, concealment, and perpetuation of suffering by an institution created to disseminate the love of God constitutes apostasy. The Church of the Healer must commit itself to healing, in every way, but most importantly, in humility. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 226-228)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Felten, David, Jeff Procter-Murphy. Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2012.
Epperly, Bruce. A New Pentecost for Progressive Christians. Florida: Energion, 2025.
Christianity is as faithful to Christ as it is to the poor
Any church that follows Jesus must work with the poor to liberate the poor. The church is as committed to Christ as it is to the poor. Jesus’s identification with the poor is absolute: “The truth is, every time you aided the least of my siblings, you aided me” (Matthew 25:40). Despite this statement, the church has more often tried to convert the poor than convert itself to the poor. It has preferred allying with the powerful who are rich in resources, to the neglect of the powerless who are poor in resources.Jesus was powerless and poor in resources. This status enables him to see society the way God sees it, as basic equality distorted by an illusion of rank. We separate ourselves from one another so that we can exploit with indifference. This separation creates injustice: social stratifications that do not cohere with our universal status as children of God. Some social stratification is inevitable, but for certain persons to starve while others waste, for some to live in palaces while others are homeless, for some to consume needless “medical” care while others die from lack of basic medical care, is unholy.
Psychologists and sociologists have accumulated evidence that the rich practice emotional distancing techniques in their relation to the poor. This distancing plays out at crosswalks, for example, where expensive cars are less likely to yield to pedestrians than inexpensive cars. By blaming the poor for their situation (“poor people are poor because they’re lazy”), the rich justify their lack of compassion.
The Christian tradition calls this practice sin. Sin justifies its refusal to love by cultivating separation, then justifies separation by disparaging the objects of its indifference. Sin scorns for the sake of convenience, refusing to see itself in others or others in itself. Sin dehumanizes itself by dehumanizing others, forgetting that others are the sacred mirror in which we see ourselves.
Distorting our perception for self-advantage distorts our self-perception, turning ourselves into idols. Either everyone is cherished, or no one is. Recognizing this truth, the church sees Christ where society sees no one, loving those who have lost the game of success or can’t even play it. Through this love we free ourselves from the harsh gaze of judgment, so we can see and be seen with the merciful eyes of God. For this reason Jesus teaches, “Blessed are those who show mercy, for they will be shown mercy” (Matthew 5
).
While we work for justice, we must practice charity. The practice of charity is a legitimate response to social suffering, but it can also deceive. Being charitable feels good. Some people profit from social suffering by exploiting labor, underpaying workers, denying benefits, and demanding unethical behavior of their employees. Then, these same people get to help the poor, whose situation they created, by practicing charity. They get to be bad but feel good, ensconcing themselves in pretentious self-satisfaction.
Because we cannot create a utopia, charity will always be necessary, but it must be practiced alongside social criticism. Charity must ask, “Why is this charity needed? Instead of feeding the hungry, could we eliminate hunger?” Charity must actively seek to be replaced by justice, the very same justice that Jesus envisioned in the kingdom of God.
In their liberating, healing ministry, churches co-create the kingdom of God with God. Each local church is an incubator of the kingdom of God, where we gather to imagine and enact what the world should be like. We do so freely, in the confidence that God lets us be us and lets the world be the world, so that both can offer surprise to divinity. Without freedom there is no community, only coercion and control. Hence, coercive power is expelled from the triune Godhead, and all church doctrines that thirst for power over are lies.
God is love, which acts upon us in the same way that the beauty of a painting or the magnificence of a symphony acts upon us; that is, by acting with us, not against us; by fulfilling us, not restricting us.
By co-creating the future with God, we feel the truth of Jesus’s assurance that “the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21), a latent presence among the powers and principalities of the world. The kingdom of God is ahead of us as the goal of human progress and among us as we work toward that goal, dealing fairly with one another and working for the universal well-being that God intends.
The Christian tradition teaches that God is unifying love, and the Christian church strives to express the unifying power of God as Abba imagines it, Jesus defines it, and Sophia inspires it. Therefore, to paraphrase Paul, if the church speaks in the tongues of humans and of angels but does not have love, it is a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if the church has prophetic powers and understands all mysteries and all knowledge and if the church has all faith so as to move mountains but does not have love, it is nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1–2).
God loves people, not the church. And God has a special preference for the powerless: the widow, orphan, immigrant, and indigent (Psalm 68:5, Deuteronomy 10:18, etc.) . Having confused themselves with the kingdom, and the kingdom with themselves, too many churches become committed to self-preservation even when they are no longer involved in kingdom creation. But a church committed to itself can no longer be committed to God, as we have seen: sexual abuse cases are kept quiet and the abuser is sent elsewhere to abuse again, while the abused are shamed and silenced.
The manufacture, concealment, and perpetuation of suffering by an institution created to disseminate the love of God constitutes apostasy. The Church of the Healer must commit itself to healing, in every way, but most importantly, in humility. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 226-228)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Felten, David, Jeff Procter-Murphy. Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2012.
Epperly, Bruce. A New Pentecost for Progressive Christians. Florida: Energion, 2025.
June 10, 2026
Genitalia don’t determine someone’s “God-given sexuality”. Science says that people are born with an array of neurological genders and genitalia, sometimes congruent, sometimes not. Current research suggests that humans are born hard-wired for an array of gender identities. “Male” brains and “female” brains and “transgender” brains and “nonbinary” brains are not standard issue. They are words that we apply to a field of neurological structures that generate a host of gender experiences. Their place in that field is already influenced in utero, partly through exposure to the hormones testosterone and estradiol. Most of the time, those hormones produce a brain that corresponds to the body’s genitalia, but sometimes it doesn’t. What should we do when someone is born with male genitalia but a female-ish brain? Or female genitalia but a male-ish brain? How should we then determine their gender identity?
Currently, there are two practices in this situation. One group demands that gender identity conform to genital identity, no matter what the person says. Even if the boy says he feels like a girl, their family tells them no—they have a penis, they must be a boy, because that’s their “God-given sexual identity”. Here, “God-given sexual identity” is shorthand for “what we can most easily see” and “what we can easily understand” and “what is familiar to us” and “what we have always thought” and “what doesn’t confuse us”. The other group waits for the child to grow up and tell them what the child’s gender identity is. This group feels that the best person to know someone’s gender identity is the person themself because, well, they’re that person.
A forced gender binary makes a complicated issue simple, which always causes suffering. At this point, anyone limiting gender identity to genital identity, and forcing that into a binary, is ignoring a vast amount of medical literature. Gender is probably best understood as a complex consisting of at least eight different aspects: 1. Societally designated sex (what sex the individual is told they are). 2. Sexual genetic karyotype (female: XX or male: XY). 3. Gonadal sex. 4. Hormonal sex. 5. Sex of internal sexual organs. 6. Sex of external genitalia. 7. Neurological gender. 8. Subjective gender (inner experience of one’s gender). Although these gender differentiations are usually congruent, any combination of these sexual differentiations may occur. Currently, science cannot determine which of these aspects are “God-given” and which aren’t. Nor can theology, I would argue.
Approximately 1.7% of persons are born intersexed, with a mixture of male and female characteristics. Medical science has a long list of intersex conditions, such as Klinefelter Syndrome or Adrenal Hyperplasia. Such intersexed conditions complicate references to an individual’s “God-given sexuality”. Disregarded by this simplification are the subject’s chromosomal sex, hormonal sex, sex of internal organs, neurophysiology, and subjective gender identity (internal experience of themselves), none of which will necessarily cohere with the sex of the genitals, none of which will necessarily fall into a neat binary. Some people refuse to recognize the internal truth of transgender and nonbinary persons. When religiously motivated, these people sometimes insist that the binaries they impose are biblical: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27 NRSV). This passage accurately describes perhaps the majority of the human population. But what about that minority who do not fit into the categories, who lie on the continuum rather than at either end, or who unite both ends? Did God also create them?
God is invisible, but Christians acknowledge God. In many quarters, the invisibility of transgender and nonbinary persons’ neurophysiology, and personal gender experience, is grounds for its denial. We can see genitals, but we can’t see brains, so we prioritize genitals over brains, even though it’s the person’s brain (mostly) that determines their own experience of their own gender. What this says to transgender and nonbinary persons, essentially, is that they should not have been born into a gender minority. Leslie Feinberg describes her experience of such rejection: “We wish you were invisible; we don’t accept you. We wish you would simply go away, and we will pretend that you don’t exist. We will ostracize and marginalize you. We will deny you any rights because you are different and we hate you” (Feinberg, Transliberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, 52). Attitudes like this, often articulated by Christians, caused one transgendered person to wear a T-shirt saying: “Jesus hates me, this I know, for the Christians tell me so.”
Christians follow Christ, who included the excluded precisely because he celebrated all. Therefore, Christians should include the excluded and celebrate all. As followers of Jesus the Healer (who is also Jesus the Christ) this essay will abide by the principle that Christians are called to ameliorate human suffering rather than exacerbate it. As Christ healed, so Christians are called to heal (Luke 9:11). And in our interpretation of the Bible, Christians are called to carry the cross, not erect it (Luke 14.27).
Gender identity is not produced by environment or upbringing. Here’s the proof. The argument that socialization (behavior and hormonal therapy) could determine or alter gender identity is subverted by the story of Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer. Bruce Reimer, as an infant, lost the totality of his penis to a botched electric circumcision. Phalloplasty (the construction of a new penis) was more experimental then than it is now, and was not even attempted. Instead, on the advice of Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University, Bruce’s parents, Ron and Janet, agreed to have Bruce undergo a sex change operation and hormone therapy, converting their little boy into a little girl. Throughout her childhood, with the most loving of intentions, Ron and Janet gave Brenda shots, dressed her in girls’ clothes, encouraged her to play as a girl, and totally – socially, surgically, and chemically, encouraged Brenda to identify with the female gender. In the meantime, John Money produced paper after paper commenting on the wonderful success of his experiment.
The problem was that Brenda Reimer felt like a boy, acted like a boy, and wanted to be a boy. She played with boys’ toys, built forts, had snowball fights, liked dumptrucks, wanted to be a Boy Scout instead of a Girl Scout, and played army. She avoided dolls, sewing machines, and the kitchen. She tried to urinate standing up. She was a tomboy, but unlike most of the tomboys, would never outgrow it. She wanted to shave like her father. The prospect of growing breasts terrified her. She was derided by her schoolmates as “butch” and “Cavewoman,” an insult to which she replied with punches. She was attracted to girls. As the girl grew older, and increasing hormones were needed to fully feminize her, she resisted more and more. When asked by her physician, “Don’t you want to be a woman?” Brenda just screamed, “No!”
At the age of fifteen, her father told her the truth: that she had been born a boy, that her penis had been burned off, that they had tried to raise her as a girl instead. She felt anger, disbelief, amazement – but primarily relief. Now she knew why she felt the way she did. Now she understood why she behaved the way she did. Now she knew why she wanted to be a boy, and that she should be a boy. She immediately demanded to be switched back, and was (Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl).
