Our Mysterious Journey

People often think of the church as a place to go for answers. They want to know why life gets so hard and why good things happen to bad people. They want to know how illness and death fit into God’s plan. They want to know what God’s plan is for their life or why years of prayer still seem to be unanswered. They want to understand, to know what they can do to make it better, to get God on their side, and get things to finally change. 

Over 30-plus years of ministry we’ve heard these questions more times than we can count.  We’ve now been pastoring at New Heart for nearly twenty years - quite a milestone in these  days - and together our gathering has sat with these questions in as many varieties as you can imagine. For years we worked out answers as best we could. We recounted the promises of God and the assurances of scripture as we understood them then with our whole hearts, and for the most part it helped. We celebrated the good in each other’s lives and pressed through the hard things together; we held to our community and to the God we knew loved us. 

But over the years the questions that wouldn’t yield to easy answers began to pile up; the boxes we’d gathered to hold our uncertainties in the early days refused to keep their lids on, and those uncertainties refused to let us look away. When nine people were killed in our city by a white supremacist whom they’d welcomed into their evening Bible study, the easy answers began to fail. When tragedy struck our families, taking our children without warning or explanation, we lived heartbreak too honest and holy to be dishonored with answers. 

As we held to God and each other through these things and more, certainty gradually began to lose its attraction, and remarkably, as our flawed sense of security began to fade away, we  found in its place a renewed and growing sense of wonder. No longer were we so worried about being sure we’re believing the right things and getting our rewards – in truth a startlingly  transactional approach to God. No longer did holding both our faith and the realities of our lives seem like working out a complicated geometry proof, needing somehow to reassure God each time that we knew Him to be greater than our challenges and our feelings. We came to see that God really isn’t trying to prepare us with the right answers for a cosmic final exam. He’s invited us on a journey, to join Abraham and Moses, Isaac and Jacob in going with Him, walking by faith, trusting not the map or our understanding of the destination, but trusting simply the One walking with us. 

It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact certitude and the  demand for certitude.
Richard Rohr, Eager to Love

Today we are learning to say with Timothy, “I know Him Whom I have believed” (2 Timothy 1:12 ASV, emphasis added) instead of what we believe. Daily we’ve come to realize that faith really is an orientation to wonder, an ever-increasing awe at Who God is and His unfathomable presence in our lives. It’s discovering Him in unimagined places, waiting for us where we never dared wander before. It’s choosing to embrace the unknown, to step forward, certain only of the One going with us and before us. It’s a journey full of mysterious mountains, with their valleys and mountain tops, each full of possibility, discovery, and most importantly, each created and held together by the God who is Love.

Honoring Human Dignity

We are dedicated to creating and maintaining a safe, inclusive, and egalitarian place for people to be embraced and loved, affirming the divine spark in every person. Each one of us is made in the image and likeness of Love. It is our differences in age, race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, and/or family status that make us unique and a resilient, adaptable, brilliant expression through which the goodness of God will be made known. We will not contribute to the polarization and dehumanization of people. We believe in the “make them one” that Jesus requested of the Father in the Gethsemane prayer recorded in John 17.

How We See God

For us there is no image of God more clear than Jesus. Believing that “in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19 ESV) and that "He is the sole expression of the glory of God [the Light-being, the out-raying or radiance of the divine], and He is the perfect imprint and very image of [God's] nature" (Hebrews 1:3 AMP), we consider the life and teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels to be the primary lens through which we learn and interpret the character of God.

The only time Jesus spoke about his own heart in all of the gospels he expressed it as gentle and lowly (Matthew 11:29 NKJV). That is how we imagine God to be: HUMBLY GENTLE.

The Jesus we see was self-giving, loved those that opposed Him, and not only included but sought out the rejected and marginalized. The healings that took place were often more than physical; in many cases there was a social restoration as well. He not only loved humanity, He was driven by compassion for them (Matthew 9:36 NKJV). That is how we imagine God to be: LOVINGLY RESTORATIVE.

Jesus rode donkeys and not warhorses, was peacefully subversive in the face of imperialism, and when Peter used a sword to attack his oppressor, Jesus said "no more of this" (Luke 22:51 NASB) We believe He meant it. That is how we imagine God to be: NON-VIOLENT

In addition to these examples from the life of Jesus, we have read the Sermon on the Mount, and we take it seriously. In this, His seminal teaching, Jesus flipped the script on centuries of religious understanding, superseding it with a new alternative wisdom. In it we find expressed the nature of the divine and inspiration for how we are to live and be as a result. The incarnation of Jesus shows us that the divine and human natures can beautifully share the same space. We have been designed all along with the integrity to carry the magnanimous love of God: "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27 NKJV). Word really did become flesh, and It still does. Richard Rohr says, "God loves things by becoming them," and we are all in that becoming. 

Beloved Community 

As Christ named us His beloved, we consider this gathering a Beloved Community. 

