Reviewing my Statement of Faith

          This morning our church service honored and recognized five teenagers who completed the confirmation class last fall and who decided to continue their faith journeys by affirming their baptisms and joining the church as full members. Part of the process of confirmation was writing a personal faith statement. It was touching and inspiring to hear several of the faith statements read aloud, and it reminded me of the faith statement I wrote when I first joined St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in February 2008. So I looked up my statement, written almost six years ago, and examined it to see how it has changed over the years. Below is my original faith statement with additions and comments inserted in [brackets] and italics. I figure if those young people at my church are brave enough to share their faith statements with the congregation, I can be brave, too.

Mark Isham

Statement of Faith

St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church

Pleasant Hill, California

February 2008

On God

I believe in God, creator of everything that was, is, and is to come. To me, that which I can experience with my five senses, both directly and indirectly, is evidence of God’s work and presence in this world and beyond.

I believe in God’s love and care for me as an individual. My own life history and its events, circumstances, and characters are evidence of God’s ever-present involvement with and concern for my life.

I believe in God’s love and care for others. The convictions and stirrings within my heart are evidence to me that God works within me to express love and care toward others, and I see events and circumstances in the lives of others that convince me of God’s love and concern for them.

On Jesus

I believe that Jesus is an actual historic figure, present on this earth some two thousand years ago in Judea, and that the reality of his existence is verified by Biblical accounts and other historic documents.

I believe that Jesus was the embodiment of the spirit of God to the world at that time, God’s representative to the world and known as God’s Son. I base this belief on the words of Jesus himself as we understand them through modern interpretations of the New Testament.

I believe that Jesus came to show us a better way to relate to God, a way through the acceptance of God’s love and grace toward us, and not through mere laws and rituals, and that this message of Jesus resulted in his crucifixion [at the hands of religious authorities who felt their power and control were threatened by Jesus’ message of love, grace, and inclusion]. I believe that Jesus died for all our sins, and that all sin is rooted in either fear, selfish ambition, or the desire to attain God’s grace by our own works. This belief is based on Scripture, church tradition and teachings, and my own meditations.

I believe Jesus did, indeed, rise from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion, and that this miracle is a sign of the promise I have of eternal existence in fellowship with God and all others to whom God has extended the privilege of fellowship. [I believe that God has already extended the privilege to all persons in all times--past, present, and future--as a gift of grace, which is the Good News of the Gospel, and that many who claim to be followers of Christ would limit that gift only to those who adopt their own brand of Christianity. In my viewpoint, this is heresy.]

I believe that the world as we know it will, indeed, end someday by God’s decree, although I do not claim to know when or how it will occur [nor does any other human being know this now or ever].

On the Holy Spirit

I believe that the Holy Spirit is God’s continued presence in the world, and that the Holy Spirit’s primary vessels for the expression of God’s love and care to the world are the church, being the individuals who comprise the universal fellowship of believers in Jesus as Christ.

However, I believe the Holy Spirit works in the hearts and minds of various individuals in different ways with different manifestations, even in the hearts and minds of those who do not adhere to the Christian tradition.

I believe that the Holy Spirit is the guide on an individual’s journey of faith toward God, and that I may serve only as a companion-advisor in another person’s journey. I believe that individuals might be guided by the Holy Spirit even though those individuals are not aware that they are being guided by God’s Spirit.

On the Church

As Christ was the embodiment of God’s spirit in his time, so I believe the church is the embodiment of Christ in our time [as well as others whom God chooses to call and who choose Christ-like attitudes and actions]. As John said about Christ, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him,” so I believe that the church’s charge is not to condemn the world, but to continue the saving work of God begun by Jesus by expressing God’s love and care to others without condition, following Jesus’ example and extending grace to all, thereby building God’s kingdom on earth.

On my individual relationship with God through faith in Jesus

My own faith journey started from the beginning of my life. I was raised by Christian parents who were involved in the life of their church. I attended services and Sunday school all through my childhood and adolescence. Indeed, I have never stopped attending church throughout my life. I have been involved in various roles in churches of several different denominations, but primarily Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian. I even earned my undergraduate degree at a Christian university.

But as regularly flying in an airplane does not make one an airline pilot, neither does regular attendance and involvement in church mean one has a close relationship with God. I would say that the most meaningful moments I have spent with God were not in church, but rather in the quietness of my home or room, or in a beautiful natural setting such as a mountaintop or a forest glade or along a coastline or while watching a gorgeous sunrise or sunset. Those are the times when I have truly felt God’s presence both within me and outside of me.

