On not being a good fit for Sunday school, even though I taught Sunday school in the nineties:
I do not consider myself to be an atheist while I am willing to claim being a Christian. There are concepts and words many Christians seem willing to use casually but have no meaning for me. The following words, among others, seem to me to be so problematic that I cannot use them with integrity: God, sin, atonement, transcendence, soul, prayer, afterlife, God's love, faith, and others. Bill Chadwick was beginning to challenge people at St. Luke just before he left. He said that we at St. Luke are great about what we do not believe, but not so good at saying what we do believe. He asserted that a person has to earn the right to call themselves a Christian. My first response - the less we believe the righter we probably are - was intended to be glib, but once said it has not turned out to be a vacuous a statement as I first intended. And I still have not worked out the conflict I create for myself when I say, on the one hand, that truth resides only in statements in English (in my case) that describe experiences I have and, on the other hand, believing that truth/comprehension/insight/whatever is available to the extent that I can shed words and cultural conventions by narrowing my experience to the present moment. I do not know yet whether either metaphysics or theology are legal propositions. While I tend to be academic and intellectual, people and lived experiences are more important to me than ideas.
The previous paragraph contains thoughts and evolutions accumulated over decades of study. There is a whole lot there. It is the beginning of a long conversation that might suggest answers to how I am not a very good fit for teaching Sunday school. I have learned much from conversations with one of my favorite people, Karen Larson, who I met at St. Luke. Since, sad to say (again for me), she has moved on to other churches after becoming ordained. She's as good as I am at being a complicated theological mess - my characterization of us, not hers - but she seems less disabled by the intellectual landmines, sand traps, and fog banks than I am.
Anyway, that's my first answer.
