What does Journey Teach?

This question is backwards, actually. We come to learn from each other. We listen to each other. We sit and think and pray together. Sure, there will usually be a “talk” that offers perspective, but we’re pretty interactive. We give feedback, offer insights, and stretch each other.

We love the Bible. We read from and study it a lot. We tend not to read it as a literal telling of history, or a book that was dictated by God to people. Instead, we see it as a gift from hundreds of people's experiences of God over thousands of years. They wrapped that gift in their own culture and traditions. They found something of immense value in their lives and went to a lot of effort to pass it on to us. So we accept that gift and try to unwrap it so we can get at the actual gift—the pearl of great price they were trying to pass to us.

We like digging around in the Bible and in other spiritual resources and asking questions. It enriches our faith to think about the background of many traditions - Christian and non-Christian. We respect our fathers and mothers in the faith. We respect other people's beliefs and traditions. We believe that there's plenty of room for people of all backgrounds to experience and think about life and God and what is important.

What do we believe about Jesus?

We get that question a lot. It’s important. Our beliefs about the person and purpose of Jesus are wide-ranging. Some of us are more traditional in our sense of Jesus - that he was fully divine and fully human, that his death was a sacrifice which paid for the sins of the world, etc. Others see Jesus as a deeply spirit-filled prophet whose greatest gift was his life, teachings, and example. Some Journeyers are agnostic. And some are atheists. And some don’t really have a specific belief about Jesus other than their desire to know more about him, and what he taught about God and ethics and love, and why he did the work he chose to do.

What is super-important, though, is that we not become absorbed in ourselves, but that we follow Jesus in paying attention to those among us and around us who are hurting, in need, or being beat down. We meet together so we can be renewed and energized to go out and be present and give real, immediate help to a hurting world. If we’re not doing that, it really doesn’t matter what we say we believe about Jesus, does it?

If you’re frustrated trying to pin us down on this, sit with that for a moment. Think about how Journey lets people find their way. We don’t get in between people and God. We won’t try to force either you or God (or Jesus, for that matter) into a box. We are here to offer perspectives, resources, and above all, encouragement. We trust God’s Spirit to meet folks where we are and do the work to heal us and restore us and give us great, abundant joy.

What do we believe regarding baptism, communion, and salvation?

Baptism

Baptism is, for us, a sign that we want to dedicate our lives to walking with and towards God. We can baptize children, who are promising to share their faith with their kids. We can baptize adults, who want to celebrate a threshold in their lives regarding their faith. We use however much water feels like the right fit: sprinkling on someone’s head in a Sunday gathering; immersion in a pool or river or lake; Maggie wanted to be baptized in her back yard in a baby pool with her friends there holding super-soakers, so, we did that.

Communion

For us, Communion, aka the Eucharist, aka The Lord’s Supper, is about Jesus wanting us to remember him, his acts, and his good news of God’s overwhelming love and immediate presence. It is about Jesus giving us the most ordinary of ways to jog our memory while participating in this great adventure of life: eating and drinking. We don’t think Jesus meant us to get in a twist about what we are eating and drinking in the moment, so you’ll find us as likely to be eating cookies and drinking milk as eating tortillas and sipping juice while remembering Jesus. What you won’t find us using is wine, because we honor the Journeyers who are in recovery.

We welcome everyone to participate in Communion; far be it from us to bar anyone from God’s table!

Salvation

If there’s any saving to be done, it’s saving us from ourselves! We don’t believe folks are born evil or sinful or any of that. We think people get hurt, people hurt themselves and others, and whole systems grow out of fear and pain. That’s what’s “wrong.” And that’s what we ask God to heal in us, and that’s what we try to help heal in ourselves and others, and the world.

Just like water saves a parched soul in the desert, we take great slaking slurps of living water whenever we come together, and that “saves” us, restores us, and refreshes us so we can offer this same healing life to everyone we touch.