My Faith Journey
December 28, 2025 Dr. Roger Ray
This sermon will bring to a close my 46 year long preaching career. I still have a few preaching events booked for next year but if there are ever new sermons posted on this YouTube or iTunes channels, it will be a special occasion. I’m not sick or tired but I am old, and, honestly, we are out of money. What small reserve we have we will use to keep our rather large catalogue of sermons up on line and to keep our website up so that the ministers who often use my past sermons can find the manuscripts.
But since this chapter of my life is coming to a close, I hope that you will indulge me some reminiscence about how I got to this point, going from being a young rural traditional Christian to be where I am now, a largely humanist Unitarian.
I was only 23 years old when I became the minister of the First Christian Church in La Center, Kentucky while I finished my degree in philosophy at Murry State University.
A year later I moved to the county seat town of Russellville, Kentucky where I served while I earned my seminary degree and doctorate at Vanderbilt. I took my very traditional evangelical faith to Vanderbilt because I thought I was a liberal. I was a liberal in the sense that I was opposed to war, and I was deeply invested in ethics, especially as regards racism, poverty, and civil rights.
My graduate school education poked all kinds of holes in the Christian religion that I had learned with its devotion to heaven and hell, the divinity of Jesus, and its devotion to the Bible. I dodged coming to terms with those things by majoring in pastoral counseling, giving my energy to working with alcoholics and drug addicts, and doing counseling with people who suffered from domestic violence and depression.
Theologically, I immersed myself in the study of monastic spirituality, especially the work of the famous Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. Devotion to spiritual mystery allowed me to stay in a traditional Christian church when I knew better than to believe in all of the magic and superstition associated with an evangelical faith.
In 1991 I was 35 years old, I had become a father, and I had been hired to be the senior minister of a large Christian Church in Springfield, Missouri. I had the staff and the financial backing to throw myself into the kind of social justice work that had given my life in ministry so much meaning. Building houses for the poor in the USA and establishing medical clinics and feeding centers in Central America helped me to make peace with my role in a church that still used the language of evangelical Christianity even though I was no longer a part of that faith.
I nervously got involved with the Jesus Seminar and began reading the works of Karen Armstrong, Marcus Borg, and the author who later became my good friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong. In the mid-90’s I was teaching a course on the gospels at Drury University. I used Marcus Borg’s seminal work, “Meeting Jesus Again (For the First Time), as a text book. Folks, there is nothing quite like teaching to force you to come clean with what you really believe. Thankfully, Marcus Borg was an uncommonly kind man who deconstructed the Christian religion in a very gentle way.
But, I can remember sitting in my opulent office at National Ave. Christian Church and reading Spong’s book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and feeling the great gulf between the post theological supernaturalism of Spong and the language and hymns and rituals of the church that kept me employed and allowed me to comfortably raise my daughter in a middle class life.
I later confessed to Bishop Spong that it took me a couple of years to finish reading his book about how Christianity had to change because I would read a bit and get scared that thinking that way would surely get me fired, so I would put it back on a the shelf to the right of my big mahogany desk . . . but I was drawn to it, like a cat to a catnip mouse. I didn’t want to finish reading it, but I couldn’t help myself.
I had one foot firmly planted in the institutional, denominational Christian Church, and the other foot more enthusiastically planed in honest scholarship in a post-theistic way of thinking.
In 2004 I was invited to be a Merrill Fellow at Harvard Divinity School. I was on Sabbatical at Harvard for just 4 months but it was my first time away from the Midwest, the weekly task of preaching, and the politics of a big church that tried to keep me in a golden cage.
I fully embraced an honest and academic approach to faith and, predictably, I was fired about a year after I got home. I will spare you the details of the mafia styled way my denomination and congregation kicked me to the curb but in a lot of ways, it was the most liberating thing that could ever have happened to me.
After a year of working as the director of the Central American charity that I had loved for years, writing for the local paper and teaching, I was persuaded to try to start a liberal, academic, church with no ties to any denomination. That is how I was allowed to become the person you have known in these past 17 years of internet sermons.
As hard as it has been to be a controversial preacher for the past 40 years, in spite of all the petty church political battles, and backstabbing associate pastors and staff, I have been very lucky.
There were enough good people around me who wanted to keep me in a pulpit to donate enough money to start a church. And, speaking of being lucky, a young man I had known as a college student in my denominational days had become an IT expert and he came along and offered to start putting my sermons on YouTube and iTunes. Rob Martin, for want of a more humble way of saying it, made me famous within the progressive religious world.
There was, in the earlier part of this century, a huge appetite for a way of being religious without believing in all of the magic and superstition. I had built a congregation, full of retired ministers and college professors, who challenged me every week to dig a little deeper, to examine the faith we had been taught as children and to come terms with reality. The transformation didn’t happen all at once. Honestly, it took me nearly 40 years to let go of the religion that I had been spoon fed sitting on a little painted chair when I was a toddler in my home church.
One of the great psychological truths is that all change is experienced as a loss. Even though I had the good fortune of going to great schools with amazing professors, who were patient enough to liberate me from the mental prison I was raised in, every subtle change was an act of giving up something I had been taught to cherish. I was raised to believe that holding onto that ancient faith was what it took, not simply to be a good preacher, but to be a good person.
You can learn better theology in your head, even write it down in your papers in grad school, but to let it into your heart is typically a journey of a lifetime.
In the Unitarian Church where I am now a member, I am only one of several retired ministers, all of whom used to be Methodists, Presbyterians, or Disciples.
Of course, most of the people who break out of the mental cage of traditional religions don’t become Unitarians. They become Rotarians, or bord members at the Y or the Heart Association. Once people realize that whoever or whatever God is, that God didn’t write the Bible and never wanted to send eternal souls to a burning hell and couldn’t bring eternal souls into the rewards of heaven, most of them just take up pickleball and never give church another thought.
I have stuck with it and I am, honestly, more involved in my local congregation than I really want to be, but I do it because I still want to be in community with people who know that racism is wrong, that sexism is wrong, that prejudice against the LGBTQ+ community is wrong, and that it is a good thing to show compassion to immigrants, to the poor, the hungry, and the sick. I still go to church because I still want to be a good person and it helps me to be around people who also want to be good people.
I am going to end now where I probably should have started, saying a hearty and sincere thank you to all of you who have donated to support me in this work, those of you who have listened, reposted, and helped us to get the word out about a life of faith that is not mired in superstition and myths.
I owe a special debt of thanks to my silent partner in all of this: Rob Martin, my cameraman, IT expert, and my good friend whose career is now very demanding and even though he has a wife and elementary aged daughter who also need and deserve his time, Rob has stuck it out to keep my content on line.
I am honored to have had all of you in my life and I will live in gratitude until the sun finally sets on balding head!
