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By calling ourselves progressive, we mean we are Christians who...

Invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including but not limited to):

believers and agnostics,
conventional Christians and questioning skeptics,
women and men,
those of all sexual orientations and gender identities,
those of all races and cultures,
those of all classes and abilities,
those who hope for a better world and those who have lost hope

Proposition 8 and Christianity
By Ian Lawton
Maybe then we could acknowledge that the early Christian church was far more accepting of diversity than the current church. Early Christian writers celebrated the loving, same sex relationship of two Roman soldiers who were also Christian martyrs, Sergius and Bacchus. Documents from the 10th and 11th centuries reveal that the Christian church devised same sex marriage rituals alongside heterosexual marriage liturgies. Homophobia is a recent aberration in the Christian church. Could we step forward, by regaining the Christian celebration of diversity?...
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Mercy and Truth Will Meet, What It Takes To Be a Movement That Matters
By Peter Laarman
Bill Coffin said, Liberal Christianity, or what we today call progressive Christianity and what some call "seminar room Christianity," has until now had a really unhelpful taint of elitism around it. We need to change that. So let's just agree to get the conversation started. Let's begin to grow in faith. Find strength in one another. See the world more clearly. And in and through all this, liberate ourselves and liberate one another for the sake of social transformation.  If we ourselves can become the first fruits of the change we seek, then change itself-real change-cannot be far behind....
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POST DENOMINATIONAL HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
Change is in the air and the deep rooted change of mind required of us in the present global stress challenges us all to set our own lives in the big picture.......Here is an attempt to make word picture of the mindshift required. I
wonder if it would stir creative thoughts among tcpc participants....
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Prayer Given by the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson at the Opening Inaugural Event
As many of you know, the Right Rev. Gene Robinson, the openly Gay Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire , gave the opening prayer at yesterday's Lincoln Memorial event. It was the first event in the inaugural festivities this year. HBO, which had paid for exclusive rights to the event chose not to broadcast Bishop Robinson's prayer. So if you watched there you wouldn't have caught it or even known that it occurred. NPR didn't air it either. There's no record of it in images placed on the sites of Getty Images, New York Times and the Washington Post. It's a complete erasure of his ever having delivered the prayer.  Such is the continuing policy of silence and erasure we have to live with from people who should know better. We are used to this. If you know your Gay history this has happened again and again. In fact this little list-serve is really about recovering the truth in our history and celebrating it. So we're going to celebrate it by providing here the full text of Bishop Robinson's prayer....
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Remarks of President Barak Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast

But no matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate. There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. This much we know.

The Phoenix Affirmations Full version
Phoenix Affirmations full version from CrossWalk America...
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Engaging the Recovering Christians
By Fred Plumer
So how do we progressive Christians share our perspective so recovering Christians can hear us and actually get excited about the progressive path of Jesus and what our churches have to offer?...
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Why I Left Christianity
By Steven Locks
I remember feeling that what happened to Jesus was unfair as (so I thought) he just wanted people to be good and to love each other. So he had my support. This was basically my attitude until my late teens. Very simplistic, and not so far particularly damaging! What I believed in from the start and what attracted me to Christianity was a message of love. It was the desire for this that was primal and would become the driving force that took me out later....
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From the Third Floor of the Gargage- The Story of TheOOZE
By Spencer Burke
I used to be a pastor. More than that, I was a pastor at Mariners Church in Irvine, California-a bona fide mega church with a 25-acre property and a $7.8 million dollar budget.  For years, I played by the rules and tried hard not to think too much about the lingering questions in my soul. Doubt, after all, was dangerous. Who knew where it might lead?...
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A Heretics Guide to Eternity
By Spencer Burke
"If Spencer Burke is a heretic, it's not because he's teaching dangerous doctrine, but because he asks the questions about faith that today's sensibilities naturally raise. Spencer is a winsome walking companion for those who find traditional dogma too narrow. It's a thoughtful conversation."  -Marshall Shelley,...
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The Bible and Homosexuality

Too many Christians blindly accept that the Bible condemns homosexuality, but rarely are the few verses that do so discussed in their textual and cultural settings.  The author, a United Church of Christ minister, investigates the small print and finds no support for oppression and bigotry in the name of faith.  This article was prompted by protests against the ordination of openly gay clergy in her husband's Lutheran congregation.

