[Dialogue] 3/04/10, Spong: Theologian in Residence, Coral Gables

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Thursday March 04, 2010 

Theologian in Residence, Coral Gables

It was — for me, at least — a new idea. In the last ten years I have been a wandering teacher, giving over 2000 public lectures in hundreds of venues. The format in which I worked was normally three days at the most and one day at the least. The three-day event would normally be composed of an opening lecture on Friday evening, two lectures on Saturday and a closing lecture on Sunday at the adult education hour, culminating in the worship service, at which I might be the preacher to wrap up the weekend. The one-day Saturday event would consist of four hours, two of which would be taken up with lectures and the other two with questions and responses. On Sunday it would consist of preaching at the morning worship service with a formal lecture after lunch. Occasionally I would do a weekday evening of two hours with a formal lecture followed by a period of questions and discussion. I have always enjoyed this activity and still do. We have commitments now to continue this pattern well into 2011. It was my job in this activity to open new doors and to point my audience towards new understandings. In this vocation, I met heroic clergy whose ministries I sought to encourage. I found the primary learning from my days as a bishop constantly reaffirmed, namely that the most important thing I had to do as a bishop was to recruit the best clergy I could find and then under gird and support their ministry in whatever way possible. That was still my vocation as a peripatetic teacher.
Then a new invitation came. It was connected with my work on the subject of life after death. I had long wondered how I could present this complex and challenging material in a single presentation or even in a packed weekend. It had taken me 250 pages to present it in my book Eternal Life: A New Vision. A major portion of that book was spent outlining why belief in life after death was fading. Only when this dead underbrush was cleared away could I begin to build a new approach to this vast subject. I had to get people to think beyond the dying concepts of reward and punishment, which invariably meant getting them beyond a God understood as the heavenly judge sitting on a throne somewhere above the sky, keeping record books up to date. My studies had led me to the realization that life after d eath had nothing to so with reward and punishment, or heaven and hell, to name their ecclesiastical counterparts. I could not, therefore, use the words "Eternal Life" without having people hear that title in terms of a setting or frame of reference with which I was in total disagreement. So on the lecture circuit, I needed the time to deconstruct the images of the past before I could begin to build in a new way the hope of eternal life — one that was, as the subtitle of my book proclaims, "Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell." My first opportunity to test this came at Sorrento, an Anglican Conference in British Columbia, while the book was still being written. In the summer of 2009, just prior to the book's publication in September, I responded to an invitation to lecture at the Highlands Institute of Philosophy and Religion in the mountains of western North Carolina. It was here, in lectures each Monday and Tuesday for four weeks, that I first p laced this material into the public arena. Highlands, North Carolina is, however, a resort community, and even though these lectures averaged over 300 people a session, the number of new people who came each week and the numbers who returned home with only a piece of the total picture made any continuity difficult. A conference center where the people signed up for the duration seemed to me to be the better format. I looked forward to such settings with 2010 summer invitations from the Chautauqua Institute in Western New York and the Pacific School of Religion (formerly the Graduate Theological Union) in Berkeley, California. Still I wondered how I could use this material in a single congregation for one day or even a weekend event.
Then, from out of the blue, a new possibility emerged. A Congregational-United Church of Christ in Coral Gables, Florida, a place where I had lectured on two previous visits during the last four years, asked me to explore with them the possibility of becoming what they called a "Theologian in Residence." In this program I would live in their church for a month. It was an intriguing opportunity and we slowly fleshed out the details. This church had an incredible ministry team. The senior pastor, the Rev. Dr. Laurinda Hafner, was a gifted leader, bright, competent and secure in herself and now in her third year at this church. The associate minister was the Rev. Guillermo Marquez-Sterling, an extremely able, bilingual Cuban pastor, who has been at this church for more than a decade. His easy pastoral style made him a great "people person." The director of Christian Education, Megan Korallis, who is now preparing for ordination by attending the Florida Center for Theolog ical Studies, saw community building as the focus of her ministry. She was also a visionary who could think outside the box of traditional church life. Finally, there was Pierce Withers, the youth minister, a former Roman Catholic who once pursued a vocation as a monastic, but who now saw youth work as "being with kids where they are" more than getting kids into church to be with him. This talented group had another hidden asset, the senior pastor's husband, Rick Walters, who was himself theologically trained and ordained in the Disciples of Christ. He was also a lawyer who worked at his Cleveland law firm's "Miami branch." He was one who was deeply involved and trusted, although not officially on the staff. He taught the adult class every Sunday morning at this church.
