Thanks for the question! You know you’re not going to get a simple answer, right? Here’s some of our answers:
“I call myself a mystical humanist. I believe in natural revelation. I am not a theist. I groove on the Tao!”
“My bumper sticker response is you don’t have to be Christian, cause lord knows the vast majority of Christians aren’t missional, but I think you do need to have a strong sense of the transcendent, even if that is conceived as the Human Spirit – something that shifts you from self to other in a fundamental way and creates a culture that church is not about you but about helping you get over the “you” or what so much of consumer culture says is you. You know, now that I think of it, I do think personally that my id-ing primarily as a Christian and secondarily as a UU, the way I would think a Methodist might in their case too, putting denomination second, might be a precipitating factor. It throws me into deeper waters, perhaps, of history than simply 1961 or 1825 or even 1620, and I feel a strong connection with pre-325 and pre-70 ekklesia which is more missional; but even here, it seems like you could also just as easily id as buddhist and be as missionally rooted or more.”
“I’m neither Christian or theist. The best I identify is as a Universalist religious humanist. The whole God issue is moot for me. The only way it enters into my religious practice at all is in a Star Wars ‘The Force’ kind of way. I was raised in and was a devout Christian until about the age of 20 when I left due to being fed up with fundamentalism and the rising prosperity Christianity nonsense. I can speak fluent Christian and use it as a primary source because of my familiarity with it. I was very missional with my Christianity. I carried the concepts through into my Pagan practices, and am thrilled to see it emerging within the UU faith community.”
“Aside from answering that I am a Unitarian Universalist, the rest of the answer depends on the day, and the context of the question. And the tenor of the questioner. If the questioner meant ‘theist’ as in, do I believe in A divinity, then no. If he/she meant theist as in, do I believe in DIVINITY, then yes. My mom (who is a staunch and loving Roman Catholic) and I often talk about how I am a ‘little-c catholic.’ I definitely belong to the one holy, catholic and apostolic church, which, for the record, is not run by the pope but by the power of love. Jesus certainly understood that pretty well, and I give him credit where it’s due. What we call the sacred is much less important to me than what we are called to do after we experience it in our lives. Which is why, as I said in the beginning, I am a Unitarian Universalist.”
–
And, a fusion of the opinion of several of us:
One of the tasks and missions of the Red Pill Brethren is to help Unitarian Universalists have less of a need to ask this question and much less needy to require an answer to it. Being needy for an answer to this question is evidence of having swallowed the blue pill… I have an overall uncomfortableness with the question in the first place. Our Faith still seems so fixated with putting things in well defined boxes, when the reality is that we all function within Mandelbrot shaped polygons. My answer to the question would probably be ‘If we are doing the good work, why does it matter what we claim as our personal faith or denominational structure.’ I know for a fact when I’m handing out food to the hungry or clothes to the naked, they don’t ask what I believe or to whom I pray…The point of being missional, to me, is to focus on what we do with what we believe, and get beyond the need to categorize. The conversation is a valuable one, but it’s peripheral to the work of the missional church. I think sometimes when people ask this kind of question, the answer that would be of most benefit is to tell them how what we believe shapes what we do.
Red Pill Brethren 