The above summary is offered only to establish that socialization and hormone therapy cannot change brain structure. Although one story is not scientifically conclusive, many scientific studies imply that the brain’s sexual differentiation is inelastic; we are born with a gender, not as a blank slate. Thus the theory that behavior changes neurophysiology falls flat. More importantly, this theory ignores the life stories of transsexuals. No one has ever claimed: “I was born with a boy’s genitalia and I really enjoyed being a boy and really identified with my boyishness, but when I got to be an adult I decided to spend $100,000 for gender-affirming surgery so that I could be rejected by my society, my family, and my church.” Instead, in every story, transgender identity simply arises, just like cis-gendered identity. Transgender and nonbinary persons tell stories much like Leslie Feinberg’s:
Transgender and nonbinary persons report their experience of gender identity as something they were born with, and not as something chosen. Many try, for many years, to choose that gender identity which is congruent with their genitalia. But neurophysiology and personal authenticity prevent such a choice and force them back into their true gender identity. How should Christians address this very painful issue?
Short answer: with love and acceptance that celebrates the person as they are. As disciples of Jesus the Healer (who is also Jesus the Christ), Christians are called to the vocation and discipline of relieving suffering. We are not called to worsen suffering. Yet often, accidentally, we do. The means to alleviate the suffering of transgender and nonbinary persons is to recognize the biological reality (not psychopathology) of their condition, and to support them in the decisions they make.
We are proposing a church that manifests God’s agapic love of all humankind. Jesus is called “the express image of God’s person” (Hebrews 1:3), yet he never condemns anyone for being born a certain way. Jesus responds only to the disposition of the person’s spirit and the ethics produced by that spirit. What he condemns is the spirit of compassionless legalism; what he embraces is the spirit of fearless generosity. And when Jesus seeks examples of faith, he finds them at the margins, not centers, of society: “He never refuses to love or accept anyone who came to him with a genuine desire to experience God’s presence and truth. He never tells people to go away and not bother him until they can find some way to be more socially acceptable (e.g., the thief on the cross, Luke 23:39-43)” (Sheridan, Crossing Over: Liberating the Transgendered Christian, 57).
Transgender and nonbinary persons have suffered and will continue to suffer from a society that fears the unusual and unknown, and from demagogues who feed those fears. A church in the image of Christ will not erect walls of painful exclusion, but will instead offer celebration and embrace. That celebration will ordain, marry, and accompany transgender and nonbinary persons as they seek to manifest their God-given authenticity. In doing so, the Church will best serve as the body of Christ and as the incarnation of the teachings of Jesus, who pleads: “Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
*****
For more reading, please see:
Dowd, Chris and Christiana Beardsley. Trans Affirming Churches: How to Celebrate Gender-Variant People and Their Loved Ones. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2020.
Feinberg, Leslie. Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
Sheridan, Vanessa. Crossing Over: Liberating the Transgendered Christian. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001.
Ordain Transgender and Nonbinary Persons Now!
Let's celebrate each other the way Jesus celebrates us. Gender identity is an aspect of human sexuality as inflammatory as it is misunderstood. Transgender and nonbinary persons tell stories of suffering; people comfortable with their assigned gender are confused as to why anyone would want to be other than they are. For people of faith, scripture offers little direct guidance; tradition offers almost none. In the meantime, people are suffering and lives are being lost. Here, I will argue for the full celebration of transgender and nonbinary persons in the church—for their ordination as ministers, for celebrating their love through marriage, and for accompanying them as they transition to their most authentic gender identity.Genitalia don’t determine someone’s “God-given sexuality”. Science says that people are born with an array of neurological genders and genitalia, sometimes congruent, sometimes not. Current research suggests that humans are born hard-wired for an array of gender identities. “Male” brains and “female” brains and “transgender” brains and “nonbinary” brains are not standard issue. They are words that we apply to a field of neurological structures that generate a host of gender experiences. Their place in that field is already influenced in utero, partly through exposure to the hormones testosterone and estradiol. Most of the time, those hormones produce a brain that corresponds to the body’s genitalia, but sometimes it doesn’t. What should we do when someone is born with male genitalia but a female-ish brain? Or female genitalia but a male-ish brain? How should we then determine their gender identity?
Currently, there are two practices in this situation. One group demands that gender identity conform to genital identity, no matter what the person says. Even if the boy says he feels like a girl, their family tells them no—they have a penis, they must be a boy, because that’s their “God-given sexual identity”. Here, “God-given sexual identity” is shorthand for “what we can most easily see” and “what we can easily understand” and “what is familiar to us” and “what we have always thought” and “what doesn’t confuse us”. The other group waits for the child to grow up and tell them what the child’s gender identity is. This group feels that the best person to know someone’s gender identity is the person themself because, well, they’re that person.
A forced gender binary makes a complicated issue simple, which always causes suffering. At this point, anyone limiting gender identity to genital identity, and forcing that into a binary, is ignoring a vast amount of medical literature. Gender is probably best understood as a complex consisting of at least eight different aspects: 1. Societally designated sex (what sex the individual is told they are). 2. Sexual genetic karyotype (female: XX or male: XY). 3. Gonadal sex. 4. Hormonal sex. 5. Sex of internal sexual organs. 6. Sex of external genitalia. 7. Neurological gender. 8. Subjective gender (inner experience of one’s gender). Although these gender differentiations are usually congruent, any combination of these sexual differentiations may occur. Currently, science cannot determine which of these aspects are “God-given” and which aren’t. Nor can theology, I would argue.
Approximately 1.7% of persons are born intersexed, with a mixture of male and female characteristics. Medical science has a long list of intersex conditions, such as Klinefelter Syndrome or Adrenal Hyperplasia. Such intersexed conditions complicate references to an individual’s “God-given sexuality”. Disregarded by this simplification are the subject’s chromosomal sex, hormonal sex, sex of internal organs, neurophysiology, and subjective gender identity (internal experience of themselves), none of which will necessarily cohere with the sex of the genitals, none of which will necessarily fall into a neat binary. Some people refuse to recognize the internal truth of transgender and nonbinary persons. When religiously motivated, these people sometimes insist that the binaries they impose are biblical: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27 NRSV). This passage accurately describes perhaps the majority of the human population. But what about that minority who do not fit into the categories, who lie on the continuum rather than at either end, or who unite both ends? Did God also create them?
God is invisible, but Christians acknowledge God. In many quarters, the invisibility of transgender and nonbinary persons’ neurophysiology, and personal gender experience, is grounds for its denial. We can see genitals, but we can’t see brains, so we prioritize genitals over brains, even though it’s the person’s brain (mostly) that determines their own experience of their own gender. What this says to transgender and nonbinary persons, essentially, is that they should not have been born into a gender minority. Leslie Feinberg describes her experience of such rejection: “We wish you were invisible; we don’t accept you. We wish you would simply go away, and we will pretend that you don’t exist. We will ostracize and marginalize you. We will deny you any rights because you are different and we hate you” (Feinberg, Transliberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, 52). Attitudes like this, often articulated by Christians, caused one transgendered person to wear a T-shirt saying: “Jesus hates me, this I know, for the Christians tell me so.”
Christians follow Christ, who included the excluded precisely because he celebrated all. Therefore, Christians should include the excluded and celebrate all. As followers of Jesus the Healer (who is also Jesus the Christ) this essay will abide by the principle that Christians are called to ameliorate human suffering rather than exacerbate it. As Christ healed, so Christians are called to heal (Luke 9:11). And in our interpretation of the Bible, Christians are called to carry the cross, not erect it (Luke 14.27).
Gender identity is not produced by environment or upbringing. Here’s the proof. The argument that socialization (behavior and hormonal therapy) could determine or alter gender identity is subverted by the story of Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer. Bruce Reimer, as an infant, lost the totality of his penis to a botched electric circumcision. Phalloplasty (the construction of a new penis) was more experimental then than it is now, and was not even attempted. Instead, on the advice of Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University, Bruce’s parents, Ron and Janet, agreed to have Bruce undergo a sex change operation and hormone therapy, converting their little boy into a little girl. Throughout her childhood, with the most loving of intentions, Ron and Janet gave Brenda shots, dressed her in girls’ clothes, encouraged her to play as a girl, and totally – socially, surgically, and chemically, encouraged Brenda to identify with the female gender. In the meantime, John Money produced paper after paper commenting on the wonderful success of his experiment.
The problem was that Brenda Reimer felt like a boy, acted like a boy, and wanted to be a boy. She played with boys’ toys, built forts, had snowball fights, liked dumptrucks, wanted to be a Boy Scout instead of a Girl Scout, and played army. She avoided dolls, sewing machines, and the kitchen. She tried to urinate standing up. She was a tomboy, but unlike most of the tomboys, would never outgrow it. She wanted to shave like her father. The prospect of growing breasts terrified her. She was derided by her schoolmates as “butch” and “Cavewoman,” an insult to which she replied with punches. She was attracted to girls. As the girl grew older, and increasing hormones were needed to fully feminize her, she resisted more and more. When asked by her physician, “Don’t you want to be a woman?” Brenda just screamed, “No!”
At the age of fifteen, her father told her the truth: that she had been born a boy, that her penis had been burned off, that they had tried to raise her as a girl instead. She felt anger, disbelief, amazement – but primarily relief. Now she knew why she felt the way she did. Now she understood why she behaved the way she did. Now she knew why she wanted to be a boy, and that she should be a boy. She immediately demanded to be switched back, and was (Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl).
The above summary is offered only to establish that socialization and hormone therapy cannot change brain structure. Although one story is not scientifically conclusive, many scientific studies imply that the brain’s sexual differentiation is inelastic; we are born with a gender, not as a blank slate. Thus the theory that behavior changes neurophysiology falls flat. More importantly, this theory ignores the life stories of transsexuals. No one has ever claimed: “I was born with a boy’s genitalia and I really enjoyed being a boy and really identified with my boyishness, but when I got to be an adult I decided to spend $100,000 for gender-affirming surgery so that I could be rejected by my society, my family, and my church.” Instead, in every story, transgender identity simply arises, just like cis-gendered identity. Transgender and nonbinary persons tell stories much like Leslie Feinberg’s:
I didn’t want to be different. I longed to be everything grownups wanted, so they would love me. I followed their rules, tried my best to please. But there was something about me that made them knit their eyebrows and frown. No one ever offered me a name for what was wrong with me. That’s what made me afraid it was really bad. I only came to recognize its melody through its constant refrain: “Is it a boy or girl?” “I’m sick of people asking me if she’s a boy or a girl,” I overheard my mother complain to my father. “Everywhere I take her, people ask me.” I was ten years old. I was no longer a little kid and I didn’t have a sliver of cuteness to hide behind. The world’s patience with me was fraying, and it panicked me. When I was really small I thought I would do anything to change whatever was wrong with me. Now I didn’t want to change. I just wanted people to stop being mad all the time.
Transgender and nonbinary persons report their experience of gender identity as something they were born with, and not as something chosen. Many try, for many years, to choose that gender identity which is congruent with their genitalia. But neurophysiology and personal authenticity prevent such a choice and force them back into their true gender identity. How should Christians address this very painful issue?
