The Unorthodox Gatherings

We have all grown up in a time of separation. We believe we are separated, as individuals, from everything around us. We produce and we consume, we purchase and we consume, and life continues on. However, whether we see it or not, we are connected to everything around us and our actions have consequences. The ancients used to have a theology and cosmology that looked at the world this way, and ind...

We face a world full of uncertainty, large trends going into scary directions, the ground shifting under our feet day to day. We can bury the pain we feel and distract. We fear facing that pain, because we're so used to doing it alone. But facing our pain with community is release, it is connection, it is the world's immune system responding, and it is a reminder that we are love. Join us...

Marcelino begins with the first part of this ongoing spiral of reconnecting work: Gratitude. Indigenous cultures going back thousands of years have been rooting themselves in gratitude as part of our connection to the world around us. Jesus, before he began his ministry, was rooted in gratitude when the divine voice announced: this is my beloved. Gratitude is not simply giving thanks, it's res...

We are starting a 6-week series on The Work that Reconnects, presented by Unorthodox's Marcelino Sepulveda. Today's episode is a bit of an introduction and the series will be more pragmatic than lecture based. The Work that Reconnects is to help guide us through a spiral of centering in gratitude, connecting our bodies with the pain we're encountering in the world, and moving through t...

For a long time, Christianity has had an identity crisis and we need a shift. When we take the expanse of the Bible, we have these amazing stories of our beginnings that teach us God wants us to co-create with the divine. It is one of our greatest gifts, to help bring about the kingdom of heaven. This series has been about falling in love with our identity as co-creators, in particular, here in ou...

Neighborhoods are sacred places when we treat them as such. They are the spaces where we'll both experience and bring about the kingdom of heaven most prominently. Neighborhood are sacred and the Commons are the glue that hold neighborhoods together. The commons are all the spaces where local community come together. They can be rooting together at a local football game, or coming to the park...

The world is only feeling more chaotic and divisive, and with that comes an even greater sense that there's nothing any of us can do but watch. And yet, Jesus spent his time empowering normal people in small communities. We may not know it, but our neighborhoods are the area where we have the greatest effect, and it's where we'll experience the Kingdom of Heaven the most. Yet we ignore...

The home, like so much else has shifted in the last 300 years. We've gone from people who grow up among generations of family on ancestral lands, to moving away and developing the nuclear family, to having the most diversified homes imaginable. Yet, linking them all is a sense of belonging and connection. Home isn't just a physical place, but a space where vulnerability and safety are gran...

There has been a boom in the last 10 years of people interested in their genealogy. People are craving to know where they come from, but I believe it's because people are craving to feel their roots grounded in a community, the way are ancestors lived. Today's episode explores what those roots look like for our Unorthodox community in particular, and if you're listening to this from ou...

The community in which you reside is one of the most sacred things about this life, and yet, we are being drastically pulled away from it. Each of us has a particular community, filled with specific people, plants, animals, and environments that are a balm for moments of chaos, and the fulfillment of what's most meaningful. Jesus called it The Kingdom of Heaven. How do we get back to it? This...

In today's episode we look at some localized stories of nonviolent action people have taken in response to tremendous violence we've seen in the world. We can fall victim the belief that if nonviolence doesn't solve big problems, it's meaningless, but nonviolent action is like grains of sand that alone seem insignificant, but when brought together create a tremendous, lasting force...

In this episode we're going to look at Martin Luther King Jr.'s principles of nonviolence as a way to explore the question: is violence futile? Our conversation on nonviolence gets into some of the struggle we have around the concept of redemptive violence. We've been raised to believe there are moments where violence is necessary and so the question remains: is it?

I'm going to say something as explicitly as I can. If you are going to call yourself a Christian, nonviolence is fundamental to that identity. The problem? As a nation, we are addicted to violence. And we've manipulated Christianity to adapt to that addiction for hundreds of years. We start a new series with this episode, not just looking at nonviolence as a fundamental of Christianity, bu...

We come to the last episode of our Last Week series and we talk about the penultimate question: what is the meaning of Easter? This series has meant to respond to that question from the first episode of the series to the last episode, because the gospel writer of Mark is clear: you can't answer that question without the full picture. Many of us were raised with the belief that Easter is about...

The Harrowing of Hell is famous in medieval paintings and depictions in some of the oldest churches across the world. Yet, it's not mentioned anywhere in the Gospels, nor in any of Paul's authentic letters. So where did this early tradition come from detailing the lone day between Jesus' death and resurrection? The origin is a lot deeper than one might guess, going all the way to the o...

One of the most accepted doctrines within Christianity is the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. But here's the thing: when you take Mark's gospel, the earliest of the 4 gospels, nowhere does Mark make this claim, and rhetorically, he is saying something The Church has gotten wrong for hundreds of years. Today's episode will look at how Mark answers the age-old question: Why did...

As we get closer to Easter Sunday, we finally start the story of Maundy Thursday. But here's the problem: most of this stuff comes from John's Gospel. John's Gospel doesn't have the last supper during Passover, nor does he have the words of institution. John seems to be making big theological statements that the Synoptic Gospels don't include. Which means our Holy Week Liturgy...

Fewer moments in the gospels elicit both misunderstanding and tremendous contrast of what the gospel means on doesn't mean than the woman with the alabaster jar. A moment that was twisted by the Church to turn this unnamed woman into a prostitute, a broken individual, a person who only prioritizes worshipping Christ over following Christ, all to detract from who she really is: The First True C...

Honestly, it's hard to imagine that The Church missed the point of Jesus' "Cleansing of the Temple" in particular and his last week in Jerusalem as a whole. The glaring point is this and it needs to be understood implicitly by all: worship is never a substitute for justice. In this episode we go through Mark's story of the cleansing of the temple and a plethora of stories tha...

Every Gospel writer has a purpose for their story beyond simply recounting details. Mark's gospel, the earliest of the 4, is the only one that details every day of Jesus last week, and there's a purpose to his story that The Church has missed for centuries. We begin a new series looking at this last week through the rhetorical lens of Mark, in the hopes of understanding how this story continues to...

Many people aren't aware of this, but there was a massive and intentional shift in the perception in which Christianity is centered in the early 20th century. Two oil magnates paid theologians to write what was known as the Fundamentalist Essays, creating the Five Fundamentals of Christianity, altering the way the word "Gospel" would be understood and used from then on. None of the F...

An ambiguous and oft used word or phrase thrown around by pastors and speakers is truth or biblical truth. We must all guard it, embrace it, and express it. But what is it? Rarely defined, but often used. A ploy to firm up the speakers own bias. However, our understanding of what truth is today comes more from Aristotle and Plato than it does the Bible. Today we ask that question together, What is...

You'll hear the preacher talk about standing firm in Biblical Truth, defending the Gospel, avoiding sin. You'll hear it so frequently, you'll be afraid to ask the question, What do you mean by that word? In Christianity words are used so frequently, it's as though everyone should know the definition of the word, but in reality, the word is used ambiguously, and this is on purpose....

The conclusion to our series on Process Theology is the best! How does this theology become applicable in our real lives, our prayers, our response to injustice, etc. This is a theology for today's world that knows the opposite of faith is certainty, but how do we navigate life with the divine in an uncertain world.

God is process, event, verb, relationship! This is the essence of Process Theology and it responds to God in our day. Today's episode highlights some critiques of the classical language of God and brings to light a new way of consideration and being.