 As ministers prepared to begin a worship service centred on the question, “What is the Kingdom of God like?” Beyond the Walls chaplain Pam Luce offered a spiritual practice inviting us to explore that question through the familiar sights, sounds, tastes, and feelings of everyday life. We invite you to try it in your own personal or congregational devotional time.
If we were to be present in God’s kingdom, what might that feel like? This morning it is cool enough here in Northern Michigan for our first fire in the woodstove. One of the Gospel of Thomas scriptures says that the kingdom is within us, and also outside of us. As I sit here, it is easy for me to imagine the kingdom as the comfort and warmth from the woodstove that is wrapping itself around me. I can imagine the kingdom within as I drink this warm, restorative tea. You might have other, very different imaginings of what the kingdom feels like. What might the kingdom smell like? Perhaps like the spiced carrot muffins I made for my loved ones this morning, their aroma lingering in the air. Or the pungency of the wood smoke wafting through the colour-changing trees in our woods. What might the kingdom of God sound like? My granddaughter’s giggles of pure joy. Or voices joined in harmony singing songs of hope and peace. Or thousands of murmured prayers being lifted from every nook of the world. What would the kingdom look like? Take a few silent moments to picture it for yourself. For author and poet Jan Richardson, one image begins around a table. She introduces her poem “And the Table Will Be Wide,” from How the Stars Get In Our Bones: A Book of Blessings, with this story: “Near the end of her life, one of my aunts was at a dinner table at the home of friends. During the dinner, she asked a pastor who was at the table, ‘What do you think [the Kingdom of] heaven is like?’ The pastor paused, looked around the table, and said, ‘I think it’s a lot like this, only with more people.’ What will the kingdom taste like? Perhaps like the water I have here from our blessed artesian well. Perhaps like the bit of homemade bread from my oven. Perhaps like the communion emblems you have prepared this morning. Perhaps like wine gathered from droplets left in a shattered jug, or a cracker made from spent grain from a broken jar. Imperfect in their journey and form. Made sacred by intention and awareness. Made holy by the Spirit. May we be intentional, aware, and open to the Spirit, is my prayer. Amen.
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 By Leandro Palacios, Director of Communications When people ask, “Why should I join Community of Christ instead of any other mainstream Protestant church?”, what should we say? Chuck Boyd, a former pastor of the Toronto congregation who is now a member of the Woodfield congregation, asked President Stassi Cramm and members and friends from across Ontario a question along those lines when they gathered at the Corinth congregation last Saturday to celebrate its 150th anniversary. When he was baptized in 1945, our members believed that ours was the one and only true church. While Chuck admitted that he himself wasn't fully comfortable with the claim and its implications for relations with our neighbours, he believed that it offered solid ground for our faith and identity, and also gave us a solid “sales pitch” to invite people to Christ. In the decades since that time, we stopped teaching that we had a monopoly on the true gospel and acknowledged that other churches—and in fact other religions—could also be valid spiritual paths or ways to connect with the divine. That’s when our old invitational sales pitch became obsolete. Now what? The question led to a fruitful conversation about our shared identity and mission, but in the end, I think we weren’t able to fully address Chuck’s main concern. Since that weekend, I have reflected back on the question. And it seems to me that the answer to questions like “Why this church and not others?” or “What does this church have to offer that others don’t?” was all around us at the Corinth congregation that day: When I arrived, I took a few photos of the building’s exterior. Everything looked beautiful, yes, but I wouldn’t say it was unique—although the flower bed was amazing! But when I opened the door and walked in, our church history greeted me with what felt like an unexpected warm embrace. That was special! I was effusively embraced by historic artifacts including photos, hymnals, letters, stories, articles, membership records, games, a model of the Independence Temple, and more. Led by congregation historian Nancy Baer, the Corinthians—that’s what local members call themselves and I love it—had laid out the congregation’s history on a wonderful display, filling tabletops and walls with their inheritance. Nancy also did something that made me—as Communications Director and as someone who loves history—extremely thankful and excited: she invited everyone to write down their memories, testimonies, and other stories and compiled them all together into a large binder. But that day I was also embraced by a giant “Map of Ancient America” that was likely still used back when Chuck was baptized, even though today we understand it does not reflect at all the history of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. And during the worship service, we sang hymns that no longer reflect our understanding of the gospel. While the congregation today is fully welcoming and is actively promoting the gospel in mission without making exclusive claims, the Corinthians proudly embrace and celebrate their own story, even those parts that we often hide away and don’t talk about for fear that someone will find out about