Hmmm. I thought I knew what I wanted to say until I saw this empty white block looking back at me.
To introduce myself: I'm in my late 40s, married, three kids (16 year old son, 14 year old twins: boy and girl). For over a decade now I've been a Unitarian Universalist, but there is a long and winding theological road leading up to becoming a UU.
For the first decade of my life, I remember going to church maybe twice back when I visited my grandparents when I was maybe 4 years old. So I never really understood all those movies about Jesus I saw on TV when I was growing up. For me, my most perplexing theological question I had at the time was what did all of that have to do with chocolate bunnies and that queasy sugar high I got on Easter morning.
In th mid-'70s, my family had a lot of difficult times and we got into a non-denominational church that rented out a meeting room at a local lumberyard and handed out those bizarre JT Chick tracts. We eventually joined a rural United Methodist church for a while. I became quite a little born-again true believer and even thought I wanted to be an evangelist when I grew up. The kind of literalistic Christianity I embraced really was something of an anchor for me in stormy waters; however, in my adolesence, the reassuring answers that kind of faith gave me couldn't address the increasingly complex questions I was beginning to have.
So I left Christianity from about high school through my early 20s and even tried to be an atheist for a brief while, but it didn't do much for me. It was around this time that Bill Moyers did his show on the power of myth with Joseph Campbell (which really resonated with me on a very profound level). It was also at this time that I found a certificate studies program on theological studies at Georgetown University that promised to provide participants with an overview of the current scholarship on the New Testament. It was around this time, too, that I read Bishop Spong's book on saving the Bible from fundamentalism.
Ironically, learning about the historical Jesus and the origins of the Gospels as faith documents (and not literal historical accounts) ended up reviving my faith and, as a result, I experienced something on such a profound level that it transformed my life dramatically.
Unfortunately, when I joined a mainline church, I found that what I had learned (and more importantly, had experienced) while at Georgetown was not what was valued and preached in the church. For awhile I thought there was room for me in the church, but eventually, I began to feel embattled as a wave of neo-orthodoxy (and homophobia) rose in the denomination.
That wave (among other things) ended up pushing me away from the Christian church and into UUism. Because of my positive experience at Georgetown, I never rejected or became angry with Christianity (as some UUs are), but I liked the openess and freedom UUism encourages.
I've already gone on for too long ( so much for that empty white block looking back me ), so I'll just finish up by saying as much as I enjoy the freedom in UUism, I also am feeling the need to re-engage Christianity again, especially after I gave a lay sermon on Jesus at the UU fellowship I attend on the Sunday before Christmas last year. I'm considering starting a UU Christian lay group there, if anyone is interested; even if they're not, I'm still interested in reconnecting with progressive Christianity.
Which is what brings me here, I suppose.
Looking forward to getting to know you.