Bishop John Shelby Spong spoke at First-Plymouth Church on "Beyond Heaven and Hell on Monday, March 28th
After our visit to Omaha, we journeyed to Lincoln, the capital of Nebraska, to speak on a Monday night at the First Plymouth United Church of Christ, served today by a very genial and multi-talented Senior Pastor named Jim Keck. He is an able successor to their former Senior Pastor Otis Young, who died not too long ago after his well-deserved retirement from this church. Otis Young saw his church as an open and intellectually inquisitive congregation offering an alternative to the closed-minded fundamentalism so prevalent in that part of the Midwest. He developed a television ministry that carried the services of his church every Sunday not only across Nebraska, but to the surrounding states. People were thus introduced on a regular basis to a different kind of Christianity, one in which brains were allowed to be engaged, honest doubts were respected and compassion was displayed toward all those that traditional, conservative Christianity seems eager today to denigrate. People of color are not only welcomed at this church, but they are deeply part of this church’s life. Women are honored; three women pastors are on the staff. Gay and lesbian people experience complete acceptance and their sacred unions are regularly recognized and blessed. The television ministry continues today and across the heartland of America, a different understanding of Christ’s inclusive love blankets that geographical area each Sunday.
Over 600 people packed that church on that Monday, (March 28th) night when I spoke on how my search for the meaning of eternal life had deepened my understanding of life itself, but even more about how it has deepened my understanding of Christianity. The response was touching; the questions that followed the lecture were deep, provocative and insightful. Present in that audience were atheists and agnostics, Christians and Jews, believers and searchers. I found no one defensive for God or eager to man the barricades around the traditional Christian understandings that are dying in the light of the intellectual revolution that has engulfed the Christian world from the time of Copernicus and Galileo, through Newton, Darwin, Freud and Einstein. They seemed to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I came home from Nebraska enormously encouraged about the future of Christianity and impressed with the possibility that the renewal and even the revival of a new Christianity for a new world might arise from the heartland of America. I would be happy attending and becoming a significant participant in any of the congregations that I experienced on this particular lecture tour. Senator Hruska may have felt the need to champion “mediocrity” a quarter of a century ago, but there was nothing mediocre about the Nebraska that I encountered. I was emboldened by what I saw–an open, loving, secure, questioning Christianity; an invitation regularly offered to people in these congregations to journey deeply into the mystery of God and a genuine conviction that God is bigger than our human minds can ever embrace.
I would go back to Nebraska in a moment. I thank them all for inspiring me so deeply that their gift to me, by itself alone, will surely carry me at least through the rest of 2011.
~Bishop John Shelby Spong
(used with permission by ProgressiveChristianity.Org)
John Shelby Spong was the Episcopal Bishop of Newark before his retirement in 2000. As a visiting lecturer at Harvard, The Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California and at universities, conference centers and churches throughout the world, he is one of the leading spokespersons for liberal Christianity. His books include Jesus for the Non-Religious, The Sins of Scripture, A New Christianity for a New World, Eternal Life: A New Vision, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Resurrection: Myth or Reality?, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and his autobiography Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love and Equality.
Purchase CD/DVD of Bishop John Shelby Spong at First-Plymouth:
Contact Addie at 402-476-7550 or addie@firstplymouth.org
DVDs: $16
CDs: $10
Worship Times at First-Plymouth Church:
Sundays:
9:00am
10:30am
11:59am
Saturdays:
5:30pm
Taizé Service:
1st Sunday of the month, 7:00pm
