This debate goes back a long way. Some of you will remember Bishop John Robinson in the 1960s, one of the early proponents of what we now call Progressive Christianity. His famous book was Honest to God, followed by one with a lovely title: “But That I Cannot Believe”! Robinson addresses a credibility gap between dogma and our reason and human experience which is seen to contribute to the decline of mainline churches, when we have not ask the question “Why are they leaving us in droves?” or “Why are the generations that followed ours not picking up the way that we have led?

And so I believe that for all of these reasons and because these gaps have opened up, something is needed that speaks in a new way to society; speaks authentically; speaks honestly, even if it means that we speak our doubts rather than thump the table with certainties that are not believable.

And so what we called Progressive Christianity is not actually anything new. It is rather a gathering of different strands of belief and understanding of the Christian way. There is little that you have not heard from here for the last seven years or so, but what is happening now is that some people are saying in effect “We have something positive to offer and we want to put it together in a systematic way and offer it as a new spiritual home for those who have struggled with the old one; who have not been able to take the leap over the credibility gap”.

It’s also a positive statement about what’s already happening in the Christian Church in many places. For example, in Hal Taussig’s book “A New Spiritual Home,” he describes some of about one thousand churches in the USA who take on the characteristics of Progressive Christianity. This is a new movement of the Holy Spirit that is good and it is strong and it is worth proclaiming. So today I am going to very briefly mention five main characteristics of Progressive Christianity and then over the following five weeks I will deal with each in detail.

1. Progressive Christianity is a movement for spiritual renewal. It’s not the first and it won’t be the last, but it is that. It is a movement that recognises that people are seeking a genuine spiritual experience; that most people in the modern generation are no longer happy with churches that are set up like lecture halls, where what is addressed only is the mind- where we think about our faith. People are yearning for experience, for engagement, for participation. And so we, (and I say ‘we’ because I identify myself fully with this movement), seek wherever we can and within the constraints that allow us to make worship more participatory; to be more expressive and where possible to be infused with the arts- music, drama, poetry and symbolism. Progressive Christianity is willing where appropriate to go beyond the Christian tradition to draw on helpful symbols. Meditation, which has not necessarily been a part of traditional Christianity as some of us, is encouraged as part of prayer in worship and elsewhere. This is a movement for spiritual renewal that seeks to engage our whole beings , and not just our minds, as our traditional ways so often did.

2. Progressive Christianity welcomes and encourages intellectual integrity. For example, it challenges and welcomes alternatives to the language we so often use about God that is not meaningful for many people. We can call God ‘Father’ but be conscious that God is not a male, but that this is just one way to understand how God reaches out to us. When we are really game we occasionally call God ‘Mother’ too! God is not a mother but sometimes it helps us in our humanness to understand the nurture of God by using that metaphor. But there are many other ways of speaking about God that do not limit God to the ‘old man in the sky’, but look at the breadth of the mystery of creation and all that God is beyond what we can ever describe. Progressive thought promotes an approach to scripture that uses the scholarship that teaches us about how the scriptures came about, challenges some of the Fundamentalist claims about God. For example Val Webb questions whether we can go on accepting the image of a tribal God who annihilates neighbouring clans in order to annex land for the chosen ones. Such a God, she observes, would inevitably face an international war crimes tribunal today. Contemporary ethics would have no time for a God who fails to condemn the so-called righteous Lot who offers his virgin daughters for gang rape in order to protect his male houseguests. We want to challenge some of those ideas and say that simply because they are written in the Bible does not mean necessarily that this is what our God is like. We want to open our minds to new possibilities. We want to have intellectual integrity in the way we think about science, not discarding science because it does not accord with a metaphorical Biblical creation in six literal days some mere thousand years of years ago.

3. Progressive Christianity rejects gender stereotypes, acknowledging that the scriptures were written in the midst of a patriarchal society, and some of that influence is still felt today. We want to assert and live out a radical equality of men and women, recognizing people not on account of their gender but on account of their gifts. We assert the importance of welcoming everyone regardless of sexual orientation, especially recognizing the hurt and rejection felt by gay, Lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender people, including at the hands of the church. There are wrongs here that need to be put right. We share our common humanity and we must welcome everyone equally.

4. Progressive Christianity values vitality without asserting superiority. Christians need to stop saying that our way is the only way to God and wholeness. It is our way; it is a wonderful way; it is a way that leads us to God, but we want to stop putting down other religions, stop saying that there is no good in them, stop saying that we alone hold the keys to the gates of heaven. There is so much that we can do together if we value one another’s wisdom and contribution to the wellbeing of humanity.

5. Progressive Christianity promotes justice and ecology, recognising that at the heart of the life and teaching of Jesus is the way of justice and compassion. If we go back and read the Gospels again we will see how radically true it that is that justice and compassion go hand in hand. Whatever our dogmas may be, if we don’t stand for justice there is a huge credibility gap between us and Jesus. Particularly in our day and age, the centrality of the issue of ecology must be engaged with; the importance of recognising the God of the environment and how critical it is that we have a holistic theology that takes very seriously what is happening in the world around us.