Weekly Update from Pastor Adam - March 21, 2025

Easter Egg-Venture is coming April 12-13 to all Resurrection locations. This FREE, family-friendly celebration features an egg hunt, meaningful crafts, and engaging activities that the whole family will enjoy. Invite your friends to join in the fun. No registration necessary to attend!

We are also looking for enthusiastic people middle school age and older to help at the events! You can register here.

The Greater Kansas City Community Blood Center shared today that due to lingering disruptions from winter storms, a seasonal dip due to spring break travel, and fewer school-based blood drives, they collected nearly 2,000 fewer donations than needed to keep up with hospital demand. If you were not able to donate at Resurrection’s February blood drives, you can go to savealifenow.org to schedule an appointment to donate at a nearby location and make an impact on this emergency situation. Resurrection’s next blood drives will be May 5-14.

We are planning a two-day civil rights immersive trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma in June. Led by Pastor Robert Johnson, you will tour the Greenwood district, also known as “Black Wall Street,” learning from expert guides about the history and continued impact of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. You will also spend time at The Osage Nation, immersing yourself in the history, art and culture of the Osage people. Click here to let us know you are interested in the trip, and when registration opens you will receive an email with details of the trip and a link to register.

Check out this week’s episode of my podcast Making Sense of Faith – it is a 14-minute listen on the meaning of two hugely important Hebrew words, what I believe Republicans and Democrats can agree on, and a big idea we cannot afford to forget. To listen or watch click here.

Warning, this is a lengthy article 😊

Recently someone forwarded one of our members a sermon preached by a pastor in the Lee’s Summit area. Ultimately one of our staff passed it on to me. The pastor, noting Resurrection is opening a location in Lee’s Summit, warned his members that “Church of the Resurrection is going to move their heresies into our neighborhood.” He wanted them to warn their neighbors that “this is not a church.” Then he noted that Resurrection is a “false church led by false teachers. It just is. I’ve got a book of the pastor’s teaching, and it ranges of [sic] everything that would be anathema of [sic] scripture.”

I never respond to these kinds of things – it serves no purpose. I would never convince the pastor of my positions, nor would he convince me of his. Although, I’m always open to sincere conversation to help me learn and understand where someone with whom I disagree is coming from. I would not mention this to you except that we’re launching Resurrection Lee’s Summit in April, and, in the event that this pastor’s members actually tell their neighbors what their pastor has said, I wanted you to have some framework from which to respond.

I don’t think I’ve ever met this pastor. My sense is that his church would lean fundamentalist. His sermon, at least the portion I heard, spoke about false and true teaching. He described some beliefs as “first-order things – essential to historic Christianity. These are the non-negotiables – if you don’t believe these things you…are not a believer.”

I actually agree that there are non-negotiables in the faith. We probably agree on many of these non-negotiables. For me the non-negotiables are found in the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian Creed – these are the creeds of the first five hundred years within Christianity. Likewise, the Articles of Religion of the United Methodist Church, which John Wesley himself modified from the Anglican Articles of Religion. These contain the essentials of what is typically considered orthodox Christianity.

The pastor did not mention the creeds, many conservative and fundamentalist churches don’t engage the historic creeds, so I’m not sure where his list of historic essentials comes from. Christian fundamentalism as it developed in the late 19th and early 20th century lifted up five “fundamentals” that they believed liberal theologians and churches were rejecting: 1. The inerrancy of the Bible, 2. The virgin birth, 3. Belief that Christ’s death atones for human sin, 4. That Jesus literally rose from the dead, and 5. That Christ actually performed miracles. Of these, I believe in 2, 3, 4 and 5.

He mentioned three examples of essential doctrines in his sermon: “Jesus is the Divine One, Inerrancy of Scripture, and Salvation through faith alone by grace alone.” And then he noted, “If you don’t believe these, you are not a believer.”

On the first and third, we agree. I believe in the divinity of Christ, and the statements made about him in the creeds. I believe we are saved by grace alone, through faith, not by our works. Though I am certain the pastor would agree that our faith should manifest itself in good works (Ephesians 2:10 and James 2).

