CHRISTIC
We are a limb of the one Christian church, the Mystical Body of Christ. We acknowledge the Christ as our founder, living head, and eternal high priest.
INDEPENDENT CATHOLIC
We are a Catholic church in the original, universal, sense of that word as well as in our form of sacramental worship. We are neither Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, nor Protestant, though our bishops and priests trace their Holy Orders, or “apostolic succession” (the tradition of bishops consecrating other bishops), through Roman Catholic and Orthodox lines. In this way we trace our roots as far back any other Catholic or Orthodox church. Our priests perform the liturgy and administer the seven sacraments.
SACRAMENTAL
We are a sacramental church. We hold that the sacraments are visible signs of a manifestation of divine grace, and are powerful aids to spiritual growth.
Holy Eucharist (Communion), Reconciliation (Penance), Holy Unction (healing of the sick), and Holy Matrimony and Holy Union are made available to all who seek them. Baptism is the rite of formal initiation into Christ’s church. Confirmation seals the commitment to a Christian way of life. Holy Orders is an initiation available to those who wish to serve as clergy.
MODERN
We are a modern church. We maintain that eternal truth cloaks itself in garb appropriate to the age, and that the outward form of religion should keep pace with human development. We do not shrink from new knowledge. Our form of Independent Catholicism embodies an ancient truth for a new age. We provide an intelligent alternative — traditional worship with the free exploration of new ideas and techniques. All seekers are encouraged to explore every relevant resource for spiritual development.
FELLOWSHIP
Our church is a spiritual fellowship, a community of followers of the Spirit. We give ourselves and others encouragement to live the truth. To live the truth is to become ever more the Christ, the true Self of all and the source of real happiness and abiding fellowship.
LOVE CENTERED
We are a church of love. We accept Saint John’s testimony that God is Love For us, Christ’s ministry is the law of love: “Love the Lord, thy God, with thy whole heart, thy whole mind and thy whole strength; and love thy neighbor as thyself. This is the whole of the Law and the prophets.” Saint Augustine epitomized Christian ethics in the precept, “Love and do as you will.”
UNIVERSAL
We maintain that the Holy Spirit acts through pure channels everywhere, regardless of age, sex, race, creed or culture. There is only one true God, however this God is known or worshipped; hence, there is eternally only one holy universal Church, regardless of the cultural form it happens to assume in a given time and place. We revere the saints, sages, and holy ones of all ages and places.
MYSTICAL
We are a mystical church, keeping in mind the Old Testament words, “Be still and know I AM – God.” We give a primary place to Christ’s saying, “The kingdom of heaven lies within you.” and acknowledge that the greatest advancement in spiritual truth is made by those who discover that divinity resides within. If God is Love, then it is through our love that we come to a real and abiding knowledge of God. For Christians, love is spiritual knowledge par excellence.
SPIRITUAL
We seek to draw back the veil, first to discover the deeper intellectual import and then the experiential dimension, which is the true meaning of spiritual symbolism in scripture, ritual, liturgy and theology.
OPEN COMMUNION
At Gentle Shepherd, we believe that the chief purpose of our spiritual community is to perpetuate the historical sacramental tradition as instituted by Jesus Christ, and as preserved through apostolic succession. We maintain that the sacraments are channels of divine grace and are therefore easily available to all.
Communion is not a reward for following the rules. Rather, it represents and repeats the great sacrifice that Christ made for us by atoning for our sins. We believe that the Eucharist puts us in communion with the Christ and is a channel of Grace without parallel. Therefore, at our altars all reverent persons are welcome to receive communion, whether members of our church, or any church.
AN INVITATION
Do you want the freedom to read and investigate the best of modern thinkers and writers, at the same time keeping your roots in the beauty form and poetry of the traditional church? Large numbers of worshipers are leaving their traditional churches because they realize the difficulty of combining rational thought with irrational and old fashioned religious control.
That these people are often the most intelligent and best educated church members! They have used their time and energy to keep up with the times and investigate the best thinking of our age and they have had the heartbreaking experience of having to leave the churches, which they still love and in which most of them were raised in order to respect what they have learned.
