Bringing the Kingdom
Progressive Reflections on Scripture
Kevin Brown
For everyone who has shown me how to work for the kingdom and where I so often fail to do so
Introduction
This book came out of a Sunday school class I was in a couple of years ago. We were reading selections of a book structured much like this one: short sections reflecting on one or two passages. Rather than using the lectionary calendar, as I do, this author went through the Bible in the order it’s published. I liked the general structure and set up of the book, but there was something nagging at me every week we used one of the sections to guide our discussions.
I attend a rather progressive church in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) denomination. We have a female minister, and we have several LGBTQ members, including at least a couple who are elders. The leader of our Sunday school for that particular study was a retired former minister who’s a gay male. We purposefully work to be open, affirming, and inclusive. However, the book we were reading seemed to go only so far; the author would hint at ideas related to Jesus’s radical inclusivity, but then not pursue them. I left most days frustrated at how close we came to talking about these ideas without quite getting there.
I grew up in a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregation, but it was moderate to conservative. We had a minister who was formerly Baptist, and the church was in a conservative town, which skewed even most progressive denominations that direction. As a teenager, I went to an Independent Christian Church (the moderate branch of the Church of Christ/Christian churches; we had music, but no women in leadership) because of their youth group, but that led me (by my own decision; no one forced me into it) into an eight-year (or so) stretch of fundamentalism. I took the Bible literally, listened only to Christian music, and, for a time, watched only Christian movies and no television.
I even went to a college associated with the Independent Christian Church, as I planned to become a youth minister. Those years did provide me with a solid biblical education, even if I ultimately moved away from the interpretations I heard throughout that time. I ultimately left the denomination and church, as I began asking questions that not only had no satisfactory answers, but which led people (one youth minister, in particular) to tell me to stop asking questions. I was out of the church for four (or so) years. While I wouldn’t recommend people leave the church, it helped me considerably, as I was able to come back to my faith with a new perspective.
I came back in through writers my younger self would have believed to be heretics, people who took a more scholarly approach to the Bible, Jesus, and faith, in general. I had done some reading in other religions—Buddhism, especially—which also helped shape my thinking. Most importantly, I found University Presbyterian Church, a church in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I could ask questions, and people would take them seriously, encouraging me to explore them. The year after that, I moved to Macon, Georgia, where I attended First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), another church that gave me freedom to explore my questions and resources to support that search. For the past eight years, I’ve attended Northminster Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga, TN.1 As with the previous two churches, I’ve found people here who encourage me and others to delve into uncomfortable ideas, supporting us as we do so. I couldn’t have become the Christian and thinker I am today without these churches and a number of people there.
While I’m not a trained minister and have not attended seminary, I have spent much of my adult life reading and studying, often teaching Sunday school classes. Thus, I’ve written this book for lay people, particularly for Sunday school classes, who want to explore what it means to be a progressive Christian in the twenty-first century. I’ve structured the book using the liturgical calendar, so the book lends itself to short sessions during seasons like Advent, Lent, or Easter. Classes could use it for longer periods of time, as well, or individuals could use it as a weekly reading to provoke thought in their lives.
Overall, my hope is simply that this book will help anyone who wants to explore the more progressive side of Christianity. I needed a book like this one when I was coming back into the church, so I hope you find it as useful as I believe I would have. If nothing else, I hope that it reminds us all that God can handle any questions we might have, that it’s not just acceptable to ask those questions, God encourages us to do so. The church should be a place of welcome, a place where we can find grace and mercy and love, no matter who we are, what we have experienced, and where we are in life. I’ve tried to write this book to remind us of those truths.
1. A special thanks to our minister, Rev. Laura Becker, for reading this manuscript and providing helpful and challenging feedback.
Bringing the Kingdom
Progressive Reflections on Scripture
Copyright © 2018 Kevin Brown. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1955-7
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Manufactured in the U.S.A. January 26, 2018
It’s the End of the World As We Know It
First Sunday in Advent
Matthew 24:36–44
Romans 13:8–14
For most of us on the more progressive end of the religious spectrum, any talk of apocalypse becomes problematic quite quickly. First, for those of us who grew up or spent time in more fundamentalist, evangelical circles, we have all too vivid memories of sermons talking about the end times and how, somehow always, we were living in them. We had signs and wonders pointed out to us, showing how they matched up with Daniel or Revelation, making it clear that the end of the world was just around the corner. We watched awful movies in the 1980s that portrayed what would happen when Jesus returned (usually involving children coming into houses to find no one there, an image that might have leeched into our own lives), and, of course, there was the Left Behind book series. I’ve even heard some people describe “rapture practice,” where they would do deep knee-bends, then rise up, lifting their hands to the heavens, as they imagined they might be carried away one day. We might have even bought and read Hal Lindsey’s book showing exactly how everything matched up with passages from the apocalyptic sections of the Bible, so we were quite clear on how the end of the world would occur. Not surprisingly, those predictions never came true, which often led us to question our faith, given that our faith was built on the Bible’s being an accurate forecaster of future events, as if it is our Christian Nostradamus.
There’s a larger problem, though, in that, for