The first thing that was clear was that the job of the "Theologian in Residence" was to support this enormously competent staff and to open up new areas of theological inquiry into which these individuals and this congregation might move. So the shape of the role of the "Theologian in Residence" began to take form. Christine and I would live in a small but comfortable house across the street from the church. A member of the congregation put a car at our disposal so that we could get to the grocery store, or out to dinner when we did not want to cook. The world famous Biltmore Hotel, literally across the street from the Church, offered us memberships in their health club that we both used for an hour a day every day. I was to do eight lectures about the book, one every Monday and Wednesday night for four weeks. Each session was designed to last two hours, with the second hour given to questions and conversation. I was also to preach on two of the four Sundays of the mon th that I was "in residence," and both Christine and I were invited to involve ourselves as deeply as we could in the life of the congregation. The adult class on Sunday morning, led by Rick Walters, was dedicated to being a place of reflection on and response to the lectures — a time to challenge, debate, argue, discuss. With Rick as the leader nothing was out of bounds for them to discuss. Other things would inevitably grow out of our life together.
On the second night of our residency there was a funeral for one of their very active young people, a 20-year-old, just engaged member of the congregation. This young man, Mason Keller, killed in an automobile accident, was clearly loved by his church family and by his numerous friends. We went to that service and embraced the rather amazing level of caring that we found in this congregation. We saw the sensitivity of the clergy to this painful trauma, the witness of both his grieving mother and his fiancée's family. We observed the shock of grief present in his young adult friends, who were embracing mortality, perhaps for the first time in their own history.
The next day we went to a church supper, held regularly every Wednesday night, and prepared by the multitalented Rick Walters. We discovered that a number of people in this congregation who lived alone came to these weekly dinners as the highlight of their social life. On one Friday we attended an Hispanic dinner dance, part of this church's outreach to the Hispanic majority in the Miami area, and we immediately noticed how deeply these people felt and saw themselves not as visitors in someone else's church but as part of this rather special church, completely at home in a place where they deeply belonged. At that dance, we noticed a young woman of Greek heritage dance with more energy that any of the Hispanics. She was also at home. We visited the evening music program, which was started by this Church with the help of the Coral Gables public schools to encourage and to train children and teenagers to play instruments and to participate in both classical ensembles and jazz bands. We were taken by members of this congregation to see the beautiful scenery of the greater Miami area, including the tropical botanic garden, local museums and local sculpture. We rode with another couple in an air boat deep into the Everglades, embracing its wonder as never before. We went to see the Miami Heat play the Indiana Pacers. They won! We went to Little Havana for lunch and enjoyed Cuban cooking. We went to dinner with other couples to a Thai restaurant, a Cuban restaurant and a Miami Irish pub where we ate "corned beef and cabbage," no less. 
The lectures were well attended and the audience was maximally consistent. The church was also full on Sunday mornings. The music was fantastic. Some of the choristers were also members of the Miami Gay Men's Chorus. We participated in and celebrated this congregation's ability to raise ten tons of food in one weekend for the homeless of Miami. We saw them organize and carry out effective assistance programs in Haiti. Perhaps most fulfilling of all, we watched this staff and its responsive lay people engage the issues of the day, wrestle with new theological concepts and embrace us first as friends and then even as guides as they began to move into the new territory. Spending a month in this single congregation turned out to be one of the great experiences of our lives. I hope it was for them, also. What had been a new idea became something I yearned to do again. It has now been a month since we left Coral Gables and the fact is that, even now, we still miss our frien ds there.

