Don’t get me wrong now. I am a Christian. I accept Christ as my savior and I do my best to follow him (though Lord knows I fall short on a regular basis) but there are certain issues that I hold dear to me that have led others to accuse me of not being a Christian at all. I thought it would be best to get them right out into the open here at the start of this journal so that people know what they’re in for when they visit.

1. I fully support the LGBT community. I believe that homosexuals/bisexuals/transgendered folk/whathaveyou have the right to be married both in the eyes of the government and the eyes of God. I believe that they have the right to be church leaders and should not have to renounce love or be celibate for the rest of their lives to do so. I do not believe that love between two consenting adults of the same sex is a sin (see #2.)

2. I’m not a literalist. I believe that the Bible was inspired by God but I also believe that it was written by fallible human beings living in a different time and cannot be completely divorced from its cultural context. I read the Bible. I soak up the words of God and if I come across something that seems difficult I pray about. I pray a lot. And then I wait for an answer. Sometimes the answer falls in line with scripture. Sometimes it does not. I live my life according to what he tells me. I cannot do otherwise.

3. I fully support the ordination of women all the way up to the highest offices of the church. This one isn’t so controversial among a lot of the Christians I know but there are those who would tell me I am disobeying God by believing it so I’m adding it to the list.

4. I believe that Jesus is male but I don’t think that gender labels can be adequately applied to big-G God. So sometimes I say “he” and sometimes I say “she” and sometimes I say “hers” or “Mother” instead of “Father”. Now, this shouldn’t be controversial at all. After all, almost every Christian I have met, even some that fall squarely in the fundamentalist camp, admits that God is beyond gender. It’s funny, then, that so many will get bent out of shape if you refer to God with anything other than masculine pronouns.

5. This is the big one; the one that nets me the most criticism. I do not believe that the organized religion we call Christianity is the only way to salvation. I believe that the way to salvation is to live the kind of life that Jesus calls us to live — a life guided by love for God and love for others — and I don’t think Christians have the monopoly on that.

So there it is. I’ll be writing more about each of the above issues in more detail somewhere down the line, I’m sure, but I feel better having it out in the open now.