The biggest challenge I have faced in my faith development is my personal identity and how others perceive me. Growing up gay in a small, conservative town in Texas in the 1970’s and 80’s was not easy, and for the longest time I believed that there was something in me that needed fixing, that I needed to first change myself in order to be worthy of God’s grace. To make a very long story as short as possible, I prayed and prayed for that change, and nothing happened. Then I prayed for God to help me accept myself with conditions, and nothing happened. Then I finally prayed for God to help me accept myself as I am, and the burden was finally lifted. I believe that was the first time in my life that I experienced God’s love and grace toward me in a very real and personal way. I respect the journeys that other Christian people have experienced and what they have come to understand about God through their journeys [as long as those understandings do not cause harm to others], and I expect them to respect my journey as evidence of God’s love and grace in my life.

On my role as a member at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church

As a member of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, I will contribute of my time, talents, and finances as I am able. I will do my best to treat other members of the congregation with love and respect, and I expect the same of them in return. I will support the pastors, elders, deacons, and staff with my prayers and words of encouragement. I will seek to use my natural and spiritual gifts to contribute to the life of the church. I will prayerfully consider requests that are made of me, and either accommodate those requests, or respectfully decline them, as I am led by the Spirit. [NOTE: I will soon complete my first year as a deacon at St. Andrew’s. I have learned much about serving others…but especially about how to make coffee for large numbers of people. LOL].

Following the Glad Path

            Big news: I have officially become a mid-life career changer. Well, not exactly a career-changer. I’m staying within the field of education, but the path I’m about to travel is quite different from anything I’ve done as an educator yet.

The decision to leave my full-time counseling position at the end of this semester has been a long time coming. About four years ago I realized that counseling was not what I wanted to do for the long term. At the time, though, I didn’t know what I wanted to do instead. I toyed with the idea of voice acting, but after taking a few voice acting classes, I learned how competitive that industry is. Then I explored copyediting, even finishing a certificate in copyediting from the University of California San Diego Extension. By the end of the program, however, I had realized that working for the publishing industry probably wouldn’t be a good fit for me. Completing the certificate did help me improve my own writing skills, though, and it reminded me of how much I used to enjoy teaching English as a second language. So after taking a refresher course in teaching English to speakers of other languages, I decided that returning to teaching ESL was the route to go. After speaking privately with one of my supervisors, though, I decided to give counseling one more year.

          Then last summer, after unexpectedly finding extra time on my hands, I took another course through UCSD Extension, Introduction to Online Learning. It was very interesting, and immediately afterwards I took the second course in the six-course certificate program. Those courses introduced me to instructional design. I started reading some books and exploring websites on my own, and the more I discovered, the more right it felt for me.

          Instructional design synthesizes most of my interests and skills as an educator: theories and best practices in teaching and learning; audio and video production; writing and copyediting; and multimedia and educational technologies. It is more creative than counseling, more tactile and active, and it is more project- and product-based, resulting in a tangible outcome in the form of an online class or workshop. And it’s dynamic: learning is assessed and revisions are made on an ongoing basis, so the product and process don’t become stagnant.

          Instructional design also appeals to my inner geek. I’m fascinated by anything technological, even if I don’t have a clue as to how it works. But that’s OK, because instructional design isn’t about the technology; it’s about the teaching and learning that occur in digital environments and how human beings make virtual connections to construct learning collaboratively within those environments.

          So 2014 will be a year of transition for me. I’ve made a plan: By the end of the year, I will complete the certificate in online teaching through UCSD Extension. I will also take a couple of classes at the community college where I work now. I’ll investigate professional associations for instructional design, including the American Society for Training and Development, and maybe even find a conference to attend. And I’m considering looking for an internship in instructional design early next year.

          This will be the first time in my life that I will be using social media to explore job opportunities and promote myself. This blog connects with my Facebook account, and anyone interested can find me easily on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mjisham/. Another of my 2014 goals is to get a personal website up and running, which will offer another digital venue for self-promotion.

          Besides pursuing the certificate, training in instructional design, and creating my own website, I plan to give some attention to a couple of book projects that have been languishing in the cobwebs of my mind for far too long. The characters in those stories are clamoring to get out.

          And I would like to take this opportunity to thank President Obama and the supporters of the Affordable Care Act for helping to make this decision possible. The main reason I left teaching twelve years ago is because I felt pressure (mostly from myself) to find a full-time job with a retirement plan and health benefits, which were not offered in the term-to-term assignments I had as an ESL teacher. Thanks to the ACA, I can afford to pay for my own health insurance, and maybe even explore the “American dream” of being self-employed. Yes, I may have to work until I’m eighty before I can retire, but if I’m doing work that I find enjoyable and fulfilling--work that matches my skills, interests, values, and personality--then work will be a pleasure.