Short answer: with love and acceptance that celebrates the person as they are. As disciples of Jesus the Healer (who is also Jesus the Christ), Christians are called to the vocation and discipline of relieving suffering. We are not called to worsen suffering. Yet often, accidentally, we do. The means to alleviate the suffering of transgender and nonbinary persons is to recognize the biological reality (not psychopathology) of their condition, and to support them in the decisions they make.
We are proposing a church that manifests God’s agapic love of all humankind. Jesus is called “the express image of God’s person” (Hebrews 1:3), yet he never condemns anyone for being born a certain way. Jesus responds only to the disposition of the person’s spirit and the ethics produced by that spirit. What he condemns is the spirit of compassionless legalism; what he embraces is the spirit of fearless generosity. And when Jesus seeks examples of faith, he finds them at the margins, not centers, of society: “He never refuses to love or accept anyone who came to him with a genuine desire to experience God’s presence and truth. He never tells people to go away and not bother him until they can find some way to be more socially acceptable (e.g., the thief on the cross, Luke 23:39-43)” (Sheridan, Crossing Over: Liberating the Transgendered Christian, 57).
Transgender and nonbinary persons have suffered and will continue to suffer from a society that fears the unusual and unknown, and from demagogues who feed those fears. A church in the image of Christ will not erect walls of painful exclusion, but will instead offer celebration and embrace. That celebration will ordain, marry, and accompany transgender and nonbinary persons as they seek to manifest their God-given authenticity. In doing so, the Church will best serve as the body of Christ and as the incarnation of the teachings of Jesus, who pleads: “Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
*****
For more reading, please see:
Dowd, Chris and Christiana Beardsley. Trans Affirming Churches: How to Celebrate Gender-Variant People and Their Loved Ones. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2020.
Feinberg, Leslie. Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
Sheridan, Vanessa. Crossing Over: Liberating the Transgendered Christian. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001.
June 1, 2026
Churches should ordain all genders to leadership positions in the church. Patriarchy wastes the God-given talents of women. All genders should flourish within whatever vocation (calling) God has given them, including the vocation to pastoral ministry.
Regarding women specifically, the celebration of women’s gifts would be in keeping with the Bible, which deems both men and women to be made in the image of God, to love and be loved and celebrate love (Genesis 1:27). Although it was written during times of horrible misogyny and violence, the Bible still repeatedly records women’s leadership. Miriam was a prophet (Exodus 15:20) who led the exodus along with Moses and Aaron (Micah 6:4). God appointed the prophet Deborah as a judge, leader of the Israelites (Judges 4). When the priests Hilkiah, Ahikam, Achbor, Shaphan, and Asaiah needed help interpreting a newly discovered religious text, they consulted the prophet Huldah, wife of Shallum (2 Kings 22:14). Isaiah’s wife was likewise a prophet (Isaiah 8:3). And the prophet Joel predicted that the Holy Spirit would animate both men and women (Joel 2:28–29).
Recognizing the powerful women hailed by his tradition, Jesus chose to celebrate and empower women. The Gospel of Luke records that Anna the prophet praised Jesus’s arrival at the temple as a boy, making her the third person (after Mary and Simeon) to recognize him as the Messiah (Luke 2:36–38). Once Jesus began his ministry, he defied patriarchy by including women among his disciples; he included among his followers Mary Magdalene, Joanna (the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza), Susanna, and many other women who supported Jesus with their own funds (Luke 8:1–3).
In the ancient world, women were rarely considered suitable for education, but Jesus invited them to learn (Luke 10:38–42). Matthew records only female disciples being present at the crucifixion (Matthew 27:55–56). Luke recounts that women were the first to discover Jesus’s resurrection, but when they told the male disciples, none but Peter believed (Luke 24
–11). Women were Jesus’s most faithful disciples, perhaps because Jesus has no fragile male ego to defend.
The early church continued Jesus’s liberating praxis. Paul writes that, since all are one in Christ Jesus, there is no longer male and female (Galatians 3:28). He acknowledges that women can be prophets (1 Corinthians 11:5), an acknowledgement ratified in Acts, which deems Philip the evangelist to have four unmarried daughters with the gift of prophecy (Acts 21:8–9). Paul calls Phoebe a deacon of the church (Romans 16:1) and calls Junia an apostle (Romans 16 ). He refers to Euodia and Syntyche as his coworkers (Philippians 4:2–3), as well as Prisca, Mary, and Tryphosa (Romans 16:3–12).
One of the oldest Christian basilicas in Israel refers to “the Holy Mother Sophronia,” while its references to male and female deacons are almost equal in number. Scholars now call this basilica the “Church of the Deaconesses.”
Despite this evidence for the historical importance of women’s ministry, most churches do not ordain women. They give a variety of “reasons” for their refusal, but there are good reasons to ordain women, who can preach as well as men, perform sacraments as well as men, care for the sick as well as men, interpret the Bible as well as men, and lead as well as men. These “reasons” cannot justify the ongoing waste of talent and denial of call.
Tragically, people are so used to male priests and pastors that they have a hard time imagining otherwise. Given our unholy tendency to divinize the familiar and demonize the unfamiliar, the idea of women’s ordination offends many. Nevertheless, those denominations that ordain women generally attract more female than male pastors. The first church that my wife, Abby, and I pastored had a slew of female ministers before we came as co-pastors. When I gave my first sermon, a girl in the congregation exclaimed to her mother, “I didn’t know men could preach!”
That girl had never felt spiritually excluded, thank God. By ordaining women and using gender-balanced language for God, we assure girls that they, too, partake in divinity. We inform boys that girls are their spiritual equals and deserving of equally respectful treatment. We encourage women who have been marginalized by their spiritual traditions to feel centered. And we allow men, many of whom have or had emotionally distant relationships with their fathers, to have a closer relationship with their metaphorical Mother-God.
The Reign of Love, toward which the church works, celebrates all difference as a gift from God that enriches reality. For the church, the many genders provide the many perspectives through which we see into the Holy, together. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 224-226)
For further reading, please see:
David, Ariel. “Byzantine Basilica with Graves of Female Ministers and Baffling Mass Burials Found in Israel.” Haaretz, Nov. 15, 2021. https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. London: SCM, 1995.
Ordain women now! It's biblical, it's rational, it's time.
(Please note: this week’s essay will argue for the ordination of women. Next week’s will argue for the ordination of nonbinary and transgender persons.)Churches should ordain all genders to leadership positions in the church. Patriarchy wastes the God-given talents of women. All genders should flourish within whatever vocation (calling) God has given them, including the vocation to pastoral ministry.
Regarding women specifically, the celebration of women’s gifts would be in keeping with the Bible, which deems both men and women to be made in the image of God, to love and be loved and celebrate love (Genesis 1:27). Although it was written during times of horrible misogyny and violence, the Bible still repeatedly records women’s leadership. Miriam was a prophet (Exodus 15:20) who led the exodus along with Moses and Aaron (Micah 6:4). God appointed the prophet Deborah as a judge, leader of the Israelites (Judges 4). When the priests Hilkiah, Ahikam, Achbor, Shaphan, and Asaiah needed help interpreting a newly discovered religious text, they consulted the prophet Huldah, wife of Shallum (2 Kings 22:14). Isaiah’s wife was likewise a prophet (Isaiah 8:3). And the prophet Joel predicted that the Holy Spirit would animate both men and women (Joel 2:28–29).
Recognizing the powerful women hailed by his tradition, Jesus chose to celebrate and empower women. The Gospel of Luke records that Anna the prophet praised Jesus’s arrival at the temple as a boy, making her the third person (after Mary and Simeon) to recognize him as the Messiah (Luke 2:36–38). Once Jesus began his ministry, he defied patriarchy by including women among his disciples; he included among his followers Mary Magdalene, Joanna (the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza), Susanna, and many other women who supported Jesus with their own funds (Luke 8:1–3).
In the ancient world, women were rarely considered suitable for education, but Jesus invited them to learn (Luke 10:38–42). Matthew records only female disciples being present at the crucifixion (Matthew 27:55–56). Luke recounts that women were the first to discover Jesus’s resurrection, but when they told the male disciples, none but Peter believed (Luke 24
–11). Women were Jesus’s most faithful disciples, perhaps because Jesus has no fragile male ego to defend.
The early church continued Jesus’s liberating praxis. Paul writes that, since all are one in Christ Jesus, there is no longer male and female (Galatians 3:28). He acknowledges that women can be prophets (1 Corinthians 11:5), an acknowledgement ratified in Acts, which deems Philip the evangelist to have four unmarried daughters with the gift of prophecy (Acts 21:8–9). Paul calls Phoebe a deacon of the church (Romans 16:1) and calls Junia an apostle (Romans 16
). He refers to Euodia and Syntyche as his coworkers (Philippians 4:2–3), as well as Prisca, Mary, and Tryphosa (Romans 16:3–12).
One of the oldest Christian basilicas in Israel refers to “the Holy Mother Sophronia,” while its references to male and female deacons are almost equal in number. Scholars now call this basilica the “Church of the Deaconesses.”
Despite this evidence for the historical importance of women’s ministry, most churches do not ordain women. They give a variety of “reasons” for their refusal, but there are good reasons to ordain women, who can preach as well as men, perform sacraments as well as men, care for the sick as well as men, interpret the Bible as well as men, and lead as well as men. These “reasons” cannot justify the ongoing waste of talent and denial of call.
Tragically, people are so used to male priests and pastors that they have a hard time imagining otherwise. Given our unholy tendency to divinize the familiar and demonize the unfamiliar, the idea of women’s ordination offends many. Nevertheless, those denominations that ordain women generally attract more female than male pastors. The first church that my wife, Abby, and I pastored had a slew of female ministers before we came as co-pastors. When I gave my first sermon, a girl in the congregation exclaimed to her mother, “I didn’t know men could preach!”
That girl had never felt spiritually excluded, thank God. By ordaining women and using gender-balanced language for God, we assure girls that they, too, partake in divinity. We inform boys that girls are their spiritual equals and deserving of equally respectful treatment. We encourage women who have been marginalized by their spiritual traditions to feel centered. And we allow men, many of whom have or had emotionally distant relationships with their fathers, to have a closer relationship with their metaphorical Mother-God.
The Reign of Love, toward which the church works, celebrates all difference as a gift from God that enriches reality. For the church, the many genders provide the many perspectives through which we see into the Holy, together. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 224-226)
For further reading, please see:
David, Ariel. “Byzantine Basilica with Graves of Female Ministers and Baffling Mass Burials Found in Israel.” Haaretz, Nov. 15, 2021. https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. London: SCM, 1995.
May 26, 2026
Bad theology produces Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS). Alice Walker is a queer black woman who grew up in a homophobic, racist, misogynistic culture. But her faith empowered her to declare, “I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way.”
Alice Walker’s statement is an act of healing for herself and others. She was wounded by unholy forces that told her she was not enough, that she was inherently distorted because she was Black, female, and a lesbian. But she reclaimed her identity as a blessing, then shared that blessing with others, helping them to reclaim their own identities.
Tragically, many of the psychic wounds that people receive are from bad theology promulgated in churches. Bad theology threatens believers with this-worldly condemnation and next-worldly damnation, causing “religious trauma syndrome” (RTS)—fear, anxiety, hatred, and self-loathing.
