This is my first blog posting. I welcome the global community to respond to the conversation I intend to begin. I am a Lutheran Pastor in a small ELCA congregation in central PA. I am a husband and a father. What you know now is enough about me to suffice in the beginning.

As a person of faith, I join others in an exploration for truth, wisdom, peace, and hope. Strong convictions do not presuppose narrow-mindedness. I think it's important to respect all people, in fact to love all people with a genuine mutual affection (to quote St. Paul). This is not easy. But it is necesary. We must seek to understand one another, from the perspective of one's religous convictions.
Now, I for one do not believe that Christianity is a religion. At least not in a gospel/Pauline Christological construct from which the ecclesia or church is derived. Most of the New testament, as well as the OT prophets, engaged in a discourse that rose above religion. Christianity, at its core, is a theological anthropology. It is a way of being and becoming human in light of God's creative activity. Christianity is about God's activity, called grace. It is not about human activity called religion. Faith itself is not a religious experience, but an encounter with the divine. Paul talks about becoming right with God, by virtue of grace through faith in Jesus. God freely frees people from the restrictions imposed by finitude.
For the most part, Christianity has become a religion. That is, people have devoted themselves to certain practices that encapsulate what it means to be a believer in the trinitarian God. I wonder if it is possible to extract the faith from the religion in order to encounter God apart from our human prescriptions?