Emergent Church Leaders Promote Evolutionary Spirituality - The Crosstalk Blog

Emergent Church Leaders Promote Evolutionary Spirituality - The Crosstalk Blog

Emergent Church Leaders Promote Evolutionary Spirituality
Posted by Ingrid Schlueter in Emergent Church, New Spirituality on December 23rd, 2010 32 responses

Emergent Church leaders Sally Morgenthaler, Spencer Burke, Doug Pagitt and Brian McLaren are joining “Evolutionary Evangelist” Michael Dowd in the promotion of evolutionary spirituality, long taught by leading New Age gurus like Barbara Marx Hubbard. Dowd sent out this press release yesterday about the new project.


DECEMBER 22, 2010 – This Christmas season, bestselling author and evolutionary evangelist Rev. Michael Dowd is having an online revival of sorts, and pitching what may be the biggest tent yet for fellow Christians who embrace evolution and honor science: EvolutionaryChristianity.com.


As a sequel to his breakthrough book Thank God for Evolution (Viking/Plume), Rev. Dowd is hosting and producing a living library of free podcasts and live panels with preeminent Christians on the leading edge of science and religion, where mythic beliefs and measurable reality collide.

 “The New Atheists and scriptural literalists are not the only games in town,” says Dowd. “In contrast to Richard Dawkins’ God-less universe, tens of millions of us in the middle celebrate both Jesus and Darwin. For us, religious faith is strengthened by what God is revealing through science.”


Dowd will speak one-on-one with 38 religious and scientific luminaries representing Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Progressives, and both Integral and Emerging Church leaders about “how science can deepen faith, not threaten it.”


The historic dialogues, titled, The Advent of Evolutionary Christianity: Conversations at the Leading Edge of Faith, explore the emergence of a new form of religious experience that reveres what God is revealing through science and embraces all of creation. Dowd will talk with some of the most respected names in science and religion — Nobel laureates and Templeton Prize-winners among them.


His guests also include Brian McLaren, named by Time magazine as one of America’s 25 most influential evangelicals; Catholic theologian John Haught and Brown University biologist Ken Miller, both key witnesses for the plaintiff at the 2005 Dover ‘intelligent design’ trial; Wired magazine co-founder Kevin Kelly; Ian Lawton, pastor of the Michigan church that recently made national news for removing its cross; Sister Joan Chittister, co-chair of the U.N. Global Peace Initiative of Women; and Sister Gail Worcelo, co-founder of Green Mountain Monastery with Thomas Berry; Bishop John Shelby Spong, whose books on evolving faith have sold more than a million copies; Matthew Fox, defrocked by now Pope Benedict XVI for embracing Creation Spirituality; Paul Smith, a veteran pastor who was kicked out of the Southern Baptist Convention for blessing gay unions; and 30 other evolutionary Christians.


In the spirit of the season, Dowd and his guests are giving away free access to all the interviews. The daily dialogues were launched December 4 on EvolutionaryChristianity.com, and will continue through January 14. Already more than ten thousand Christians from around the world, including hundreds of clergy, have found the site, with many joining the conversation.


“For far too long the public debate has been a battle of extremes,” says Rev. Dowd. “After nearly a decade on the road sharing the good news of evolution, I felt called to convene a coalition of Christian leaders who embrace scientific evidence as divine communication. By focusing on values and perspectives that we all share, rather than on our differences, we are discovering extraordinary common ground. There’s more than one way to be an evolutionary Christian, but what we all share are deep-time eyes and a global heart.”


From January 15 through February 1, Dowd will host six live online seminars with an internet audience of tens of thousands who can ask questions of the panelists. In February, transcripts of all the dialogues and panel discussions will be made available to the public, along with study guides for churches, seminaries, and school boards.


A recent Gallup poll reveals that four in ten Americans still believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” or what Dowd dubs “denial about the reality of deep time and our real history.”


Dowd believes that now is the time to help fellow Christians relate to their faith within the context of a universe that he exclaims is “far more glorious and inspiring than anyone living thousands of years ago could have possibly imagined—even prophets!”


Rev. Dowd has come a long way since handing out anti-evolution tracts in his early 20s. Today, he and his wife Connie Barlow, a science writer, are itinerant evolutionary evangelists proclaiming a gospel billions of years old.


The unorthodox missionaries have spoken to more than eleven hundred audiences, from Baptists to Buddhists, about how science and religion can enjoy a happy marriage. The Dodge Sprinter they call home travels North America with a clear message on both sides, the Jesus and Darwin fishes kissing, a graphic Dowd says gets them “a lot of smiles and a few gestures.”


Dowd’s first book, EarthSpirit: A handbook for nurturing an ecological Christianity, was one of the first attempts to look appreciatively at biblical Christianity in light of what scientists have discovered about the universe.


His most recent, Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World, was endorsed by six Nobel Prize-winning scientists and by religious leaders across the spectrum.


Meanwhile, Barbara Marx Hubbard and her New Spirituality friends are promoting their upcoming Shift Retreat where they are also going to be addressing evolutionary spirituality. This is where all the teaching on evolution was eventually headed–not into atheism, but to this global spirituality with man at the center and on the throne. As Hubbard declares in her demonic retelling of the book of Revelation, those who will not participate will face judgment day. Doug Pagitt, Brian McLaren, Spencer Burke, Sally Morgenthaler and anyone who legitimizes them by participating with them in their conferences, books, and online seminars are helping to promote the doctrines of demons. Those who refuse to come out from among these men and women and stay clean from their lies are participants in with them.