About the Author: Rev. Robin R. Meyers

Dr. Robin Meyers is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, the Distinguished Professor of Social Justice at Oklahoma City University, the best selling author of seven books, an award-winning columnist for the Oklahoma Gazette, and an award-winning commentator for National Public Radio. He has been the Senior Minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC church of Oklahoma City since 1985, the fastest growing UCC church in the Kansas Oklahoma conference. Dr. Meyers was born in Oklahoma City and grew up in Wichita, Kansas. After graduating from Wichita State University (75) he received his M. Div. from the Graduate Seminary of Phillips University (79) and his Doctor of Ministry degree from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey (81), and his PhD from the Communication Department at the University of Oklahoma (91). His dissertation was on the concept of self-persuasion in preaching, and was published as a textbook for preachers. Dr. Meyers is the author of seven books: With Ears to Hear: Preaching as Self-Persuasion (Pilgrim Press, 1993); Morning Sun on a White Piano: Simple Pleasures and the Sacramental Life (Doubleday, 1998); The Virtue in the Vice: Finding Seven Lively Virtues in the Seven Deadly Sins (HCI, 2004); Why the Christian Right is Wrong: A Minister’s Manifesto for Taking Back you Faith, your Flag, and your Future (Wiley, 2006); Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus (Harper One, 2009); The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus (Wiley, 2012), and forthcoming from Yale University Press, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance. Set for release in the spring of 2015, it expands on his 2013-2014 Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale. Dr. Meyers is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a frequent speaker and preacher on the merits of progressive Christianity, and was twice a finalist for the pulpit of the Riverside Church in New York City. He has given the Earl Lectures in Berkeley, was awarded the Angie Debo Civil Libertarian Award from the ACLU, and was featured in an HBO documentary, The Execution of Wanda Jean, the story of the first woman executed in Oklahoma, and Dr. Meyers’ efforts to save her life. Most recently, Dr. Meyers gave the Robinson/Spong Lecture at the Gladstone Library in North Wales. He is married to Shawn Meyers, an Oklahoma City artist and university professor, and they are the parents of three children, Blue Austin (36), Chelsea Elizabeth (33), and Cass Isaac (21), and the exceedingly proud grandparents of Iris Blue (4), and Hazel Elizabeth (6 months). (Updated May 2015)

  • Robin Meyers on What Progressive Christianity is all About

    By Published On: November 11, 2016

    In this short interview, we asked progressive Christian leader, author and activist, Rev. Robin Meyers, What is the most important aspect of progressive Christianity to you?

  • Book Review: Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

    By Published On: June 24, 2015

    "This is Robin Meyers at his pastoral and prophetic best. Read it, and then for the love of God—RESIST!" --Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu

  • Faith must fight capitalism: Forget theological purity — the church needs a revolutionary spirit

    Excerpted from Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

    By Published On: May 26, 2015

    The very definition of what it means to be a Christian must be salvaged now, taken back, by force if necessary, from those who domesticated a way of life and turned it into a quarreling quagmire of noisy “believers.” While we fiddle with the meaning of the Trinity, present-day Rome is burning. While we mumble our prayers for the poor, their poverty and pain increase by the hour. While we coddle the industries that ravage the earth for energy and then market death to us disguised as comfort, the conscience of the faithful has been euthanized by public relations campaigns that make us swoon with gratitude for the humanitarian altruism of Big Oil.

  • Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

    By Published On: March 25, 2015

    During his thirty-year career as a parish minister and professor, Robin Meyers has focused on renewing the church as an instrument of social change and personal transformation. In this provocative and passionate book, he explores the decline of the church as a community of believers and calls readers back to the church’s roots as a community of resistance. Shifting the conversation about church renewal away from theological purity and marketing strategies that embrace cultural norms, and toward “embodied noncompliance” with the dominant culture, Meyers urges a return to the revolutionary spirit that marked Jesus’s ministry.

  • The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus

    A new way to follow Jesus that draws on old ways of following Him

    By Published On: June 18, 2012

    The Underground Church proposes that the faithful recapture the spirit of the early church with its emphasis on what Christians do rather than what they believe. Prominent progressive writer, speaker, and minister Robin Meyers proposes that the best way to recapture the spirit of the early Christian church is to recognize that Jesus-following was and must be again subversive in the best sense of the word because the gospel taken seriously turns the world upside down.

  • Saving Jesus From The Church – How To Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus

    By Published On: July 3, 2011

    "In his least political and most thoughtful book to date, Dr. Robin Meyers finds the common ground in the world of Jesus and lays out a call to action that unites us under a banner of hope and reconciliation." ~Erick Ebama.  This is not a call to the church to move to the far left or to try something brand new. Rather, it is the recovery of something very old. Saving Jesus from the Church shows us what it means to be a Christian and how to follow Jesus' teachings today.

  • Why The Christian Right Is Wrong

    By Published On: September 30, 2010

    "In the pulpit, Robin Meyers is the new generation's Harry Emerson Fosdick, George Buttrick, and Martin Luther King. In these pages, you will find a stirring message for our times, from a man who believes that God's love is universal, that the great Jewish prophets are as relevant now as in ancient times, and that the Jesus who drove the money changers from the Temple may yet inspire us to embrace justice and compassion as the soul of democracy. This is not a book for narrow sectarian minds; read it, and you will want to change the world." —Bill Moyers