Elaine Furniss
21 November 2025
“Faith often needs to become more complex before it can become clear again.” Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus, 2021.
I first found Diana Butler Bass through her online newsletter The Cottage with an offering called Sunday Musings, which usually has an emphasis on the weekly lectionary text. An American historian of Christianity, commentator, preacher and author, Butler Bass’s writing often packs a punch and makes me sit up and take notice. I think this is because she writes of things I think about in and of church, but often don’t discuss.
Born in 1959, Butler Bass says in her 2004 book The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church she has had three conversions in her life. These include when she left the childhood Methodist faith of her parents for Evangelicalism in 1975, and when she left Evangelicalism for a more liberal Christianity found in the Episcopal Church in the 1990s.
In this book, she describes congregations that still seem to be set in the 1950s. I think we still have them in Melbourne today: places where new theology doesn’t often trickle down to parish life, or there’s a tradition that people must or like to keep. She quotes Anthony de Mello’s book, The Way to Love, and suggests such congregations are a bit like this:
“A group of tourists sit on a bus that is passing through gorgeously beautiful country: lakes and mountains, green fields and rivers. But the shades of the bus are pulled down. They do not have the slightest idea of what lies beyond the windows of the bus. And all of the time their journey is spent squabbling over who will have the seat of honour on the bus, who will be applauded, who will be well considered. And so, they remain until the journey’s end.”
In Christianity After Religion, 2012, Butler Bass suggests that at the far ends of the continuum of religious practice, one simplifies the religious experience of the other, in order to kill the other more cleanly. How true this can be, even if we don’t admit to it. In this book, Butler Bass defines coming to faith by behaving, belonging and believing.
For many people, the starting point can be different. For Evangelicals, it is most often believing, so that behaving and belonging can occur. But for others, behaving may be the starting point for accepting faith, or even belonging. I wonder if you’ve been able to chart your pathway into faith and your journey onward? I think mine was probably a big childhood dose of belonging, followed by believing. Now I think behaving and believing meld together.
In her 2015 book, Grounded: Finding God in the World – A Spiritual Revolution, Butler Bass suggests that some of us are still living with the concept of a three-tiered universe where the church mediates the space between heaven and earth and hell as a kind of holy elevator.
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In Melbourne, post-World War II, this played out as a series of small arcades and shopping centres, often with a church or two just around the corner, mediating right and wrong: the whole contributing to the suburban village. This was long before the likes of shopping centres like Northland or Chadstone. The broader ownership of cars, and access to platforms like Zoom, have changed all of this as people gravitate to the church that best suits them, or worship from home without having to travel at all. The local church doesn’t hold sway as it used to 70 years ago, even though we all hanker after the village appurtenances like the perfect coffee shop or the local farmers’ market.
She explains that the definition of neighbourhood has changed dramatically. It’s not just those around us, like friends and family, but also: “across the nation and the world through social media groups, professional associations, shared interest groups. Sometimes we retreat into our own houses because the neighbourhood is so large that it is intimidating. We don’t know how to live with the neighbours.”
Unfortunately, Butler Bass says, you can’t revive a God for a world that no longer exists. We are able to produce the terrors of hell right here and now (as our wider world right now so blatantly demonstrates), and she says, “if hell has moved next door, perhaps heaven has as well.” Butler Bass sees this world, not heaven, as the sacred stage of our times.
All great spiritual leaders push the boundaries outward of who should be defined as neighbour, but religious forms often develop on much narrower visions than those of their founders. Some typically define neighbours as “people like us” or “who agree with us”. In Conrad Kanagy’s Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination: A Theological Biography, Brueggemann puts it so well in a prayer entitled Life Outside our Homemade Cages, based on John chapter 9, where Jesus heals the man born blind:
“We live conveniently in our homemade cages of explanation.
We live comfortably in our cages of cause and effect.
We liberals live in our cages of being smarter and more woke.
We conservatives live in our cages of being better grounded and more reliable …
But then sometimes … not often … but often enough
Your wonders elude our explanations
Your miracles violate our confident calculations”
I think the following statement from Butler Bass in Christianity After Religion says it for many of us who still faithfully attend church (or not) and who find our faith seeks wider boundaries:
“I have found it increasingly difficult to sing hymns that celebrate a hierarchical heavenly realm, to recite creeds that feel disconnected from life, to pray liturgies that emphasise salvation through blood, to listen to sermons that preach an exclusive way to God, to participate in sacraments that exclude others, and to find myself confined to a hard pew in a building with no windows to the world outside … The church is not the only sacred space. The world is profoundly sacred as well.”
Diana Butler Bass’s new book, A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom, and Perseverance launched in the US on 4 November.
Elaine Furniss attends St Philip’s Collingwood and Benedictus Church in Canberra online.