This debilitating spirituality is produced by religious ideologies of control. High-control church leaders who want parishioners to be puppets teach that God is a puppeteer and that the leaders are the strings. To disobey is to malfunction. Fearful that freedom will cause people to stray from the straight and narrow path, authoritarian churches erect high walls along that path so parishioners can’t peek over the top and see other options for life.
Children should be nurtured not condemned. I had a friend in seminary who grew up in rural Texas in the 1980s. In the fifth grade he was at an all-male sleepover party with friends, and they all started looking at pictures of women in underwear in a Sears catalog. They went a few pages past the women’s section into the men’s section, which my friend was much more interested in. He noticed that no one else was interested in the pictures of men in underwear and realized that he was gay. His family went to a fundamentalist Baptist church, and the people there were (otherwise) very nice, but they taught that being gay was sick and sinful, so he thought that he was sick and sinful. He kept his orientation a secret, in shame.
I have another friend who was told as a child, by otherwise very nice people, that Jesus was coming back soon and would take all the Christians (Bible believing, born again) to heaven and send everyone else to hell. He went to bed every night in terror, praying for his non-Christian and semi-Christian friends.
And so it continues. Beautiful children are told that they are sinful in the eyes of God. Adolescents are made to feel guilty for the natural sexual drives developing within. Women are told that their gender is responsible for the fall of all “mankind,” being morally blamed even as they are linguistically excluded. Suffering church members are asked what they did to offend God to warrant this punishment. Patients on their deathbeds are questioned about their wrongdoings and offered expiation so they won’t go to hell. Bad theology obsesses over sin, guilt, purity, and damnation, turning an already difficult life into fully accomplished hell by anticipation.
Good theology produces flourishing. Faith reveals that women, men, trans, nonbinary, Black, Brown, White, Asian, able, disabled, rich, poor, middle-class persons and more are all equal. They are equally created by God, infinitely loved by God, and universally called to lives of meaning, purpose, and joy. Recognizing this truth, churches must model egalitarianism—equality in thought and practice—to the world.
Egalitarian community makes use of all members’ talents and places them in service of the common good. In contrast, patriarchal and heterosexist communities waste the talents of many members by denying them full access to leadership positions, limiting both personal and institutional flourishing.
As egalitarian, churches are also universalist—universally valuing all persons, inside and outside the church, especially those persons devalued by society. This universalism is the mission of the church. Since all are children of God and inseparable from one another, ethics becomes universalist—all are treated equally (Matthew 5:43–48). Since Abba is the divine mother who births all creation (Job 38:29; Isaiah 66 ; etc.), and no mother rejects her sinful child, salvation is universal (1 Timothy 2:3–4).
In a lethally tribal world, universalism provides the church with a healing mission—resistance to fear, anger, and hatred through the ministry of faith, hope, and love. Assigning the church this mission, Jesus states that his followers should be kind to all, even as God makes it rain on the just and unjust (Matthew 5:45). Thus, the church does not prefer Christians to non-Christians, or men to women, or rich to poor. We are all permeated by implicit biases and tribal identities, but joining a church begins a journey of resistance to these traditional loyalties. Through this journey, we learn to value all persons, of every nationality, race, religion, class, orientation, and gender.
In allegiance to the cosmic God rather than our tribal god, the church replaces natural loyalties with a universal family. Jesus states, “Who is my mother? Who are my kin?” Then, pointing to the disciples, Jesus said, “This is my family. Whoever does the will of Abba God in heaven is my sibling and parent” (Matthew 12:48–50).
Following Jesus produces counter-cultural communities. Egalitarian, universalist churches practice social resurrection, defying accepted norms in witness to the universal God. In the late 1960s, Anne Moody and other civil rights activists tried to racially integrate southern churches. On the Sunday of one such action, White churches met the Black activists with armed policemen, paddy wagons, and dogs. A few Whites protested, saying that the Blacks should be let in, but they were outnumbered.
Having been rejected from several White churches, Anne and her friend went to pick up two activists who were trying to integrate an Episcopal church. When they got there, the friends were nowhere to be seen, so Anne got nervous. But after circling the church a few times, the thought occurred to her: “What if they got in?” Anne and her friend walked up the steps to the church, which were miraculously free of armed policemen and dogs. They entered the church, where worship had already started. Two ushers approached them, asking, “May we help you?” “Yes,” Anne said, “We would like to worship with you today.” “Will you sign the guest list, please, and we will show you to your seats,” said the White ushers. Anne and her friend were seated with the other two Black activists, and four Black women worshiped in an all-White church. Anne remembers, “When the services were over the minister invited us to visit again. He said it as if he meant it, and I began to have a little hope.”
That was a White church in a White supremacist culture hosting four Black women. Some churches immerse themselves in the gospel but absorb it no better than a rock absorbs water. Other churches immerse themselves in the gospel and absorb it like a sponge, recognizing that Abba loves all, that Jesus represents the agapic love of God, and that Sophia counsels love without boundaries. These churches practice the gospel to transform society, thereby revealing the universalism of God, rejecting the exclusivism of their society, and implementing Revelation’s vision of the saved community, which is a community of difference: “After that, I saw before me an immense crowd without number, from every nation, tribe, people, and language. They stood in front of the throne and the Lamb, dressed in long white robes and holding palm branches. And they cried out in a loud voice, ‘Salvation is of our God, who sits on the throne, and of the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7 ).
The Gospels relate Jesus’s radical inclusivity in his story of the prodigal son (inclusion of the sinful), his choice of a Samaritan as hero-protagonist (inclusion of the religious outsider), his decision to dine with Simon the leper (inclusion of the scripturally excluded), his decision to dine with Zacchaeus the tax collector (inclusion of the hated powerful), his decision to converse with the Canaanite woman (inclusion of the marginalized female), and his protection of the woman framed for adultery (inclusion of the socially expendable). In the imitation of Christ, inspired by the Spirit, we are given the vocation of enacting the Sustainer’s imagination. This activity is our meaning and purpose. Without it we are lost. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 221-224)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of Growing Up Poor and Black in the Rural South. New York: Random House, 2011.
Walker, Alice. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. New York: New Press, 2010.
Bad theology produces suffering. Good theology produces flourishing.
Bad theology produces Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS). Alice Walker is a queer black woman who grew up in a homophobic, racist, misogynistic culture. But her faith empowered her to declare, “I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way.”
Alice Walker’s statement is an act of healing for herself and others. She was wounded by unholy forces that told her she was not enough, that she was inherently distorted because she was Black, female, and a lesbian. But she reclaimed her identity as a blessing, then shared that blessing with others, helping them to reclaim their own identities.
Tragically, many of the psychic wounds that people receive are from bad theology promulgated in churches. Bad theology threatens believers with this-worldly condemnation and next-worldly damnation, causing “religious trauma syndrome” (RTS)—fear, anxiety, hatred, and self-loathing.
This debilitating spirituality is produced by religious ideologies of control. High-control church leaders who want parishioners to be puppets teach that God is a puppeteer and that the leaders are the strings. To disobey is to malfunction. Fearful that freedom will cause people to stray from the straight and narrow path, authoritarian churches erect high walls along that path so parishioners can’t peek over the top and see other options for life.
Children should be nurtured not condemned. I had a friend in seminary who grew up in rural Texas in the 1980s. In the fifth grade he was at an all-male sleepover party with friends, and they all started looking at pictures of women in underwear in a Sears catalog. They went a few pages past the women’s section into the men’s section, which my friend was much more interested in. He noticed that no one else was interested in the pictures of men in underwear and realized that he was gay. His family went to a fundamentalist Baptist church, and the people there were (otherwise) very nice, but they taught that being gay was sick and sinful, so he thought that he was sick and sinful. He kept his orientation a secret, in shame.
I have another friend who was told as a child, by otherwise very nice people, that Jesus was coming back soon and would take all the Christians (Bible believing, born again) to heaven and send everyone else to hell. He went to bed every night in terror, praying for his non-Christian and semi-Christian friends.
And so it continues. Beautiful children are told that they are sinful in the eyes of God. Adolescents are made to feel guilty for the natural sexual drives developing within. Women are told that their gender is responsible for the fall of all “mankind,” being morally blamed even as they are linguistically excluded. Suffering church members are asked what they did to offend God to warrant this punishment. Patients on their deathbeds are questioned about their wrongdoings and offered expiation so they won’t go to hell. Bad theology obsesses over sin, guilt, purity, and damnation, turning an already difficult life into fully accomplished hell by anticipation.
Good theology produces flourishing. Faith reveals that women, men, trans, nonbinary, Black, Brown, White, Asian, able, disabled, rich, poor, middle-class persons and more are all equal. They are equally created by God, infinitely loved by God, and universally called to lives of meaning, purpose, and joy. Recognizing this truth, churches must model egalitarianism—equality in thought and practice—to the world.
Egalitarian community makes use of all members’ talents and places them in service of the common good. In contrast, patriarchal and heterosexist communities waste the talents of many members by denying them full access to leadership positions, limiting both personal and institutional flourishing.
As egalitarian, churches are also universalist—universally valuing all persons, inside and outside the church, especially those persons devalued by society. This universalism is the mission of the church. Since all are children of God and inseparable from one another, ethics becomes universalist—all are treated equally (Matthew 5:43–48). Since Abba is the divine mother who births all creation (Job 38:29; Isaiah 66
; etc.), and no mother rejects her sinful child, salvation is universal (1 Timothy 2:3–4).
In a lethally tribal world, universalism provides the church with a healing mission—resistance to fear, anger, and hatred through the ministry of faith, hope, and love. Assigning the church this mission, Jesus states that his followers should be kind to all, even as God makes it rain on the just and unjust (Matthew 5:45). Thus, the church does not prefer Christians to non-Christians, or men to women, or rich to poor. We are all permeated by implicit biases and tribal identities, but joining a church begins a journey of resistance to these traditional loyalties. Through this journey, we learn to value all persons, of every nationality, race, religion, class, orientation, and gender.
In allegiance to the cosmic God rather than our tribal god, the church replaces natural loyalties with a universal family. Jesus states, “Who is my mother? Who are my kin?” Then, pointing to the disciples, Jesus said, “This is my family. Whoever does the will of Abba God in heaven is my sibling and parent” (Matthew 12:48–50).
Following Jesus produces counter-cultural communities. Egalitarian, universalist churches practice social resurrection, defying accepted norms in witness to the universal God. In the late 1960s, Anne Moody and other civil rights activists tried to racially integrate southern churches. On the Sunday of one such action, White churches met the Black activists with armed policemen, paddy wagons, and dogs. A few Whites protested, saying that the Blacks should be let in, but they were outnumbered.
Having been rejected from several White churches, Anne and her friend went to pick up two activists who were trying to integrate an Episcopal church. When they got there, the friends were nowhere to be seen, so Anne got nervous. But after circling the church a few times, the thought occurred to her: “What if they got in?” Anne and her friend walked up the steps to the church, which were miraculously free of armed policemen and dogs. They entered the church, where worship had already started. Two ushers approached them, asking, “May we help you?” “Yes,” Anne said, “We would like to worship with you today.” “Will you sign the guest list, please, and we will show you to your seats,” said the White ushers. Anne and her friend were seated with the other two Black activists, and four Black women worshiped in an all-White church. Anne remembers, “When the services were over the minister invited us to visit again. He said it as if he meant it, and I began to have a little hope.”
