FireDragon76

Messianics in my experience are generally preaching a fundamentalist evangelicalism, not appreciably different from the sort of thing I've already come to reject, just packaged with Judaica.

I recently found this video. There's some interesting food for thought: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=what+is+causing+decline+in+ELCA%3f&view=detail&mid=8A7DB7202884B61943988A7DB7202884B6194398&FORM=VIRE It's good that some people are thinking about these issues. I know I have. What's frustrating is when you are in a congregation where the pastor simply doesn't care about the relevance of the religion. That is offensive to somebody like me who values their own time. Coddling octagenarians is all fine and dandy but misunderstanding and refusing to listen to younger people who come to church is simply unacceptable, it's organizational suicide. Plus, I'm not sure that the trend towards individualism can be halted, or that it even should be. People have just lost faith in the Christian narrative of the world. There are some real alternatives to the loneliness Pr. Baumann talks about, such as practicing mindfulness, that doesn't require a community. Perhaps that is the spirituality of the third millenium. We have to find new practices and new stories that center our lives and that cannot be swindled away by con-men.

I finally came to the realization a few months ago that I'm done with my church (conservative ELCA congregation). I do not agree with evangelicalism approach to spirituality anymore, even in a relatively tolerant, quasi-mainline form. There's too much potential toxic religious ideas there. So, I'm not sure what I do now... if I consider myself Buddhist or just become a religious none. It's a new thing for me. I accept the conclusions, more or less, of the Jesus Seminar, especially Marcus Borg's views on the subject. I'm not a pure skeptic, but I am a pragmatist and since I don't have a realist view of God, I would need a really good reason to remain identified as a Christian. I suppose my worldview is Jungian, something closer to that. I'm not a materialist, nor am I inclined towards scientism. I just don't accept the dogmatism and anti-intellectualism that's part and parcel with evangelicalism.

What does "the Way is many and yet one" mean? This sort of thing is very vague, and also not demonstrated very well by real life experience. Jesus believed in the Hebrew God. How exactly does atheism fit in with that? I am not saying the Christian Church shouldn't welcome everybody, but Christians have a right to identify their own religion as theistic, and it's arguably intellectually dishonest to think otherwise. Prayer and communion with a personal God has been a consistent aspect of Christian practice since the beginning. A radical reinterpretation of Christian faith along New Age or Eastern religious lines begs the question of why be Christian at all? As Thich Nhat Hanh has demonstrated, one can be committed to a religion like Buddhism and still appreciate Jesus' teachings without committing oneself to a Christian identity.

I'm familiar with the notion of "Progressive Christianity" from following the Progressive Christian channel on Patheos. The ethos of the 8 points seems more like new age sentiments, in comparison. There's insufficient explanation of the connection to Jesus of Nazareth or what he taught.

Frankly, the eight points sound more like Unitarianism than Christianity.

I'm suggesting many people here don't necessarily express the types of sentiments that would find a home in an actual mainline Protestant churches. Most mainline denominations in the US are still committed to theism, and even Trinitarianism, as part of their identity; it's in their liturgy and in their hymns, and even in some cases as part of their code of canon law. https://www.christianpost.com/news/episcopal-priest-defrocked-after-refusing-to-recant-muslim-faith.html

That's more or less been my experience as well.

You can be a Unitarian Universalist without giving a whit about Jesus, but it would be difficult to conceive of a "Christianity" without Jesus.

Well, when people are talking about "the universe" instead of God, that's generally how UU's talk.

Progressive Christianity still defines itself as Christian in some way, UU generally does not.

UU's and progressive Christians seem subtly different. UU spirituality is much more individualistic... and doesn't pretend to be Christian.

Watch the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode "Darmok" some time, and you get a clue into this.

The creation-Creator distinction is a kind of dualism.

Muslims and Jews get along just fine without doing so, so I don't see why it is necessary. I don't see the author of the Gospel of John anthropomorphosizing God- that would be a distortion of the doctrine of the incarnation. The notion of connecting ones religious teacher to the transcendent, what the doctrine of Incarnation is really about, is a common intuition across religions. And that's all that's occurring in the Gospel according to John.