The Historical Challenge
For those of us who grew up in Christian traditions, we were often either taught outright or at least led to believe that we were inherently superior to people from other faith traditions (or no tradition at all). That because we had declared our allegiance to Team Jesus we could rest easy in our salvation, while all others were required to convert to our way of thinking if they wanted to avoid eternal conscious torment.
For many of us, it’s not until we undergo some sort of deconstruction process that we begin to see the foolishness of such a dogmatic stance. As we come to know people who hold other beliefs about the divine and find them to be just as—if not more—generous, compassionate, and forgiving than other Christians, we start to question the exclusivity of our religion as it has been imposed upon us.
But with much of the Christian church in the US still firmly entrenched in silly culture wars and the futility of an exclusivist worldview, it begs the question: how can we do better?
During this Easter season our community will consider these questions through a video presentation from The Work of the People featuring author, speaker, and activist Brian McLaren titled “Toward the Other.” For the next four Sundays we’ll discuss the challenges McLaren sees toward community transformation: Historical, Doctrinal, Liturgical, and Missional (see below for video link & time stamp info for each session).
Please join us this Sunday, April 14, in the New Wineskins Virtual Theology Pub powered by Zoom for Part 1 of our 4-week journey From Fear to Transformation as we talk about the Historical challenge and how we might respond.
6:00pm ET: Happy Half-Hour (informal meet & greet time)
6:30pm ET: Presentation & conversation begin
We’ll use a single discussion video from The Work of the People for the next four Sundays. Feel free to view the entire video at your leisure, or use the following approximate time stamps to locate each week’s session (you’ll need to manually navigate to each segment of the video using the video player’s time slider):
April 14 — Introduction/The Historical Challenge: 0:00-4:15
April 21 — The Doctrinal Challenge: 4:15-8:25
April 28 — The Liturgical Challenge: 8:25-10:00
May 5 — The Missional Challenge: 10:00-13:31
View our first session here (time stamp 0:00-4:15)
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