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First in-city music, art, sacred community and social transformation festival with a progressive Christian framework. Leaders from around the world join us to co-create a deeper vision for the future and share practical tools to heal ourselves, our communities, and the planet in on-going ways moving forward. We hope to see you there!

The below probably speaks for itself but in a nut shell it is about churches, chapels and retreat centers joining the movement to move from an overly human-centered religious consciousness (what Pope Francis calls our “narcissism” as a species) to a cosmically-aware consciousness. It is about uniting anew the psyche and the cosmos that was torn asunder in the modern era with the divorce of religion from science but today can and must be healed. With a practice like this we can move from centuries of battles over Jesus and Christ dogmas to the “third nature of Christ,” the Cosmic Christ (which in fact is present in our earliest Christian sources including Paul and the Gospel of Thomas). Such an understanding paves the way for an Eco-Christ and an eco-theology but based on a spiritual practice, not just speculative theologizing.

Thank you for your attention,

Matthew Fox

Now is the time to arise, in truth and love, and declare unequivocally: “No more war for oil! No more war at all!”

The abuses at Standing Rock must be seen for what they are: war crimes against a sovereign nation.

Now that I am venturing onto the terrain called “aging,” I would like a do-over in how I responded to people over 65 when I was their pastor.

I don’t think I began to comprehend the complexity of aging. I viewed it as a single-track pastoral problem to be solved by regular home visits and the occasional group event, like a bus tour. I tended to treat the elderly as needy, more like patients in a hospital than self-differentiating adults. Some were hospital patients, of course. But I missed seeing the rest of their journeys.

The tension between “bricks and mortar” and “mission and ministry” is never easy to navigate. Facilities seem so real and practical, while mission and ministry tend to be ambiguous and unmeasurable.

The tension gets especially complicated when facilities are enshrined as “historic.” Some constituents derive personal status from things historic, whether or not it is deserved, and the old implies a certain continuity that many desire.

Members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, over 200 Tribal Nations, and thousands of allies from across the United States and the world have been taking direct action since April 2016 to call attention to the violation of their Indigenous rights, desecration of their lands and waters and the threats to their ecosystem engendered by the Dakota Access Pipeline.

If you were to plan a Spiritual Development ministry for your church, you might start with prayer: the simple but far-reaching act of talking to God.

Your second element might be meditation: the not-quite-so-simple act of listening to God.

On you would go with study, worship, confession – each harder the one before.

This is going to be one of those stories where the names and locations are kept anonymous to protect privacy. When it comes to racial and religious reconciliation, all too often the most heartfelt stories are also the most confidential.

It is a story that needs to be told, though. I will do my best to share the light and protect all parties.

The twenty-first century has been dubbed the “age of interspirituality” by Brother Wayne Teasdale and others who are impressed by the increased sharing of wisdom and practices among people coming from different spiritual traditions. It acknowledges that beneath the diversity of our faith and life experiences lies a deeper unity of spirituality.

I am sure you know that the United Church of Canada has subjected one of its ministers,
Gretta Vosper to a hearing where she was thoroughly interrogated over what up until now has
been the basis for ‘essential agreement’. Not anymore! She is now in the process of being
defrocked which means the UCC has now become a signing creedal church, with no
expectation of growth since ordination vows. It also means from henceforth any ordained
minister can be hauled before a similar court on the basic of one complaint, NOT EVEN
from within the congregation, about what that minister said.

In general, mainline congregations have missed two successive generations of young adults. Funerals far outnumber baptisms and weddings. Our average age is pushing 65. Sunday schools and youth groups are sparse. Young families in our community don’t aim their SUVs toward us. Many church activities serving young families happen away from Sunday morning, anyway, which our Sunday-oriented elderly don’t understand or value. Meanwhile, the elderly are dealing with isolation, an epidemic of loneliness, and a range of health issues that only other elderly appreciate.

Dear interfaith leaders around the world: Scriptural Reasoning is a process in which small groups of Jews, Christians and Muslims, and sometimes people of other faiths, gather to read and reflect upon short passages from their scriptures. “Opening our sacred texts to others for conversation from the heart, and modeling a fellowship that sees difference as rich and illuminating” fashions a relationship through the medium of sacred writings. Scriptural Reasoning’s well-constructed website includes a number of guides and rich resources, including 24 “Text Bundles” which offer brief scriptural readings from the three Abrahamic religions, with titles such as “Encountering God”, “Abrahamic Hospitality”, “Fasting” and “Refugees.”

If yours is a typical mainline church, your congregation’s average age is pushing past 60 and moving toward 70. Every Sunday, you see more “gray” in your pews and more empty spaces.

So what do you do? You have three choices:

Our question to the church is “How can we grow and evolve in our experience and understanding of the Mystery of the universe if we close our ears and minds to the creative voices that push us beyond the traditional views?”

In 1958 – as, coincidentally, mainline Protestant churches were enjoying their happy heyday – economist John Kenneth Galbraith began to use a term to describe widely acceptable and comfortable ideas that might not actually be true but …