God is in everything and everything is in God, nothing exists outside of God, but God is so much more than everything.
God has three faces. There is the eternal IT, far outside our understanding. But God also meets us as the personable YOU and manifests in us as the divine I.
Christianity has developed the trinity to explain the three dimensions, personalities, or best, faces to us in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The idea has been externalized and anthropomorphized and has to be redefined or uncovered.
God has never separated himself from us. God is the everlasting giver that created a counterpart and complement that receives and reflects. We respond to God, the primary principle, by receiving from God echoing God’s character and personality.
We are unique and wonderful. Each of us reflects a certain facet of God and when trying to fit a mold we prevent the unique facet God entrusted to us to create an echo in this world.
But we have lived under the impression of being separated from God and having to earn back God’s approval.
God like a father accompanies and invests in his children meeting them where they are intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.
God not only allows us to go astray, to wander, to both grow and fall back in our maturity but never leaves us on the way.
God sees all possibilities, offers them to us, and tries to nudge us in the direction of a decision we are going to profit from individually and as creation. But the decision is ours.
The Bible is the log book of Judaism and Christianity, describing the dialog, the dance between God and us over time. It is a treasure of stories about our understanding of God and our interaction.
Christianity is one expression of this play between us and God, and there are many more. Each of them has understood other facets of God. Some overlap and some complement each other.
As Christianity is the lens that developed in my area during the last two millennia almost, intertwining our lifestyle with its understanding of the divine, it is the lens I am most acquainted and familiar with.
The Bible is not the Word of God. It is neither inerrant nor infallible but inspired. The Word of God was with God from the beginning and became flesh to live in our midst.
Jesus is the Word of God, and Jesus is an example of us more than an example for us. Jesus showed the disciples on the Emmaus Road that the Bible spoke of him from cover to cover, and in the same way, the Bible speaks of us.
In the YOU of Jesus, we learn to see the I of ourselves and walk into the identity of the great I AM.
The church, while it has become an institution within almost no time after its founding, never was meant to be more than the gathering of those that are constantly called out (ekklesia). It takes on the form that is needed by the people it consists of.
I believe in a non-hierarchical church that enables the visions of its members rather than uses its members to enable the vision of its leaders.
The church in dialog defines its form. All members express their needs and visions and together define the works and branches they will provide to each other and the local community. This will shape the church as a congregation and determine whether a shared building, hired pastors, or other shared resources are needed and how they will be financed. There is no preconceived notion of what a church has to look like. It is not even limited to one locality per se.
While nobody is separated from God and there will be no eternal damnation, we can experience heaven on earth and help others to grow into that reality. Thus, the church does not need to get people saved but helps them grow in awareness of the divine.