our Restoration roots. Today we know we are not the one and only church. Neither are we better than all other churches. So what should be our sales pitch today? What I witnessed at Corinth reminds us that in Community of Christ, as we learn new and better ways to understand scripture and the good and not so good chapters of our shared story, we learn to discern the path forward. We certainly cannot claim to be the “one and only true church,” but perhaps we can invite people to true transformation. Our heritage gives us a unique lens to continue to grow and learn and be transformed not only as a church, but also as individuals. In our lives, we all have things we would rather hide away from others, things that make us feel guilty and unworthy. But what if the embarrassing things we try to hide in the closet are actually what make us special? I believe that celebrating our story while recognizing past errors and remaining prayerfully committed to always becoming more inclusive, more loving, and more Christ-like is very special indeed. A huge shout-out to the Corinth congregation for showing that responsibly celebrating our heritage can bring about the honest transformation we need to discern our path forward. Congratulations on your 150th anniversary!  By John Hamer, Director of Outreach and Innovative Ministries The archive of the Woodfield Community of Christ in London, Ontario, preserves a “Preaching Chart” drawn in the 1930s. In the early 20th century, ministers from our church traveled in circuits, visiting congregations, cottage meetings, and revivals, holding preaching services that could last for hours. Much of the preaching was extemporaneous: the speaker would begin with a passage of scripture and perhaps a rough outline, then expound from that jumping-off point. Preaching charts served as both a memory device for the speaker and a visual aid for the audience.
From the church’s central tower, we see two great walls supporting windows labelled to the right: “FAITH, WISDOM, KNOWLEDGE, DISCERNMENT, HEALING” — which are still in keeping with how we see the church today, especially if we understand “healing” as spiritual restoration. The labels to the left are less familiar in today’s church: “MIRACLES, PROPHECY, TONGUES, INTERPRETATION OF TONGUES, DREAMS/VISIONS.” Our predecessors in the church were far more Pentecostal than we are today. Services at reunions frequently included the spiritual practice of glossolalia, where one member caught up in the spirit utters syllables they believed were an unknown language. A second minister would then “interpret” the tongues, by speaking a pronouncement in English that was given the weight of revelation. The practice could be used irresponsibly when commands were directed at others, and it consequently was phased out. Although these beliefs were earnestly held, they were factually incorrect. Scholars have now reconstructed the development of the early Christian movement, giving us new insights into our history. At the earliest stratum, the movement was spread by committed disciples who sold their property, gave the proceeds to the poor, and lived a life of voluntary poverty, begging for their daily bread as they spoke in the spirit and shared the gospel. These mendicant disciples were alternatively called “teachers,” “apostles,” and “prophets” — all of which were synonyms. In the next generations, as fixed congregations were established, they began to require ongoing local leadership, calling “helpers” διάκονος (deacons) and “overseers” ἐπίσκοπος (bishops), along with πρεσβύτερος (presbyters) — a word that the King James Bible alternately translated as “elders” and “priests.” Elder and priest are thus synonyms for the same early priesthood role. As the apostolic age ended, the mendicant apostle/prophet/teachers were fully replaced deacons, priest/elders, and bishops. If we go back to our preaching chart, we may ask: what about evangelists, pastors, and seventies? There are three references to “evangelists” in the New Testament, which literally means “bringer of the good news” — essentially a synonym for “apostle.” (Over time, “evangelist” developed the technical definition of the author of a gospel.) “Pastor” is Latin for shepherd (ποιμένας poiménas in the original Greek) and has a single mention in the New Testament as a priesthood office, likely meant as the leader of a congregation — making it a synonym for bishop. Use of the word pastor was revived during the Protestant Reformation as some Protestants rejected the evolution of the episcopacy during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Finally, “Seventy” is not really an office at all. Historically, there were many more than 12 apostles (the “Twelve” were a subset of the larger group of mendicant teachers). In the 1830s, early members of our church read the story in Luke of Jesus sending out “seventy” more disciples after the twelve and used that story to create the office of “Seventy.”  The foundations for the two great walls on the chart are labelled “AARONIC PRIESTHOOD” and “MELCHISEDEC PRIESTHOOD” and include the offices of each, as understood in our tradition: “PRIESTS, BISHOPS, DEACONS, and TEACHERS” to the left and “HIGH-PRIESTS, SEVENTIES, ELDERS, PASTORS, EVANGELISTS, APOSTLES, and PROPHETS” to the right. Speaking at a revival a century ago, a minister could expound at length on all of these offices. Their conclusion would inevitably be that these offices were established by Jesus himself; that they were essential to the functioning of the true Church of Jesus Christ on the earth; and that our church alone operated with the fullness of this structure. To them, this proved that ours was the one and only true church.
