The Loft LA - Progressive Christianity in Podcast Form

Small groups were essential in the creation and maintenance of The Methodist Church. They remain the bedrock of how we sustain connectedness in our increasingly post-religious society. For the members of the Westwood UMC Queer Group, it has been a balm for the soul. Please join Rev. Dr. Carter as he is joined in conversation with members of our Queer Group to discuss their faith journeys, the role our community has played in their ...

We sometimes forget that no Gentiles (i.e., non-Jewish folks) were present to receive the pouring out of the Holy Spirit during the first Pentecost. To be sure, eventually there would be Gentile followers of the Way of Jesus, and those Gentiles would be baptized with the fire of the Holy Spirit. The story of the Gentile Pentecost teaches us that, despite our perceptions of ourselves, we are not qualified to determine who is and isn...

That human beings are created in the image and likeness of God has been a fundamental theological pillar in the history of Christianity. However, who images God and to what degree do they reflect God’s image has been a consistent point of contention. In our current social and political moment, queer persons are now facing the same scrutiny over whether they image God in ways that mirror what Black, female, disabled, and other nonwh...

We are living through such a period of stark political polarization that the idea of a multi-racial, pluralistic democracy feels more like an idea than a tangible reality. Indeed, these are difficult, but not new times. Both the early Christian communities and those living with HIV/AIDS knew what it felt like to be cast as outsiders rather than members of their community. Is it possible to find healing and wholeness in the midst of...

Life isn’t fair; this is a simple lesson that we learn in childhood. However, knowing that life isn’t fair doesn’t necessarily make responding to life’s unfairness any easier. How we respond to life’s unfairness shapes us in more ways than we often realize. We invite you to join us this Sunday as we explore how the biblical story of Joseph and the story of Jean Valjean from the musical Les Misérables show us how we can experience g...

Celie is a young black woman growing up in rural Georgia in the early 20th century. Esther is a young queen and Jewish woman living under Persian colonialism around 450 BCE. Though they lived over two thousand years apart, their stories have unfortunate similarities that have stood the test of time. Patriarchy and sexism are not new, and yet what we see in their stories is that if you are faithful in an unfaithful world, you will f...

This Sunday, we’re celebrating Earth Day by reflecting on and reimagining our relationship with the land. After their escape from slavery and bondage, the Israelites are given the opportunity to build new economies that run counter to the Imperial Domination System they had seen within the Egyptian Kingdom. Against this social background, the wilderness narrative reveals the struggle of a people charged with cultivating a radically...

Throughout his entire earthly ministry, Jesus taught his followers that the kingdom of God had arrived that and now was the time for them to choose which kingdom they would serve, God or humanity. That Jesus was crucified tells us that he was executed by the rulers of the Kingdom of Rome, and that he was resurrected tells us that he was vindicated by God.
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We invite you to join our Loft community in the Sanctuary for an Easter Sun...

The majority of Christians would probably not use the term “mystic” to describe Jesus. Many Christians, especially those of us in the West, think of mysticism as a spirituality that is disconnected from the everyday experiences of life. However, what we see in the life of Jesus is that his spiritual practices created a sense of Oneness with God and other human beings that deeply informed his beliefs on our responsibilities towards ...

Jesus’s baptism and subsequent time alone in the desert mark the beginning of his ministry. Both events describe profound spiritual experiences of the Divine, whom Jesus names his Father. While these experiences follow patterns similar to previous prophets, his response to the tempter while in the wilderness offers helpful insight into how our experience of the Divine can sustain us if we listen for the still, small voice.

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After having spent time in his community preaching and teaching, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do the people say that I am?” For those of us who grew up Christian, how we answered that question was extremely important. However, as we mature in our faith, an equally important question begins to emerge: how will we tell the story of Jesus? There are many ways to tell the story of Jesus, but how we choose to tell it significantly inf...

We know that there were women whose resources and labor enabled Jesus to travel and heal and preach. We even know some of their names: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna. On this final Sunday of our “Blessed Are the Women” series, we honor their stories, and imagine what they offer to us today. On this final Sunday of our series, we center the stories of these women at the margins (in diverse ways!), who claimed and shared power for t...

This Sunday we will continue our sermon series that focuses on women in the Christian tradition and highlight the work of M. Shawn Copeland, a Black Roman Catholic theologian whose work explores the nature of being human as we recognize Black History Month. What does it mean to be human and yet treated as an outsider, less than human? The story of the bleeding woman forces us to wrestle with this question and explore the gender dyn...

For the next two Sundays, we will be highlighting the work of two pioneering black women theologians as a way of both honoring Black History Month and our current sermon series that focuses on women in the Christian tradition. This Sunday, we will be celebrating the work of Rev. Dr. Delores Williams. When most Christians read the story of Abram, Sarai, Hagar, and Ishmael, Hagar is seen as having a small role in a story that ultimat...