From “Worth Fighting For: Finding Courage and Compassion When Cruelty Is Trending” by John Pavlovitz
Years ago, I sat on a panel discussion on “Progressive Christianity.” The host’s first request of the panelists was to describe what progressive Christianity meant to them. My new friend, the Reverend Vince Anderson, took the mic and said, “Let’s be clear: progressive Christianity is just Christianity. We are Christians – and we are progressing in our knowledge and understanding.” We could have stopped there.
This is the heart of what it should mean to be a Christian of any designation: the desire to continue to move and grow and learn and change, even if those things place us in opposition to the person we once were or the beliefs we once held firmly or the testimony we once gave. As we move through space and time, our faith should be in continual evolution. We should always look back at the previous version of ourselves and realize how much we didn’t know then. We should be able to see how far we’ve come in matters of spirituality.
Progressive Christianity is about not apologizing for what we become as we live this life and openly engage the faith we grew up with. There are not sacred cows, only the relentless, sacred search for Truth. Tradition, dogma, and doctrine are all fair game, because al pass through the hands of flawed humanity, and as such are all equally vulnerable to the prejudices, fears, and biases of those it touched.