In Beloved Community we seek to inspire transformative growth in each other. Love keeps us  curious, with an attitude of wonder about what could be, what is under the surface of this life we are living, and about those with whom we live it. All our stories are different, so we consider each one with curiosity, openness, and honor. We desire to know each other whole-heartedly in our complexity and diversity. 

In Beloved Community We… 

• Aspire to be self-aware, in the hope that we can be present, authentic, and clear in our  intentions and expectations. 

• Create space for all by listening attentively, speaking responsibly, and encouraging  everyone to find their voice. 

• Encourage curiosity and wonder in regard to God and everyone created in His image,  especially those outside our own frame of reference or experience, desiring to consider others with openness and curiosity, a readiness to forgive, and an eagerness to love beyond agreement. 

• Respect each other's differences and allow each to process at their own pace. 

We seek out and encourage our community to use tools that are helpful for becoming the best versions of ourselves, such as contemplative prayer practices, studying the Enneagram, journaling, and Morning Pages, among many others.

Love’s Diversity

Our spiritual formation and later ministry began in a conservative evangelical denomination. Like so many with similar beginnings, we were largely informed by both a belief in the far-reaching grace of God and the implied teaching that some people, by their own choice and lifestyle, were living very far from that grace. Driven to near hysteria by the changing mores of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many with the same background were convinced that LGBTQIA+ individuals should be kept at the top of this list. During this same period, we continually sensed God’s calling to be a loving community and a safe place for all, especially for those who found themselves disenfranchised from or simply without a place in the prevailing Church models of our time. While we’ve heard (and experienced!) endless ways that people have found themselves marginalized from the spaces meant to care for them, we’ve been especially impacted by the LGBTQIA+ believers God has brought in our path. After years of hearing their stories, sharing their tears, and experiencing their genuine and fruitful love for Jesus and His people, we began to wonder if God’s love could be bigger and more diverse than we’d been taught. We increasingly sensed a choice: we could be another closed door, or we could risk digging a little deeper to see if what we’d been taught reflected the true heart of God or the biases, judgements, and preferences that always seek to warp and influence the true expression of His love.

And so we did, and over many years we learned so much from our digging into scripture, reading different perspectives, and listening in our relationships.

For us this journey left us with far more than reasonable doubt regarding our past understanding of scripture regarding LGBTQIA+ believers. More importantly, as we continue to look more and more into the lived example of Jesus, we see that over and over in His earthly life, Jesus was asked for permission or at least an excuse to exclude someone or some group, to declare them unworthy of His presence, His attention or His love. Over and over, He said no. At every opportunity, He chose the breathing and beloved people in front of Him over the texts and their disputed interpretations. To each of them, He offered His welcome; like Him, so do we. Today we are lovingly inclusive, affirming, and celebrative of our LGBTQIA+ friends and New Hearters and grateful that we began to wonder and risk the digging a little deeper.

Our View of Scriptures

Scripture is combined of at least 66 books and letters (some canons have more) that have  diverse authors, including shepherds, kings, fishermen, and more. They wrote from different  perspectives and to people in situations and circumstances within cultures and realities that are very different from the world we live in today. Some of the texts are letters to specific churches in the first century. Some are personal recollections of the life of Jesus on earth. Others are poetry, allegory, parables, or apocalyptic in genre. They are filled with metaphor, paradox, and even satire, and so to read these sacred texts on only one level would be to miss their full and intended meaning. Therefore, we don’t approach each book the same. While we fully believe them to be inspired, or as Timothy says, “God-breathed”, we don't see them as God-dictated. These letters and books weren’t written to us, but are preserved for us and meant like a holy icon to point us to the Christ. 

There are a multitude of interpretations of what scripture is saying on certain topics, as  evidenced by the endless disagreements between generations of well-meaning believers when it comes to both the fundamentals and the particulars of our faith. Very simply, as much as Christians like to claim that it is, scripture very often is not clear. We readily admit that despite our best efforts we all bring our preconceived notions, life experiences, and personal biases to the text. That is normal and expected; however, as we mature in Christ, we hope to have the truth set us increasingly free of our biased approaches and preset programming. We can learn and choose to read scripture through the lens of Jesus and seek to interpret and apply it in keeping with His teachings and lived example of the greatest love. He often said, "you've heard it said, but I say", and so we seek the greater meaning and deeper understanding in Him. 

To be clear, we dearly love scripture, believe it to be an important part of a believer’s life, and  our gatherings are chock-full of it, but we also understand Jesus to say that you can search it  and still miss the dynamic experience of actually knowing Him. Without the starting point of  Jesus, scripture can easily become a hammer in the hands of angry people, while its intended  purpose is to be a light shining brightly on our Beloved. The words in scripture give us a frame  of reference, but can’t ultimately describe the full experience of knowing God. As inspirational as they are, God is far too vast to be contained in mere words on a page. God is bigger than the Bible, and the final destination of His Word isn’t to reside in a book but to be enfleshed in people. While we have a high regard for scripture, our highest regard is for the One to whom those verses point us: the Christ.