That was a White church in a White supremacist culture hosting four Black women. Some churches immerse themselves in the gospel but absorb it no better than a rock absorbs water. Other churches immerse themselves in the gospel and absorb it like a sponge, recognizing that Abba loves all, that Jesus represents the agapic love of God, and that Sophia counsels love without boundaries. These churches practice the gospel to transform society, thereby revealing the universalism of God, rejecting the exclusivism of their society, and implementing Revelation’s vision of the saved community, which is a community of difference: “After that, I saw before me an immense crowd without number, from every nation, tribe, people, and language. They stood in front of the throne and the Lamb, dressed in long white robes and holding palm branches. And they cried out in a loud voice, ‘Salvation is of our God, who sits on the throne, and of the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7
).
The Gospels relate Jesus’s radical inclusivity in his story of the prodigal son (inclusion of the sinful), his choice of a Samaritan as hero-protagonist (inclusion of the religious outsider), his decision to dine with Simon the leper (inclusion of the scripturally excluded), his decision to dine with Zacchaeus the tax collector (inclusion of the hated powerful), his decision to converse with the Canaanite woman (inclusion of the marginalized female), and his protection of the woman framed for adultery (inclusion of the socially expendable). In the imitation of Christ, inspired by the Spirit, we are given the vocation of enacting the Sustainer’s imagination. This activity is our meaning and purpose. Without it we are lost. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 221-224)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of Growing Up Poor and Black in the Rural South. New York: Random House, 2011.
Walker, Alice. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. New York: New Press, 2010.
May 12, 2026
Because God is authentic community, and authenticity demands freedom, authentic churches are low social control groups. They don’t demand that you subordinate your self to an ideal. Instead, they nurture your ideal self, helping you bring it to full expression.
A low social control church respects members’ uniqueness, trusting that cohesion will emerge from diversity, as it does within God. Some churches deny the possibility of unity-in-diversity and become high social control groups, subjecting members to shame, shunning, denial of sacraments, and threats of damnation if they fail to be who the church wants them to be.
These churches demand that members subordinate their God-given uniqueness to a church-generated stereotype, hiding their authentic self within a conformist shell.
In high control churches, where members are opaque to one another, secrets are kept. But, as it is said, where there are secrets, there is shame.
Authentic churches celebrate their LGBTQ+ members. In God-centered community, we must trust one another’s self-revelation. We must practice interpersonal honesty or, in philosophical language, intersubjectivity. For decades, most churches have denied the self-revelation of their gay and lesbian members. These members are telling their churches that they can find emotional intimacy only with members of the same sex, they are telling their churches that this disposition cannot be changed, and they are telling their churches that this disposition does not need to be changed, that they feel blessed in the loving relationships they are in.
At the same time, most churches are denying the self-revelation of their trans and nonbinary members, who are telling them that they do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth, that their interior experience is of the opposite gender, or both genders, or no gender, and that they need to live out that identity to live fully.
For decades, most churches have told these parishioners that their inner life is unnatural, or unbiblical, or diseased, or in need of repair. Most churches have told these members to conform their inner self to their outer appearance. In so doing, these churches refuse to see transgendered and nonbinary persons as God sees them: “God does not see as mortals see; mortals see outward appearances but God sees into the heart” (1 Samuel 16 b).
The church’s rejection of their authentic selves causes horrific harm to trans and nonbinary persons. Nevertheless, they persist. They are risking themselves in repeated acts of vulnerability and self-disclosure, like unto God. They are coming out and suffering rejection, yet they continue to reveal themselves until the world sees them the way God sees them. The perseverance of these saints is changing minds, which is changing souls, creating a more grace-filled world.
Transparency transforms and transfigures. Just as the disciples were allowed to see Jesus transfigured (Mark 9:2–8), LGBTQ+ self-revelation allows the world to see itself transfigured, liberated from fear and invited into celebration. This transfiguration is not an act of inclusion on the part of the excluders, with the excluded passively waiting at the gate. No, it is an ongoing act of conversion by the excluded, of the excluders, for the excluders, who continue to suffer behind walls of ignorance. This conversion is for all. Like God, it is for us; hence, for all of us.
For the trans community, external transition to their neurological birth gender is often accompanied by persecution—expulsion from home, loss of job, physical attacks, and worse. Despite this persecution, most record greater life satisfaction after choosing to express their internal gender identity.
To mark their transition, most trans persons change their name. Likewise, the Bible frequently renames persons when they undergo a profound change: Abram became Abraham, Sarai became Sarah (Genesis 17), Jacob becomes Israel (Genesis 32), Simon becomes Peter (Matthew 16), and Saul becomes Paul (Acts 13). Associates who reject the transitions of transgendered persons will sometimes express this rejection by “deadnaming” them—calling them by the name given at birth rather than their chosen name. Would these rejectionists also deadname Paul as Saul? Sarah as Sarai?
The Bible is about transformation: our potential for it, our call to it, and our invitation to celebrate it. Today we can fulfill that call by supporting LGBTQ+ rights and LGBTQ+ identity, until everyone can say, with Alice Walker, “I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way.” (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, page 219-221)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015.
Walker, Alice. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. New York: New Press, 2010.
The Church Must Celebrate LGBTQ+ Persons as LGBTQ+
Bad churches are inauthentic; good churches are authentic. The persons of the Trinity live in interpersonal freedom, never hiding any part of themselves. We are made in the image of the Trinity, for such honesty. Therefore, in faithful community we can express our deepest self authentically. If a church demands that we hide our self to be accepted, if a church creates an artificial standard and demands that we conform to it, then that church has stifled the image of God within us.Because God is authentic community, and authenticity demands freedom, authentic churches are low social control groups. They don’t demand that you subordinate your self to an ideal. Instead, they nurture your ideal self, helping you bring it to full expression.
A low social control church respects members’ uniqueness, trusting that cohesion will emerge from diversity, as it does within God. Some churches deny the possibility of unity-in-diversity and become high social control groups, subjecting members to shame, shunning, denial of sacraments, and threats of damnation if they fail to be who the church wants them to be.
These churches demand that members subordinate their God-given uniqueness to a church-generated stereotype, hiding their authentic self within a conformist shell.
In high control churches, where members are opaque to one another, secrets are kept. But, as it is said, where there are secrets, there is shame.
Authentic churches celebrate their LGBTQ+ members. In God-centered community, we must trust one another’s self-revelation. We must practice interpersonal honesty or, in philosophical language, intersubjectivity. For decades, most churches have denied the self-revelation of their gay and lesbian members. These members are telling their churches that they can find emotional intimacy only with members of the same sex, they are telling their churches that this disposition cannot be changed, and they are telling their churches that this disposition does not need to be changed, that they feel blessed in the loving relationships they are in.
At the same time, most churches are denying the self-revelation of their trans and nonbinary members, who are telling them that they do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth, that their interior experience is of the opposite gender, or both genders, or no gender, and that they need to live out that identity to live fully.
For decades, most churches have told these parishioners that their inner life is unnatural, or unbiblical, or diseased, or in need of repair. Most churches have told these members to conform their inner self to their outer appearance. In so doing, these churches refuse to see transgendered and nonbinary persons as God sees them: “God does not see as mortals see; mortals see outward appearances but God sees into the heart” (1 Samuel 16
b).
The church’s rejection of their authentic selves causes horrific harm to trans and nonbinary persons. Nevertheless, they persist. They are risking themselves in repeated acts of vulnerability and self-disclosure, like unto God. They are coming out and suffering rejection, yet they continue to reveal themselves until the world sees them the way God sees them. The perseverance of these saints is changing minds, which is changing souls, creating a more grace-filled world.
Transparency transforms and transfigures. Just as the disciples were allowed to see Jesus transfigured (Mark 9:2–8), LGBTQ+ self-revelation allows the world to see itself transfigured, liberated from fear and invited into celebration. This transfiguration is not an act of inclusion on the part of the excluders, with the excluded passively waiting at the gate. No, it is an ongoing act of conversion by the excluded, of the excluders, for the excluders, who continue to suffer behind walls of ignorance. This conversion is for all. Like God, it is for us; hence, for all of us.
For the trans community, external transition to their neurological birth gender is often accompanied by persecution—expulsion from home, loss of job, physical attacks, and worse. Despite this persecution, most record greater life satisfaction after choosing to express their internal gender identity.
To mark their transition, most trans persons change their name. Likewise, the Bible frequently renames persons when they undergo a profound change: Abram became Abraham, Sarai became Sarah (Genesis 17), Jacob becomes Israel (Genesis 32), Simon becomes Peter (Matthew 16), and Saul becomes Paul (Acts 13). Associates who reject the transitions of transgendered persons will sometimes express this rejection by “deadnaming” them—calling them by the name given at birth rather than their chosen name. Would these rejectionists also deadname Paul as Saul? Sarah as Sarai?
The Bible is about transformation: our potential for it, our call to it, and our invitation to celebrate it. Today we can fulfill that call by supporting LGBTQ+ rights and LGBTQ+ identity, until everyone can say, with Alice Walker, “I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way.” (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, page 219-221)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015.
Walker, Alice. The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker. New York: New Press, 2010.
May 6, 2026
We are made in the image of God, for authentic community. In previous essays, I have argued that the Trinity is three unique persons united through love into one divine community. Abba, Jesus, and Sophia are specific centers of consciousness, thought, and feeling; hence, each one is a subject— a self with a specific identity. An object is a thing without consciousness, thought, or feeling, while a subject is a person with consciousness, thought, and feeling.
The divine subjects differ from human subjects in their perfect love for, and openness to, one another. What they could hide, they always choose to share. Their subjectivity is transparent. Hence, they are not only subjective, they are intersubjective—perfectly open and lovingly transparent to one another. God is intersubjectivity itself. By way of consequence, individual uniqueness, and its contribution to the kaleidoscope of difference, is holy.
To be known, we must know one another. Recognizing our own uniqueness, and our unique value, we desire to be seen. We want the depth of our subjectivity to be known, even if we don’t know it ourselves. We want to be acknowledged as a self who possesses a soul. We want to be perceived as consequential, not because we’re rich or famous, but because we are of inherent worth. Such co-celebration is what should happen in religious communities. The endeavor is sacred, and even partial achievement grants us a foretaste of the kingdom.
As gathering places for the people of God, churches should be places of transparency and intersubjectivity. Such openness, in a culture of acceptance, is healing in itself. We can think of participants in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting who begin by stating their name and their addiction to alcohol, always in full confidence of welcome.