          In the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, there is a First Nations proverb on the wall in one exhibit that reads, “Follow the path that makes your heart feel glad.” As a person of faith, I believe that if we listen to our hearts as well as our heads, then we will be blessed and become all that we are meant to be. And who says we have to stay on the same path for the rest of our lives? For many, there is joy in following various paths to explore new avenues of self-discovery. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in The Lord of the Rings that “…not all those who wander are lost…” Eighty is twenty-nine years away for me, so Lord willing, that’s a lot of paths to travel. As I begin my journey on this new path, I pray that my heart finds its song, along with the courage to go in directions that make it feel glad.

On Ducks, Free Speech, and Religion

          The controversy over the comments made by Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson about gays and blacks has me thinking about free speech and freedom of religion in the US. I’m grateful to live in a country where we can express our opinions and religious beliefs openly without fear of persecution. But, does being reprimanded by one’s employer for making controversial remarks about certain groups of people amount to persecution?

          History in the US has shown us that people in the media can get fired for making comments that hurt the image of their employers, even if those comments are based in religious opinion. Celebrities, professional athletes, comedians, and talk show hosts are often reprimanded or canned after making controversial remarks because their employers depend on advertising contracts to make a profit…and advertisers hate controversy. It’s not good for business. Mr. Robertson is an actor on a reality TV show (Duck Dynasty is not a documentary; its purpose is to entertain, not inform), thus he is an employee of the media. The network that hosts his show believes his remarks will have negative backlash, hurting network ratings and causing loss of advertising revenue. Thus, Mr. Robertson was put on “hiatus” as a way to placate parties potentially offended by his remarks in GQ.

Think of it this way: If I work for the hypothetical Acme Incorporated, and they value X, and I devalue X in a widely public forum, and that hurts Acme’s business, then doesn’t Acme have the right to reprimand or fire me, even if I claim my opinions are based in my religious beliefs? Doesn’t Acme have the right to retain employees that promote their values and terminate employees who don’t? After all, corporations are people, right? And corporations have rights, correct?

In Mr. Robertson’s particular case, I think it’s important to consider the source. I do not know this man personally, but I gather from what little I do know of the show that he is not a highly educated man with a broad world view. I do not intend to demean his life experience. We are all products of our times and our cultures. A person who has spent most of his or her life in a small town or village, surrounded by like-minded people who look and act much like each other, will likely not have a broad world view, even if they and their family are suddenly thrust onto the world stage thanks to a quirky reality TV show that centers on them. Thus, when asked about people and issues with which they have little personal experience, they will naturally respond from their own limited perspective. Ask me how to effectively hunt for ducks in the swamps of Louisiana, and you will get a response that will make any mildly seasoned duck hunter anywhere in the world laugh out loud or cringe in disbelief.

So when political figures and other people get their knickers in a twist because Mr. Robertson’s religious and free speech rights have been violated, they need to remember that Mr. Robertson is an employee of the A&E network, and as an employee, he should respect the values of his employer and think carefully about what he’s saying, how he’s saying it, and to whom he says it. Should Mr. Robertson be denied employment because he personally believes that homosexuality leads to bestiality, and blacks in Louisiana didn’t suffer from racial discrimination? Absolutely not. But should he be reprimanded by his employer for speaking his mind in a public forum such as GQ magazine and potentially hurting his employer’s business? Absolutely!

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, no matter how ill-informed those opinions may be.  However, when we use words from texts—the Bible, the Constitution, Shakespeare, whatever—we have a moral and ethical responsibility to consider the historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts of those words, and not just their literal, face-value meaning. As a self-proclaimed Christian, Mr. Robertson most likely bases his opinions about homosexuality on words taken from the Bible. But the majority of modern Bible scholars today agree that the Christian Bible does not condemn same-sex relationships as we understand them in the US and other developed countries. And more and more mainstream Christian theologians are coming to not only accept same-sex partnerships, but celebrate the love and commitment that two people of the same gender can demonstrate to each other.

