I started this blog in November of 2014, and now, after 8 months and 20 visits to different religious communities and services, it's time for me to say goodbye.I'm moving off to the Los Angeles area to attend Claremont School of Theology where many great adventures await me. Sadly that means my time working with the University of Minnesota's Multifaith Student Council has come to a close, and so too must this blog.

What did I learn about my neighbors' faith in 20 visits? I learned that some of my neighbors attend big churches alongside thousands of other people, while others gather weekly in small groups of a handful or so. Some of my neighbors pray silently, others pray out loud, still others sing and dance their praises, some prostrate themselves before the Almighty, some process before God's altar with candles and incense, and some are moved by God's Spirit to cry out in unknown tongues. Some of my neighbors like to listen to really long sermons, others keep it short and sweet. A few places host sermons that make good use of slideshows, while one church offers sermons consisting entirely of quotes from sacred texts, and two places I visited don't have any preaching at all. Some places of worship are joyously loud, others are contemplatively silent.

And all of these are places where my neighbors come together to share with each other, to build community, to have fellowship, to share joys and sorrows, to be together and recognize that they are better together and that there is something greater than themselves. Despite the bad rap many religious organizations get for spreading hate and intolerance, I never once heard hateful or bigoted speech. Instead everywhere I went I found love, warmth, welcome, respect, and excitement to share with me what each community cherished.

I began this adventure hoping to enrich my appreciation of my community and challenge my preconceptions of other traditions. I have surely accomplished both. If you are interested in learning more about the faith traditions in your community, I encourage you to visit your neighbor's church, temple, masjid, gurdwara, synagogue, or meeting house. I guarantee you'll discover lots about unfamiliar traditions, and learn far more than you imagined about your own faith.

Most of all, you will learn that whether we talk about "Allah", "Mind", or never refer to God; whether we gather on Sundays, Saturdays, Fridays, or Tuesdays at 2:30pm; whether we believe in transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or don't know what that means; whether we attend every week, or just whenever we feel like it; we all long to be loved, to have meaning in our lives, to have time to reflect, to be thankful, and to challenge ourselves to lead the best lives we can.


Thank you for making the journey with me. It's been a wonderful adventure.

The Assemblies of God have a similar heritage and similar beliefs to Pentecostals, and their worship services are similar in style: congregants are moved by the spirit, they call out in praise to the Lord, they raise and wave their hands in praise, they praise and bless the Lord for His goodness and mercy out loud. At the service I attended, I was one of the few people not raising their hands, swaying to the music, shaking tambourines, or dancing in the aisle. (The only time I moved along with everyone else was when we made a big procession to put our tithes and offerings in a box at the front of the church. Thankfully I remembered to bring cash.)

Worship at Great Grace had a similar fervor in its prayer and sermon as Calvary Pentecostal. But where Calvary stressed baptism by the Holy Ghost, the pastor at Great Grace exhorted the congregation (in incredibly loud tones) to have a personal relationship with God, to have faith in God's ability to do anything and answer prayers, and to trust no man's opinion about God but learn about God from experiencing God.

Indeed everyone at Great Grace seemed to be experiencing something greater than themselves. While I'll leave it to Andrew Newberg to explain what exactly these people are experiencing, this is certain: the experience is real, powerful, and the future of Christianity.

Like the Pentecostal movement, the Assemblies of God are one of the fastest growing Christian groups worldwide, and have about 3 million members in the U.S. In the US, AGs are growing fastest in the Southwest, but these numbers pales in comparison the 57 million members worldwide, and the church's incredible growth in Africa, South America, and Asia. Great Grace was in many ways indicative of the future of Christianity. How so, many theologians argue the future of Christianity lies in people experiencing God and being moved by the Spirit. (Great Grace certainly has that down). And all demographers claim the future of Christianity lies in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. (Basically everyone at Great Grace was of an African ethnicity.)

And so I'm going to take this post as an opportunity to reflect, not on the service I attended, but on how the service I attended is indicative of Christianity's future.

Much has been made of the recent Pew Reseach Center's survey of Religion in American, and while I encourage you to peruse the findings, I think a few things should be kept in mind. While some of the changes in the religious landscape were religious and/or political, demographics also played a role. Basically, the number of European Americans is decreasing, and so you would expect that religious groups like Mainline Protestants, who are mostly European Americans, to decline. And while some Evangelicals celebrated how they didn't decline nearly as much as Mainline Protestants and Catholics, much of this can be attributed to the fact that the birthrate of Evangelicals, while now identical to Mainline Protestants, fell a generation later, and so they have not yet experienced the drastic declines that other Christians have experienced, and so until they do, they will continue to increase their share of the Christian Pie.

