Leap of Faith

Now this is something I never expected to see, “New studies demonstrate welcoming congregations are more active on social justice and LGBT advocacy“.    First some background about my experience.

My experience in Evangelical Church circles had been a mixed blessing on social justice.   On one hand there was a tremendous life of the church on Sunday. Vibrant and moving worship.  Excellent preaching and teaching.   Strong support for most members. Miraculous answer to prayer at times.  And effective children’s ministry.  But the lack of actual practice of Micah 6:8, the social justice piece of the gospel, was troubling:

6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord really wants from you: He wants you to promote justice, to be faithful, and to live obediently before your God (NET Bible)

It’s such a big part of the Gospel I often wondered, “shouldn’t we have more attention on that piece?”

So the headline “New studies demonstrate welcoming congregations are more active on social justice and LGBT advocacy” really caught my eye, and the results even more so.  Check these out:

• More than half of clergy in welcoming congregations reported that the welcoming process helped their congregation to witness and act on other social justice issues. In describing this effect, one welcoming pastor said the church is more active in “the plight of the oppressed and marginalized” because of the church’s welcoming process.
• “One of the most exciting findings from this study is the direct connection between being a welcoming congregation and involvement in other social justice issues,” says the Rev. Rebecca Voelkel, Institute for Welcoming Resources and faith work director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “Our surveys demonstrate that the welcoming process makes a meaningful difference. Welcoming congregations are on the front lines in economic justice, homelessness, racial justice, immigration and other important areas of religious witness.”

Now granted, the survey does focus on churches who are welcoming and affirming of the LGBT community already so perhaps there is some bias.  I wonder what the effects would be on a broader range of churches.  Still, I found the connection between a church being welcoming and affirming and being more open to helping the oppressed and down trodden unexpected.  Perhaps opening our hearts to one group makes cold hearts thaw towards others.

You can read the press release on the study at The Task Force’s website here.
If you’ve got enough coffee left, you can read the whole study at the Institute for Welcoming Resources website here.

Oh and if  you are in Massachusetts, a great welcoming church for Christians is First Presbyterian of Waltham.   There are others too, if you do a search on you favorite search engine under “Open and Affirming” you should see a list.  Keshet is a good choice to find resources if you are Jewish.

(Graphic image courtesy of Bemky and used under Creative Commons License)

I could probably post alot on this topic but I’ll leave the info for our readers over a nice cup of coffee or cocoa. In a nutshell, one of the largest and most influential Evangelical Churches, Willow Creek Community Church, has concluded that homosexuality is not a sin. It’s part of who you are.

While that may seem self-evident, it’s a major deal for a church like Willow Creek to admit it.

This happened during a meeting that none other than Julie Nemeck attended at Willow Creek. You might remember Dr. Nemecek, she’s both an experienced pastor and educator who was booted from her job in Michigan for being trans.

Here’s a quote from the story on her blog:

For our part, we were surprised and pleased that Willow Creek’s own 30-year study of homosexuality has led them to conclude that: (1) Sexual orientation is unchangeable. and (2) Sexual orientation should not keep someone from being received into their church. They acknowledged that 6 of the 7 verses used to condemn homosexuality are irrelevant; really referring to other things.

You can read the full story at Julie’s blog at her story, “Soulforce, Willow Creek and Me“.

Their story is pretty amazing and really goes back to something that we miss sometimes as Christians and as transgender people: God isn’t so much concerned with who we are but in our resultant behavior; our character. Are any of our behavior Christlike or not? Are our behaviors and actions showing we are redemptive and healing in our relationships and still uncompromising, and, though very much imperfect, disciples?

For me, it’s important to remember my behaviors are a reflection of my individual heartfelt desire to “give back”, in a sense, to Christ for His sacrifice for me on the cross and my personal acceptance of His sacrifice for my sins. My behaviors can’t earn me God’s love but they can show how much I love Him by loving others.

It’s easy to forget that in Jesus’s day, He was considered an out there radical bent on destroying the government and the powers of the day. He was considered a major league weirdo and threat! And though He was a radical, even a surface read of the Gospels shows you how redemptive and healing His behaviors were. What a great example He left us.

