01: The Center for Progressive Christianity represents a unique attempt to market liberal Christianity and make it “user-friendly” to both church members and seekers.
The founding of CPC was inspired by the liberal and critical religious views of retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong and is based at the Episcopal Divinity School in Boston. Its purpose is to encourage mainline churches, starting with the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ, “to care about people who find organized religion irrelevant, ineffectual, or repressive.” CPC, headed by Episcopal priest Jim Adams, used focus groups to insure that prospective members would find what they are seeking, while holding to its concerns with the equality of the world’s religions, gender and racial equality, and sexual freedom.
The center’s “eight points” includes the positions that Jesus is one of many gateways into the realm of God and that the Lord’s Supper is not partaking of Christ’s body and blood but a ritual meal projecting a vision of world peace. TCPC invites local congregations to affiliate with the “mother” organization, with degrees of affiliation offered.
(Source: Theology Today, January, 2001)
02: The Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship (ICES) was launched last year by leaders associated with the religious right.
The group drafted the Cornwell Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, which holds that the free market rather than government action can resolve environmental issues and calls Christians to be responsible. caretakers of the earth’s resources. The group denounces much of the environmental movement for embracing “faulty” science that presents a “gloom-and-doom” view of the state of the earth.
The group does not plan to directly initiate environmental legislation. Among its participants are Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Charles Colson, Rabi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition and Fr. Robert Sirico of the free market Acton Institute.
(Source: http://www.emagazine.com, January-February, 2001)