This leaves us with the office of “High Priest” and the two priesthood orders: Aaronic and Melchisedec. Members in the 1830s based these on their interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The author of Hebrews develops an extended argument contrasting the Old Covenant of Moses with the New Covenant in Christ. At the heart of the Old Covenant was the Jerusalem Temple, led by a mortal High Priest descended from Aaron, who performed a ritual sacrifice each year to atone for his sins and the sins of the people. But this practice has been superseded, according to Hebrews, by “a better covenant.” Christ has given himself as an atoning sacrifice for everyone and for all time and thus has become our eternal High Priest. The author of Hebrews quotes Psalm 110:4, “You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchisedec,” as the basis for this image. Early members of our church got the idea that we should have two orders of priesthood from Hebrews, but they clearly misread the point the author was making. The priesthood of Aaron with its High Priest was part of the Old Covenant and has been done away with. In the New Covenant, there is only one High Priest after the Order of Melchisedec: Jesus Christ, our eternal High Priest. Centuries of study have given us a window in Christian origins that our ancestors in the Restoration could only imagine. Learning about things that they got right (and wrong) is not an occasion for discouragement. As the Community of Christ “Principles of History” teach: “The responsible study of church history involves learning, repentance, and transformation.” Understanding the path we’ve taken, allows us to be better informed for the path ahead. Recognizing the intersection of devout conviction and the inevitable imperfections of our predecessors renders our shared narrative far more authentic and grounded in reality. In creating two orders of priesthood and the many offices referenced on the preaching chart, members of our movement believed they were “restoring” practices established by Jesus in the First Century. Instead, they were creating something new, which has now become part of our legacy and inheritance in Community of Christ. Generations of faithful ministers have worked to magnify their callings, finding new and innovative ways to serve as servants of Christ. Doctrine and Covenants 162:1e reminds us: “The spirit of the Restoration is not locked in one moment of time, but is instead the call to every generation to witness to essential truths in its own language and form.” As we discern our path forward as a sacred community, it’s important that we understand and honor the many inheritances that have informed our journey, while opening our minds and hearts to new light and knowledge for the road ahead.  By John Hamer, Director of Outreach and Innovative Mission You won’t want to miss the church’s biggest event of the year! Stassi Cramm and other world church leaders will be hosting the 2026 Peace Forum at the Temple in Independence this October 16–18. The theme is “Seeds of Peace”: in a world distracted by so many ongoing crises, what can we do to plant seeds that can one day develop into enduring peace and justice? If you are not able to travel to the United States this year, Community of Christ in Canada is holding two in-person gatherings: one in Vancouver, the other in the Greater Toronto Area. Events of the Peace Forum will be livestreamed to both locations, including the keynote address by environmentalist Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? In addition to the livestream, both Canadian gathering sites will host their own in-person workshops, presentations, and activities. What to expect at the Greater Toronto Area Gathering All generations are welcome! Saturday October 17 will include a youth and intergenerational track with activities including a young peace-maker scavenger hunt and team puzzle-solving challenges. There will be presentations about:
What to expect at the Vancouver Gathering Get ready for hands-on activities, including:
Cross-Canada discussion groups
Both gatherings will include a session where younger adults across Canada will connect via videoconference to answer the question “What should ‘being a peace church’ look like in the 21st century?” Plan to connect, even if you cannot make it to Vancouver or the GTA. Because our Canadian Mission Centre Conference will be held online this year, the Peace Forum is our biggest opportunity this year to connect as a church in groupings beyond congregations and reunions. You won’t want to miss out on either local gathering. And the activities and topics provide a great opportunity to invite children and grandchildren or friends join you. Please do! We hope to see you there.  By John Hamer, Director of Outreach and Innovative Mission