Saving Jesus From The Church - How To Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus
By Robin Meyers
"In his least political and most thoughtful book to date, Dr. Robin Meyers finds the common ground in the world of Jesus and lays out a call to action that unites us under a banner of hope and reconciliation." ~Erick Ebama.  This is not a call to the church to move to the far left or to try something brand new. Rather, it is the recovery of something very old. Saving Jesus from the Church shows us what it means to be a Christian and how to follow Jesus' teachings today....
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Mind In The Balance-Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity
By B. Alan Wallace
By establishing a dialogue in which the meditative practices of Buddhism and Christianity speak to the theories of modern philosophy and science, B. Alan Wallace reveals the theoretical similarities underlying these disparate disciplines and their unified approach to making sense of the objective world.  "This work is replete with lucid argument and wonderful, (nearly breathtaking) detailed explanation as to the congruencies and parallels between Eastern & Western contemplative traditions and modern, that is to say: quantum physics. Mind in the Balance is now in my top three favorites of all time, easily a must read 5 plus star effort," reviews Matthew J. Schimpf.

RDPulpit: Is Barack Obama a “Fierce Advocate” For Gays or Just Pragmatist-in-Chief?
The Obama administration has gone from indifference to actively promoting religious opposition to the civil rights of gay Americans, comparing same-sex marriage to incest and pedophilia....
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Are Labels really Necessary?
By Joseph Mattioli

This short article was written as a post on the TCPC forum by Derek Ward who goes by the name Tariki on our discussion board concerning labels.

My Politico-Religious Journey

The Christianity I knew had nothing to do with today’s moral judging from the religious right. It didn’t depend upon a church hierarchy throwing around its weight in the name of ecclesiastical authority. It wasn’t defined by the drama of today’s fights over gay rights or attempts to sneak creationism into the schools. There was no political grandstanding. It was a deeply humble, self-emptying, other-serving Christianity.

ButterflyFish Music CD

Butterflyfish is a rootsy blend of American folk, gospel, blues, country, and bluegrass, cooked down and spiced up into fresh takes on the spiritual themes so characteristic of old American music.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart

By: Bethany Moreton To Serve God and Wal-Mart is one account of the anointing of free enterprise, the unlikely legitimation of neoliberal economics through evangelical religion. It tells this story through the twinned biographies of the world's largest company and the ideological apparatus it nurtured. It is not intended to blur the harsh picture of 21st-century political economy offered by a Naomi Klein or a David Harvey; their facts speak for themselves. Rather, it is meant to populate that picture with three-dimensional historical actors who support a purportedly irrational worldview. This move reveals the triumph of that vision as even more clearly the outcome of human effort and corporate resources, not of historical inevitability

Lots of Love
By Gary A. Wilburn

Gary's third and final book - Lots Of Love - is an urgent and loving testimonial to the simple but fundamental building blocks of our human and spiritual DNA - that "love is the beginning and the end of our journey." Each day physical life may conspire to ebb out of Gary's body but his spirit flows through his pen and his glorious fight to bring us all a message of hope at the holiday season. Lots of Love is an ornament to be hung on every tree, a candle to be lit on the last night of Hanukkah, an Eid prayer at Ramadan and a strand of lights at the new moon of Diwali.

The Need for an Inclusive Faith

When I was more dualistic in my faith the key question was: Are my beliefs correct and how do I get others to believe the right things? Now that I am more inclusive in my thinking the key question is: How can I fall in love with an unconditionally loving God and share this love with others?

Praying A New Story
By Michael Morwood

In this invigorating, poetic and imaginative paperback, Morwood shares prayers that can be used in small groups that reflect a fresh and bold reframing of Christian views of God, the universe, Jesus, the Spirit, and holidays such as Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost. Here you will read about an everywhere God instead of an elsewhere God, who is present and active in every corner of the universe and in every dimension of our everyday life.

What About Sin?

Obviously how we think about sin changes how we think about repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation.  If we understand sin to be primarily personal… the burden is on us individually to change our behavior. Change in personal behavior is always good when we identify behaviors and thoughts that we know we need to change.  But personal change does not adequately deal with destruction and hurt and evil that can come from the corporate, communal sin. For example: we might know that we have to change our attitudes toward homeless persons…and be more generous in our personal charity.  And it is good to do so.  But that still does not change the structural economic and political situations that will continue to result in more and more homeless people.  Or we might become aware that we personally need to be more open minded to those who are different from us.  So personal transformation is good.  But that does not change the systems of racism, sexism or homophobia. That infuses much of our cultural landscape.

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