Statement of Spiritual Journey

I grew up as a Southern Baptist preacher’s kid in south Alabama.  That alone should tell you a lot.  My father was in ministry in the Southern Baptist church for 30 years and then came out as a gay man and pastored MCC churches for 20 years before his death.  That should tell you a lot more.  I start with these things, because in retrospect, I know they have shaped much of my spiritual journey.

While I was victim to some of the Southern Baptist dogma, I was spared somewhat because of my father.  Perhaps because he always knew he was gay, he somehow taught me a different brand of Baptist that stayed with me, even in the hardest of spiritual times.  When I say hard times, I am referring to my own coming out process and the struggle that followed. 

While I had to re-think a lot of things and struggle to grasp a new and different God, I never once doubted that God loved me.  I also inherited from my dad a keen sense of God’s grace for all people as I watched him stand up for African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement and I witnessed him take heat for marrying people who had been divorced when no other minister would.

I watched as he helped teenage girls deal with pregnancy in an environment that looked down upon them.  I guess you could say that his example taught me that the rules paled in the presence of God’s grace toward us.

Now, all that helped me, but trust me, I have had a lot of other theological issues to rethink.  Like, can God really be in control of everything AND give us free will at the same time?  Does God cause death and call us home at a particular point in time?  Does God punish us when we mess up?  Does God bless America and not other parts of the world?  Is the Bible infallible, a great work of literature or an inspired, living word?

Well, these and many more, have been wonderful explorations for me over the last 20 years. 

I came to MCC while I still had braces on my teeth.  I was disillusioned with the church and disappointed by having my seminary aspirations crushed in light of my sexuality.  I was hurting for my father who had lost everything for the sake of being his true self.  But thank God, MCC was there.

For the first time in my life, I had to actually consider the good in the practices of other communities of faith.  It was in those very foreign and sometimes weird worship services that I began to learn that no denomination had a corner on God and once I got that, I believe I began a rich and wonderful journey toward a new understanding of the grace of God.

Today, I can say without flinching, that the more I know about God, the more I realize I don’t know anything.  I now understand God to be a mystery and I am in love with that mystery.  I am so glad that nothing within our grasp can explain or contain God.  I am comforted by the mystery of it all.

I believe that God is pure love and light and broods over us like any parent would a child.  I believe that God has made provisions for our good but we still make choices that create our world and our circumstances.  I believe that God’s grace is precious and is no respecter of the person or the deed.

I have been able to fall in love with Jesus all over again.  After considering other belief systems, I have returned to the life of Jesus and am amazed every time I read about him.  His courage, his compassion, his wisdom, his relevance and his willingness to get in the faces of the religious right of his day, inspire me.  Introducing his humanness to others give me great joy.  Introducing others to their own divinity give me great peace.

The Holy Spirit has become my friend.  After worshipping with some of my Pentecostal brothers and sisters as well as my African American brothers and sisters, I have learned to pay attention to the urgings and prompting of the Spirit.  I have learned to trust the “wind” that goes where it will.  I can’t explain it and I’m glad.

I simply want to be the kind of person who is able to be attentive to the Spirit and who can discern its movement.  I want to work on myself such that I am open enough to allow the Spirit to fill me up.  I want to pray and listen for the still small voice.

I feel such freedom today in continuing to ask hard questions and live with them until I can live into the answer.  I no longer have a need to be able to explain it all.  I simply know that God is not sitting in heaven with a list of rules waiting on us to break them.  I don’t believe God is vengeful or punishing (we do that quite well, all on our own).

I believe that Jesus was the ultimate example of compassion for ALL people and I think he left us a legacy of challenging the rules that destroy and exclude.  I believe that God wants to free us not bind us up or have us feel guilty.  I believe that all things are possible when we unleash our own divinity and express it through the giftedness of our humanity.

Perhaps my greatest spiritual struggle has simply been me.  I have had allot of work to do on myself and that continues.  But through that struggle, I bring a valuable lesson to ministry;  “you can’t no more give what you ain’t got than you can come back from where you ain’t been!”

In order to lead and minister, it is essential for me to continue growing deeper in my relationship to God.  It never stops, it never will.  That is my commitment to my own spiritual journey.