The focal point of Community of Christ’s international headquarters complex in Independence, Missouri, is the Temple. Across Christian denominations, significant places of worship are commonly called cathedrals or basilicas. Very few use the designation “temple.” The primary exception is other denominations within the Latter Day Saint or Restoration movement, especially the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS church) headquartered on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah. Temples have become ever more central to the LDS church, which has constructed hundreds of them around the world and is currently engaged in building dozens more. Entrance into LDS temples is restricted. Only fully committed church members who pay a “full tithe” (understood as 10% of their income) and pass other tests of “worthiness” are allowed inside. The interiors of LDS temples are set apart for temple rituals unique to the Mormon tradition, including proxy baptisms on behalf of the dead, the “sealing” of married couples and families in the afterlife, and the “endowment” ceremony, which is also seen as a preparation for the afterlife. Our own Temple in Independence is very different. It is open to everyone. There are no tests of fellowship to enter. It is the symbol of our mission initiative of “developing disciples” by fostering a culture of life-long learning. The Temple houses the library and archives of the church and our Center for Innovation in Ministry and Mission (CIMM). Most importantly, the Temple in Independence is dedicated to world peace, and our sole temple ritual is the prayer for peace. Though very different today, both the LDS and Community of Christ temple traditions ultimately spring from the same source. This was the longing of members in the 1830s to “restore” the practices of the earliest Christian community as described in the Book of Acts. Acts chapter 2, verse 46 says that “day by day” the first Christians in Jerusalem “spent much time together in the temple.” Having read this passage, members of the Restoration longed to restore the same experience by building a temple of their own in Kirtland, Ohio, the headquarters of the church in 1836. This vision of the earliest Christians sharing and worshiping together in the Jerusalem temple has continued to inform our understanding of the Temple in Community of Christ. The LDS understanding of temples changed when early members moved from the original goal of “restoring” the early Christian church to an expanded goal of “restoring all things,” including ideas and practices found in the Old Testament. According to the traditions recorded in the Hebrew Bible, the worship of the God of Israel was confined to a single location: the Jerusalem temple (and its predecessor, the tabernacle). It was in this single location that Aaronic priests and Levites ritually sacrificed offerings of animals and plants. And God’s presence was understood to dwell behind a veil or curtain within the temple’s innermost precinct, the Holy of Holies. No human was allowed to enter this sacred space, except the High Priest, who entered it on a single day, to offer a sacrifice that atoned for the entire people. While LDS temple practices did not revive animal sacrifice, Mormon temple rituals were believed to be based on rituals practiced in the Jerusalem temple at the time of Solomon. (In fact, the direct inspiration were rituals of contemporary Freemasonry, which were inaccurately thought to have great antiquity.) Besides the idea of temples found in the Old Testament and Acts, the Bible includes a third vision of the temple. The gospels tell the story that at the moment of Jesus’ death on the cross, the veil covering the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem was torn open—symbolizing the end of the idea that God’s presence was confined to a single, physical house. The universal God is present everywhere in the universe and can be worshiped everywhere. Christ himself served as the ultimate atoning sacrifice, ending ritual sacrifice at a physical temple. This third Biblical view of temples is found in the First Epistle of Peter. The author of First Peter names Christ, the living stone, as the cornerstone of a spiritual temple: Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 2:4–5) In this understanding, the meaning and imagery of the temple as “the house of the Lord” lives on for Christians—even as the physical temple in Jerusalem lost its function and was soon afterwards destroyed forever. Disciples who follow Christ’s example allow themselves to become the living stones of a temple that is spiritual rather than material. Thus, in the same way that God’s Church is not a building—it is the people—the true, living temple—the house in which the Lord’s Spirit can dwell—consists of all of us, everywhere, as we seek to embody Christ in the world and in our own communities.  By John Hamer, Director of Outreach & Innovative Mission
Community of Christ in Canada provides a number of resources for sharing invitation, including source files that can be printed as posters, framed pictures, or art on canvas. These include a set of images, representing our understanding of the church’s sacred inheritance: the Old Covenant, the New Covenant, and the Restored Covenant. The first is an image of Mt. Sinai with a quotation from Exodus 3:5: “The place where you’re standing is holy.” In the Exodus story, the God of Israel communes directly with Moses on the mountain sharing the name “I Am” — revealing God as divine being and the source of all being. The second image is the shore of the Sea of Galilee, with the simple words Mark 1:17: “Follow me.” In the gospels, Jesus walks along the shore, and seeing simple fishers, Simon-Peter, Andrew, and others, says “Follow me” — an invitation to embark on the path of the disciple. The third image represents the Sacred Grove in Palmyra, and shares the quotation from The Epistle of James 1:5: “If you lack wisdom, ask God.” Two centuries ago, a young spiritual seeker named Joseph Smith Jr., troubled by doubts, came across this verse, rendered in King James’ English: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.” Taking this invitation seriously, he went into the woods near his home to pray. In later recollections, he remembered a spiritual experience that became known as his “First Vision” by members of the Restoration movement that grew up around