Bishop Spong's Q&A 9/5/08

Doris Christoph, via the Internet, writes:

Having read two of your books, I finally have answers to several questions that have troubled me for years. But now I have some new ones, two of them of immediate importance:

1. My very fundamental Seventh Day Adventist Church: How do I fit in when I no longer fit in?2. Prayer: How do I now pray? To whom? About what? For what? How do I express my gratitude, my sorrows, my joys?

Though I feel that a great burden has left me now that I feel you have given me permission to understand God and Jesus in the light that I have seen in the distance for a long time but was too afraid to reach for, I also feel very much an outsider and alone. How do I deal with this?

Dear Doris,

Thank you for your letter. I assure you that in the Christian life there is no such thing as a time when questions will cease and you will arrive at answers that will endure forever. Christianity is a journey, not a religious system into which all truth can be fitted.

To your questions, only you can decide whether you can continue your pilgrimage inside the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Normally I encourage people to remain in their households of faith as change agents. However, that is based on the assumption that a particular household of faith is open to change. Churches are frequently security systems and change will destroy them, not transform them. This is particularly true for those parts of the Christian Church that are built around a single issue or a single ethnic group. Such churches are themselves not likely to survive.

In terms of prayer, this format is not nearly large enough to address those concerns. First you need to develop an understanding of God other than the supernatural parent figure who lives above the sky and is waiting to come to your aid. Christian prayer is not an adult letter to Santa Claus. Second, you need to understand the nature of the world in which you and I are living. It is not a world of miracle, magic and divine intervention, but a world of order, natural law and precise mathematical formulas that enables us to predict with total accuracy the tides, the time of sunrise and sunset and even eclipses of the sun and moon. We can send spacecraft to the moon and to the planets as far out as Jupiter because we know the laws by which such things as motion and gravity operate. Prayer must take place in that kind of world.

There are many books that might help you in this phase of your journey. I have written on this subject twice, once in a book entitled Honest Prayer that has recently been republished by St. Johann Press (315 Schraalenburgh Road, Haworth, NJ 07641) and the second is A New Christianity for a New World, published by Harper-Collins. Maybe one or both of them would help.

Enjoy your quest for truth.
John Shelby Spong