The most important fact about the changing American religious landscape, is that the Christianity is decreasing, and the nones are making a meteoric rise. (Nones include all non-religious people like Humanists and people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious.) While this make you think that religion is declining, I invite you to look at the global picture.

The Pew Forum also released a (somewhat less talked about) report on the global religious landscape, and made predictions about the worldwide religious landscape out to 2050. Here predictions can be made because demographics, not theology or politics, are the guiding factor. And so while secularism may rise in the US to levels similar to Europe and Japan, the number of religious people will increase because the total number of people in places with high levels of secularity, will decrease. Many of the fastest shrinking countries are also some of the most secular while many of the most religious countries, are the fastest growing, not to mention that countries that will experience the largest numerical gains, like India, tend to be very religious. Basically, there's a bunch of factors determining how religions will grow., but the data tell us that the numbers of non-religious will grow for a while, then begin to shrink, as will the numbers of Buddhists, Folk Religionists, and "others." Hinduism and Judaism will grow a bit, and Islam will pass Christianity as the world's most popular religion around 2070.

But what the numbers don't tell us is how the religions will be transformed by these demographic changes. The future of Christianity, lies in the Global South. Check out the countries with the largest Christian populations in 2050, and you'll see what I mean. Much scholarship has been done about the differences between Christianity in the developed world and Christianity in the developing world. The consensus is that Christianity in the Global South is rooted in faith and experience more than creeds and rituals. Harvey Cox describes in his book The Future of Faith how Christianity's future lies in the faithful having an experience of the divine (like at Great Grace Assembly of God) and being inspired/led by the Spirit to transform your life and work for social justice.

Exactly what the future holds for Christianity and how global trends will affect Christian practices in the US remains to be seen. Perhaps we will have a wave of missionaries coming to the US from Africa, Asia, and South America. Perhaps more and more Christians and churches will quit worrying about creeds. And perhaps Christianity will become the force for social justice that Walter Rauschenbush, Oscar Romero, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Pope Francis, Desmond Tutu, and so many others believe it is called to be.

On Sunday mornings, people gather in a beautiful assembly hall in a mid-century building situated on Mt. Curve road in Minneapolis. The assembly hall has rows of benches facing a stage that has a piano, an organ, and a podium on it. People find seats in the assembly hall and chat with their neighbors as they wait for service to begin. At the sound of a bell, the service began.

In many ways this service was very similar to any Christian service. We sang an opening song, a candle was lit on the stage, we shared our joys and sorrows, a collection was taken, a passage was read, a message was delivered, we sang some more, the congregation recited things in unison, the congregation responded to the pastor as one, and at not time was there made any reference to God or the Divine. Welcome to the Unitarian Universalist Church.

The Unitarian Universalist Church or UU formed from the 1961 merger of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America and is committed to living in the tensions between liberal Christianity and Humanism.  The UU church makes no claims about God, Jesus, or the afterlife, it holds no creed, it emphasizes personal experience and the changing nature of religious understanding, and teaches the need for us to come together and share our wisdom and experiences.

UUs trace their history to the earliest followers of Jesus, at least those who rejected his divinity. These people, who would later fall into the Arian category, would be declared heretics during the Council of Nicea in 325 CE. Unitarian ideas reemerged in 16th century Switzerland, and later found strongholds in England, Hungary, and Italy. The movement spread widely through the United States, gave birth to transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, and then experienced a decline in numbers (like liberal Christianity in general) during the 20th century. Today most American UUs live in the Northeast, yet the metro area with the second highest number of UU congregations (after Boston) is the Twin Cities.

Many humanists call the UU Church home. Humanism is being good without God. And while there are Christian Humanists and Muslim Humanists, these terms refer to people who stress the human aspects of their religious traditions. Here I will use humanism as a synonym for secular humanism. The First Unitarian Society calls itself "a heritage of forward-thinking humanism at home in the here and the now", and while I don't know the proportion of humanists in the FUS community, I will make the (unjustified) assumption that it was 100%. Given my current fascination with humanism, I knew a trip to FUS was in order.

Having recently read a couple of books about Humanism (Good Without God, by Greg Epstein and Living the Secular Life, by Phil Zuckerman) both of which stressed our human need for ritual, I was thrilled to see how FUS had cultivated rituals while eschewing any reference to God. While some rituals, such as lighting a candle in a candle holder shaped as the UU flaming chalice, seemed on their surface to be religous-y, the words recited when lighting and extinguishing the candle referenced our human need for community and our search for truth, not God.