If you are such a person, it could be that you are spiritually ready to join us at Gentle Shepherd Church of Antioch. Perhaps do not even realize it! We set no limits to your thinking, and instead encourage you to use your intelligence to develop the deepest spiritual truths that you can.
We urge our family to read and assimilate all they can on scriptural interpretation, comparative religion, mystical traditions, as well as the best works in psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and anthropology. At the same time, we share in community the experience of worshiping in the rich traditional beauty of Eucharistic fellowship.
need to know more???… read on for a bit more depth….
Independent Catholicism for Modern Christians
Independent Catholicism is a journey for us all, a visit to places we may have visited many times before in a different light, but also a passport to locations that many of us have longed to investigate. As children of one of many traditional churches, sometimes prisoners of its dogma and tenets, many of us have often felt less than empowered by the compromises, hypocrisies, and dictates with which to which we were subjected in the name of Christ. While our inner faith may not have been compromised, many have often felt despair at the rigidity and intolerance of these old fashioned teachings. And of course guilt when our souls could simply not find conciliation with prevailing thought.
Gentle Shepherd Church was founded by a small and brave group of Christians that had fought and sacrificed for their beliefs. Coming from a variety of church backgrounds from Catholic to Adventist, they had scratched from the very ether a small church, a community really, that has embraced the spirit of independent Catholicism. This was not an easy thing for them to do in Richmond, one of the most conservative cities in the nation. Firstly, they were all gay. It was extremely difficult for them to even find a place to worship. Then, Catholicism in the south is not as prevalent as in other areas, and all Catholics tend to be thrown together into one basket. It has been a difficult task to convince outsiders that Rome has no monopoly on Catholicism, and that there can be viable independent and modern thought within a branch of the original and traditional church.
In spite of these obstacles, our little church has survived, and is exposing the Richmonders to a Catholicism that most people never knew existed, a church of love and tradition, of community and tolerance to which most churches pay only lip service. And now, our little community endeavors to expand their horizons, spreading a message of peace and inner spirituality to all that will listen.
Independent Catholicism
The scriptures have for the most part held an untenable position as divinely inspired revelations, often allowing the perpetration of “pious fraud” through the pulpits. It is our belief that the scriptures can only be truly understood if they are read in historical context, and with a deeper understanding of the circumstances surrounding their authoring. We attempt always to bring to the attention of others the fact that the Bible can be and has been used to bring to focus nearly anything that a quick mouth and silver tongued preacher desires.
This should not mean to imply that biblical lessons should not be used to teach modern day life situations and to serve as examples in how we can love God. At Gentle Shepherd, we elect to participate in the use of modern findings to construct a reformed Catholicism; perhaps then we can we can also minimize the adverse reactions such as fundamentalism fossilization and an abandonment of Christian belief in favor of some other sort of spirituality.
The non-independent Catholic denominations seem to have a massive problem in understanding that modern man needs modern religion, and that a “living” religion more viably meets the needs of educated and enlightened humanity than does dogmatic “fire and brimstone” rhetoric.
Freedom to evolve, whether it is with an infusion of new scientific discovery, or a new and more precise translation, or even a reevaluation of prior non conforming thought, should be the moving factor in motivational religion and fulfilling our faith in Christ the Redeemer. At Gentle Shepherd, we fee that this freedom start with the denominational leadership.
Mystical
We harbor the belief that the elements of “the sacred” are structures of our consciousness, which would seem to be more in keeping with a church that desires to attract and keep contemporary worshippers. In fact, the fundamental message of Christianity as the knowledge that “the kingdom of God is within you” is, and always has been, an innate factor in the development of Gentle Shepherd Church. We teach that the spirit of Christ is manifested in our interaction with the world, and that we as individuals are the only Christ that many people will see in their day to day lives. We feel that this innate spiritual evolution and expression of faith is in fact a developmental asset for human spirituality.
Reformed
If you ask the great majority of our little flock about the difference between Orthodox and Reformed Catholicism you would undoubtedly be surprised by their ignorance. We teach the traditions of the sacraments, the history of our religion, and the core basis of our belief as Christians. Our instinctual reflexes have always been to deny any doctrine as sacrosanct. This is one area where we differ substantially with other branches of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and many of the Protestant denominations.
