Note to anyone visiting: You’re welcome! We are using this biog as a record of our thinking, so include these notes from our monthly meetings.

Notes from meeting held on 2019-09-17

Present: John, Martin, Peter and Jonathan.

We began with a Pray as You Go meditation from Luke 6 about Jesus healing on a sabbath despite opposition from the religious leaders. This led to a discussion of how to deal with Christians who are exclusive and condemn others. For example, Peter had been in a group of Christians who were vehemently against gay practice. They believed that the Christian thing to do is to help gay people change their orientation. What would Jesus have done in that situation?

We also looked at other examples where Christians can be intolerant of those who differ from them.

Our discussion covered:

1. Jesus would not have kept quiet. His most emphatic rebukes were to people who got in the way of God’s love to others. He was especially harsh on religious leaders who warped the love of God to justify unloving behaviour. So we have a duty to help Christians with un-Christ-like views not just for their own sakes, but for the sake of those they might influence.

2. Arguing does not help. We do want the people holding these views to know the love of God so profoundly that they learn to pass it on to others. So can we provide a different perspective? One position to take is that if we are going to err, let it be on the side of love.

3. We agreed that we need to become more assertive in proclaiming the inclusive love of God. There is no need to be diffident about proclaiming the Gospel just because the audience has an immature understanding of it. Maybe an approach could be to express deep concern for the person holding the prejudiced view and urge them to be converted by the love of God. And this is one occasion when we should use traditional Christian words and concepts. “I’ve got good news! Jesus has come to break down the old legalistic ways of thinking and acting, providing us with a model and the power of the Spirit to love that does transform society into something holy. Jesus warned his followers against the way of the Pharisees, who allowed the superficial letter of the law to take precedence over the spirit of the law. So, brother/sister, accept the forgiveness of God for your past judgmentalism, when you applied outward principles of law at the expense of inner spiritual ways of loving, and allow yourself to be transformed by the mind of Christ. You can be saved.”

If we do this sincerely with love in the hope of bringing the person into the Kingdom of God, maybe eventually the sincere love shown will enable them to see a different perspective.

4. How do we know we are correct? We discussed whether and how we can be assertive when we are also being open to others’ wisdom and are aware that our own understanding is at best partial. Part of the answer is that we should hold our intellectual beliefs lightly but be quite clear about acting assertively on the basis of love and justice. I suggested that instead of using creeds as the yardstick for orthodoxy, and allowing each person to decide what that means in practice, we could reverse that and use loving practice as the yardstick for orthodoxy, and allow people to come to appropriate beliefs under the guidance of God’s Spirit. That is admittedly very different from how the church has operated, but seems to me to be more consistent with the teaching of Jesus and also of St Paul when read in context.

5. We also discussed contextual interpretation of Scripture: We need to understand what the insight was that the speaker / writer meant to convey in their context, and then take that insight and re-apply it in our context in order to do justice to the original intention.

MEMBERSHIP AND BLOG

We discussed how big the group should be. We did not put a limit on the number, but agreed that people would be very welcome whatever their faith position might be. A divergence of views in the discussion would be helpful.

Then we noted that the blog would be a way of including those who could not attend. The blog could be used in various ways, but we decided at first to aim it at our own circle of people we think are interested in what we are doing. Then we could consider later whether or not we wanted to create something that could be pushed to a wider audience. For now we decided Jonathan would be the person to manage posts (so please send in material you would like to post) and we would keep comments open to anyone. We could limit that later if it came to be abused.

NEXT MEETING

We didn’t discuss this, but I propose Wednesday 16 October, 7:30pm.