[Dialogue] 3/11/10, Spong: Common Dreams II, Melbourne, Australia, 2010

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Thursday March 11, 2010 

Common Dreams II, Melbourne, Australia, 2010

Australia is a unique and wondrous country to which I have had the privilege of traveling on nine different occasions and in which I have lectured extensively. It is an overwhelmingly secular country in which religious fundamentalism is vigorous and well endowed, but culturally has a minuscule presence. Its three major Christian bodies are the Anglicans, reflecting the influences of the early English settlers; the Roman Catholics, reflecting Irish immigration first and Southern European second; and the Uniting Church, an indigenous church created locally of most of the traditional Protestant denominations, especially the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Congregationalists. The Anglicans have the flavor but not the essence of "establishment," but they are roughly divided into three disti nct groups. First, there are the "Sydney Anglicans," who live theologically in another century, apparently unaware of the massive advance in biblical scholarship that has occurred over the last two hundred years. They act like 18th century Northern Irish evangelical Protestants who got transplanted to the Pacific and were frozen in time. They, however, control the endowed wealth of the Anglican Church, since as the church grew out from Sydney across Australia, the leaders in Sydney did not divide the wealth with the developing provinces. Recently that endowed wealth has been badly diminished by foolish and clearly incompetent management, but it still gives the Sydney Anglican leaders the ability to interfere in other parts of Australia and even in New Zealand, as they seek to impose their brand of fundamentalism on the Anglican Church throughout the South Pacific. Sydney is characterized by a total opposition to the ordination of women, by a visceral and profoundly ignor ant opposition to gay and lesbian people and by an almost psychotic defense against any inroads into their thought by the intellectual revolution of the last 500 years, out of which has come the new insights into the nature of our world that stretch from Copernicus in the 16th century, through Darwin, to Stephen Hawking in the 21st century.
Once you get outside of Sydney's grasp the second group of Anglicans becomes visible. They are made up of enlightened leaders who are held in enormous respect, including Philip Aspinall, the Primate of Australia and the Archbishop of Brisbane, and Roger Herft, a Sri Lankan by birth and now the gifted Archbishop of Perth. Between these two wings of Anglicanism in Australia that are engaged in a tug of war there is the third group, consisting of less courageous bishops and clergy who seek not to offend either side in the perceived hope that they will someday be the compromise candidate in the next primate election. They stand for little and impress few.
Australian Catholics appear to have moved into the pre-Vatican II camp. They have squelched their ablest modern leaders, including Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, whose thorough investigation of and honest response to the clergy abuse scandal in that land caused him to be marginalized until he offered his resignation and went into retirement. He was neither willing nor able to work under the leadership of the current Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell. This Church also fails to appreciate its own questioning priests, treating them with discipline and fear.
The Uniting Church has some incredibly able leaders — Dorothy McMahon, Rex Hunt and Ian Pearson are prime examples — but it also faces the undertow of its Neanderthal wing.
I go into this brief and surely neither exhaustive nor profound summary in order to set the religious scene against which a new phenomenon is growing throughout this "Land of Oz." A group of Christian leaders, drawn from all of these religious bodies but also transcending each of them, has come together to form a progressive Christian network. In 2007 they put on an international conference in Sydney that attracted over 1500 people who, although predominantly Australian, came from many lands. This Conference was called "Common Dreams." I keynoted this initial gathering, much to the discomfort of the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, who by attacking it and me so vigorously provided this conference with maximum publicity. (See my 2007 column on the conference.) He awakened in the people acros s that land the possibility that there might be far more to Christianity than they had ever imagined. Other outside leaders at that first conference included Brandon Scott, a leading member of the Jesus Seminar in America; David Felten, one of the two Methodist ministers from Arizona who co-created the series "Living the Questions," an enormously popular progressive Christian study initiative modeled on the evangelical Alpha program but based on contemporary and competent biblical scholarship; Fred Plumer, the head of the Center for Progressive Christianity in the United States; along with many others. The echoes of this conference played throughout Australia and raised a banner for a new way to look at Christianity. The killing options that seemed to be publicly available to religiously inclined Australians, namely to embrace a mindless fundamentalism or to give up all religious thought as irrelevant, now saw a third possibility arising. Indeed, the success, the excitem ent and new hope were so strong that the local leaders of this conference immediately began to plan for "Common Dreams II," to be held in Melbourne in 2010. That conference will convene next month, from April 15 to 18.
The theme of Common Dreams II is "Living the Progressive Religion Dream." The international keynoter this year will be the Rev. Gretta Vosper, the pastor of a United Church of Canada congregation in a suburb of Toronto. She is also the head of the Progressive Christian Network of Canada as well as the author of a best-selling book, With or Without God, which broke all records in Canada for a first-time religious writer. Gretta and that book were featured in the cover story in Canada's best-known weekly newsmagazine, Maclean's, the Newsweek of Canada. She has become a lightning rod for fundamentalist/traditionalist anger across Canada. She is a brilliant, articulate, well-read, passionate and caring theologian. In Gretta Vosper, progressive Christianity has entered a new generation.
The next exciting thing that this second Conference has done is to recognize the importance of their own Australian leaders, who are now featured as major presenters. Among them are Rev. Dr. Gregory Jenks, who is today a professor of theology in Queensland, the head of an organization called "Faith Futures Forward" and who is now completing his first major book on the Bible. (Several years ago he broke on to the world scene when he was elected vice-director of the Jesus Seminar in America.) Dr. Val Webb, who lives in New South Wales, is both a biologist and a theologian as well as the wife of a Mayo Clinic doctor in the United States. Her most recent book is entitled Catching Water in a Net: Reimaging the Divine. Another is Rev. Dr. Francis Macnab, the outstanding and longtime senior pastor at the downtown Uniting Church of Melbourne. Dr. Macnab, along with recently retired Uniting Church pastor Rex Hunt of Canberra, has long carried the banner of progressive Chris tianity in Australia. His stature near the end of his creative career has never been higher and his reputation has now traveled far beyond the boundaries of his native Australia.
Also quite visible in this movement are Roman Catholics. One of them is a former Catholic priest named Michael Morwood. He was present at Common Dreams I. Several years ago Michael resigned from the priesthood under pressure from the conservative Catholic hierarchy and is now an author and public lecturer of some note. Featured this year will be the Reverend Peter Kennedy, who is now engaged in a titanic struggle with that same hierarchy. He has been removed from his former parish for not being "traditional," but overwhelmingly the members of his large Catholic congregation have decided to follow him into exile rather than return to the deadly and dying form of orthodoxy from which Father Kennedy had delivered them. These two and other Catholic priests, at once both heroic and lonely in their struggles for theological integrity, now see themselves as leaders in a growing movement and a rising consciousness. Both enhance the leadership and reputation of this progressi ve thrust.
New Zealand is far better represented at Common Dreams II than it was at Common Dreams I. Three "Kiwis" will take leading roles. One is Dr. Lloyd Geering, former professor of Old Testament at Knox Theological College of Otago University in Dunedin and the grandfather of progressive religious thinking in that land. Dr. Geering was put on trial for heresy in the 1960's by the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand in a case covered widely in the press. He was exonerated, but in the process his church began its inevitable slide into obsolescence. Professor James Veitch is the second. He is also a member of the Jesus Seminar and for years was the editor of The Fourth R, the magazine of the Seminar. The new New Zealand leader is the Rev. Glynn Cardy, the rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church in the city of Auckland, which may well be the most exciting Christian church in that country, standing as it does at the center of that major multi-ethnic city and where radical new theological insights are blended with familiar liturgical forms to produce an amazing congregation doing amazing things.
Hopefully, this year's Australian international gathering of religious progressives will once again send shock waves throughout the Christian world, offer hope to millions who see themselves as "believers in exile," and break that strange bottleneck by which modern Christian scholarship is regularly prohibited from being heard in the pews of our churches by fearful hierarchies and local ordained leaders. This conference offers hope that the choice between the closed minds of the fundamentalists and the rejection of all religion by the secular humanists will not be the only choices available to Australians and the rest of us in order for us to be Christians in the 21st century. 