Many churches claim to be so welcoming, yet they subtly coerce members into that church’s image of what a Christian looks like, encircling them in candy-coated barbed wire. Other churches are truly welcoming, encouraging participants to fully embody the unique image that God created them to be. These churches encourage authenticity, which is confident self-revelation, an external life lived in accord with one’s internal self. Such churches truly practice Paul’s instruction, “Accept one another as Christ accepted us, for the glory of God” (Romans 15 ). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, page 218)
In our age of "the Mar-a-Lago look," we need authentic community more than ever
We are made in the image of God, for authentic community. In previous essays, I have argued that the Trinity is three unique persons united through love into one divine community. Abba, Jesus, and Sophia are specific centers of consciousness, thought, and feeling; hence, each one is a subject— a self with a specific identity. An object is a thing without consciousness, thought, or feeling, while a subject is a person with consciousness, thought, and feeling.
The divine subjects differ from human subjects in their perfect love for, and openness to, one another. What they could hide, they always choose to share. Their subjectivity is transparent. Hence, they are not only subjective, they are intersubjective—perfectly open and lovingly transparent to one another. God is intersubjectivity itself. By way of consequence, individual uniqueness, and its contribution to the kaleidoscope of difference, is holy.
To be known, we must know one another. Recognizing our own uniqueness, and our unique value, we desire to be seen. We want the depth of our subjectivity to be known, even if we don’t know it ourselves. We want to be acknowledged as a self who possesses a soul. We want to be perceived as consequential, not because we’re rich or famous, but because we are of inherent worth. Such co-celebration is what should happen in religious communities. The endeavor is sacred, and even partial achievement grants us a foretaste of the kingdom.
As gathering places for the people of God, churches should be places of transparency and intersubjectivity. Such openness, in a culture of acceptance, is healing in itself. We can think of participants in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting who begin by stating their name and their addiction to alcohol, always in full confidence of welcome.
Many churches claim to be so welcoming, yet they subtly coerce members into that church’s image of what a Christian looks like, encircling them in candy-coated barbed wire. Other churches are truly welcoming, encouraging participants to fully embody the unique image that God created them to be. These churches encourage authenticity, which is confident self-revelation, an external life lived in accord with one’s internal self. Such churches truly practice Paul’s instruction, “Accept one another as Christ accepted us, for the glory of God” (Romans 15
). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, page 218)
April 29, 2026
Suffering wants us to believe that we are alone, but love knows differently. For this reason, the church provides consolation. The word consolation derives from the Latin con or with, and solus or lonely. It means “to be with the lonely.” Consolation does not take away the pain, but it does lighten it, because pain coupled with loneliness is excruciating.
We suffer less when we suffer with others, and we suffer less when we suffer wisely, so we suffer best when we suffer in a wise community. A thirteen-year-old youth in our church lost a friend who was hit by a truck while riding her bicycle. The Sunday after the accident, the youth came to church and, as her fellow parishioners offered condolences, eventually began weeping.
Three matrons of the church, who had known her since she was born, stood up, surrounded her, and just comforted her—undistracted, undisturbed, and undismayed—until she was finished. Did they make her sadness go away? No. Did they explain why this tragedy happened? No. Did they let her know, without words, that life would continue, and become good again? Yes, because they believed in the power of community: “Bear one another’s burdens,” writes Paul, “and thus fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2).
Backstage churches are authentic; frontstage churches are inauthentic. Our sharing of sorrows helps us to get real and live authentically, but such sharing occurs only in backstage churches. Backstage churches are different from frontstage churches. In frontstage churches, everyone puts their best foot forward, showing up well-dressed and clean and all put together. Many frontstage churches believe that God rewards religious virtue with health and wealth. God may test us, on occasion, but if we respond faithfully to the test, then God will reward us with even greater prosperity, as in the utterly shallow, prosaic conclusion to Job. These churches inevitably devolve into the hellhole of competitive virtue signaling, in which parishioners compete to see who can appear the most virtuous, hence the most blessed by God.
Worse, if a church believes that God sends suffering as a punishment for vice, then parishioners will have to hide their suffering from each other. We know a woman in a fundamentalist area of the country whose young daughter got cancer. She set up a website to raise money for medical bills and, being a person of faith, she asked for prayers on the website as well. Most comments were kind and supportive, but a large number speculated about how her family had sinned, causing God to punish them. Others suggested ways that they could get right with God so the cancer would go away, or even claimed that their use of modern medicine revealed a lack of faith. The mother had to edit her request for prayer, insisting that the cause of her daughter’s cancer was purely medical, and she informed visitors that any comments suggesting otherwise would be deleted.
The belief that human suffering is divine punishment for hidden sin produces frontstage churches and lonely churchgoers, a combination of words that should be oxymoronic. Likewise, the belief that prosperity is a reward for virtue produces pride: “My life is perfect, see how God has blessed me!” This boast is a misery-inducing lie, to oneself and everyone else. It arises from envious insecurity and sinks us deeper within it. It misrepresents God’s love as conditional and separates parishioners from one another.
Frontstage churches foster rivalry rather than grace and contest rather than community. “Therefore, let’s have no more lies. Speak truthfully to each other, for we are all members of one body,” admonishes Paul (Ephesians 4:25). Because we need to be known, because we need to be seen, we need to share ourselves with one another. In backstage churches, we allow each other to see the inevitable messiness of our lives. Acknowledging the universality of our struggles frees us from envy and recenters us in one another. Sharing life’s joys and worries allows us to be loved through both and to love others through both. This love is oxygen for the soul. Acceptance after self-revelation heals, while secrets eat at us like tapeworms. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 216-217)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Jurgen Moltmann. The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology. London: SCM Press, 1993.
Danielle Shroyer. Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.
Does your church practice competitive virtue signaling? If so, then you may already be in hell!
Radical honesty creates authentic community. Jesus is the great Amen of God, the Yes to life in all its agony and ecstasy. Following his example and empowered by the Spirit, the church also says yes to life, to both its joy and its suffering.Suffering wants us to believe that we are alone, but love knows differently. For this reason, the church provides consolation. The word consolation derives from the Latin con or with, and solus or lonely. It means “to be with the lonely.” Consolation does not take away the pain, but it does lighten it, because pain coupled with loneliness is excruciating.
We suffer less when we suffer with others, and we suffer less when we suffer wisely, so we suffer best when we suffer in a wise community. A thirteen-year-old youth in our church lost a friend who was hit by a truck while riding her bicycle. The Sunday after the accident, the youth came to church and, as her fellow parishioners offered condolences, eventually began weeping.
Three matrons of the church, who had known her since she was born, stood up, surrounded her, and just comforted her—undistracted, undisturbed, and undismayed—until she was finished. Did they make her sadness go away? No. Did they explain why this tragedy happened? No. Did they let her know, without words, that life would continue, and become good again? Yes, because they believed in the power of community: “Bear one another’s burdens,” writes Paul, “and thus fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2).
Backstage churches are authentic; frontstage churches are inauthentic. Our sharing of sorrows helps us to get real and live authentically, but such sharing occurs only in backstage churches. Backstage churches are different from frontstage churches. In frontstage churches, everyone puts their best foot forward, showing up well-dressed and clean and all put together. Many frontstage churches believe that God rewards religious virtue with health and wealth. God may test us, on occasion, but if we respond faithfully to the test, then God will reward us with even greater prosperity, as in the utterly shallow, prosaic conclusion to Job. These churches inevitably devolve into the hellhole of competitive virtue signaling, in which parishioners compete to see who can appear the most virtuous, hence the most blessed by God.
Worse, if a church believes that God sends suffering as a punishment for vice, then parishioners will have to hide their suffering from each other. We know a woman in a fundamentalist area of the country whose young daughter got cancer. She set up a website to raise money for medical bills and, being a person of faith, she asked for prayers on the website as well. Most comments were kind and supportive, but a large number speculated about how her family had sinned, causing God to punish them. Others suggested ways that they could get right with God so the cancer would go away, or even claimed that their use of modern medicine revealed a lack of faith. The mother had to edit her request for prayer, insisting that the cause of her daughter’s cancer was purely medical, and she informed visitors that any comments suggesting otherwise would be deleted.
The belief that human suffering is divine punishment for hidden sin produces frontstage churches and lonely churchgoers, a combination of words that should be oxymoronic. Likewise, the belief that prosperity is a reward for virtue produces pride: “My life is perfect, see how God has blessed me!” This boast is a misery-inducing lie, to oneself and everyone else. It arises from envious insecurity and sinks us deeper within it. It misrepresents God’s love as conditional and separates parishioners from one another.
Frontstage churches foster rivalry rather than grace and contest rather than community. “Therefore, let’s have no more lies. Speak truthfully to each other, for we are all members of one body,” admonishes Paul (Ephesians 4:25). Because we need to be known, because we need to be seen, we need to share ourselves with one another. In backstage churches, we allow each other to see the inevitable messiness of our lives. Acknowledging the universality of our struggles frees us from envy and recenters us in one another. Sharing life’s joys and worries allows us to be loved through both and to love others through both. This love is oxygen for the soul. Acceptance after self-revelation heals, while secrets eat at us like tapeworms. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 216-217)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Jurgen Moltmann. The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology. London: SCM Press, 1993.
Danielle Shroyer. Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.
April 20, 2026
To enter this type of community, a community modeled on the triune God, is an act of faith. Faith is not a moral accomplishment, or rigorous obedience to rigid rules, or stubborn adherence to propositions for which there is no evidence. Faith is openness to the most basic experiential truth of the universe, a way of being that is plumb with reality, the practice of which entails risk.
Jesus ascended to Abba so that the Holy Spirit Sophia, who had animated Jesus, could now animate his followers. Together, they would continue his ministry as the church. In church God is known not just in community, but as community, in the freedom of self-gift.
This concept of freedom as self-gift, self-revelation, and self-communication resists contemporary culture, in which people increasingly delay commitment to preserve what they deem to be freedom: the spontaneity of a life unencumbered by responsibility for others. Such delayed commitment can lessen the self that it seeks to indulge. Self-donation in relationships of mutuality and equality, and in communities of mutuality and equality, is self-fulfillment, not self-renunciation.
Good churches manifest agape—the universal, unconditional, egalitarian love of God. The function of church is to provide communities in which love can be equitably given, received, and shared with the world. (That is what good churches do. They don’t cause religious trauma by controlling their parishioners through fear.) This sacred exchange accesses a new realm of belonging—the domain of Sophia. Her Holy Spirit is a gratuitous energy that perpetually renews and transforms the community. Thus, the church experiences Sophia as ever heightening our quality of shared life.
The self finds itself only in community. Hence, to limit self-donation is to limit the self. This statement is not dogmatic; it is empirical and will be ratified by those willing to risk it. Paul writes, “If one member suffers, all the members suffer together with them; if one member is honored, all the members share their joy” (1 Corinthians 12:26). He believes this because “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another” (Romans 12:5 WEB).
The phrase “of one another” is one word in Greek, allēlōn (ah-LAY-loan). Allēlōn and its variations are used one hundred times in the Newer Testament, which repeatedly insists on our inseparability from one another. The church’s conviction that we are members of one another expresses itself in the doctrine of universal priesthood. Instead of a class of priests who mediate God to the laity, the church believes that there is only one High Priest, Jesus (Hebrews 4:14–16; 1 Timothy 2:5). The sole mediation of Jesus places all followers on the same spiritual plane. But it does not lower their status; it universally elevates their status to that of priest. For this reason, Bible passages refer to the fledgling church as a “holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5), “royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2 ), and “priests to God” (Revelation 1:6; Revelation 5:10).
