The Loft LA - Progressive Christianity in Podcast Form

In this episode, Julia, Westley, and Rev. Dr. Carter talk about one of the four values that shape the theology of The Loft - Decolonization. We discuss what we mean by "colonial theology" and explore the ways colonial theology shapes how many of us practice Christianity. We end our podcast by unpacking the decolonial strategies that we see modeled by Jesus in the gospels.

At The Loft, we have a conversational approach to "doing" church and our hope is that this approach helps build and deepen relationships throughout our worshiping community. But what exactly do we mean when we say we are a conversational community? In Matthew 18, Jesus tells his disciples that "where two or three are gathered in my name, I'm there with them." Indeed, relationships are at the core...

At The Loft, there are four fundamental values that we draw from the teachings of Jesus that inform how we practice Christianity: Compassion, Decolonization, Belonging, and Conversation. We have spent the summer exploring belonging and in our current series, The Loft 101, we will explore how the remaining three values inform who we are and who we aim to be as a faith community. This Sunday's gathe...

We invite you to join us for our annual Homecoming Gospel Concert at The Loft. Homecoming is an opportunity to celebrate our community, reconnect to our spiritual roots, and cultivate a culture of belonging. This will be a musically driven worship service led by Dedrick Bonner and the Singers of Soul. Rev. Dr. Carter will conclude our summer sermon series on Belonging by exploring how belonging is...

In this episode, Julia, Westley, and Rev. Dr. Carter are joined by Rev. Dr. Nikia Smith Robert, assistant professor at the University of Kansas and founder of Abolitionist Sanctuary to discuss the intersection of abolition and Christian praxis. We discuss how abolitionist thinking can help us imagine strategies of resistance and repair for the writers and actors who are on strike and those who are...

As followers of the religion of Jesus, we are called to seek out and create homeplaces, communities to which we can feel safe, be seen, and develop a sense of belonging. And yet, daily, we are confronted with the reality that we live in a society founded upon the principles of class division, racial segregation, and patriarchy. Abolitionists have been working against these divisions for centuries,...

On today's episode, Julia and Westley are joined by community member Alex Smith, and housing rights attorney and affordable housing activist Ysabel Jurado! We discuss the negative mental health effects of becoming unhoused, the social conditions we subject our unhoused community to, and the various statistics around housing affordability in Los Angeles. Our conversation delves into the myriad ways...

There are many things that Angelinos love about living in LA, but the cost of living – especially housing – is not one of them. Our sacred text is filled with passages encouraging people of faith to care for the poor, the widowed, and the orphan. As progressive Christians, we know that we ought to do something to address housing insecurity, but what exactly can we do? How might the theological pri...

In this episode, Julia, Westley, and Rev. Dr. Carter discuss healing from the trauma of feeling exiled from the spiritual communities of our upbringing. Our conversation turns to the film Barbie as we find inspiration in Barbie's journey to discover who she is and create the home that she longs for. We end our conversation by exploring how we can heal from the traumas of our past to create the chu...

At The Loft, we strive to be a community of care, a place where all people can feel like they belong. As a community, our belonging finds its center at our church and in our worship space. Belonging to a community asks us to develop an attachment to a place. How might our attachment, or lack thereof, to our sacred space influence our ability to foster a culture of belonging? www. TheLoftLA.org

In this episode, Julia, Westley, and Rev. Dr. Carter discuss spiritual formation for young adults. We begin our conversation discussing the difficulty young adults face when trying to find a spiritual home that allows them to genuinely question their embedded beliefs. Organizations such as Young Life and Intervarsity tend to fairly conservative. We then transition to discussing how the concept of...

Whether in school or our professional lives, our journey into young adulthood grants us the freedom to discover who we are outside of the gaze of our immediate family. How might our church support and accompany young adults on their journey to discover where they belong? Join us this Sunday as Rev. Dr. Carter will share the center table with Deaconess Jeanne Roe Smith, Executive Director of 580 Ca...

