The Unorthodox Gatherings
by Chris Brown
The Unorthodox Gatherings are a community of people who gather for conversation and connection around topics of faith, spirituality, deconstruction, social justice, community, and experiencing the Divine in one another and the world around us. Led by Pastor Chris Brown, these are the recordings of the gatherings that take place every Sunday at 11AM at Bethania Church in Solvang, CA
Episodes
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Women of the Bible: The Matriarchs of the Hebrew Bible
The Bible was written in deeply patriarchal times, in which women had property value and they had little agency in the world they occupied. Yet, in the stories of the Matriarchs, we not only see women transcend these boundaries, but as their stories are told by later generations, this…
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Women of the Bible: Asherah, the Wife of God
We're starting a new series on women in the Biblical stories. This series will not simply be focusing on naming women in the Bible and the stories written there, but looking in particular how women in the Bible show leadership and power despite the patriarchal world they were in. Additionally,...
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The Work that Reconnects: Seeing through New Ancient Eyes
We have all grown up in a time of separation. We believe we are separated, as individuals, from everything around us. We produce and we consume, we purchase and we consume, and life continues on. However, whether we see it or not, we are connected to everything around us and our actions have...
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The Work that Reconnects: Honoring Our Pain
We face a world full of uncertainty, large trends going into scary directions, the ground shifting under our feet day to day. We can bury the pain we feel and distract. We fear facing that pain, because we're so used to doing it alone. But facing our pain with community is release, it is...
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The Work that Reconnects: Gratitude, ft. Marcelino Sepulveda
Marcelino begins with the first part of this ongoing spiral of reconnecting work: Gratitude. Indigenous cultures going back thousands of years have been rooting themselves in gratitude as part of our connection to the world around us. Jesus, before he began his ministry, was rooted in gratitude...
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The Work that Reconnects, ft. Marcelino Sepulveda
We are starting a 6-week series on The Work that Reconnects, presented by Unorthodox's Marcelino Sepulveda. Today's episode is a bit of an introduction and the series will be more pragmatic than lecture based. The Work that Reconnects is to help guide us through a spiral of centering in…
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Grounded, Co-Creators
For a long time, Christianity has had an identity crisis and we need a shift. When we take the expanse of the Bible, we have these amazing stories of our beginnings that teach us God wants us to co-create with the divine. It is one of our greatest gifts, to help bring about the kingdom of heaven....
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Grounded, Commons
Neighborhoods are sacred places when we treat them as such. They are the spaces where we'll both experience and bring about the kingdom of heaven most prominently. Neighborhood are sacred and the Commons are the glue that hold neighborhoods together. The commons are all the spaces where local...
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Grounded, Neighborhood
The world is only feeling more chaotic and divisive, and with that comes an even greater sense that there's nothing any of us can do but watch. And yet, Jesus spent his time empowering normal people in small communities. We may not know it, but our neighborhoods are the area where we have the...
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Grounded, Home
The home, like so much else has shifted in the last 300 years. We've gone from people who grow up among generations of family on ancestral lands, to moving away and developing the nuclear family, to having the most diversified homes imaginable. Yet, linking them all is a sense of belonging and...
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Grounded, Roots
There has been a boom in the last 10 years of people interested in their genealogy. People are craving to know where they come from, but I believe it's because people are craving to feel their roots grounded in a community, the way are ancestors lived. Today's episode explores what those roots…
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Grounded, The Land
The community in which you reside is one of the most sacred things about this life, and yet, we are being drastically pulled away from it. Each of us has a particular community, filled with specific people, plants, animals, and environments that are a balm for moments of chaos, and the…
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Nonviolence, pt. 3
In today's episode we look at some localized stories of nonviolent action people have taken in response to tremendous violence we've seen in the world. We can fall victim the belief that if nonviolence doesn't solve big problems, it's meaningless, but nonviolent action is like grains of sand that...
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Nonviolence, pt. 2
In this episode we're going to look at Martin Luther King Jr.'s principles of nonviolence as a way to explore the question: is violence futile? Our conversation on nonviolence gets into some of the struggle we have around the concept of redemptive violence. We've been raised to believe there are...
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Nonviolence, pt. 1
I'm going to say something as explicitly as I can. If you are going to call yourself a Christian, nonviolence is fundamental to that identity. The problem? As a nation, we are addicted to violence. And we've manipulated Christianity to adapt to that addiction for hundreds of years. We start a new...
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The Last Week of Jesus: Easter Sunday
We come to the last episode of our Last Week series and we talk about the penultimate question: what is the meaning of Easter? This series has meant to respond to that question from the first episode of the series to the last episode, because the gospel writer of Mark is clear: you can't answer...