him. Sinai, Galilee, Palmyra — Old Covenant, New Covenant, Restored Covenant. These stories of connecting with the divine have long been rich sources of inspiration, but they have also been abused when people have looked back and interpreted the individual experiences as sources of authority and then misused the stories to make authoritarian claims. By the 2nd century BC, the Torah had taken its final form, and tradition had imagined Moses as its author. When a Judean priest named Judas Maccabeus, outraged at the desecration of the Jerusalem Temple by King Antiochus IV, led a revolt — his family, the Maccabees or Hasmoneans, successfully established an independent Judean kingdom. Although short-lived, the Maccabean kings took the opportunity to conquer their neighbours, destroying the rival Samaritan temple. They also conquered the Idumeans to the south and the Galileans to the north. And using Moses as a source of authority, they forcibly converted these new subjects to Mosaic law. In the Christian era, Jesus’ calling of Simon bar Jonah has been used to make incredible claims to divine authority. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus renames Simon “Peter” (rocky) and says: “upon this rock I will build my church” (6:18). Tradition named Peter the first bishop of Rome, and later Roman bishops — considering themselves the heirs of Peter — developed claims to primacy over everything on earth. In the Restoration era, Joseph Smith's first vision led to the claim of the church he organized to be “the one and only true church on the face of the earth.” An exclusive claim to divine authority we originally maintained as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and a claim that is still made by many other expressions of the Restoration, including the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From our perspective in Community of Christ today, all three of these authoritarian interpretations of scripture miss the point of the stories themselves. In all three cases, God chooses an ordinary individual. Moses is “slow of speech and tongue” — not the most obvious candidate for God’s spokesperson. Simon-Peter is a simple fisherman, seemingly ill equipped to spread a gospel message in the culturally sophisticated Greco-Roman world. Joseph Smith was a farm boy from a poor, downwardly mobile family in the American countryside. The conclusion we should draw is that God is not focused on powerful leaders; God is available to the most humble. God’s revelation is available to everyone. That is the clear message in the scripture from The Epistle of James that inspired Joseph Smith to pray. It does not predict a chosen one will come in the latter days, to whom all authority will be given. It says “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.” God gives generously to all. Not to just one state or kingdom. Not to just one church. Not to just one leader. God gives generously to all. If you would like to make use of this set of three posters in your congregation or campground, you can download the source files here.  By John Hamer, Director of Outreach & Innovative Mission
Churches from many denominations put signs out in front of their doors that read “All are welcome.” Most are placed with honest intent by church members who believe that their congregation is welcoming. But being truly welcoming isn’t as easy as saying so. Humans by nature are most comfortable with people they already know and next most comfortable with people who feel familiar — who look and act more or less like they do. Being truly welcoming requires effort on the part of members within the church—both congregations and camp communities—to learn about issues different people experience. If a congregation in a particular country includes only natives of the country, they may not be aware of issues faced by members of the immigrant community. People from a nation’s historically dominant or privileged race do not share the experience of individuals from one that experiences regular discrimination. We are not born understanding issues faced by members of the transgender community. For this reason, Community of Christ’s affiliate Harmony sponsors a program that helps congregations learn how to become truly affirming and welcoming. If you’re part of a local congregation of the church and would like to find out how you can participate in the program, the details are on their website: Harmony.lgbt Even congregations with the best intentions of being welcoming can be unwelcoming. When someone is writing a sermon, a lesson, or a prayer, the audience they picture is usually the people they know — the same members of the church who come back week after week. Those regulars share the same experience, language, and traditions of what church is and what church means. And since everyone knows what we do in church, people never think to explain what it is we’re doing and why. And that works fine when everyone’s in the know. But it fails to work when a new person walks into the church and doesn’t know what’s going on. The church has unintentionally become unwelcoming. When I travel across Canada and around the world, I love to tour the Community of Christ buildings and campgrounds that exist in each location. These always have their own unique character and back story. One of the first things I do is ask: what about this space says “Community of Christ”? How does this building communicate our particular distinctives? Next, I try to think to myself: what would this look like to someone who has no prior experience with Community of Christ? What does it say about us as a sacred community? Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised by welcome centers that tell our story, share our principles, and our initiatives. For myself, each week as I lead a team preparing the component parts of our Beyond the Walls worship services, I try to be welcoming by going through a similar exercise. When I read the text of a sermon, lesson, or prayer, I ask myself: what would someone joining us for the first time make of this or that phrase? If it’s completely opaque, can we add a sentence or even a few words to introduce the idea and give it context? It’s not the easiest thing to do — and, moreso, it’s not the easiest thing to remember to do. As a church, I think Community of Christ members desire to be true to our word that “all are welcome.” But as with so many things, being truly welcoming requires self-reflection, thought, and effort. As you go through the next week sharing in church-related activities as a leader or participant, I invite you to go through this same exercise. Ask yourself, if you had no experience with the church, would you understand what was being said during this worship service or in this camping activity? You may be pleased to find that people are already doing a good job of making sure we’re explaining ourselves to others. Or we may uncover subtle or even substantial areas for improvement. Let’s be intentional about being welcoming. Let’s say “All are welcome” and truly mean it.  By John Hamer, Director of Outreach & Innovative Mission
Toward the end of the 2nd century, in the city of Carthage, a Christian thinker became concerned that ideas from Greek philosophy were entering Christianity and affecting it negatively. His name was Tertullian, the first Christian to write eloquently in Latin, and famous for the quip, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” What does the home of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle have to do with the city where Jesus taught and was crucified? It is a very memorable and emotion-laden line. But Tertullian wrote it with an amazing degree of unintended irony because he himself was a classically trained scholar. His entire worldview, conceptual framework, and vocabulary were founded on his Greek philosophical inheritance. For example, Tertullian is credited with being among the first Christians to use technical Greek philosophical ideas like “hypostasis” and “ousia” through their Latin counterpart terms “persona” and “substantia” to understand God theologically. In short, Tertullian’s question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” is answered, “Quite a lot, actually.” Last week on Beyond the Walls, we explored the theme “What Is This New Teaching?” This is taken from a scene in Acts 17 set in Athens. The Apostle Paul is visiting the city and is invited to share his ideas on the famous Areopagus (or “Hill of Ares,” the Greek god of war). The Areopagus was the location where a principal council of the Athenian democracy met. And although most of the crowd who listened to Paul left unpersuaded, we are told that at least two Athenians were converted and became Christians: a woman named Damaris and a man named Dionysius, who was a member of the Areopagus council. Centuries later a Christian philosopher was inspired by this story and wrote a number of influential treatises under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. Building on the ideas of Plato and his successors, these texts expanded on the analogy of God and light, speaking eloquently of divine illumination. These texts directly inspired the medieval custom of using stained glass windows in churches as teaching tools — an art form that continues to this day. With our greater historical perspective today, we are able to assess our many religious inheritances: ideas developed by the ancient Israelites and Judeans alongside ancient Greek and Hellenistic thought. But Christianity also inherited ideas from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and more. And as the living tradition has continued to evolve and grow, along the way it learned from new peoples who were added to the faith, including Latin, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and other peoples in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and in modern times, new inheritances from peoples all around the world from Indigenous Americans and Pacific Islanders, to Africans, East and South Asians. In Community of Christ, we recognize this with the informal motto that we seek “Truth wherever it is found.” As we encounter teachings that are new to us, let us recognize the diversity and depth of the traditions that are part of our Christian inheritance. May we ever be open to new insights and to recognizing the value of truth wherever it is found.  By Leandro Palacios, Director of Communications
