At the Center for Progressive Christianity, we articulate five core values that positively define what progressive Christians believe—not as boundary markers meant to exclude, but as signposts pointing toward a generous, faithful, and honest way of living the Christian tradition. In our ongoing collaboration with Good Faith Media, we are taking a deeper look at each of these values. We begin with the first and perhaps most foundational.

Our first core value reads: “By calling ourselves progressive Christians, we mean we are Christians who believe that following the way and teachings of Jesus can lead to experiencing sacredness, wholeness, and unity of all life, even as we recognize that the Spirit moves in beneficial ways in many faith traditions.”

In other words, progressive Christians find deep meaning in the teachings of Jesus and use them as our primary lens for making sense of the world. Jesus is the path we have chosen to walk toward the Divine. His words, his life and his way shape our ethics, our spirituality and our hope.

At the same time, we resist the arrogance of claiming that our path is the only valid one. We affirm that while Christianity is our way, it’s not the only way. 

God has never been confined to a single religious tradition. There are many paths that lead toward God, even if they are not the paths we ourselves are walking.

This perspective is not a modern concession to pluralism; it is rooted deeply in the story of Jesus himself. Twenty-first-century American Christians sometimes forget that Jesus was Jewish. He did not set out to start a new religion.

Rather, he was a religious reformer, calling his own tradition back to what he understood as its most authentic and life-giving expression. Jesus spent his time proclaiming and embodying the basileia—the reign of God breaking into the world.

Yet, within a generation of his time on earth, his followers shifted their focus from the religion of Jesus to a religion about Jesus. Christianity emerged, in part, from that transformation.

The simple fact that Jesus practiced a different religion from those of us who now claim to follow him should cultivate humility and spark interfaith curiosity. If Jesus could speak about God from within his own tradition while honoring the work of God beyond it, surely his followers can do the same.

Indeed, Jesus often made outsiders and religious “others” the heroes of his stories. The Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel is a striking example. The one who embodies neighborly love is not the religious insider but the foreigner—the theological enemy.

It is deeply ironic, then, that Christian fundamentalism so often insists on exclusivism when Jesus himself consistently undermined it. To claim people living in this particular place, at this exact moment in history, have somehow cornered the market on divine truth is not only implausible; it is spiritually impoverishing. Such certainty robs us of the richness that comes from encountering God through other traditions.

My own faith has been profoundly shaped by wisdom beyond Christianity. Taoism, for instance, helped me let go of the “old guy in the sky” image of God that much of Christianity has handed down. Instead, I began to understand God as a sacred, cosmic reality that binds all living things together—a presence perceptible when we learn to move with, rather than against, the flow of life.

Buddhism has taught me how much of our suffering is self-inflicted, born from our attachments. For me, that attachment often shows up as clinging to expectations about how I think things should go.

Each religious tradition carries wisdom because God is simply too expansive to be contained by any single system or set of doctrines. Most people’s god, frankly, is entirely too small.

What I’ve discovered is learning from other traditions has not weakened my Christian faith; it has clarified it. The more I explore other paths, the more I appreciate the beauty of the one I am walking.

Interfaith openness does not require abandoning Christian identity; it invites us to inhabit it more deeply and honestly. It also allows us to find common ground with people of other faiths and with those of no faith at all, so that we might work together for the common good.

For that reason, I am grateful for other religious traditions. They expand my imagination, deepen my compassion, and help me dream about the kind of world that might be possible when we stop arguing about who owns God—and start walking, together, toward love.