– John Shelby Spong
 



Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Dr. Larry L. Ligo, Professor of Art History at Davidson College, writes:
Thank you so much for your clear, informative, exciting, liberating insights into the meaning of Christ for Christians living in the twenty-first century. I first heard of you and your ministry in a Charlotte Observer article when you were lecturing in Charlotte last fall. I missed your presentation but was intrigued by the article and have since read five or six of your books. Thank you.
I also wish to express my condolences to you concerning the recent death of your friend Michael Goulder. I have gained much from your treatment of his work in Liberating the Gospels. I have been trying to find copies of his out-of-print books but have not, as yet, been successful.
Will you be speaking in the North Carolina area in the near future? Do you have a schedule of your upcoming speaking engagements?
Dr. Larry L. Ligo, Professor of Art History at Davidson College, writes:
Thank you so much for your clear, informative, exciting, liberating insights into the meaning of Christ for Christians living in the twenty-first century. I first heard of you and your ministry in a Charlotte Observer article when you were lecturing in Charlotte last fall. I missed your presentation but was intrigued by the article and have since read five or six of your books. Thank you.
I also wish to express my condolences to you concerning the recent death of your friend Michael Goulder. I have gained much from your treatment of his work in Liberating the Gospels. I have been trying to find copies of his out-of-print books but have not, as yet, been successful.
Will you be speaking in the North Carolina area in the near future? Do you have a schedule of your upcoming speaking engagements?



Dear Professor Ligo,
Thank you for your letter. When I was growing up in Charlotte, N. C., Davidson College was the crown jewel of nearby educational opportunities. I always admired its commitment to academic excellence. What was then a very small town had a mayor named Tom Griffith, who was a dairy farmer and in fact my mother's brother and thus my uncle. Your letter brought back many memories to me.
Thank you also for your condolences on the death of one of my three major mentors in life, Michael Goulder. I will write about his death and his influence on me in a future column. His books are indeed hard to find. I suggest looking at a major theological library.
A schedule of my speaking schedule is available on my column's Web site at all times (view the calendar here). My next venues in North Carolina will be in Hendersonville at a UCC-Congregational Church in late May and early June, and in Highlands on the Monday and Tuesday nights of the first three weeks of August, sponsored there by the Highlands Institute of Theology and Religion. Both are about a three-hour drive from Davidson, but I would love to see you.

– John Shelby Spong






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