We were sitting around the dinner table last night in Winnipeg. I was in “the Peg” to preach at my childhood congregation and to spend a little time with my parents and two of my sisters, and their families. After a delicious meal, prepared by my brother-in-law Pat, the conversation turned to The Big Picture.

 

My sister, a teacher, told me that the reason she hadn’t been to church for close to 15 years is that when she did decided to go back    (once) it was the same old, same old. She was a sinner, Christ died for her sins, and all she had to do was to believe this, and she would be saved. She was having none of it, didn’t need, and furthermore nobody used the language of sin anymore.

 

I mentioned that the sin-redemption paradigm of Christianity was losing ground in mainstream Christianity, and then she (correctly) pointed out that the service she had just attended (at which I was the guest preacher), smacked of that old model. The singing was uninspired and all she was really interested in was what I had to say.

 

I had to confess that even in so-called “progressive” congregations our liturgies, ways of praying, hymnody was still very churchy - the form hadn’t changed all that much and the words (even in the new hymn books) often reflected that sin-redemption paradigm.

 

My brother-in-law, the CEO of an architect company, talked about how our society is breaking down, evidenced by materialism and consumerism, the breakdown of the family, and youth crime, together indicating that we do need some kind of unifying mythos (my word) in the wake of the demise of Christendom. This was exacerbated, he thought, by the way in which academia had fragmented into separate disciplines, each one drilling deeper and deeper into their own respective field of knowledge, with little concern for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. What were the connecting links? What united us?

 

I then piped in with the possibilities of an evolutionary Christian spirituality incorporating the following elements: embracing of the “common creation story” given to us by science as the mythos that is the common connection everybody and every thing in the universe shares; for those who are spiritually inclined, let’s learn to tell this story as a sacred narrative, the unfolding of Spirit in space and time; holding up that humans share 90% of their DNA with all life forms and 98.6% of their genetic material with chimpanzees.  (Only 1.4% of our DNA is distinctive to humans); we are therefore kin with all, and this is not an abstraction, it is a biospiritual truth; we are all part of the kin-dom of God/Spirit; Christ then is the presence of sacred wisdom, the heart and mind of God immanent in the evolutionary process (S/he is the one “in whom all things are held together”); Jesus of Nazareth was the human being Wisdom/Sophia became, in the words of biblical scholar, Elizabeth Johnson. Of course, those from other faith traditions would name this cosmic intelligence according to their particular tradition.

 

My brother-in-law, the cook, wondered why were weren’t taking this message across North America - to the churches, but beyond the church as well into the corporate world. This is what Canadian Memorial is trying to do by freeing up some of my time to write and to travel to get this message out there. We are in desperate need of a unifying story that gives our lives meaning. There is a secular way of telling this story of evolution and another way to tell it within the context of traditional religious systems.