When the Apostle Paul visited Athens, according to Acts 17, he became “deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” Although today we think of Athens as a place of philosophy and politics, the city was also intensely religious. It was connected to great religious festivals like the Eleusinian Mysteries, and divine images and cult objects were integrated into ordinary civic life. Walking through Athens, especially the Agora and sacred areas, Paul would have encountered statues of the city’s patron goddess Athena, as well as images of Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, Dionysus, the imperial cult, hero shrines, altars, processions, and other tangible expressions of devotion. But idolatry is not only the worship of statues. Idolatry happens whenever we mistake a limited image for the fullness of the divine. When God is imagined too narrowly, creation is also imagined too narrowly. A male image of God can become a sacred hierarchy, where maleness is treated as closer to the divine and gender roles are defended as if they were created by God. Biological sex can be treated as a divine boundary on human expression, as if what we do, what we wear, and whom we love should be determined by the bodies we were born with. Last weekend, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and many other cities around the world celebrated Pride. In this context, “pride” means “dignity”, not “hubris”. In fact, when we gather to celebrate human dignity, we are rejecting a type of idolatry rooted in hubris. This type of idolatry is based on an unfounded sense of certainty, the kind that, as the hymn says, limits “the truth of God to our poor reach of mind by notions of our day and sect, crude, partial, and confined.” Pride reminds us that God is not a man, not one gender, not one body, not one race, not one fixed image of holiness. The God who cannot be contained by human art, words, or imagination likewise cannot be confined by our inherited ideas of gender, sexuality, family, or love. Pride invites us to reject the inherited black-and-white boundaries our society and even the church have drawn around a creation that God made in a rainbow of colours. Pride is not just a party or a protest. Pride is not just for people who identify with the letters 2SLGBTQI+. Pride is the rejection of a type of idolatry that causes harm and division. Pride is a call to recognize and uphold the enduring principles that define our community: Worth of All Persons, Unity in Diversity, and Sacredness of Creation. Happy Pride!  Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
What can a shared meal teach us about ending division? In Acts 10, Peter has a vision that changes the direction of his ministry. He realizes that the ritual purity rules that had kept him separate from gentiles no longer define the boundaries of the good news. A barrier is erased, and the table becomes a place where people once kept apart can now share in sacred community. This reflection by John Hamer, Director of Outreach and Innovative Mission, was shared from the Ottawa congregation, with Pat Mooney as our reader, as part of Beyond the Walls on June 14, 2026. Ancient religions were not primarily about individual beliefs. Far more important were the things that you do and how you do them. Every activity was accompanied by rules and rituals designed to keep people in right relationship with divine forces operating in a very dangerous world. While rituals accompanied important life events like the birth of a child, marriages, and deaths, they also accompanied every little thing you might do daily, like stepping across the threshold of your door, or preparing a meal. When societies developed special priestly castes, the priests were often subject to even more specialized rules. These rituals were understood to purify the individual, enabling them to mediate with divine forces on behalf of the whole community. For example, in Hinduism, members of the priestly caste (known as the “Brahmins”) are required to follow strict dietary laws to maintain their ritual purity. If Brahmins eat from the same plate or share utensils with someone from a different caste, they become ritually impure. The resulting caste system has had enormous consequences for India, including discrimination against individuals who are literally “outcastes.” The Sikh religion was founded in the 15th century with the goal of overturning the caste system. All Sikh places of worship include a “langar” hall, where anyone of any caste or religion can come to eat a free meal. However, all must sit on the floor and eat together, sharing a meal that signifies a complete rejection of the rules of caste and ritual purity. Israelite religion in the 1st century AD was at a crossroads with two competing ideas that were both gaining momentum. On the one hand, prophets and teachers had begun to see the God of Israel as the God of the Universe—with the implication that God is not simply Lord of a single ethnic group, but must also be Lord of every nation. On the other hand, a growing focus on the five books of Moses meant that an ever-expanding number of Judeans had begun to observe purity rules. While these historically had only been maintained by Jewish priests, many sects like the Pharisees promoted the idea that all Judeans ought to live like a nation of priests—an entire people set apart through ritual purity. In Acts, Peter testifies that from childhood on, he has never eaten foods that Mosaic law labels as ritually “unclean.” As with the Brahmins in India, following these codes has meant that Peter has been unable to share meals with individuals who are not also following the same rules. Sharing a meal with a gentile would make Peter ritually unclean. And so, the idea of ritual impurity was effectively separating Peter from the people to whom he had been commissioned to bring the good news: all the nations (or “gentiles”) of the world. Peter’s vision that “what God has made clean, you must not call profane,” signals an end to Christian observance of ritual purity laws. Like the Sikh langar that sought to overturn the caste system, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper broke down the ritual barrier among early Christians by allowing those with Jewish backgrounds, like Peter, to share a sacred meal with new converts from all nations. |
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