Believing, Behaving and Belonging

Belonging comes before Believing

Richard Rice:

Believing, behaving, and belonging are all essential to the Christian life, but belonging is more important, more fundamental than the others. Believing, Behaving, Belonging: Finding New Love for the Church

Brian McClaren:

Phyllis Tickle’s book The Great Emergence ends with the note that emerging churches are changing the context in which faith is being lived. Whereas the traditional formulation is one of “believing-behaving-belonging”, the new movement points to “belonging-behaving-believing. ”

Karen Armstrong:

I say that religion isn't about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness. People have such clear ideas of what God is you know: creator, father, personality watching over me. It's not what I believe in, even though I like to use the word sometimes. So people will ask, "Is traditional faith wrong?" And I say, "No." It doesn't really matter what you believe as long as it leads you to practical compassion. If your belief in a traditional God makes you come out imbued with a desire to feel with your fellow human beings, to make a place for them in your heart, to work to end suffering in the world, then it's good. Nobody has the last word on God, whether they're conservative or liberals.

Marcus Borg:

(I offer) a vision of the Christian life that is not very much about believing at all. Rather, the Christian life is about a relationship with God, as mediated to us by the Christian tradition as a whole. The Bible, of course, is foundational to that tradition. But the Christian life is not about believing. It’s about living within this tradition and letting it be a mediator of the sacred – letting this tradition, critically, have its way with us, shaping our identity, shaping our sense of what is real, shaping our sense of what life is about. It is a relational, a sacramental vision of the Christian life….

I see the Bible not simply as a lens through which I see God, but I also see it as a sacrament. Here I’m using the word sacrament in the broad meaning that it has in religious studies. A sacrament is a mediator of the sacred, a means whereby the Spirit comes to us. In this broad sense of the word sacrament, virtually anything from time to time can become a sacrament. Nature can become a sacrament. Another person can be a sacrament. A sacrament is a mediator of the sacred. I see the Bible as a means whereby the Spirit of God continues to address us, to speak to us in this day most obviously in the devotional and meditative use of scripture, but also sometimes in the use of scripture in public worship.

Philip Clayton:

We would have thought that mass communication would take away the need for the basic experience, but it’s actually the other way round — democratized social media depends on shared core experiences, in religion no less than in all other forms of human community. In Transforming Christian Theology I describe it as putting Belonging before Believing…