Bearing Witness
I know I’m not the only Christian who has ever shaken their heads over the Fred Phelpses of this world, read some of the pronouncements of some of the Christian personalities and politicians in the USA and thought to themselves “that’s not what my faith is about at all! What happened to ‘God is Love’? Where are the Christians who don’t want to condemn and hurt people? When are they going to stand up against this tide of hatred and be heard?”
Well, this Pentecost (May 23rd) we’re going to try and do that. To that end, Jules Jones and Zeborah have started up the Bearing_Witness communities on Dreamwidth and Livejournal. We’re calling for fellow liberal Christians to come along and join up and make the commitment to do one blog post aimed not at converting non-Christians, but at explaining to our fellow (less liberal) Christians why things like gay rights, women’s rights, universal healthcare etc are things we ought to be calling for, in obedience to Christ’s command to do God’s will in the world.
My contribution so far has just been icons, but I’m hoping I will find something to say when it comes to it. In the mean time, if you fancy icons, there are some here.
Splendid idea. Maybe you guys can have a go at explaining to the pope why citicising the leader of the most dominant Christian sect in the world for the fact his church is full of kiddie fiddlers is not quite the same thing as What Happened To The Jews, as well. (Put ‘pope penance’ into the news.bbc search box if you don’t get what I mean).
Yes, I’m hoping that Chris Smith will join – she’s Catholic, and that sort of thing would come better from a Catholic than one of us Prots. But if not, then it ought to be said anyway. I’ll add it as no.1 in my list 🙂 Thanks!
Oh, there are a lot of us out there in the USA. We are the majority actually. Take faith and comfort in that. The world would be a very different place if this were not true.
It is simply that those who are moderate in temperament even allow for those who are not to have a say and speak their minds. We simply agree to disagree and let them go ranting off in a corner somewhere. Cowards? No. Difference of philosophy.
People who are more liberal in thought tend to judge the merits of a position by mainly two things:
1. Is it fair?
2. Does it hurt anyone?
People who tend to think more conservatively add to this and place more value on:
3. Loyalty to the group
4. Respect of Authority
In my experience, they are less likely to think for themselves and more likely to depend on a church leader to tell them what the right thing to do is.
I think you can see why a liberal minded person, who has no problem reading the same Bible and coming up such different ideas–seems an anathema to the conservative viewpoint. We are defective in our thinking, obviously!
God’s Love is only for the ones who are loyal to the group and respect the authority of the given leaders. This other idea of trying to be fair and decent to everyone–saying that God loves all equally–is too difficult a stretch. Moral anarchy.
However, what an awesome idea you have come upon. I like it.
Hi Kim! Yes, I’ve long suspected that there are more liberal Christians out there than anyone suspects. I know we have a long history of toleration, which leads us to tolerate even the people who are intolerant and who we don’t agree with. To a certain extent this is a good thing, and an exercise in judging not lest we be judged. I just suspect that our silence is resulting in people only hearing the ranting voices, and – for lack of contradiction and argument – believing that those voices represent the true voice of Christianity.
We’ve got an amazing message of love and freedom that we could be proclaiming, but we don’t. And worse than that, we allow people to be driven away from Christianity and from God by the ranting of our fellow Christians. So I’m not suggesting that we attempt to shut them up in any way, but just that it’s time for us to stand up and say “theirs is not the only way of understanding this. There are other traditions and other ways of looking at this. Here they are.”
How else are people to know that the judgemental Christians don’t represent the whole story?