Torkelson: Pastor sees need for changes

By Jean Torkelson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Monday, December 5, 2005

The Rev. Jean Schwien admits there are some days when she walks into the office of her Lakewood church and groans, "I don't want to be a United Methodist today."

She has a hunch that some in her increasingly conservative denomination might wish she weren't.

But on Sunday, there wasn't a hint of the maverick in Schwien as she read Scripture to the filled sanctuary at Green Mountain United Methodist Church, a dramatic trapezoid looming high over the foothills on West Cedar Drive.

"If peace is just pie in the sky, why do we bother to pray for it?" she asked the crowd of about 230, which included lots of young families and children.

She sounds traditional, but Schwien, 41, has joined a number of liberal pastors disillusioned with traditional Christianity and ripe to try the Center for Progressive Christianity, a movement started by Boston-based author and retired Episcopal clergyman Jim Adams.

Adams' ideas are meant to work within existing churches. Among them: There are alternative ways to truth, not just Christianity. The influence of Christian conservatives must be blunted. Gays, agnostics, "conventional Christians" and skeptics are welcome.

Adams also joins his colleague, the maverick former Episcopal bishop Jack Spong, in questioning the existence of a personal deity, and he says he doesn't believe Jesus is God.

Schwien agrees with Adams about Jesus, so I couldn't help but ask if that doesn't make her "Jesus, My Lord and Savior" prayers and hymn-singing hypocritical.

Not so, she said: "We're not trying to wipe out tradition in the church; we're trying to create more ways for people to enter the church."

Schwien sees the movement's inclusive philosophy as "an option for people who have been hurt by the church."

At Schwien's invitation, Adams paused on a national tour to speak at her church Sunday night. Today, he speaks at 6:30 p.m. at Parkview Congregational Church in Aurora.

"I call it evangelization," Adams said by phone, his youthful voice belying his 71 years. "We are people who find community and ritual without finding absolute answers."

Schwien was alerted to Adams' work through her church's program director, Steve Walden, a Buddhist who's well aware of the irony of working at a Christian church. (Sign on his office door: "Not ordained - not even close.")

Like Schwien, Walden's interest in Adam's work springs from his outrage at seeing gay friends excluded from traditional Christianity. Both he and Schwien are increasingly chagrined over the conservatism overtaking the church since 2000.

Once considered on the liberal track, the United Methodist leadership recently defrocked a lesbian pastor and supported another who refused membership to a practicing homosexual. Scores of pastors reportedly have signed protests that will be carried in advertisements Tuesday. Schwien's name is among them.

Still, she's confident of tolerant church leadership in the Rocky Mountain region and hopes to interest more disaffected people in Progressive Christianity: "We hope they will find in us support for being Christians without requiring them to be something they are not."

torkelsonj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5055