Inappropriate Conversations

Ignoring the spiritual gifts of women is a mistake I do not tolerate. While this wasn't foremost in our minds when my family left one congregation, and denomination, to find a new church home. As this early Walk The Earth episode documents, it quickly became impossible to ignore -- sometimes from first impressions, but often from more lasting ones. 

http://www.inappropriateconversations.org/e/walk-the-earth-6/

I'm probably less sure now than I was 7 years ago about whether the Sunday School hour in most Christian churches is the best type of small group. It was the type I was most familiar with then. Now, I'd say the main requirement isn't location or time of meeting, but the ability to speak very freely about a challenging range of topics. Today, that range would include double-standards and miscarriages of justice from the halls of Congress to local district attorneys offices. Any small group that cannot handle conversations like that fails to achieve its mission. And any notion that conversations like that have no place within the church fundamentally misrepresents what "church" should be.

In the process of considering whether the message, or a worship service itself, was fundamentally different inside a sanctuary or some other form of cathedral versus a more ordinary room, my family ended up encountering a church that didn't have a building at all. No sanctuary. No roof over their heads at all, so to speak. And that's where we ended up, too. 

TalkBack episodes in podcast form exist largely due to Spotify. That's also among the places the new Harmony Springs Gives Voice podcast can be found.

Whether racism is more prevalent and toxic within, rather than outside, the church?

Robert P. Jones of PRRI

Preview for White Savior: Racism in the American Church

Being active in a church, really active, often involves a spoken or unspoken expectation of very steady attendance. Learning what other churches and denominations are doing can be challenging, if not impossible, in such circumstances. The initial phase of "walking the earth" was eye-opening for this reason. Even the definition of "sermon" raised immediate questions. The first two episodes in Walk The Earth covered what I considered to be easy questions. This question was the first that led me to think I ought to record my answers.

http://www.inappropriateconversations.org/e/walk-the-earth-3/

My first of more public commitments to being an ally was the weekend of August 28, 2015, in Las Vegas. Walk The Earth 30 is a recording of a live podcast at Pride48 that year. For me, this moment was historic.

http://www.inappropriateconversations.org/e/walk-the-earth-30/

As the old saying goes: the church is not a building; the church is the people. Well, I've been interacting with some of those people in new/old ways lately. The early episode of Walk The Earth was about walking away from one congregation. We had not yet found a new one yet. Now, years later, the church I've since joined is planning to start a podcast. Some of our sessions have been planning, others recording. I'll share links to Harmony Springs Gives Voice when podcasts are posted, probably on TalkBacks like this one. I've also recently joined a panel discussion on the podcast This Week In Gay with religious freedom/liberty among the topics. I'll share that the same way at the appropriate time. 

For now, I did need to define "church" if I wanted to talk about walking away from one, either permanently or on the way to something better.

http://www.inappropriateconversations.org/e/walk-the-earth-2/