Dove-award winning artists Michael and Lisa Gungor are known for their music that goes outside of traditional genre limitations while still keeping a Christian theme. But their latest work has them stepping a little too far outside.
The band’s ideas are outlined in a February blog post titled, “What Do We Believe?”—in which Michael Gungor says we should be “very slow to judge people for their beliefs.”
He writes about a conversation he had with a friend who wouldn’t consider him a Christian anymore.
“Why?” Gungor asks. “Not because my life looks like Jesus or doesn’t look like Jesus. But because of my lack of ability to nail down all the words and concepts of what I exactly BELIEVE. Because I’ve lost so many of the unconscious assumptions that I used to have and have no ability to un-see what I have seen.”
He then outlines what he no longer believes: “that the first people on earth were a couple named Adam and Eve that lived 6,000 years ago” or “that there was a flood that covered all the highest mountains of the world only 4,000 years ago and that all of the animal species that exist today are here because they were carried on an ark and then somehow walked or flew all around the world from a mountain in the middle east after the water dried up.”
Gungor says he has “no more ability to believe these things than I do to believe in Santa Clause [sic] or to not believe in gravity.”
This theological ambivalence is evident in the group’s latest project, a collection of EPs released under the name The Liturgists, in which they worked with Love Wins author Rob Bell and other poets.
The first EP, Garden, is about “movements of lament, doubt, and joy as we move through the Easter cycle.” God Our Mother, the second EP, “supports moving beyond the Scriptural formulation of God as Father, since that allegedly limits an appreciation of God’s fullness,” Jeff Koch writes.
Koch concludes: “Gungor is clearly still animated and inspired by the person of Jesus. But it was Jesus who upheld the authority of Scripture and whose recipe for divine connection was fairly simple: ‘Our Father, who is in Heaven, hallowed be your name …’ “
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