Progressive Christianity is a rapidly growing movement that includes or affects about 20% of Christians of many different denominations. 

Because it is relational and not intentionally based upon a set of beliefs, it has been perceived negatively as in opposition to several conservative and conventional beliefs. There is a need to state the positive aspects of Progressive Christianity if it can be done without becoming just another rigid belief system. 

Progressive Christianity is emerging, diverse, and inclusive.

The majority of persons believe for the most part that God lives in heaven, where he is watching over us like a benevolent parent (father figure of course). Occasionally, God comes to Earth, like he did in Jesus, or more frequently through the Holy Spirit. But primarily, the conventional belief is that God’s home is in heaven where he rewards those who do the right things and punishes those who don’t.

Progressive Christianity, however, sees God as existing everywhere at all times. God is always with us and within us, and with and within everything created. God is in the midst of everything like water is to a fish. He is the source and sustainer of our existence, not simply out there, but within us and around us. 

There is no need to plead with God to be with us because he always is. We exist because he is.

It takes a greater degree of faith to believe in this kind of God because one can never escape from God’s presence, nor does God ever abandon us. God shares all our sorrows and delights in all our joys. 

A God of infinite and eternal presence can never be put on a shelf in heaven where we sometimes try to put God. God is most readily found within our hearts.

Progressives honor with openness the universality of God’s love regardless of its faith expression.

Progressive Christians make a distinction between the Earthly Jesus and the divine Christ. The Earthly Jesus is the person who Jesus really was when he walked and taught and lived upon this Earth, while the divine Christ is what Jesus’ followers have made him out to be for generations since his death and resurrection. 

In truth, there is a real difference between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Christ.

Jesus is to be followed as the Way, while Christ has unfortunately become someone only to believe in and to worship. For Jesus’ first followers, believing in Jesus actually meant following Jesus’ way of life and death, not simply intellectual assent. Progressive Christians believe that following Jesus as the Way is more important than simply believing that Christ is God without a commitment to those things for which Jesus taught and died.

Jesus’ central message was the Kingdom of God being established here on Earth. Jesus came so we might best learn how we can both live and die abundantly in this world so the Kingdom of God might be experienced here on Earth as it is experienced in heaven. Jesus’ message was mostly about this life.

During his ministry, Jesus announced and began the saving process to be accomplished through love and forgiveness; love to establish relationships and forgiveness to sustain and maintain them. Progressives acknowledge the importance of experiencing the love and forgiveness of God so one may be set free from sin and death to follow Jesus’ way.

Happily both Conventional Christians and Progressive Christians believe the Bible is central and essential to Christian faith. Progressives, however, acknowledge the Bible is not a divine, inerrant revelation but a human product which contains God’s word.

The Bible is really a record of man’s understanding of God and their relationship with Him during and for their particular time here on Earth. Of course their witness and experiences are very important because they help guide and shape our own faith.

The Bible is true in light of our experiences with it just as it was true through the experiences of those who wrote it and lived it. The meaning that lies behind many of the difficult to understand events in the Bible is more important than their factual occurrences. 

For example, an actual virgin birth is less important than the fact that Jesus was born a very special person, which is the meaning of that event. The Bible is best understood historically (within its historical context) and metaphorically or symbolically.

Most Conventional Christians regard salvation as being saved from our sins by the price Jesus paid on the Cross to obtain our forgiveness so that we might go to heaven. It is an individual experience where Jesus saves you and me by our believing in Him.

For many Progressives the idea that Jesus was sent by his Father to die in payment for our sins is an offensive notion of God and among other things a direct contradiction to the idea that we are saved by Grace alone. 

Grace is unpaid for, undeserved, and freely given without price. If Jesus had to pay for our sins, then where is God’s grace? The payment idea of atonement, so dominate today, didn’t arise until the 11th Century.

Progressive Christians do not see the forgiveness of sins as the major and certainly not the only reason for Jesus’ coming. God and Jesus forgave men and women their sins long before Jesus went to the cross. The significance of the cross rests upon the understanding that death for Jesus resulted in resurrection for him and for his living presence with us, just as our dying to worldly ways leads us to be re-born or born again into God’s Kingdom here on Earth and beyond.

While Conventional Christianity’s primary concern is individual salvation, Progressive Christianity is about world transformation — how Jesus came to save the whole world by teaching how we can and should live with God and one another in this life, so in God’s time and with our help the whole world might be transformed into the Kingdom of God here on Earth.

Because some Christians believe the world may soon be destroyed and end, they seek a safe exit to heaven. Progressives believe God so loved his world that he sent his Son Jesus to save and restore the world. Progressive Christians believe God’s plan for our world is much bigger than our individual salvation or a trip to heaven. 

God’s plan is for world transformation, the Kingdom of God on Earth; which means God’s rule on Earth.

If the world is to become God’s Kingdom here on Earth as Jesus taught us to pray, then God must be concerned that there be something left of this world worth living in and for. His concerns then include justice, peace, a fairer distribution of necessities and the care of our natural resources to name a few, not only for now but for future generations.

God’s concern and ours must be with this world, how we treat one another, loving not only God, but loving each other; following what Jesus taught us as the Way to abundant life on both sides of the grave. Progressives have a desire to have a personal and social transformed relationship in this world with God through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. 

Progressives do not see mankind as hopelessly lost, but rather as hopefully involved in making this world a better place for all mankind to live together in love. 

Rev. Raymond Ticknor is a retired Christian Church (Disciple of Christ) pastor living in Monett. He may be reached at 1udith.ticknor@yahoo.com.