Whether our homes are happy or troubled, our families functional or dysfunctional, our homes and our communities are our original schools of love, compassion, justice, and belonging. Children develop their sense of identity as it is reflected to them from within these spaces, and they are ever attentive as they discern who and whose they are. Join us this Sunday as we continue our sermon series on...

In this episode, Julia, Westley, and Rev. Dr. Carter discuss the challenges churches face when they attempt to be a community where people who are reconstructing or building their faith identity can belong. All too often, churches will want you to confess certain beliefs that do not align with what you believe. We end the podcast discussing how we at The Loft are trying to address this dilemma by...

Each week I begin our gathering by stating, among other things, that all people should feel welcome at The Loft, regardless of belief or unbelief. However, can someone who isn't sure what they believe about the Sacred feel welcome in a church? This week, Rev. Dr. Carter will be joined by Dr. Fay Lin, a member of The Loft community who started attending our gatherings as she constructed her own spi...

In this episode, Julia, Westley, and Rev. Dr. Carter are joined by Dr. Katie Schellenberg-Bell, a holistic advocate for students with exceptionalities, and founder Learning Lab LA . We talk about the history of disability justice, how our contemporary society falls short of creating spaces that are welcoming for all bodies, and how those who are already marginalized are disproportionately impacted...

The Christian church has not done a good, or perhaps even decent, job of creating spaces where disabled people can feel like they belong. Unfortunately, our inaction builds upon a long legacy of a complicated relationship with the disabled human body. The biblical writers often used the disabled body as a metaphor for broader social or personal sins or as punishment for the sins of their ancestors...

In this episode, Julia, Westley, and Rev. Dr. Carter continue their conversation about creating communities of belonging. We discuss the challenges of creating communities that include "outsiders" and how our failure to love our neighbor ultimately reflects our inability to love the totality of ourselves. So what must we do to love ourselves? We have lots of thoughts about this, but the overarchin...

"And who is my neighbor?" How we answer this question, which was posed to Jesus by a legal expert in the parable of The Good Samaritan, directly informs our practice of creating a space of belonging at The Loft. This Sunday, Kathleen Rogers will join me in the center to discuss the documentary film With This Light. The film profiles the life of Sister Maria Rosa Leggol, who, for over 70 years, hel...

The structure of our modern world gives us the illusion of control. We can control the temperature of our cars and homes. We can control where we purchase our groceries or what types of foods we buy. There are numerous other areas of our lives where we like to think we have control. However, events such as natural disasters or a pandemic serve as reminders that, as human beings, we don't have as m...

If we are not careful living in urban and suburban communities can lead us to believe that human engineering can control nature. However, climate science and human history show us that ultimately nature rules. We all belong to the earth, and we participate in its wonder. How might we live in ways that honor this belonging? How might the wonder we find in the created world encourage us to view ours...

When have you experienced genuine belonging? Our answer to this question is a window into our community life. We all have a longing to belong and the church has historically been a place for building one's community. However, for progressive Christians, the church has sometimes been a place of dysfunction and spiritual abuse and was no longer a space for genuine community. But the longing for comm...

Given the effort required to develop meaningful relationships, what is the value of finding and creating spaces to which we belong? This question is at the heart of the epidemic of loneliness that faces so many people in our country. As progressive Christians, we are often afflicted by a kind of loneliness, a longing for our past religious communities where we experienced both love and abuse. We a...

This week we're joined by Rev. Kimberly Scott, incoming Senior Pastor at Grace UMC in Baldwin Hills, to discuss how resilience is rooted in our ability to remember that we didn't get to where we are alone. Show Notes: "Alabama Grandson: A Black, Gay Minister's Passage Out of Hiding" Book by Cedrick Bridgeforth "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" Book by Alice Walker www. TheLoftLA.org

This episode we're joined by Reverend Kevin Kim Wright to have a freewheeling conversation about helping people find liberation as a form of spiritual formation, the self-preservation of institutions like the Church and how that can sometimes find itself at odds with the community-based work necessary for a thriving society. We also talk about the corrosiveness of hate and how we can listen for th...