In Trinitarian community, our neighbors are portals of God. In older religions, priests offered burnt sacrifices to God to garner goodwill for the people. In contrast, the followers of Jesus are universally empowered to offer sacrifices, but of a different sort: “Keep doing good works and sharing resources. These are the sacrifices that please God” (Hebrews 13:16).
During the Protestant Reformation, leaders such as Martin Luther and John Calvin institutionalized this priestly status by teaching and establishing the priesthood of all believers. While certain members of the faith may be educated for and ordained to professional ministry, this status does not elevate them over other believers; it only assigns them a specific role within the universal priesthood. Pastors minister through sermons and sacraments, while doctors have a ministry of healing, laborers have a ministry of building, educators have a ministry of teaching, carpenters have a ministry of making, etc. All ministries are equally legitimate, so their (only male, alas, in the time of the Reformation) practitioners had equal standing within the democratically governed church.
The priesthood of all believers does not mean that each believer is a priest unto themselves alone, with a direct, solo line to God. Unfortunately, this misinterpretation has achieved dominance in some denominations. Prayer and Bible study in isolation, unchecked by any Christian community, is a dangerous practice, encouraging individuals to confuse their personal spirituality with divine truth. All too often, this practice produces very harmful theology that overconfident enthusiasts propagate with prophetic zeal.
Instead, the priesthood of all believers implies that we are all mediators of God to one another. God is always fully present, absolutely attentive, and perfectly solicitous. This presence is what we finite beings receive from the infinite God and what we need most. We may not be present to each other—we may be distracted or disengaged—but God is always fully present to us.
In church, we try to make the divine presence real by being fully present to one another. Such presence poses a challenge in this era of technology, when every conversation can be interrupted and the screen always beckons, offering its anaesthesia. We are plagued by the absence of presence. We need to be tended to, and we need to tend, because tending manifests grace.
Divine community is for the sacred now. This life-giving conception of the church denies that it is a waiting room for heaven. The function of the church is this-worldly, not next-worldly. God loves us here and now and wants us to thrive here and now, not delay our thriving into some distant future. Certainly, the afterlife is a true consolation for the bereaved, but not at the cost of this life. Because Abba loves us in this moment, Jesus’s message and Sophia’s counsel are both urgent: “After John’s arrest, Jesus appeared in Galilee proclaiming the Good News of God: ‘This is the time of fulfillment. The reign of God is at hand. Change your hearts and minds, and believe this Good News!’” (Mark 1:14–15).
To take on God’s way of being is not possible in isolation. We are spiritually interdependent. Recognizing this truth, Buddhism commends the sangha, Hinduism commends the ashram, Islam commends the ummah, Judaism commends the minyan, and Christianity commends the church. The religions recognize that inertia dooms privatistic faith. Individualist salvation, consumerist spirituality, and personalized piety are all deficient because we cannot realize divinized life in isolation. In response, religions create spiritual communities within which lamas, sadhus, imams, prophets, and rabbis—and fellow congregants—jar us out of complacency, from separation to union, through love. In all these institutions, we manifest God’s mode of existence by forming a spiritual family (Romans 8:29). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 213-216)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Boff, Leonardo. Trinity and Society. Translated by Paul Burns. 1988. Reprint. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005.
LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.
Volf, Miroslav. After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity. Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age (SACRA). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.
We weren't made to be alone: finding divinity in community
In community, we fulfill the image of God within us. Writing about the social Trinity, Miroslav Volf argues: “Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion.” Such communion cannot express itself in solitary life, a private person worshiping a private deity alone. Instead, the divine communion draws us into human communion, into togetherness, into a community that practices love of God and love of neighbor.To enter this type of community, a community modeled on the triune God, is an act of faith. Faith is not a moral accomplishment, or rigorous obedience to rigid rules, or stubborn adherence to propositions for which there is no evidence. Faith is openness to the most basic experiential truth of the universe, a way of being that is plumb with reality, the practice of which entails risk.
Jesus ascended to Abba so that the Holy Spirit Sophia, who had animated Jesus, could now animate his followers. Together, they would continue his ministry as the church. In church God is known not just in community, but as community, in the freedom of self-gift.
This concept of freedom as self-gift, self-revelation, and self-communication resists contemporary culture, in which people increasingly delay commitment to preserve what they deem to be freedom: the spontaneity of a life unencumbered by responsibility for others. Such delayed commitment can lessen the self that it seeks to indulge. Self-donation in relationships of mutuality and equality, and in communities of mutuality and equality, is self-fulfillment, not self-renunciation.
Good churches manifest agape—the universal, unconditional, egalitarian love of God. The function of church is to provide communities in which love can be equitably given, received, and shared with the world. (That is what good churches do. They don’t cause religious trauma by controlling their parishioners through fear.) This sacred exchange accesses a new realm of belonging—the domain of Sophia. Her Holy Spirit is a gratuitous energy that perpetually renews and transforms the community. Thus, the church experiences Sophia as ever heightening our quality of shared life.
The self finds itself only in community. Hence, to limit self-donation is to limit the self. This statement is not dogmatic; it is empirical and will be ratified by those willing to risk it. Paul writes, “If one member suffers, all the members suffer together with them; if one member is honored, all the members share their joy” (1 Corinthians 12:26). He believes this because “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another” (Romans 12:5 WEB).
The phrase “of one another” is one word in Greek, allēlōn (ah-LAY-loan). Allēlōn and its variations are used one hundred times in the Newer Testament, which repeatedly insists on our inseparability from one another. The church’s conviction that we are members of one another expresses itself in the doctrine of universal priesthood. Instead of a class of priests who mediate God to the laity, the church believes that there is only one High Priest, Jesus (Hebrews 4:14–16; 1 Timothy 2:5). The sole mediation of Jesus places all followers on the same spiritual plane. But it does not lower their status; it universally elevates their status to that of priest. For this reason, Bible passages refer to the fledgling church as a “holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5), “royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2
), and “priests to God” (Revelation 1:6; Revelation 5:10).
In Trinitarian community, our neighbors are portals of God. In older religions, priests offered burnt sacrifices to God to garner goodwill for the people. In contrast, the followers of Jesus are universally empowered to offer sacrifices, but of a different sort: “Keep doing good works and sharing resources. These are the sacrifices that please God” (Hebrews 13:16).
During the Protestant Reformation, leaders such as Martin Luther and John Calvin institutionalized this priestly status by teaching and establishing the priesthood of all believers. While certain members of the faith may be educated for and ordained to professional ministry, this status does not elevate them over other believers; it only assigns them a specific role within the universal priesthood. Pastors minister through sermons and sacraments, while doctors have a ministry of healing, laborers have a ministry of building, educators have a ministry of teaching, carpenters have a ministry of making, etc. All ministries are equally legitimate, so their (only male, alas, in the time of the Reformation) practitioners had equal standing within the democratically governed church.
The priesthood of all believers does not mean that each believer is a priest unto themselves alone, with a direct, solo line to God. Unfortunately, this misinterpretation has achieved dominance in some denominations. Prayer and Bible study in isolation, unchecked by any Christian community, is a dangerous practice, encouraging individuals to confuse their personal spirituality with divine truth. All too often, this practice produces very harmful theology that overconfident enthusiasts propagate with prophetic zeal.
Instead, the priesthood of all believers implies that we are all mediators of God to one another. God is always fully present, absolutely attentive, and perfectly solicitous. This presence is what we finite beings receive from the infinite God and what we need most. We may not be present to each other—we may be distracted or disengaged—but God is always fully present to us.
In church, we try to make the divine presence real by being fully present to one another. Such presence poses a challenge in this era of technology, when every conversation can be interrupted and the screen always beckons, offering its anaesthesia. We are plagued by the absence of presence. We need to be tended to, and we need to tend, because tending manifests grace.
Divine community is for the sacred now. This life-giving conception of the church denies that it is a waiting room for heaven. The function of the church is this-worldly, not next-worldly. God loves us here and now and wants us to thrive here and now, not delay our thriving into some distant future. Certainly, the afterlife is a true consolation for the bereaved, but not at the cost of this life. Because Abba loves us in this moment, Jesus’s message and Sophia’s counsel are both urgent: “After John’s arrest, Jesus appeared in Galilee proclaiming the Good News of God: ‘This is the time of fulfillment. The reign of God is at hand. Change your hearts and minds, and believe this Good News!’” (Mark 1:14–15).
To take on God’s way of being is not possible in isolation. We are spiritually interdependent. Recognizing this truth, Buddhism commends the sangha, Hinduism commends the ashram, Islam commends the ummah, Judaism commends the minyan, and Christianity commends the church. The religions recognize that inertia dooms privatistic faith. Individualist salvation, consumerist spirituality, and personalized piety are all deficient because we cannot realize divinized life in isolation. In response, religions create spiritual communities within which lamas, sadhus, imams, prophets, and rabbis—and fellow congregants—jar us out of complacency, from separation to union, through love. In all these institutions, we manifest God’s mode of existence by forming a spiritual family (Romans 8:29). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 213-216)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Boff, Leonardo. Trinity and Society. Translated by Paul Burns. 1988. Reprint. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005.
LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.
Volf, Miroslav. After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity. Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age (SACRA). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.
April 14, 2026
Small miracles happen here. When I was in seminary and needed to earn some extra money, I preached regularly at a small Presbyterian church in north Philadelphia. It was a dying White church in a largely Black neighborhood with at most twenty attendees on any given Sunday, mainly elderly. Still, they conjured religious beauty.
George (name changed for privacy) sang in the church’s small choir and performed most solos. As a boy, George had a physically abusive father. To escape the abuse, George joined the army, which sent him into combat in Vietnam. Returning home, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and spent years on the streets of Philadelphia in alcohol addiction. Through Alcoholics Anonymous he achieved sobriety, met a woman from the church, got married, and became a regular attendee.
Together, they never missed a Sunday. Although he was the church’s main soloist, George couldn’t sing. At the risk of being disrespectful, for which I apologize: George couldn’t carry a tune, and his voice was cracked by years of drinking and smoking. But George didn’t know this himself, and he never held back, praising God with full-throated gratitude. His cracked voice reminded the congregation that, in the words of Leonard Cohen, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
No one complained about the quality of the music. The music director kept asking him to sing, and the congregation kept listening, in respectful attention, grateful that he was in recovery, grateful that he had married, grateful that he had found redemption. Their joy in George’s joy overwhelmed any discomfort with the performance.
George’s years of alcoholism caught up with him, and he was hospitalized with cirrhosis of the liver. Only 10 percent of his liver was still functioning, his body was too weak for a transplant, and the doctors gave him a few months to live. George returned home, jaundiced and out of breath. Naturally, the music director called and asked him to sing a solo for the congregation, of his own choosing.
George chose “How Great Thou Art.” We gathered one Sunday to watch a frail man, beaten by his father, scarred by war, and poisoned by alcohol, sing from his soul to the glory of God, in joyful rapture. Grace so flooded the sanctuary that, to our ears, he sounded like an angel. George died two weeks later, in the presence of his wife and members of the community.
