God Unbound: On The Nontraditional Traditions

The Responsibility of Kingdom Work

This blog, the books I’m writing, the speaking gigs I’ve got scheduled — all of these are a huge responsibility and I take them very seriously. So while I joke about being the feminist who often elicits eye rolls when I talk about how men are just as damn capable as women of answering phones when the receptionist is out, and while I will explain ad nauseum why Black Lives Matter, and while I will stand in love with my homosexual friends against bigotry and hatred, I do so carefully, in great love, and in great submission to Jesus, and gratitude for His freedom. And I’m dead serious about these issues.

It is, in my view, Kingdom work, where the God of the Angel Armies is shaking things up so that everyone who should be at the banquet is sure to get the invite.

I grew up in the Methodist Church, but frankly was too young and stupid to understand whether it was traditional, contemporary, or Buddhist, for that matter. Here is what I know about myself and my spiritual journey: I hate being told what to do. I hate forced prayer and words shoved in my mouth. Imagine what happens when someone tries to tell me what to think. This is often a very good thing, and something I value.

It often also gets me in a lot of trouble, and means I usually must learn from my own mistakes instead of from the comfortable distance of witness to the train wrecks of others. I am sure I will continue to create train wrecks of great magnitude, but hopefully, as I move from my Christian infancy, I’ll stop spilling so much damn milk and get to the meatier matters. And the meatier matters might just be the mystical.

God Unbound is a call for the church to make room in its coffers for the mystical and its perpetrators: the mystics. Though I never thought of myself as such, I think this might be me — me, who has communed with God and come out loving people I used to not love, in a way that could only be God because surely I was incapable of it.

This doesn’t always make me right, but I do think it makes me something, and it’s a thing I am still working out, with great fear and trembling to be sure.