The Loft LA - Progressive Christianity in Podcast Form

Both the writers of the Hebrew Bible and Jesus taught, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Indeed, Jesus tells us that this is the greatest commandment. In the final sermon of our After Deconstruction series, we address the corollary question this commandment raises: what does it mean to love God? What does lov...

Salvation is most often associated with what we must do (or believe) to go to heaven. As a result, most Christian theologies of salvation focus on what happens after we die. However, if we assume that salvation is important, it seems odd that Jesus would speak so little about what happens when we die. What Jesus speaks about frequently and passionately is how we can transform the world he lived in...

The phrase “born again” carries A LOT of theological baggage. Yet the New Testament suggests that if being “born again” leads to judgmentalism, self-righteousness, and policing in-group and out-group boundaries, we can question whether someone has experienced the spiritual transformation of the heart Jesus describes in John. This transformation is both personal and political: when we are centered...

Christianity is unique among world religions because God is not revealed to us through a text but through Jesus, the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus is what can be seen of God, embodied in a human life. Through his life and his teaching about a Way of life, he reveals the heart of God to us. www. TheLoftLA.org

As Christians, we believe that God is the heartbeat of reality, a life-giving and sustaining presence. All Christians can affirm this claim. However, as we deconstruct our faith, we realize that the way we "see" God, our understanding of God's relationship to the world, and God's character significantly shape how we practice Christianity and how we respond to the evil and corruption of our time. C...

To be Christian is to be centered in the God of the Bible. For us, the Bible is our sacred scripture and sacred story. Yet the Bible is also one reason many people have left Christianity or the church and now describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious." At some point in our spiritual formation, we must answer this question: How do we read the Bible after deconstruction, and why does it ma...

Most people would define Christian faith as believing a set of Christian beliefs to be true. In some parts of the world, the word "believer" is a synonym for Christian. Defining faith this way has made it primarily about the beliefs in our heads, but this is not how the Bible and the Christian tradition speak about faith. Faith has always been a matter of the heart. Recovering and reconstructing o...

What are we to do when the tradition that taught us to ask "what would Jesus do?" no longer reflects what Jesus showed us in his life and teachings? Deconstruction. Decolonization. Reconstruction. For many people of faith, these three words mark the moments when they realized the religious beliefs embedded in their childhood were at odds with their experience of God as Divine Love. Those three wor...

Join guest preacher Everest Harvey in The Loft as we wrap up our sermon series on hospitality and explore what it means to create home for every person in God's community. www. TheLoftLA.org

Because we practice hospitality as a core part of our faith, we work to make the our spaces more welcoming. This requires us to pay attention to how people experience our homes and our churches, in hopes that they will be places characterized by love and generosity. www. TheLoftLA.org

How does greed or emptiness get in the way of offering hospitality to God? And what can we do? We welcome Rev. Dr. Diana Holbert, our Minister of Care, to The Loft this week as Rev. Dr. Christopher Carter has been home battling Covid. We invite you to keep him in your prayers as he continues to recover. www. TheLoftLA.org

Throughout his teaching and ministry, we encounter Jesus as a vulnerable guest, a needy stranger, and a gracious host. Jesus both welcomes and needs to be welcomed. In this way, when we are hospitable to the needy stranger, we do so with the awareness that we may be showing hospitality to Christ. And when we receive hospitality from a stranger, they give it knowing that they may be showing hospita...

In ancient times, hospitality was regarded as a pillar on which the world's moral structure rested. It is an important theme in scripture, central to the gospel story. In the New Testament, we encounter Jesus as a vulnerable guest, a needy stranger, and a gracious host. The teachings of Jesus enrich and challenge our modern definitions of hospitality, inviting us to see it as a spiritual practice....

The Song of Mary and the Song of Hannah remind us that God's call to prophecy, service, and leadership is not limited to cisgender men. The songs of Elsa, a character whose story is decidedly queer, suggest something similar. Reading these stories together can help us understand how essential it is to respond to our calling. www. TheLoftLA.org

The Bible tells us that when Jesus was baptized, he heard a voice from heaven declare, "This is my Son whom I dearly love." In the story of Jesus' baptism and temptation, we see the triumph of vulnerability over toxic masculinity and the beginnings of a found family that can survive temptation and thrive as their authentic selves. www. TheLoftLA.org

Even before he was immortalized in musical theater for his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (TM), Joseph's story has so many points of connection with the experiences of Queer folx. Come "draw back the curtain" and hear his story again. Lofter and drag performer Elliot Handloser joins Pastor Molly this week for a second week of our Pride month "We Have Always Been Here" series. www. TheLoftLA.org

The way we read the Bible is filtered through the lens of our experience. Our interpretive lens determines what we do and what we do not see. This Sunday, we begin our Pride month sermon series by learning how a queer hermeneutic can help us to see what has always been there. www. TheLoftLA.org

Join us for a special Loft conversation with clergy women who have been connected to Westwood, including Bishop Dottie Escobedo-Frank, Bishop Mary Ann Swenson, Rev. Dr. Sharon Rhodes-Wickett, Rev. Jane Voigts, Rev. Dr. Natalie Houghtby-Haddon, Rev. Kathy Cannon, and Rev. Blair Stowe. www. TheLoftLA.org

What does it mean for us to grow in Christ-likeness? It is Pentecost Sunday, and we will end our series on the Holy Spirit by examining the third function of the Spirit - inspiring us to develop the mind of Christ. This Sunday, we are also celebrating Youth Sunday and Confirmation in The Loft! We will celebrate all of our young people who went through the confirmation process, and after worship, w...

The Holy Spirit is the implanted hope that continually moves us to live the Christian life, the Way of Jesus. In addition to reconciliation, a section function of this movement is found in our vocation. This Sunday we will be joined by  Reverend Rae Huang . She is a community organizer, ordained Presbyterian minister, and actively engaged in Los Angeles politics. We will discuss how her vocational...

The Holy Spirit is the implanted hope that continuously moves us to practice living the Christian life, the Way of Jesus. One function of this movement towards God is that we are restored to a right relationship with God by grace and through faith. When we choose to go with, rather than against, the momentum of our souls, we step into the Divine flow of love that restores our love for our neighbor...

As Christians, we believe in one God who has revealed Godself to us in three distinct persons - the Creator, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. While the concept of the Trinity has helped us understand something of the nature of God, within the Western church much more has been written about the Creator and the Son than about the Holy Spirit. This Sunday, we begin our four-week series on the Holy Spiri...

The gospel accounts tell us that Jesus spent roughly three years with his disciples during his earthly ministry. Interestingly, the only thing the disciples specifically asked Jesus to teach them was how to pray. In his life and ministry, Jesus shows us that when prayer is our anchor, we can feel grounded while in calm waters and have the courage we need to stay afloat through the storms. www. The...

Last week, I suggested that the purpose of prayer is to deepen our relationship with God so that we are transformed by centering in Divine presence, and that it is not about coercing God or others to do something. This week, we continue our series by exploring why we pray. Why do human beings, even ones who don't identify as people of faith, feel an urge to pray? www. TheLoftLA.org

What is prayer, and what is its purpose? In this first week of our three-week series on prayer, we explore some answers to these questions by reflecting on the community in Thessalonica and the Apostle Paul's encouragement that they "pray without ceasing." www. TheLoftLA.org