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The Last Week of Jesus: Saturday
The Harrowing of Hell is famous in medieval paintings and depictions in some of the oldest churches across the world. Yet, it's not mentioned anywhere in the Gospels, nor in any of Paul's authentic letters. So where did this early tradition come from detailing the lone day between Jesus' death…
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The Last Week of Jesus: Friday
One of the most accepted doctrines within Christianity is the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. But here's the thing: when you take Mark's gospel, the earliest of the 4 gospels, nowhere does Mark make this claim, and rhetorically, he is saying something The Church has gotten wrong for...
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The Last Week of Jesus: Thursday
As we get closer to Easter Sunday, we finally start the story of Maundy Thursday. But here's the problem: most of this stuff comes from John's Gospel. John's Gospel doesn't have the last supper during Passover, nor does he have the words of institution. John seems to be making big theological...
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The Last Week of Jesus: Wednesday
Fewer moments in the gospels elicit both misunderstanding and tremendous contrast of what the gospel means on doesn't mean than the woman with the alabaster jar. A moment that was twisted by the Church to turn this unnamed woman into a prostitute, a broken individual, a person who only…
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Last Week of Jesus: Monday & Tuesday
Honestly, it's hard to imagine that The Church missed the point of Jesus' "Cleansing of the Temple" in particular and his last week in Jerusalem as a whole. The glaring point is this and it needs to be understood implicitly by all: worship is never a substitute for justice. In this episode we go...
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The Last Week of Jesus: Palm Sunday
Every Gospel writer has a purpose for their story beyond simply recounting details. Mark's gospel, the earliest of the 4, is the only one that details every day of Jesus last week, and there's a purpose to his story that The Church has missed for centuries. We begin a new series looking at this...
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What is The Gospel
Many people aren't aware of this, but there was a massive and intentional shift in the perception in which Christianity is centered in the early 20th century. Two oil magnates paid theologians to write what was known as the Fundamentalist Essays, creating the Five Fundamentals of Christianity,...
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What is Truth?
An ambiguous and oft used word or phrase thrown around by pastors and speakers is truth or biblical truth. We must all guard it, embrace it, and express it. But what is it? Rarely defined, but often used. A ploy to firm up the speakers own bias. However, our understanding of what truth is today...
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The Intentional Ambiguity of Language
You'll hear the preacher talk about standing firm in Biblical Truth, defending the Gospel, avoiding sin. You'll hear it so frequently, you'll be afraid to ask the question, What do you mean by that word? In Christianity words are used so frequently, it's as though everyone should know the...
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Process Theology, pt. 3, ft Erik Winn
The conclusion to our series on Process Theology is the best! How does this theology become applicable in our real lives, our prayers, our response to injustice, etc. This is a theology for today's world that knows the opposite of faith is certainty, but how do we navigate life with the divine in...
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Process Theology, pt. 2, featuring Erik Winn
God is process, event, verb, relationship! This is the essence of Process Theology and it responds to God in our day. Today's episode highlights some critiques of the classical language of God and brings to light a new way of consideration and being.
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Process Theology, pt. 1, Featuring Erik Winn
We are all theologians whether we know it or not. We're meaning-making creatures and we go to many sources to make that meaning. For many of us, we left either conservative Christianity or Christianity in general b/c the classical doctrines of God no longer held up to the pain and suffering we…
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Life After Doom: The Conclusion
It's hard to wrap up everything this series has explored, especially as it asks us to genuinely reflect on and make changes to ourselves. As we wrap this series, there's one question that I believe helps us get to the core in a unique way to each of us: If you had 24 hours left to live, how would...
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Life After Doom, pt. 6
In this episode we talk about something that might be the most important aspect for an individual: How do we find resolve in the midst of despair and loss. Whether it's personal grief in our lives our it's facing an uncertain future with the climate, how do we find the resolve to not just curl up...
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Life After Doom, pt. 4
This episode really has two distinct parts. The first part rejoins the perspective of the Bible as texts written by indigenous people called to live in relationship with creator and land, and the consequences of straying from those paths. The second part moves into the emotions of the heart and...
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Life After Doom, pt. 3
It's easy enough to look at people who stand on the other side of the spectrum of climate data and say they need to remove their rose-colored glasses, but do we notice our own rose-colored glasses. Most of us still live in a world where we may intellectually know we live in an interconnected web,...
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Life After Doom, pt. 2
Last Episode we talked about some pretty heavy stuff as we confronted the four scenarios to which data points the direction of our world. This episode we look at how our brains are wired to deal with crises like those scenarios, for better or worse, and then we move to the place that grief can…
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Life After Doom pt. 1
Almost all of us have spent the last few decades coming to terms with scientific data around climate change and what the future holds. This series is not about convincing people with data, or looking at a plan of action for us not in national leadership positions, but how do we, as the every day...
