Our Beliefs

At Watershed we don’t believe that our claims and metaphors about the being of God are ever adequate to capture the mystery of the divine. A wide variety of concepts, a diversity of imagery, and a spectrum of analogies have sought to explain the notion of God throughout human history and all fall short. We think every failed attempt provides an opportunity for more curiosity and more discovery.

But we do believe that the claim that “God is love” provides a great starting point for our God-talk. And we believe that claim is beautifully revealed in the person of Jesus Christ who provides the first word — but not the last word — for our God-talk.

At Watershed we don’t believe that the Jesus conceived within and articulated by Western Christianity acts as the only way to God or Salvation. This notion of Jesus — in both his humanity and divinity — has too often been stretched and twisted to serve purposes that would have been inconceivable for the 1st century Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth.

But we do believe that whatever we mean by God or the divine is revealed truly in the person of Christ and we believe — as Jesus himself promised his followers — this revelation is repeatable and recognizable in countless other contexts, even when the name of Jesus is not made explicit.

At Watershed we don’t believe that the Spirit is something that can be objectified. We don’t believe that we can point to specific markers as evidence of the Spirit’s work or as proof of one’s own chosenness or favor. These claims risk making our own desires and projections into a kind of idol that — at best — create buffers between ourselves and others and — at worst — can be weaponized over and against those who live, love, and look differently than us.

But we do believe that the Holy Spirit - whether it be understood in traditional Trinitarian terms and/or more metaphorically as the divine breath and bond embodied in all of us — offers the very power of salvation. But this power, crucially, must be understood paradoxically as a kind of weakness, an absence or humility that makes space for another. In this sense the Spirit might best be understood according to a more ancient designation, the Holy Ghost, coming to us as a haunting, a present absence drawing us out of our comfort and into divine communion. 

At Watershed we don’t believe that we are born separated from God due to some inherited wretchedness we call sin. This sense of sin would have seemed strange to the folks for whom the Bible was originally compiled and even in its most well-intentioned articulations it has been a source of shame and hurt for centuries.

But we do believe that sin offers a broad set of categories helpful — even necessary — for talking about the pain and brokenness that we experience in the world and that we — often in our own hurt — inflict on one another. In a redemptive sense, sin names something we all have in common — not in our shared fallenness — but in our shared humanity.

At Watershed we don’t believe that Salvation is reducible to some kind of vague notion of afterlife insurance achieved through proper belief or religious association. This sense of salvation — as with many ideas many of us were raised with — has little scriptural basis and even less theological and philosophical support.

But we do believe that Salvation names a kind of reconciliation available to all people. Not — to be clear — a reconciliation with an offended God. But rather reconciliation with a reality and an authenticity that has always already been true and available to us, both for humanity and the whole of creation. 

At Watershed we don’t believe that the Bible acts as some kind of divinely dictated user manual for life and practice. We believe this notion of scripture — often associated with words like inerrancy and infallibility — does an injustice to the beautiful complexity and diversity recorded in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament.

But we do believe that the Bible is inspired. Or perhaps rather that it is inspiring insofar as it puts us in conversation with a generous and diverse host of humanity who have — like us — wrestled with the question of God. And it allows us to commune with and learn from them as we seek to encounter the same God that they tried — and often failed — to capture in their stories and writings.

At Watershed we don’t believe that this life exists for the next, and that in some sense all of us are destined for an eternity of either bliss or damnation. Our inherited expectations regarding the afterlife often lack biblical and historical grounding — more often reflecting the hopes and fears of a particular people group than anything we could confidently call God’s revelation. Said another way, we certainly don’t believe that anyone’s relatively short existence in this life will leave them separated from God for all eternity.

But we do believe that the question of eternity weighs on the hearts and minds of all people and that it gets at some of the most fundamental hopes and longings of the human experience. We believe it is fruitful to explore these questions, to hold our answers loosely and our hopes close, and that whatever happens when we die, that it will be in line with a God who has revealed Godself as love.

At Watershed we don’t believe that the exploration of creation necessitates a tension between faith and spirituality on the one side and science and reason on the other. We therefore reject the implication that the findings of the material sciences can speak conclusively for or against the metaphysical claims of theology and philosophy.

But we do believe that an exploration of creation — of the cosmos — can be the site and ground for spiritual reflection. We believe that these disciplines can be conversant as opposed to competitive, and that as much as the doctrine of creation is about the existence of matter, it is even more about why that matter matters. Creation is about meaning.

At Watershed we don’t necessarily believe that Satan is an actually existing entity that works and plots in conflict with God and humans. While we aren’t dogmatically opposed to belief in the existence of spiritual beings (like angels or demons), we don’t think that the way that Satan (and demons) have traditionally been understood holds up to biblical, theological, and historical scrutiny.

But we do believe that language around the demonic — be it literal or metaphorical — provides a powerful lens through which we can interrogate and dismantle systems of oppression and exploitation in our world. Regardless of whether these systems are backed in some literal sense by malevolent entities, whether our notions of being are even adequate to describe those entities, or whether they are metaphors for things that simply exceed the bounds of language, we believe it’s important to name and resist evil wherever possible. 

At Watershed we don’t believe that any church has a monopoly on talk about God or access to God. Nor do we believe that the Church is meant to exist in competition with culture or promise some kind of saving respite or escape from the world. These notions of the Church are — at best — guilty of creating an unhelpful binary in-group/out-group dynamic and — at worst — can lead to things like anti-semitism, Christian Nationalism, and the like.

But we do believe that the Church in all its diverse forms and expressions offers a compelling illustration of our collective relationship with God. The Church represents an attempt — and by extension a failure — to speak of God. And thus the Church also offers the possibility of new God-talk and new divine encounter, with each failure necessitating a new opportunity to speak of God again.