The importance of personal freedom and personal responsibility is paramount to us in terms of the repression many have all suffered at the hands of organized religion, government, and society as a whole. Our fundamental belief that we were all created in the diverse image of God precludes our forced acceptance of “external conditions.” and embraces the continuing spirit of reform begun by Christ against the orthodoxy of Jewish Law.
We agree with the premise that simply replacing one “orthodoxy” with another is not conducive to the success of a modern church, especially when based on anachronistic scriptural interpretations. Our future at Gentle Shepherd will continue to operate under the original Catholic premise that the spirit of the Law is Love.
Our belief in the full power of the sacraments is reinforced by our personal spiritual need to justify all teachings in context of contemporary thought and learning. This route is of course limited in most of the main line denominations. Today however, our clergy rejoice in being able to instill the concepts of personal responsibility and freedom of choice that were previously considered almost nefarious.
Liberal
For many of us, our experiences in main line Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, has exposed us to a full spectrum of beliefs ranging from ultra liberal to fanatically fundamental. Our belief is that fundamentalism is often in contradiction to reason and often wrongly mistaken for faith. Bronislaw Malinowski’s once wrote that religion is functional and particular to social environment. Certainly, our current lifestyles, levels of education, and mental attitudes are not even vaguely related to those of the past. We, as a spiritual community dealing with the modern world, find it both curious and frustrating that many of the major religious denominations, both orthodox and reformed, have remained indifferent to this social evolution.
If we concentrate not on the absolute verity and non-contextual translations of the scriptures, but instead on what they may have meant in terms of the socio-political times in which they were written, then we can perhaps gain insight into the thought processes of the oh-so human beings that authored them. We can then use these insights, thoughts, traditions and aspirations, to aid in our individual spiritual development, the internal manifestation of our own personal Christ. And…. most importantly… we can do this without taking a position secondary to our own intelligence.
Catholic
The original founders of Gentle Shepherd labored long and hard about whether or not to found a “catholic” church, understanding that the definition of “catholic” was in fact not fully understood by the world at large. Upon deciding to do so, a great deal of soul searching was done to determine whether or not the needs of the small group could be met or even compromised by a liturgical church. Highly appealing was the preservation of apostolic succession, a feeling of connection to the Christ and his immediate successors that seemed especially important to those who had spent decades being castigated. The value of tradition, especially of the sacraments, was also of great interest.
However, our primary concern has always been the maintenance of an emphasis on responsibility, individual thought and conscience. Our quest for affiliation with a group that is more liberal than magisterial and more dedicated to progress than compromise has led us to where we are today with the Catholic Apostolic Church of Antioch. We adopt the simple but profound statement that liberal tradition being “freedom for,” rather than “freedom from” or “freedom to” as being far more consistent with our theology. It is the direction in which our clergy leads us. Our desire to be “catholic” in the true spirit of “universalism” is not to adhere rigidly to a dominating monolithic hierarchy but rather to create spiritual bonds that both recognize the value of tradition and promote faith by the development of internal growth, understanding, and self -evaluation.
Spiritual and Religious
We believe that faith is beyond the limits of experience and hence unknowable, and therefore it follows that spirituality and religion are two separate but distinct entities. Our clergy is called to assist parishioners in our voyage to spirituality, but to emphasize that the voyage must be individual and personal. The tools are at our disposal are the basic religious tools; rites, tradition and history, the so-called “best resources for spiritual growth.” It is in the realization that worship in itself does not automatically result in spirituality that we find the basis for the success of religion in the modern world. The Church of Antioch, we believe, can provide a synergism between religion and spirituality to foster internal enlightenment and development.
Love
It has always been particularly perplexing and disappointing that a church based on the tenet that “God is Love” could have degenerated into myriad factions of intolerance, self-indulgence, and even hatred. Many in our spiritual community have been the targets of various forms of “non-love” by church, friends, and even close family. There is simply no room in our personal theology for any but the Augustinian dictum: ” Love and do as you will.” It is also an intrinsic part of our community life at Gentle Shepherd, and will so remain.