– John Shelby Spong 
Anyone interested in learning how the congregation experienced the Theologian in Residence program is invited to contact either Megan Korallis, who coordinated it, or The Rev. Dr. Laurinda Hafner, senior pastor. 




Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


John Gamlin from Old Hall, East Bergholt, Colchester, UK, writes:
If we are now beyond theism then I suggest we are also beyond the word "God" — beyond it because:


of the baggage it carries. 
to continue to use it is to be constantly misunderstood. 
we will continue to drift back into the old language and old images.
So what new name?
Life? 
Energy? 
Love?
None will do, but we need to look somewhere for a new way to describe the bearer of eternity.
John Gamlin from Old Hall, East Bergholt, Colchester, UK, writes:
If we are now beyond theism then I suggest we are also beyond the word "God" — beyond it because:


of the baggage it carries. 
to continue to use it is to be constantly misunderstood. 
we will continue to drift back into the old language and old images.
So what new name?
Life? 
Energy? 
Love?
None will do, but we need to look somewhere for a new way to describe the bearer of eternity.



Dear John,
Thank you for your perceptive question, which has forced me to think about this issue in a new way to answer it — or at least to keep the conversation going. I need to make some distinctions or clarifications.

There is a difference between the experience of God and the explanation of the experience. Religion tends to assume they are the same. Theism is a human explanation of the experience of God; it is not God. The experience can be real or delusional. The explanation will never be eternal. No explanation ever is. 
Personhood is the deepest experience of our lives as human beings and we cannot escape its boundaries. We describe everything in terms of that reality. That is why we think of God after the analogy of a person. We can also never get into the being of God, or of a fellow mammal, a reptile, a fish or an insect. We define each out of the reference of our own personhood. The same is true for every other creature. Xenophanes said it in the third century before the Common Era, "If horses had Gods, they would look like horses." 
The concept of God has been evolving as long as there have been human beings. In animism, which appears to have been the earliest human religion, God was defined as multiple spirits in a spirit-filled world. These spirits caused everything to do the things that we human beings observed happening. The sun moved, the moon turned, the flowers bloomed and the trees bore fruit. Animism sought to help us relate to and win the favor of these animating spirits. When we human beings moved into agricultural communities, God was defined in terms of the processes of fertility. When we grew into tribes on our way toward nation states, God became a tribal deity. In the Gods of Olympus, animism and tribal deities were merged into a hierarchy of Gods ruled by the head (chief) of the Gods (Jupiter, Zeus) but with animistic functions still being defined by spirits (Neptune and Cupid, for example). Finally, we moved into a concept of God's oneness and God began to grow vaguer and more m ysterious.

During our history, definitions of God have been born, changed and died and that is the process that is going on today. Our knowledge is expanding and our definition of God will expand with it. The God who was thought to ride across the sky as the sun, changed as our knowledge of the sun grew.
So what do we do? Allow the name to evolve. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is identified with wind and breath, concepts that eventually evolved into the word Spirit. God was identified with love, as the expander of life, and evolved into the understanding of the Christ figure as "love incarnate." God is also identified with the idea of "rock" and evolved into the Ground of Being that we identify with the old patriarchal word Father.
I do not believe that in the last analysis any human being can actually define or redefine God, whether we call God the Holy, the Sense of Transcendence or anything else, but I do believe we can experience this presence and I do believe it is real. When we experience this presence I know of no other way to describe it except as "God." History teaches us that the word God is never static; it is always in flux and ever changing. I suggest that we not be frightened and allow that process to continue.
I will continue to think about it because of you. So I thank you for your question.
– John Shelby Spong






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