The songs we sang, most of which celebrated nature, had a spiritual flavor to them, yet needn't have been viewed as spiritual. Still other songs were completely secular. While the collection was gathered, the pianist played Send in the Clowns, and the closing song was a parody of Elvis's Blue Christmas, in which the vocalist sang how, once the community had dispersed for the day, it would be a "Blue Sunday" at FUS.

The reading was from Hermann Hesse, and the "talk" that followed it discussed the need for sabbath, for us to slow down, take a break, get bored, and let our minds refresh.

FUS did an incredible job of creating an environment that led you to rejoice in and care for the world and those around you. The wall behind the stage was decorating with beautiful prints of flowers, trees, and waterfalls. The north wall was floor to ceiling glass offering a splendid view toward downtown Minneapolis. And alongside the welcome message and general announcements, time was set aside for the "Social Justice Minute" which praised the recent anti-sandpiper pipeline march in St. Paul and reminded people of the work FUS would be doing for the annual Twin Cities Pride Week.

Perhaps what strikes me most about Humanism is how much it helps people lead incredible, rich lives. Humanists understand deeply the need to be in community, and to share our life with those we love. Humanism is, in some ways, a celebration of life, and a recognition of our ability and responsibility to make life as wonderful and meaningful as humanly possible. After all if there is no hereafter, all your efforts should be focused on giving meaning and beauty to this life, to cherishing each moment you share with your loved ones, and to enjoying and celebrating life. As the congregation recited when welcoming new members to FUS "And we believe in life, / and in the strength of love; / and we have found a need to be together."

The Mass at Compassion of Christ was beautiful: informal yet reverent, simple and thoughtfully put together. There was a small gathering of about 20 faithful on the Sunday evening I visited, yet each individual seemed intent and proud to have come to this particular Catholic community instead of just any other. The hymns we sang were traditional in style, led by a couple of vocalists accompanied by a guitar and a piano, and were sung with male and female inclusive lyrics. The community was vibrant and hopeful for a better tomorrow. They were thrilled to welcome their newly-ordained priest who invited questions and comments on the sermon.

And the priest was a woman.

Yes, you read that correctly. I went to a Mass said by a Roman Catholic Woman Priest. And it was beautiful.

There are women who serve as Roman Catholic priests who, while not recognized by the Vatican, care for congregations and do wonderful ministerial work. The RCWP movement began in 2002, with the ordination of seven women in the Danube river. The Womenpriests, including the originals in 2002, were ordained in Apostolic Succession, and therefore claim to be just as completely a priest as the next (Man)priest.

What's "Apostolic Succession"? Apostolic Succession refers to the unbroken chain of succession of bishops leading back to the original Apostles. Jesus "ordained" his apostles as the first "bishops" who then passed this authority on (by the laying on of hands) to other followers some as bishops, others as priests or deacons. While the idea of bishops, popes, and priests as well the roles these people play developed into their current form over many generations, and there is disagreement over who Jesus appointed as his successor (either Peter as the Catholic church claims or James, who was most likely Jesus' brother) the Catholic church views contemporary priests as the newest link in an unbroken chain stretching back to Jesus (who is of course also God). So to be ordained in Apostolic Succession, the priest who ordains you must have been properly ordained by another priest who had been properly ordained by another properly ordained priest and so on and so on back to the original Apostles being ordained by Jesus. Whether or not there were women in this chain prior to 2002 is a question to keep historians awake at night. Episcopa Theodora is a controversial candidate for an earlier female bishop.

According to Compassion of Christ's website, the Catholic people have spoken (the "sensus fidelium") and women have now taken back their role as priests. And considering there were three Womenpriests and a couple of deacons serving at Compassion of Christ, and there are many ordained Womenpriests in dozen of churches across the US and around the globe, Womenpriests seem to be doing a good job of taking back their role.

I'm sure you're wondering, how do these women get away with it? Well they don't really. They aren't recognized by the Vatican, the Mass I attended was held in a United Methodist Church, and Womenpriests are open about having broken the Church's (sexist) Canon Law 1024. Are they worried about being excommunicated? As they presider told me after Mass, excommunication does nothing to her relationship with God, it's just something a bunch of men in Rome invented to keep people in their place.

Since the Catholic church is currently facing a massive global shortage of priests, and people in my generation (millennials) don't care if your a man, a woman, or some other gender, I think this problem has an obvious solution. Whether or not a bunch of men in Rome will agree remains to be seen.

And so I leave you with the words of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (who was not Catholic btw).
"Well behaved women seldom make history."