Eclectic
If we accept together a basic premise that a primary factor for success within the framework of modern religious expression is the development of “self,” then we must be willing to accept the requirement for diversity of thought, practices and resources. Conventionality and “religion by rote” were contrary to the metaphysical development of the early church, Why then should we expect that they be anything but a hindrance in this day and age if we are searching for the enrichment of our souls and spirits. Rather, we prefer to devote ourselves ‘to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven.” Let us glean the wisdom, thoughts, faith and traditions of the ages, and transform them into a meaningful expression of what is important and relevant to us in Modern Christianity.
Pluralistic
We believe that to believe in spirituality as an internal presence demands that we allow in others the individuality of their own free expression. We do believe sincerely that those who inflict their beliefs on others and thus hinder the development of the Christ in each of us have perpetuated much injustice. We also object vehemently to those who would use the church to impede the rights of others.
A Spiritual Journey
Believing that that divinity is both mystical and internal, the duality of divine worship and spiritual science as components of religious methodology should certainly not be foreign to us. Thus Gentle Shepherd’s affiliation is with the Catholic Apostolic Church of Antioch, which embraces such precepts as interior spiritual experience and sacramental grace while eschewing canonical doctrine. We see this as a way for our community to evolve and flourish in a modern and difficult world. .
But we understandable that we are just one of the possible routes on the way to an infinite Source, and that as a cultural manifestation our obligation as a Church is more to enhance holistic awareness as a tool of spiritual development. We must, in doing this, take into consideration the vast differences in those who share this world with us, and we must respect and recognize these differences.
It is the recognition of God’s “internal” self-authority that provides the spiritual power that is the ultimate validation for any religion. We use this power to find this personal and individual truth, but we must understand that it is valid only for us as individuals. Although we can not share it with others, we can guide them to the development of their own personal level of interpretation.
If we carry this premise forward, we can then further understand that scriptural and historical writings can only be the personal interpretation of those that wrote them, even in their original form and unaltered by church and social politic. We can take advantage of modern translations and historical findings that allow us to consider historical context. We can learn from them, again using them as tools for our own personal interpretation, but we should not be held to considering them as veridical.
We can open our minds to the mystical spirituality of the Gnostics and the non-Christian spiritualists, and we can pursue without guilt other paths that were forbidden under the label of heresy to feed the magisterium of the Church. Most importantly, we can objectively respect the diversity of religious thought that has evolved as the Christian community and exploit it without guilt in our quest for spirituality through individual primacy. We can, through a combination of sacramental rites and spiritual practice foster a reawakening of focused spiritual exercise and encourage mature esoteric thinking in those who may be prepared for it, at the same time admitting that all are deserving of it.
Modern and Traditional
It is almost absurd to assume that modern man can remain viably attached to the dictates of fixed and inflexible religious denominations. We believe that denying the changes mandated by current psychosocial attitudes is fact responsible for growing church attrition. We cannot insult modern intelligence by offering a church where dogma and other barriers prevent free thought. Rather, reliance on tradition and belief as stepping-stones to freedom of thought, conscience and expression would appear to be the more successful route to spiritual development.
As a Church, Gentle Shepherd realizes that our individual sources of inspiration will differ immensely, as will both our innate and developed spiritual experience. Our responsibility is therefore not one of control, but one of management. Our goals emphasize the diversity of spiritual force and coalesce this power into a common expression of the living Spirit.
Liberal Tradition
The development of the Church as a temporal and even political institution has always seemed to be the antithesis of The Christ’s teachings. Purges, schisms and reformations have resulted in monolithic entities that emphasize differences. By emphasizing individuality of spiritual development with a goal of commonality and unity in The Spirit, we revive the repressed and forgotten vigor of early thought in successful combination with liturgical form and apostolic succession of orders.
In short, we must not teach that “there is only one way.” Our success will be measured by simply teaching that “there is a way,” and that we each have in ourselves the ability to enrich our knowledge to the point where we can find that way. There is no secret formula, no recipe that we can impart with rites, dogma, dictates, rules, and prohibitions and impart to others. There is however a vast store of separate ingredients in the form of history and traditions that we can use to concoct our own personal and internal flavor of spiritual completeness.