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World Religion w/Alexis Donkin: Christianity
We are lucky to have Alexis Donkin leading us in a series on World Religions. This week covers Christianity, the largest religion in the world. ***Unfortunately, we have not been able to record every episode in this series. We've missed Judaism and Islam. We will do our best to record the rest***
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The Mark of the Beast in Context
Honestly, the mark of the beast in Revelation 13 is just silly, and the way people have utilized this text to point to contemporary figures is even sillier. But this intensely misinterpreted part of Revelation has a significant enough effect on people today that it's important to use this as a...
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Is Homosexuality an Abomination?
Virtually no one in a heterosexual relationship in America practices the sexual ethics of the Bible. Heterosexual couples have allowed a massive departure from what the Bible says about hetero relationships because they are archaic and oppressive. Yet, when it comes to same-sex relationships, the...
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One God, but Not The Only God
There is a great assumption that because Jews, Christians, and Muslims today are monotheistic that ancient Jews were monotheistic. However, from the beginning of the Bible to the end it becomes clear that ancient Jews believed in a plethora of gods, but the supremacy of their god. In today's...
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Where Does the Devil Come From?
The Devil is as consistent as God if you ask a large swath of Christians. However, while God is clearly a part of the Biblical narrative from beginning to end, the same cannot be said about the Devil. Most of what our culture believes about the devil doesn't come from scripture, but has been spun...
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Abortion in the Bible
Abortion is not just a hot-button topic in society, it's a single-issue area for a lot of Christians who vote. But does the Bible condemn abortion? In this episode we look at what the Bible says about the practice. I will share an important disclaimer: this episode is not about a moral stance on...
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Does God Lie?
This episode is a bit of a controversial one as it starts off quickly the well established assertion that in the Fall story of Genesis, God absolutely lies to the first people. We go through the implications of this story as well as a story of deception in 2 Kings and what this means for us today.
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God Did Not Create The Universe Out of Nothing
This may seem like a pretty benign topic, but overlapping the long held assumption that God created the universe from nothing is the justification that people have maintained throughout time that since their God is all-powerful, they can do to outsiders whatever they want. We will be looking...
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How The Bible Came to Be
Just the creation of what we know today as the Bible is full of assumptions informed by dogma and doctrine. And the truth is, scholars know quite a bit about how the Bible not only came to be compiled, but how it's been edited and revised over the last 1700 years. Today's episode gives a brief...
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How the Bible Speaks Today
In this episode we lay the groundwork for the start of our new series on scholar Dan McClellan's new book, The Bible Says So. Today we go through the dilemmas of Christianity being so dogmatic, even in the face of contradicting scholastic data. Throughout this series we'll be tackling some big...
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Moralizing the Bible
We've all grown up hearing the Bible used as a moral authority for various arguments. Some of the big ones in our society revolve around sexuality, status of women in society and household, and homosexuality. However, the people that wield this moral authority are rarely versed in the context of...
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Liberation Theology, pt. 8
We conclude our series on Liberation Theology with Hope and Politics. Hope is a seemingly innocuous concept, but when considered in light of developed and developing areas, hope becomes a radical beacon that shines a light on the shortcomings of the present. However, to those whose present is…
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Liberation Theology, pt. 7
We have gone through a ton of material and not had as much time to reflect and respond, so this episode is a recap of everything so far, with some space to respond to what we've been talking about.
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Liberation Theology, pt. 6
One might not consider history a theological concept, but when a substantial group's theological belief is that the only purpose of their religion is to convince people to adopt beliefs in order to go to an afterlife destination, than history becomes irrelevant and it becomes excusable to not…
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Liberation Theology, Pt. 5
Today we talk about the concept of Salvation. A term that most people grew up with having to do with where one's soul goes after they die. However, the Biblical narrative throughout scripture has far less to do with an after-life definition and far more with the life one works towards today. With...
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Liberation Theology, pt. 4
In all relationships a dependence develops between both parties, and ideally this dependence is both mutual and equitable. However, in the course of relationships with minority communities and oppressed communities the level of dependence is not only one sided, but a mechanism to keep…
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About this show
The Unorthodox Gatherings are a community of people who gather for conversation and connection around topics of faith, spirituality, deconstruction, social justice, community, and experiencing the Divine in one another and the world around us. Led by Pastor Chris Brown, these are the recordings of the gatherings that take place every Sunday at 11AM at Bethania Church in Solvang, CA
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Chris Brown
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