You can learn about SoulForce at this linkie love here. Photos of this historic meeting are at SoulForce photos here.

Christmas, the birth of Christ, the savior, isn’t just for shoppers. While it’s true the 25th of December is likely not the precise date of Jesus Christ’s birth, the celebration of His incarnation is one of the most important celebrations in Christendom. And this is not the same as celebrating a religeous right political action win. This is about celebrating the birth of God incarnate who actually came for all the world….men and women in all the beauty of their diversity.  You can bet your Christmas fruitcake He did not come for a political party.  So, with that in mind, we have brewed up a few links on, Christmas:

• Merry Christmas; The Incarnation: a post we did last year on this wonderful day and what the meaning of the season is
• God’s Diversity Christmas: is a wonderful post on God’s audience by Julie Nemecek
• Give Mary Credit: Over at Heartlight, they give us a short, neat reminder about Mary’s faith as a woman
• Should Christians Celebrate Christmas?   Is a well documented, historical and analytical perspective on this topic

Merry Christmas to all our readers, coffee swillers and general hanger-oners from us at Beck’s Cafe.

Dr. Julie Nemecek has some interesting thoughts on the conundrum that our President, George Bush, may be finding himself in with The Matthew Shepherd bill slowly making it’s way to his desk.  The bill, which many of our reader’s already know about, makes violence against people due to their gender or gender identity, a federal crime. It’s good protections not just for the transgender but also for, as the bill states, hate crimes against persons due to:

Section 2 Findings…actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of the victim…

So if your transgender, it’s protective and it’s also true if your disabled. That’s right, the disabled are in fact a group even more subject to hate crimes than transgender people. Sadly, they can’t hardly speak for themselves at all. Thank God all we have is GID. Check out these factoids on hate crimes focused on the disabled:

• In 1994, due to the growing prevalence of studies and massive anecdotal instances of hate crimes against people with disabilities, the category of “disability” was added to the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990
• The U.S. Office on Crime Statistics reported in 2002 that in many cases, crime victims with disabilities have never participated in the criminal justice process, “even if they have been repeatedly and brutally victimized.” (the victims are often afraid of retaliation from the perpetrator; even the caregiver)
• disability-based bias crimes are all too frequently mislabeled as “abuse” and never directed from the social service or education systems to the criminal justice system. Even very serious crimes — including rape, assault, and vandalism — are too-frequently labeled “abuse.”

(data on hate crimes against the disabled from Civil Rights.org and UCLA Berkley Newsletter, “Flawed FBI reporting system undercounts disability hate crimes“. )

So back to President Bush and his conundrum. Dr. Nemecek sums it up nicely, at her blog, when she says, ”

He doesn’t need to ask “What would Jesus do?” because he has a more certain answer in asking “What DID Jesus do?” That answer is simple. Jesus befriended and sought to protect the oppressed of his day from the attacks of the religious right

In Jesus day, the Pharisees were a sect in the Jewish faith who would have been part of the religeous “right”. They were those who, in His words were:

• (vipers) “You offspring of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” (Matthew 3:7)
• (hypocrites) “But woe to you, experts in the law and you Pharisees, hypocrites! You keep locking people out of the kingdom of heaven! For you neither enter nor permit those trying to enter to go in. (Matthew 23:13)
• (unjust) “But woe to you Pharisees! You give a tenth of your mint, rue, and every herb, yet you neglect justice and love for God! But you should have done these things without neglecting the others. (Luke 11:42)

Jesus didn’t say that what the Pharisees taught was wrong…it’s how they lived and lived among the people that was wrong. It was their oppression of the people and unjust actions. That’s the conundrum President Bush has. To not sign the bill means he’s choosing to not protect the oppressed and siding with a vocal religious right. It doesn’t take a leap of faith to see that’s what Jesus did, protect and advocate for the oppressed, it just takes doing the stuff Jesus did.

