"I’ve found myself wondering whether the members of my church really wanted to hear about how Big Bang cosmology relates to Genesis 1 or what the image of God means in light of contemporary brain science. Last year we ran a weekend conference on science and theology at Bidwell Presbyterian Church, and a church member who’s now a graduate student at U.C. Davis—which is about 100 miles from Chico—drove to the church in order to hear how faith and science relate. She and her father came to conference, really enjoyed it, and subsequently said, ‘You should bring more of that material into the pulpit.’ I then asked myself, ‘Why don’t I? What’s my resistance to bringing the insights more specifically into my ministry as a pastor?’ I guess I had this suspicion that people wouldn’t really be interested. I’ve got to change that.”
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To identify existing resources of congregations and to catalyze conditions for a sustained, rich, generative engagement between science and faith.
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To provide pastors with the means to call scientists into a sustained collaboration that would enrich a scientist’s engagement with theology and a theologian’s engagement with science, and their shared participation in congregational life and leadership.
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To develop a range of locally grown models of how congregations can draw deeply from the well of their own congregational life to become communities where the life of science and the life of faith are experienced as spiritually enriching and intellectually stimulating, and to find ways of encouraging a multiplying number of other congregations to also implement, and improve on these models.
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To mediate into congregational life many of the existing resources, as well as those now under development, that are intended to cultivate a generative encounter between science and faith in the life of congregations.
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To help overcome the wider social issues which grow out of the troubling ways in which religious communities relate to science.
