we believe

The following is an excerpt from a speech I gave at the Renewing Faith, Renewing Congregations conference in Peterborough, Ontario in November of 2005.  Parts of it were adapted for a chapter in my book With or Without God. It was originally written in defense of the integrity of the ministry we are creating at West Hill United Church. Although the document that represents West Hill’s values and principles was intentionally written without the word “believe” in it, this document reclaims the word and proves that progressive Christians do believe in much, very much. We believe in the sanctity of life that is often experienced in ways that cannot be measured and that far outstrip what we can see and taste and touch.  We believe that there is much in this world that challenges the sanctity of life and that it must be defied.  We believe that to be very hard work and that it takes all the shoulders in a community to bear the burden of the responsibility.  We believe our experience of the deep sacredness of life is dynamic and cannot be named. We believe that the Bible is a human construction and it is, therefore, full of both human promise and human error.  We believe that no humanly constructed book can be the authoritative word of God and that we, who recognize this, are responsible to challenge such claims and behaviour that suggests such claims, particularly where we find it in our own church.  We believe that some of the stories of the activity of the divine in the world that are collected in the Bible are rich with metaphor and meaning and can enrich our understanding of ourselves, each other and creation.  And we believe that much of what is described in the Bible as the activity of God is destructive of relationship and equality, that it is tribal and divisive, that, despite the best attempts that the authors were making to describe their experience of the divine, they have created a legacy of judgment, horror and despair and we no longer choose to burden ourselves with that legacy.  We believe it is wrong to call such words holy or sacred. We believe that some of the words attributed to a man called Jesus, myth or reality, are words that can challenge us to seek alternate ways to live together and break down humanly-constructed barriers.  And we believe that some of the words attributed to that man are words that can divide and destroy relationship, not just by the way they are used, but by how they are recorded.  We believe that they describe a concept of hell that was very real to that man but is no longer relevant to us.  And we believe that, too often, his words have been used to imprison people in that hell, a place only the Bible and other religious texts continue to describe and make real in this world.  We believe that we have the right and responsibility to free ourselves of those concepts that are no longer meaningful and relevant for us because we do not believe that he was speaking as the only begotten Son of God, but as one who sought, as we do, to understand the sacred reality that he embraced and we call life. We believe that all that is constructed upon the church’s claim that the Bible is the authoritative word of God must be questioned because of the error of that claim.  We believe that the church’s creeds, doctrine, liturgy, ecclesiology, sacraments, hymns and theology are based on that claim.  We believe they should be assessed for their ability to support our attempts to live in right relationship with ourselves, each other and the earth, honouring the sanctity of life as we each experience it.  We believe that, though there are costs associated with such work and that much we have loved will be lost, that we must accept those costs, grieve openly, and, with love, caring and supporting one another, leave behind that which would encumber our work.  We believe we are gifted to create new understandings, that they can be rich and meaningful.  And we believe and these new understandings, too, must be questioned as time and experience lay hold of them. We believe that there are many who have spoken of or through their sacred realities in ways that open us to our tasks of building right relationship and loving from the core of our being.  We believe it is right and proper to nurture ourselves with their words, with our own words, with the ways that we and others see and know and celebrate the divine in our own lives. We believe that we are light to the world, to ourselves, to each other and that the world and all its inhabitants can be light to us.  We believe that our values will guide our choices and that our choices are the incarnation of our beliefs.  We believe that because this is so, it is more important for us to struggle to develop solid values for ourselves and society in order that we can strengthen the reality of love in the world than it is for us to be conversant in ancient theological terms. We believe that our experience of the sanctity of life is best expressed as and in love. © 2005 Gretta Vosper.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction of “We Believe” can be made without permission of the copyright holder.