But where we would disagree is the doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture. Inerrancy is a late 19th-century construct that does not accurately describe the beauty and nuance of scripture. It asserts that the Bible is totally true and trustworthy about anything it says whether regarding science, or history, or anything else. It asserts that there are no errors in scripture, though they recognize there might be errors in the Bible as we have it now and assert that inerrancy only applies to the original handwritten manuscript of each book, something we no longer have. If you are interested in knowing more about this debate over the inerrancy of scripture, I have two chapters on this doctrine and why mainline Christians and moderate evangelicals reject the doctrine as unbiblical in my book, Making Sense of the Bible. Interestingly, none of the creeds of the first five centuries of Christianity teach inerrancy. Neither do the Articles of Religion Wesley prepared.

Some inerrantists claim that to reject this doctrine means you have a low view of scripture. I don’t believe that. It is not inerrancy that gives you a “high view of scripture.” It is a commitment to daily reading the Bible, listening for God to speak through it, studying it, memorizing it and most of all living it. Which I not only strive to do but encourage you to do the same.

I suspect that the real issues underlying this pastor’s belief that I am a false teacher and that we are spreading heresies is that we welcome gay and lesbian people and believe that in scripture the handful of passages that directly mention people who are same-sex attracted are similar to the hundreds of passages that allow for slavery, the command to put persistently disobedient children to death, the requirement that a woman who is raped is to marry her rapist, the insistence that women cannot teach or have authority over a man, and that they are to keep silent in the church, and many other passages that we believe reflect the historical and cultural context of scripture more than the timeless will of God.

Resurrection is committed to being a place that includes rather than excludes, and that lives the radical love of Christ. LGBTQ people are made by many churches to feel they are unwelcome. At Resurrection, they are welcomed, loved and included, and not treated as second class citizens as happens at many churches.

There are probably other places where this pastor and I disagree. But, our disagreement is not on the historic tenets of the Christian faith that have, for the better part of the last 1,500 years, constituted orthodoxy.

Jesus taught that the first great commandment is to “love God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37). Interestingly, in Matthew, he changed Deuteronomy 6:5’s “strength” to “mind.” The Greek word for mind used here is dianoia. I love this word. It means, among other things, the power of reasoning or critical thinking skills.

At Resurrection, we want you to use your critical thinking skills in interpreting scripture. We don’t want you to check your brain at the door of the church. This is a church where it is okay to ask questions and to honestly wrestle with doubt. And we hope you actually engage the scriptures and interpret them with the help of tradition, reason and experience.

And because, as important as beliefs are, the gospel is a daily walk with Christ. I’ll mention what most of you already know: I start each morning on my knees surrendering my life to Christ. I trust in him as my Savior and seek to follow him daily as my Lord. Each morning, I invite the Holy Spirit to fill me anew, form and shape me, to help me to pay attention and to use me. Following this, I read scripture each morning, asking for God to speak to me through scripture’s words. I call you, our members, to do the same. I also ask you to be engaged in being the hands and feet of Jesus and to look at ways that together and individually, we close the gap in Kansas City helping our metro area look more like the Kingdom of God because you are here. You do that in so many ways, seeking to serve the poor, and the vulnerable and working for justice. Last year you gave over $9 million to serve others outside the walls of our church, and thousands and thousands of hours serving our community.

I’m not offended by this pastor calling me out, or our church out. I’m sure he’s a good shepherd for his flock, and he no doubt earnestly believes that we are heretics. But I’m also reminded that religious people, leaders in particular, find it hard to resist name-calling and demonizing people whose interpretation of scripture differs from their own. The religious leaders of Jesus day claimed he had demons and ultimately sought his death. They thought he was too liberal in his interpretation of scripture. The same could be said of how some Christians saw Paul, believing he was misinterpreting scripture by not requiring circumcision and obedience to all of the Law. All of the Protestant Reformers were despised by the Catholic Church of the time for their interpretation of scripture. And John Wesley, Methodism’s founder, was lampooned and lambasted by clergy in the Church of England for the things he taught and the way he ministered.

So, be proud of the congregation you are a part of. And if you hear someone who sounds like they’ve heard from this pastor or someone else like him, smile, let them know how proud you are of your church, and invite them to come and check it out!

I’m honored to be your pastor, and I’m proud of the congregation you are! And I’m excited for our upcoming launch of Resurrection Lee’s Summit on April 13!

With love,

Adam