November is National Novel Writing Month. During the month, thousands of people make it their goal to write a 50,000 word novel.
Here at Lutheran Confessions I’m setting myself the same challenge but with a different focus. Over the course of the month I plan to write A Guidebook For Progressive Church. 30 installments, 2000 words a day, give or take.
I started needing A Guidebook For Progressive Church about ten years ago when
we moved to Arkansas. So many people I meet every single day ask a single basic question: You’re a church but you do that?
People come to our church from all kinds of traditions: Church of Christ, Southern Baptist, Latter Day Saints, Jehovah’s Witness, non-denominational evangelical. Almost all are sorting out how to disengage from white Christian nationalist traditions while also staying close to Jesus. Some are ready for community. Others may never be, but remain curious.
What frequently brings them to Good Shepherd is interest in joining a
congregation that shares their progressive values. They desire to remain in Christian
community, but one that centers the needs of LGBTQIA+ and other historically
marginalized groups; one that understands social justice not as anathema to Christianity but central to it; and one that makes a difference and cares about the local community.
Part of the struggle in communicating what we do is simple: we’re kind of weird, and proud of it.
I’m always a little bit like, “Well, hang out with me at the Queer Camp Halloween party and you’ll see how we roll.” But I do I wish I had a little book I could hand out
when asked all the questions.
I’d like to be able to say, “Life in community like ours is better than a book. A book isn’t everything. But… maybe this will help.”
The core question driving this project: Could a Guidebook For Progressive
Church help readers imagine the journey that might take them from where they
are currently (disenfranchised, belief-fluid, skeptical yet curious, traumatized but seeking, angry and disappointed yet needing community) toward the life of a local progressive church?
Perhaps this is a question best answered by Sisyphus, because in our historical
moment church participation is on a steep and ever-steepening decline. Progressive church adjacent folks are rightly some of the most skeptical of religious community.
And yet, as I read books like Brooke Peterson’s recent Religious Trauma: Queer Stories In Estrangement and Return, I just can’t help but believe there is still something about
church.
I will include sections on “why we keep reading the Bible but hold it lightly” and the importance of churches and even church buildings as third places. There will be entries on theological resources present in progressive faith for resistance to empire, the organizing value of weak networks and emergent strategy. Also chapters on ecumenism, multi faith engagement (yes you can be pagan and Christian) and ecology.
Since currently the majority of the books on the shelves at Barnes & Noble and other booksellers mentioning “progressive church” are actually conservative screeds attacking the progressive church movement, this series will serve as creative alternative and counter-argument. I may then work the whole project into book form, and one benefit of being a reader this month will be your comments may improve and contribute to that project.
Want to have an insider track on how the whole project is going week by week? I’ll be posting to all paid subscribers midweek opening a special conversation with them on the writing process.
Alright, wish me luck if you would or send good vibes! And best wishes to anyone else writing a book in November with NaNoWriMo. You’ve got this!
Good luck and blessings. It sounds like a huge but important undertaking.