(Bible references are from the Net Bible)

When our children were growing we often wondered if their faith in Christ, something we had always nourished in them with the same care as we took care of their bodies, would flourish in public schools. Most of our friends opted for private Christian schools as nurturing grounds for their children’s education. We could never afford such a luxury, feeling instead that a faith that grew in the real world, no matter how questioned, would be stronger than one without tests. Afteral, Jesus had taught us that we were in the world but not of the world (John 17:14-15). That said to us that we had to stay in the world, not hide from it. We can’t say for sure that such an approach is always the best though. Afterall, poor public schools do exist and a private education, Christian or otherwise, might be the best option. But we now have a little data to backup what we had always felt in our gut.

The Denver Post reported, in the September 24th edition, the results of a study performed by the University of Texas that,

higher education is not the secularizing influence many Christians suspect it to be…Texas researchers found that college students were less likely to lose their religion than others in their age group, 18 to 25 years old.

Interestingly, 24% of those who never attended college said that religion had become less important to them compared with only 15% of those who did attend college. Could college make you smarter and more religious? We certainly didn’t think so as we saw our little birds flutter from our nest. But we felt that we and our public school, had taught them to think for themselves. It turns out that thinking about your faith is what this is all about. And at U.S. Universities, where the percentage of atheists and agnostics teaching are three times as high as the general population, a UCLA study found that,

79 percent of college students surveyed believed in God, 69 percent prayed and 81 percent attended some religious services.

Teaching of all kinds makes kids think about who they are, who they are becoming and what they believe. That sounds healthy not damaging. This quote, by Church of Christ Minister Mark Wylie, from the Denver Post article, might be the best lesson here,

“You have to let college students explore,” Wylie said. “They are incredibly spiritually active and vibrant.”

But, he concluded, they don’t like a hard sell from any side of the debate; I think alot of us fall into that category these days.

Speaking of thinking, another writer, named Caryn Lemur, has penned some outstanding articles to help Christians and non-Christians alike, think about what it means to be transgender in the midst of their faith. It can be a damning paralysis to be Christian and be transgender (perhaps this is so for all faiths) but Caryn’s essays will help you to think critically about this topic. That is if you need to think about it at all.

To read the Denver Post article; “Study: College campuses may nurture faith”, click to the Denver Post HERE.
To read Caryn’s “Essays For The Thinking Christian”, please visit her site at this link HERE.

Faith in the transgender community is sometimes talked about and sometimes not. But there is an under the surface sense in which many transgender people either struggle with their faith, wondering if they’ve “crossed the line” with God or that they are just fine, that what is happening is a simple issue of genetics and that it’s their response that matters, God is not angry with their gender dilemma. For those who are Jewish though, a new embracing has come.

The Union for Reform Judaism announced on August 7th a major revision to their 10-year old guide on welcoming individuals into the community. They are now including blessings for transgender people in the union’s 500-page resource manual for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender inclusion. The guide includes two blessings authored by Rabbi Elliot Kukla for transitioning genders. You can read the official press release on this announcement by clicking to the Union for Reform Judaism site at this link HERE.

There is some news on the wire on this so here’s some additional resources for you to check out:

• Miami Herald.com coverage of this event
• Something Jewish.com coverage of this announcement

   Merry Christmas everyone! This is indeed the Christmas Season, beginning at sundown on 24 December and ending at sundown on 5 January. It’s a time of “Holly Jolly Christmas“, eggnog, and gift giving too. But it is also the time of The Incarnation. In fact, this IS the reason for the season, the “invasion” by God as a man, into our world.

So what and why is it important? Well, in his excellent and very scholarly article, “The Importance of the Incarnation”, Bob Deffinbaugh , Th.M., writes:

In the past, God had revealed Himself through His works (as recorded in the Scriptures), His world (Psalm 19:1-6), and His word (Ps. 19:7-14). In the coming of Christ, God was revealed in the person of Jesus Christ:

• God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power (Heb. 1:1-3a).

• For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him (John 1:17-18).

• In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness did not comprehend it . . . . There was a true light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him (John 1:4-5, 9-10).

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The Incarnation is the real reason for this Christmas Season. So with your holiday mocha-cappucino in one hand and Christmas cookie in the other, I invite you to read more of Mr. Deffinbaugh’s full article at Bible.Org by clicking to it at this link HERE.

(stained glass photo courtesy of St. Hilary’s Episcopal Church)