At TCPC, we get thousands of emails from people around the country, many of them requesting sources of progressive Christian worship materials.  Where can churches find liturgical resources with creative, engaging alternatives to patriarchal, supernatural language and symbolism? 

 While our tcpc.org website is rich with stories about churches that are constantly developing remarkable liturgical forms, we have never been able to gather these materials into an accessible form.  Brilliant innovations in worship in progressive churches around the country are, like lamps hidden under bushel baskets, unknown to thousands of leaders in other churches who would be overjoyed to discover and use them.

The Center for Progressive Christianity is now embarking on a new Liturgy Project which will positively transform worship services in churches all over the world.  The Liturgy Project will contact hundreds of churches to collect a wide variety of litanies, hymn lyrics, dramas, chants, and art and design concepts.  These materials will then be organized and published on our website and in printed, CD, or DVD form.  Some of the materials will be made available for free to any user of the tcpc.org website, and others will be accessible only to TCPC affiliate congregations, or through purchase.  By the fall of 2008, we intend to roll out this rich new resource and make it available for our churches.  It will be an ongoing project, continually seeking and offering new resources to enliven congregations with artful, soulful, intellectually satisfying liturgical elements.  TCPC also will offer regional workshops and on-site consulting for church leaders to experience the creative liturgical elements and implement them in their congregations.

In this, I found a paradox. I could suddenly relate to Richard Nixon, Dick Cheney, George Bush. I got myself into a war thing, and I lost. Now I was standing on the field, dumb-struck. How was I ever going to exit the field gracefully? I felt such profound compassion for world leaders who land themselves in this position.   

Nigel Leaves knows the institutional church. As an Anglican priest he has served parishes in the UK, New Guinea, and Hong Kong; and after a stint as Chaplain to the Bishop of Perth, Australia, he is presently Warden and Director of Studies at Wollaston Theological College just outside of Perth. But as a citizen of one of the world's most secular nations, he knows the difficulty of promoting a traditional faith in a post-Christian world. And since to remain solvent his college has to double as a retreat center, he has gained first-hand acquaintance with much of the astonishing array of new-age groups that he has termed "the smorgasbord of grass-roots spiritualities."

But as a scholar he is also familiar with the panentheism of Jack Spong and Marcus Borg, the radical non-realism of Lloyd Geering and Don Cupitt (he has written a two-volume exposition of Cupitt's work), and the growing body of religious naturalism - the evocation of awe and wonder at the beauty of nature - found in writers like Ursula Goodenough.

The God Problem: Alternatives to Fundamentalism is a compact and highly readable examination of the problem of squaring the violence done in the name of religion with the theistic God of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. It focuses on those who are trying to reform or reimagine that tradition in order to create a continuing role for religion in a more humane world. And while one may hazard a shrewd guess at Leaves' personal preference among the four paths he delineates, he leaves it to the reader to decide which of them best points the way forward to a meaningful encounter with life in the twenty-first century.

The text is sufficiently clear and accessible that one need not be a specialist - let alone a theologian - to follow and become absorbed by the material; but even trained theologians will find it a well-footnoted and useful reference for viewing the present state of a crucial religious debate.

For More Information, click here: God Problem