hat I know about moral values I learned growing up in Protestant churches and in a Christian home. We went to church on Sunday as a matter of choice, perhaps of habit. Whether out of choice or habit, we went both to Sunday School and to worship. And as a teen, I went to youth group and to choir. Some years it seemed we were at the church more evenings than not.

In high school I spoke with my pastor about a sense of call to the ministry. He wondered why I felt a call, and I responded that the church was so much a part of my experience I wanted to spend my life there. And he said that wasn’t enough reason to prepare for ordained min-istry. He was right. In succeeding years I did experience a deep sense of divine calling to give my life to God through the church and the pastoral ministry. For 35 years, that’s what I have done. And I know now, more than ever, ordained ministry has been God’s call in my life.

My personal library is filled with books I have read. My formal education led to a Doctor of Ministry from Princeton Theological Seminary. I study, read, and learn from others all the time to test what I think and believe. My library has a dozen Bibles which I’ve under-lined and outlined over the years, as well as commentary sets and Bible study resources I’ve devoured as I seek to know and understand the scriptures. My heart and mind yearn for confidence that God is behind my convictions and moral commitments, that the Spirit guides my moral choices.

BASIC MORAL VALUES

Given that experience of learning over 35 years as a minister, and changes here and there in how I live out my fundamental values as a Christian, the moral values I hold and the choices I make still come out of the core of what I learned as a child growing up in church and in a Christian home.

I learned early in life simple lessons like these:

• Be kind to others.
• Be patient.
• Respect everyone.
• Forgive people who hurt you.
• Stand up to bullies without fighting.
• Be honest without hurting people.
• Let other people be who they are.
• Be faithful to your friends.
• Love God and other people.

These simple values form the concrete foundation

for the life God calls me to live out in the church, as well as in the world. I am convinced that God calls the whole church to live by them as well. As I experience the church today, I see a large crack in the foundation.

AN INVITATION TO THE CHURCH

This book is an invitation to the church in America to learn how to live together in love. By the end of it, you will read a simple proposal for how that might happen. I hope you’ll stay with it to the end of the book even if you sometimes disagree with what I say because that’s at the heart of the church’s problem. People keep leaving the conversation because we disagree.

We need to continue loving conversation without expectation of final agreement. That is the meaning of dialogue. What we experience much more in the church is debate - presenting our arguments, challenging, seeking to persuade, all with the goal of winning the majority opinion, by vote if necessary. Where is the love in that approach to disagreement?

I wrote this book to initiate more conversation with people in the church about moral values. And I wrote it for the Christian church in all its diversity, for people whose core commitment of faith is solidly within the Christ-centered tradition of the church built upon a common understanding of scripture and faith experience. People outside that tradition may find the book helpful. Much that I say could be written in the broader context of other religions and moral philosophy. But I want to address the Christian church directly in these pages.

The church today is deeply divided over our understanding of moral values and their biblical roots. Some people define key moral values as abortion and homosexuality, and some say key moral values are larger than that, the values of life and love. Some see black-and-white values taught in scripture, and others see shades of gray in a biblical tradition with its roots embedded in writings spread out over 1,000 years.

The choice is not either/or but both/and. There are some clear black-and-white moral teachings in scrip-ture (though not as many as some people think), and there are many shades of understanding of such concerns as marriage, family life, sexuality, religious life, the sanctity of all life, and the roles of men and women in society, to name just a few.

In a small book like this we cannot consider all the moral teachings of scripture. And this is not an academic study of any of them. It is a personal witness to my faith. I want to focus on the ultimate moral values of life and love, especially love. What does the Bible teach us about love, and what are the implications of love in our concern for those who have yet to be born and our concern for the sacredness of marriage - two areas of moral values argued so vociferously during the 2004 U.S. election?

Will the church survive its deep divisions? Will mainstream denominations in the U.S. find a way to continue to live together despite the seemingly insur-mountable differences of understanding about what we believe to be of ultimate importance in our faith? Will the different branches of the church - sometimes charac-terized as conservative and liberal - be able to accept each other as members of the same spiritual body and family and learn to live together without rancor and with respect? These are the fervent questions in my heart and soul as I write this book.

Introduction