How not to cross a boundary
Gretta Vosper has been making headlines for a while now. She’s the pastor of West Hill United Church in Toronto. She also claims to be an atheist. According to a recent article at Vice News, Vosper decided back in 2001 that the idea of a supernatural being who intervened in the affairs of the world was a very silly thing to believe. She has, nevertheless, been soldiering on in her church for the last decade and a half in the service of the more worthy and “progressive” concerns that she feels the church ought to be about.
Initially, her Toronto congregation was OK with this. But more recently, the complaints have been mounting. Her church has launched an investigation to determine whether she’s fit to keep her job. Vosper is, of course, appealing, seeing her desire to hang on to her position as the minister of a Christian church as an act of solidarity with all the other unbelieving ministers out there who are too afraid to admit it. (I’ve written a bit about this before here). She hopes that the United Church will be the “first denomination to have the courage to step beyond doctrinal boundaries and say we are a church that is about love, compassion, and justice.” Whether or not such a step should be deemed “courageous” or “incoherent” will be decided by an ecclesiastical court in September.
What Gretta Vosper does or does not believe about a “supernatural interventionist” deity is of very little concern to me. She’s not the first and she certainly won’t be the last to prefer a God of her own choosing or to reject the God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in scripture. I don’t even much care if she retains her position in the United Church of Canada. Yes, the idea of a self-declared atheist serving as pastor of a Christian church is, well, bizarre, but while the United Church of Canada contains many committed, compassionate Christians (I work with a number of them on a refugee project in our city), there are pockets of the denomination that have not felt particularly shackled by the constraints of orthodoxy for some time now.