Of course not everyone in Christendom agrees with these enlightened Christians. Many Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and atheists don’t, either. This is the United States, and we have the freedom to disagree based on our personal convictions. But what we don’t have the right to do as Americans is to deny other Americans their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness because of our personal opinions or beliefs, even if those are rooted in deeply held religious convictions. America is a democracy, not a theocracy. An American can be opposed to same-sex relationships—or interracial, interfaith, or May-December relationships, for that matter—and still coexist with Americans who hold opposing viewpoints. That’s one of the great characteristics of this country. Pacifists and warmongers, conservatives and liberals, Christians and non-Christians, capitalists and socialists—there is room for all of us here as long as we agree to disagree peacefully, kindly, and respectfully. Perhaps the tension held between our opposing viewpoints actually creates the common ground we all live on. Let’s just not let the ground give way beneath our feet and go tumbling down the banks of cultural entrenchment. Our diversity is what makes us strong, but we can’t embrace that diversity if all we can see are the walls of our own narrow worlds.

My Faith Tree

         The stillness of the church sanctuary on a Sunday morning is a great opportunity to open oneself to inspiration, conviction, creativity, and other whisperings of the Spirit. Or, it’s a chance to let your mind wander. Sometimes those wanderings go in nonconstructive directions: What’s coming up at work tomorrow? Did I pay that bill? I wish I hadn’t said/done that. What’s going to happen on the next episode of Game of Thrones? If you’ve ever been in church, you get the picture.

          Last Sunday, however, for some reason I reflected on my faith heritage. This weekend I will get my third (and final...maybe) tattoo, a design I created myself. It will be a Celtic cross with a triquetra knot in the middle, representing both my faith and my ethnic heritages. As a creative type, I love imagery. Maybe that’s why I have no problem perceiving the Bible’s symbols and metaphors as representations of the sometimes mysterious truths of God and the Truth that is God.

          So I reflected on my own faith history, and the imagery that came to mind was of a tree. I was raised in the Free Will Baptist church, a conservative evangelical denomination founded on Arminian principles of free will and God’s free grace, and also highly influenced by Wesleyan theology. In practice they are much like most other Baptists, but in theology they are more similar to Methodists. That church is the taproot of my tree, fed by soil composed of Wesleyan and Arminian elements.

          As I grew and became more independent, I leaned toward the Southern Baptist church. Many of my high school friends were Southern Baptists, and I got my undergraduate degree at a Southern Baptist-affiliated university. Anyone living in the central Texas area cannot help but be influenced to some degree by Southern Baptists, I suppose. So the Southern Baptist church represents the trunk of my faith tree. I was beginning to think for myself and form my own ideas about faith, and that Southern Baptist evangelicalism bolstered my maturation.

          But as I grew older and experienced more of the world, encountering people of other Christian backgrounds and non-Christian faith traditions, my mind broadened and I began to think more critically about what it meant to be a follower of Jesus and to be Christ to the world. Issues of social justice and environmental sustainability surfaced as the primary concerns for me, replacing those evangelical notions of witnessing and “winning souls for the Lord,” which in my opinion were more concerned with sheer numbers and the afterlife than with sincerely being concerned about another person’s welfare in the here-and-now. I began to look at Jesus’s life as my primary example of how to live in this world, and not the lives of Paul or Peter or any of the other disciples. Honestly, I believe some evangelicals are dangerously close to making idols out of the Bible itself and of characters in it, rather than looking to Jesus alone as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. As my spiritual explorations continued, I came to realize that much of what I had arrived at on my own in my faith journey had already actually been defined by others before me as Progressive Christianity. My faith tree was beginning to branch out from the trunk, spreading its limbs to accommodate ideals of social justice, environmental responsibility, hospitality, and intellectual knowledge balanced with more intuitive and emotional ways of knowing. And in the same way that a tree provides shade, food, and protection for other creatures, so our faith should not be simply self-serving, but rather a faith that gives to others—physical, emotional, and spiritual nourishment and protection; a place of refuge and rest; a cool respite from oppression, and a dry haven from life’s storms.

          That’s not to say that I’ve reached some sort of Christian nirvana state. I still struggle to love the unlovable…although those whom I perceive to be “unlovable” have changed through the years. Showing hospitality unconditionally is sometimes a challenge for me. I don’t always make the most environmentally friendly consumer choices. And those fruits of the Spirit that the New Testament lists? You know: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? They sometimes rot on the limbs of my faith tree because I fail to nourish them properly through communion with the Master Gardener a.k.a. God.

          But at least I do have limbs that branch out and reach up, however feebly. Reaching toward the light that comes from God’s grace and love, those limbs know that they need to grow and spread and thrive, drawing their life not just from the roots below the trunk, but especially from the sun and rain that comes from above. My faith tree may never be a mighty oak or a towering pine, but it has withstood life’s storms and droughts for over fifty years now. Even the tiny bonsai thrives with the Master Gardener’s loving attention and tender care. So, whether I am a mighty oak or a little bonsai, may I continue to grow and thrive wherever I am planted.