Church and Theological Background

tl;dr: My theological and church background includes United, Anabaptist, liberationist, and liturgical.

I've been invited to join a group spanning a few churches (a Unitarian, a United, and my Mennonite) to share reactions to the lectionary text for the week. We were asked to give a bit of an introduction of our backgrounds first, which is also appropriate to share here as I slowly rebuild some online theological presence.

Introduction

I grew up in a small rural United Church (that's United Church of Canada, but if you're reading this in the US, your United Church of Christ is a fairly close parallel). I tend to describe it as "moderate evangelical." It was absolutely adamant that the Gospel was penal substitution: that God's justice demanded violent penalty for sin, so God came as Jesus to be the sacrifice taking on that penalty so we didn't have to. I solidly reject that now for a lot of reasons. But it was not particularly strict on much else that is now common associated with the word "evangelical": we had women in leadership, we didn't affirm same-sex relationships but we were part of a denomination that did and we didn't see any need to fight over it, and we generally tried to care about people.

When I left for university, I first went to a Canadian Baptist church, which was mostly in a similar category: strict on penal substitution but would be labelled as "liberal" in today's climate on some other fronts, like a very strong refugee support ministry.

A lot of that time I was adjacent to a lot of more extreme conservative Christianity, from views on gender to sexuality to the Bible and the rest, especially in the early days of the Internet when I started encountering more resources on what being a Christian meant and most of those resources were coming from more extreme perspectives. Some of it I bought into a bit more than others, but it never quite felt right.

After undergrad, I did a seminary degree at Queen's School of Religion, which was officially tied to the United Church but had a lot of instructors from a variety of denominations. During that time I somewhat drifted between checking out a few different churches: most often was a United that was liberal in pretty much any definition but there was also a Free Methodist I really enjoyed going to and several others I checked out. It's also when I started to appreciate a lot more of the liturgical side of the tradition.

All through both of those degrees I had found The Meeting House, which some of you may have heard of either for good reasons in the past or less good reasons more recently. This was my introduction to the Anabaptist tradition and I found myself more and more feeling like that was the best descriptor for how I understood Jesus.

I got married right after university and we went to The Meeting House when we moved to Toronto. Then we went to The Meeting House when we moved to Hamilton. Then we went to The Meeting House when we moved to Kitchener. Then for a few reasons we decided it was time to try something else, and quickly settled at Rockway Mennonite where we have been since.

Along with the Anabaptist influence, I look heavily toward liberation theologies. I would not normally call myself liberal, at least not without checking what the other person means by it first, since it can mean a lot of things and some of those things apply more than others. I would normally use liberationist instead. Liberal has too much connotation to me of educated white people sitting around and talking about things abstractly without interacting with those who are more oppressed or doing much about that oppression directly, while liberationist is driven by the oppressed.

So that's largely my theological perspective: liberationist Anabaptist with some bits that sound a little evangelical and some liturgical impulses still in there.