Imperfect love is good enough. That was a good church. It is closed now. It wouldn’t have impressed anyone with its spreadsheets, attendance, or preaching, but it loved Abba, our Parent. Sophia, the Holy Spirit, was active there, flowing through the parishioners, from one to another, inspiring them to be like Jesus and love their neighbor through thick and thin.
Some churches promise earth-shattering miracles that defy natural law, but that church kept its eyes open for small miracles, the kind that we too easily overlook. Its openness to small miracles produced them—warmed hearts, settled spirits, and courage in the face of death.
Churches are supposed to practice the universal, unconditional, celebratory agape of God— the unifying love that is our source, our sustenance, and our destiny. This belief may appear idealized, or even naive, since churches can’t actually attain these heights. Imperfect persons form imperfect institutions that express the love of God imperfectly.
Nevertheless, even in our imperfection, unreachable ideals serve a function. The ideal transforms the real because it gifts us with discontent, spurring us out of complacency and into possibility. The ideal tells us where we are and where we should go. Then, the ideal serves as the mark by which we measure our progress.
I write in full recognition that many people suffer from religious trauma syndrome (RTS), and that their RTS has been caused by very bad churches. Bad churches threaten their parishioners, even their youngest, with damnation for disobedience, censure for disagreement, shunning for leaving the faith, etc. Bad churches want control, and fear is their tool.
But there are good churches, too, whose practice is love. And the existence of bad churches doesn’t condemn the existence of good churches, any more than the existence of poison condemns the existence of medicine.
The perfectly loving church does not exist in any pure form. But any honest observer will recognize that there are many good churches of many different stripes that aspire to loving unity and do much good in the world. They seek to serve rather than control, foster rather than restrict, and heal rather than harm. And sometimes they work small miracles, which come to us like manna from heaven. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 211-213)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Campbell, Ted A. The Sky Is Falling, the Church Is Dying, and Other False Alarms. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015.
Oord, Thomas Jay, and Fuller, Tripp. God After Deconstruction. Idaho: SacraSage Press, 2024.
Who else would allow a really bad singer to sing with such gusto?
Week after week after week he sang, and they listened . . .Small miracles happen here. When I was in seminary and needed to earn some extra money, I preached regularly at a small Presbyterian church in north Philadelphia. It was a dying White church in a largely Black neighborhood with at most twenty attendees on any given Sunday, mainly elderly. Still, they conjured religious beauty.
George (name changed for privacy) sang in the church’s small choir and performed most solos. As a boy, George had a physically abusive father. To escape the abuse, George joined the army, which sent him into combat in Vietnam. Returning home, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and spent years on the streets of Philadelphia in alcohol addiction. Through Alcoholics Anonymous he achieved sobriety, met a woman from the church, got married, and became a regular attendee.
Together, they never missed a Sunday. Although he was the church’s main soloist, George couldn’t sing. At the risk of being disrespectful, for which I apologize: George couldn’t carry a tune, and his voice was cracked by years of drinking and smoking. But George didn’t know this himself, and he never held back, praising God with full-throated gratitude. His cracked voice reminded the congregation that, in the words of Leonard Cohen, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
No one complained about the quality of the music. The music director kept asking him to sing, and the congregation kept listening, in respectful attention, grateful that he was in recovery, grateful that he had married, grateful that he had found redemption. Their joy in George’s joy overwhelmed any discomfort with the performance.
George’s years of alcoholism caught up with him, and he was hospitalized with cirrhosis of the liver. Only 10 percent of his liver was still functioning, his body was too weak for a transplant, and the doctors gave him a few months to live. George returned home, jaundiced and out of breath. Naturally, the music director called and asked him to sing a solo for the congregation, of his own choosing.
George chose “How Great Thou Art.” We gathered one Sunday to watch a frail man, beaten by his father, scarred by war, and poisoned by alcohol, sing from his soul to the glory of God, in joyful rapture. Grace so flooded the sanctuary that, to our ears, he sounded like an angel. George died two weeks later, in the presence of his wife and members of the community.
Imperfect love is good enough. That was a good church. It is closed now. It wouldn’t have impressed anyone with its spreadsheets, attendance, or preaching, but it loved Abba, our Parent. Sophia, the Holy Spirit, was active there, flowing through the parishioners, from one to another, inspiring them to be like Jesus and love their neighbor through thick and thin.
Some churches promise earth-shattering miracles that defy natural law, but that church kept its eyes open for small miracles, the kind that we too easily overlook. Its openness to small miracles produced them—warmed hearts, settled spirits, and courage in the face of death.
Churches are supposed to practice the universal, unconditional, celebratory agape of God— the unifying love that is our source, our sustenance, and our destiny. This belief may appear idealized, or even naive, since churches can’t actually attain these heights. Imperfect persons form imperfect institutions that express the love of God imperfectly.
Nevertheless, even in our imperfection, unreachable ideals serve a function. The ideal transforms the real because it gifts us with discontent, spurring us out of complacency and into possibility. The ideal tells us where we are and where we should go. Then, the ideal serves as the mark by which we measure our progress.
I write in full recognition that many people suffer from religious trauma syndrome (RTS), and that their RTS has been caused by very bad churches. Bad churches threaten their parishioners, even their youngest, with damnation for disobedience, censure for disagreement, shunning for leaving the faith, etc. Bad churches want control, and fear is their tool.
But there are good churches, too, whose practice is love. And the existence of bad churches doesn’t condemn the existence of good churches, any more than the existence of poison condemns the existence of medicine.
The perfectly loving church does not exist in any pure form. But any honest observer will recognize that there are many good churches of many different stripes that aspire to loving unity and do much good in the world. They seek to serve rather than control, foster rather than restrict, and heal rather than harm. And sometimes they work small miracles, which come to us like manna from heaven. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 211-213)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Campbell, Ted A. The Sky Is Falling, the Church Is Dying, and Other False Alarms. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015.
Oord, Thomas Jay, and Fuller, Tripp. God After Deconstruction. Idaho: SacraSage Press, 2024.
March 29, 2026
What good is it to profess faith without practicing it? Such faith has no power to save. If any need clothes and have no food, and one of you says to them, “Goodbye and good luck. Stay warm and well-fed,” without giving them the bare necessities of life, then what good is this? So it is with faith. If good deeds don’t go with it, faith is dead. (James 2:14–17)
Active love extends our self into the all and allows the all into our self, so that the world’s joy and suffering are ours, and will remain so, until we have created the world imagined by Abba, preached by Jesus, and inspired by Sophia, a world of peace with justice—the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God is not a fantasy; it is the destination that grants our lives destiny. As such, it is the fulfillment of Sophia’s promise: “I’ll teach you and show you the way you should walk; I will counsel you and keep watch over you” (Psalm 32:8). The kingdom of God articulates the divine imagination and moves us into a new realm of possibility. It is not the opposite of reality; it is the purpose of reality, challenging what is with what can be.
The Kingdom of God, which is the Reign of Love, allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise, seeing the oppressed liberated from their oppression and the oppressors liberated from their oppressing. By pointing elsewhere, it transforms the here and now. By presenting a vision of deliverance it spurs us to activity, because “when freedom is near the chains begin to chafe.”
The universe is an ocean. Shall we leave our spirit a thimble? Our hearts come alive when we create, and our hearts come alive when we love. Hence, the sacred life is creative love. Creative love does not seek out suffering, but it is willing to suffer to reduce suffering.
The creative, loving life offers more abundance than ease. A seven-year-old in a sandbox, playing alone with their toys, can be perfectly happy. But if this state were the best that life offered, then life would be truly tragic. There is more available: commitment, risk, meaning, purpose, challenge, and growth all produce joy.
Joy surges up from an unknown depth of self that we share with the unknown depth of other selves, which we all share with the unknown depth of the divine selves. Granted this sacred potential, we cannot be satisfied with a superficial happiness that sugarcoats our consciousness. We must become who God has invited us to become or admit that we have denied our own nature. We must risk a generous love, in hope.
Thankfully, we do so in the assurance of God’s nurturing love, which guides us into new life. Jesus declares: “If you wish to follow me, you must deny yourself, pick up the instrument of your death, and begin to follow in my footsteps. If you would save your life, you will lose it; but if you would lose your life for my sake, you will find it” (Matthew 16:24–25). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 209-210)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Jurgen Moltmann. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.
Sobrino, Jon. Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993.
God is love. Love is something you do.
Healing works toward the kingdom. God is love, and love is something you do. This observation dovetails with our observation that God is activity, more verb than noun, and we are made in the image of God. When we participate in loving activity, we are participating in God:What good is it to profess faith without practicing it? Such faith has no power to save. If any need clothes and have no food, and one of you says to them, “Goodbye and good luck. Stay warm and well-fed,” without giving them the bare necessities of life, then what good is this? So it is with faith. If good deeds don’t go with it, faith is dead. (James 2:14–17)
Active love extends our self into the all and allows the all into our self, so that the world’s joy and suffering are ours, and will remain so, until we have created the world imagined by Abba, preached by Jesus, and inspired by Sophia, a world of peace with justice—the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God is not a fantasy; it is the destination that grants our lives destiny. As such, it is the fulfillment of Sophia’s promise: “I’ll teach you and show you the way you should walk; I will counsel you and keep watch over you” (Psalm 32:8). The kingdom of God articulates the divine imagination and moves us into a new realm of possibility. It is not the opposite of reality; it is the purpose of reality, challenging what is with what can be.
The Kingdom of God, which is the Reign of Love, allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise, seeing the oppressed liberated from their oppression and the oppressors liberated from their oppressing. By pointing elsewhere, it transforms the here and now. By presenting a vision of deliverance it spurs us to activity, because “when freedom is near the chains begin to chafe.”
The universe is an ocean. Shall we leave our spirit a thimble? Our hearts come alive when we create, and our hearts come alive when we love. Hence, the sacred life is creative love. Creative love does not seek out suffering, but it is willing to suffer to reduce suffering.
The creative, loving life offers more abundance than ease. A seven-year-old in a sandbox, playing alone with their toys, can be perfectly happy. But if this state were the best that life offered, then life would be truly tragic. There is more available: commitment, risk, meaning, purpose, challenge, and growth all produce joy.
Joy surges up from an unknown depth of self that we share with the unknown depth of other selves, which we all share with the unknown depth of the divine selves. Granted this sacred potential, we cannot be satisfied with a superficial happiness that sugarcoats our consciousness. We must become who God has invited us to become or admit that we have denied our own nature. We must risk a generous love, in hope.
Thankfully, we do so in the assurance of God’s nurturing love, which guides us into new life. Jesus declares: “If you wish to follow me, you must deny yourself, pick up the instrument of your death, and begin to follow in my footsteps. If you would save your life, you will lose it; but if you would lose your life for my sake, you will find it” (Matthew 16:24–25). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 209-210)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Jurgen Moltmann. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.
Sobrino, Jon. Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993.
Profile Information
Name: Jon Paul SydnorGender: Male
Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts
Home country: USA
Current location: Boston
Member since: Wed Oct 2, 2024, 03:02 PM
Number of posts: 164