Center For Progressive Christianity - Members

Members

One of the Center for Progressive Christianity's goals involves creating a very broad tent. Their fourth point invites: "...all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including but not limited to): believers and agnostics, conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, women and men, those of all sexual orientations and gender identities, those of all races and cultures, those of all classes and abilities, those who hope for a better world and those who have lost hope." Most affiliates generally view religious belief as a process or journey—a searching for truth rather than establishing truth. Liberal Christians or post-Christians who stress justice and tolerance above creeds may also be attracted to the movement. The Center for Progressive Christianity has also during its growth with the progressive Christian movement in the United States inspired an offshoot in the British Progressive Christianity Network.

People who may be considered progressive Christians include those who:

• Disagree with and may even be repelled by exclusivist beliefs.
• Reject the concept that only their branch of their religion has a monopoly on truth and that all other spiritual paths are in error.
• Attempt to move beyond biblical inerrancy, established creeds, and church dogma. They try to recognize, as author Jack Good has written: "the fingerprints of humankind on all religious documents and symbols."
• Value the search for truth, even though they believe the truth can never be fully possessed. They view it as more important and challenging than the acceptance of those fixed beliefs found in the past by others and embedded in church creeds.
• Who are, as Jack Good describes, "chaos tolerant": They can handle a degree of disorder, uncertainty, and ambiguity in life and want to be "partners in the exciting search for tentative but satisfying answers to the most pressing problems of existence."
• Can absorb rapid change in their beliefs, as they integrate findings from social and physical sciences.
• Believe in the Ethic of Reciprocity: that how they treat other people is more important than the specifics of what they believe about God, humanity and the rest of the universe. That Collective Salvation is required for the salvation of the earth and society.

The TCPC website gives an analogy that symbolizes the methodology of the Progressive Christianity movement. It involves a Sunday school teacher and a class of 9 or 10-year-olds. Even at that age, some were skeptical of the inerrancy of the Bible. The teacher suggested that they read Charlotte's Web instead. The class enjoyed the book. The teacher interjected the thought that pigs and spiders cannot talk. The kids protested: "Well, it's a story." The teacher asked whether the story was true. They decided that it was sort of true. "In a way, it was true." So the teacher suggested: "let's look at the Bible in the same way."

For the movement's founder, James Rowe Adams, "such open-ended and searching conversations are at the heart of what it means to be religious. They are the very thing he hopes to foster through the work of his small, but visionary organization. Education is at the core of the Center’s work, but it is a vision of education that calls for open-ended conversation, the use of scholarship and intellectual gifts, as well as personal experience and emotion."