With the restrictions of gathering because of COVID-19 what are your thoughts on other ways to worship?  Can you experience the same benefits by attending an online service or in an outdoor service where everyone is spread out safely?

I (try to) lead an hour or so Bible Study before each of my two-Sundays-a- month preaching gigs… and am amazed at (and grateful for) their participation, receptivity, and curiosity… about the coming Sunday’s texts. How can I offer a more systematic, “remedial,” wholistic approach to the great Biblical stories, promises and callings? 

My answer to this question is a complex one. On one hand, I believe there are tremendous riches in the Christian tradition. It’s a 4,000+ year theological lineage which contains endless metaphors, parables, and doctrines which have helped foster human evolution and have sparked some of the greatest social reform movements in history. That must be acknowledged and celebrated.

No argument: the Christian church was complacent about standing up to Hitler and the holocaust. But ... in the United States, it also failed to stand up to Vietnam. It has tolerated racism, slavery, lynching, torture, and the death penalty. It is substantially failing to stand up to climate change. And now, it is failing to stand up to Trump's immorality, enrichment of the wealthy, military buildup, and trashing of the environment. What should our expectations be? I'm not convinced that saying "thank you" to God is adequate.

One suspects that some institutional churches are still AFRAID if reality demands that scriptures are not to be taken literally.  Why?

How can the clergy educate its members into contemporary theology and attract back the church alumni without alienating the aging conservatives that finance the local church?

Do you have any reliable estimates of the number of Christians worldwide who do not subscribe to the viewpoint that "salvation comes only through Jesus Christ”?

If you were the moderator of the United Church of Canada with no restrictions... what would the church look like? What do you see as the perfect/ideal United Church of Canada?

The "whole world" is a big place (today we know our universe is made up of two trillion galaxies!) so there is plenty of space to roam in. While Matthew's "Great Commission" talks about teaching the commandments Jesus has taught, at the heart of these are love of God and love of neighbor and vice versa. Our neighbor is not restricted to the two-legged ones, but all creation deserves to hear that humans are busy loving all creatures--not destroying other creatures in narcissistic fits of greed and violence that end whole species while endangering human generations that follow with a depleted earth.

I am a student of the soul and her journey. My ultimate allegiance, if I may call it that, is to the truth of experience as we each experience it; drawing upon all the critical tools at my disposal (especially those of psychology and phenomenology) – truth not as proposition but as dynamic language embodying personal experience. The purpose of any authentic spiritual community is to nurture this exploration of truth.

Why is Christianity growing in its fundamentalist forms and dying where it tries to engage the thought of the present world?