My Personal Creed 2020

Over the years I’ve written numerous versions of my Personal Creed, attempting to articulate my ever-evolving beliefs as a Christian. This most recent version is still in three parts: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I’m just not using those traditional titles. Because, for me, “God” has become a verb rather than a noun. “God” is an experience more than a belief. So my own Personal Creed does not describe the nature of God, but is an expression of my experience of God.

First, I experience God in the creativity that is happening all around me – in new life each spring, in the birth of a baby, in the warmth of the sun. I see God in our constantly evolving universe, its distances, its minuteness, its incredible order and system, its beauty and mystery. And I experience God in the expanding story of the evolution of life – including even me.
I can only respond with awe and wonder, with reverence and love.

Second, I experience God within me – as the risen Jesus within me – as those early Disciples must have felt even more deeply their own experience of the spirit of the risen Jesus within themselves. Jesus was a living human being within whom the holy was so intimately and totally present in the human that they were as one – revealing what it is to be fully human, embodying love and forgiveness, servanthood and sacrifice.
I must respond by living each ordinary day as a holy day with God’s presence in me defining who I am and constantly urging me to become more fully human, transcending my inborn self-serving survival instincts.

Third, I experience God in community, not only God within me, but God through me and beyond me. God’s Spirit is in my relationships that become covenants – a mutual dependency – not just with those closest to me, my family and friends, but with all humanity, all forms of life, a covenant with the Earth itself, the source of all life and its sustenance. I am an integral part of this sacred Universe. I belong!
I must respond with gratitude, but also with justice and compassion, to live in oneness with God’s world, to love extravagantly, to wash more feet.

No, I don’t live up to these words each day. But they are my vision of God’s Kingdom, and my goal as a Christian.

My Credo.

Loren Bullock
July 19, 2018, rev May 20, 2020