When I began my movement out of conservative-evangelicalism I decided to write of my journey from time-to-time.... Here then is the log of that journey since 2009 sharing personal thoughts as-I-went of my resolve to explore my fundamental past of the 1960s through the lens of my contemporary experience as I had matured in the Christian faith.
Firstly, when marrying, I switch to my wife's church after ministring at my own for the first five years of our marriage. Hers was of Reformed background to my own fundamental Baptist heritage and was then in fellowship with the early forms of evangelical Calvinism (initially birthed out of the Billy Graham crusades). My own Baptist heritage stressed dispensational teachings whereas my wife's was covenant reform in structure and one I liked a lot and still do. I was 32 when we switched churches.
After 20 years our interdenomina-tional bible church birthed Mars Hill of Grand Rapids which was led by a young kid by the name of Rob Bell. We waited a month before joining at the urging of our pastor, Ed Dobson. When we did, we little understood the culturally progressive evangelical move-ment we were entering into. This massively public outreach movement was known as the emergent (or emerging) church. This movement began in the late 1990s (Mars started in 1999) and lasted until the 2010s. During this time many faith changes were taking place in West Michigan. Many believers came; many left; and, many things were witnessed as the church blazed forward.
Since our 20 years of worship and ministry at Mars I had aged, our kids had grown up and left, and I was thinking about retirement. During this same time my former evangelicalical faith had become hardened while the newly-borne emergent church movement merged back into progressive denominationalism from whence it came (this also included Catholicism as well).
When finally retiring after 30 years in the tech industry in 2009 I immediately began writing verse until I ran off my 20th century modernal foundations. I sensed I needed a new rugged foundation from which to write when positively exploring postmodernism for the Christian faith. I felt I needed a more expansive outlook which would take several years to find.
At first, I turned from Americanized Western Analytical modernal thought to Continental philosophy searching through it's many components. After several years I fortunately stumbled across Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism and found in it a very broad and deep view of life which could supercede all current forms of neo-Platonic and Aristotelian world views. Moreover, it could easily connect the sciences and academia as well as have close fellowship with any of the world religion's processual elements. A Process worldview became then the ideal form in which to expand my Christian faith in whatever mystical stew post-evangelicalism was already brewing. Process Christianity easily embraced all the processual elements of the ancient Hebraic faith while supercedeing the church's centuries-old Hellenistic and Scholastic Vatican faith forms.
Here then was my turning point after several yerrs of deconstructing and reconstructing my faith it was somewhere around 2014 when my metaphysical and ontologic center felt cosmologically sound and became re-centered in people and love as any good progressive view of life and faith would teach. It was built upon a changeling environment such as seen in processually-orientated evolutionary science and would behave benevolently in it's interior structures organically, sociologically, and spiritually, when preaching a God of love over hate and division.
Naturally this faith displacement would demand removal of the evangelical church's Calvinism which was itself very old and filled with the church's artificial constructs; a displacement requiring a more thoughtful replacement of beliefs towards an agency-runned world that was open in all of its future aspects while also poignantly based in felt relational, experiential and spiritual forms of processual upward lift against all elements which would processually move against it (remember, the world is built of agency-based process, whether good or bad) This is how I would expect God's indefatible spirit to operate in a world filled with divine blessings, intention, fellowship, hope, and love.
What once began with a deep Spirit burden to find a way forward for a Christianity grown old and desperate has now lead out with its best foot forward in momentary success against all which would destroy the Christian faith - including the church itself lost in the heady worlds of imperialism. A success which can affect the world of religion, science, economy, and any willing ecological society or civilization in intrinsically positive ways. Ways which many minds and hearts, faiths and organizations are now attempting in outlook, demeanor, behavior, and organization.
Peace,
R.E. Slater
* * * * * *
Index - Evangelical Politics
~~ all articles are listed in chronological order from latest to earliest ~~
T
A Contemporary Understanding of the Bible - Part 4: How Israel's Shema Became Jesus' Renewed Command
W
Christian Nationalism: “Everyone outside of our worldview should be admonished.”
Christ: "I give you a new commandment: love one another. Just as I have loved you, you must also love one another" (John 13:34)
 |
| Maga Mob at the D.C. Capital, Jan 6, 2021 |
 |
| Maga Mob at the D.C. Capital, Jan 6, 2021 |
