Take the loneliness out of the sting of life

I've been reading books by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong. He has some important criticisms of some of the core pieces of doctrine of Christianity. However, I'm not going to get into that. Instead, I want to share Spong's vision of what he thinks the church should be. It is a vision that resonates with me and I wish its implementation could happen quickly. Alas, too many church leaders are heavily invested in the way things work now.

A vision for the church from the book A New Christianity for a New World:

A place where people are called out of prejudice and brokenness and into a community. This community will celebrate its members for why they are and learn what it means to be fully human. The journey will be towards wholeness instead of goodness. This is not something one does in private.

The community will be agents of life. It will celebrate all life -- plant, animal, and human -- and the ways life interconnects.

We will reach beyond the tribe to solve the needs of the whole earth and of future generations. We will challenge our excessive ways of living, our spiraling birthrate, our disregard for the environment.

We will reach to each other to heal the scars of prejudice and income inequality. The variety of faith stories will be honored, not be a source of condemnation.

We will continue to mark the stages of life, such as birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, sickness, and death. We may perhaps honor the difficult decisions to end a pregnancy or end life-support.

Guilt will not be a weapon of control. We will call people to be free to be themselves. The church will shift the basic story from estrangement from God to evolutionary incompleteness. The self-centeredness that increased the chances of survival of our ancestors must give way to a love that reaches beyond our own needs.

We will not insist the way our ancestors understood their God must be the way we understand God. Even so, there is much to learn from the faith struggles of our ancestors.

We will dedicate ourselves to the search for truth, never insisting we have all the answers.

We will be a center of caring. We may not take the sting from life, but can take the loneliness from the sting.

We will be a place of justice, calling for justice for all people in a way that leads to reconciliation. We will confront racism, patriarchy, heterosupremacy, the economically powerful.

The church leaders will have positions of service, not of hierarchy.

We will bring life, not death. Love, not oppression. Community, not destruction.