What Kind of Church is Sunshine Cathedral?

What Kind of Church is Sunshine Cathedral? (by Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins)

Sunshine Cathedral’s theology can be boiled down to “God is the power and presence of love, and that presence is omnipresent, everywhere, fully present.”

 

Every single message you hear at Sunshine Cathedral will feature that simple but powerful and life-changing idea: God is omnipresent Love.

 

Just as our worship is a blend of many ideas, experiences, and traditions, so also is our theology the product of blending. We are historically affiliated with Metropolitan Community Churches, a movement started by a gay, defrocked Pentecostal minister (Troy Perry) with a primary outreach to LGBTQ+ people and an enthusiastic affirmation of LGBTQ+ people as children of God designed to be exactly who they are.

 

We are also affiliated with the International Council of Community Churches, the Divine Science Federation, and the International New Thought Alliance. For decades, we have embraced the principles of Progressive Christianity, the principles of New Thought, and the openness of spiritual humanism. 

 

Progressive Christianity simply says questions are more important than the answers we come up with, that everyone is loved by God, that other religions also have wisdom and holiness, that science is important and not at odds with spirituality, and that scripture can be understood in a variety of ways and the best ways are those that promote justice, tolerance, goodwill, and peace.

 

New Thought began as an American healing movement in the 19th century. Their guiding

principles were the omnipresence and goodness of God, the power of thoughts, feelings, and

attitudes to help shape our experiences in life, and the use of affirmations and visualization to make prayer more effective.

 

Finally, spiritual humanism is also part of the air we breathe at Sunshine Cathedral. Spiritual humanism affirms the innate goodness and the potential of human-beings, allows for spiritual community, spiritual experiences, and a variety of opinions about the existence and nature of divinity.

 

Examples of spiritual humanists (who might have also been Christian or Jewish or Muslim, etc.) include Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius, or the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism Mordecai Kaplan. 

 

Spiritual humanists, while not being limited by dogma or creeds, value the individual spiritual experience and the insights that come from it and also value evidence-based science.

 

Sunshine Cathedral is a diverse, joyful, and non-dogmatic community of spiritual seekers where questions are sacred and absolutes are few. What we will declare without waiver or apology is: You are God’s miracle and not God’s mistake.

SunshineCathedral.org

Pardon My Overshares

Pardon My Overshares
When I came out to myself, I came out to the world (and btw world, in case you forgot, I’m still gay!). And it was such a liberating and life-giving experience that it taught me to live my life openly, gladly, and as much as possible without shame or fear (or at least in spite of fears).

And so, I may “overshare” on occasion. I share my doubts, my challenges, my victories, my hopes, my joys. I share about my battles with (and various victories over) depression. I shared about my detached retina, long healing process, and the joy of finally having better vision than before the incident. I shared when loved ones passed from this life experience to whatever is next. I share about my long, complicated, and often dysfunctional relationship with the scale. I share about coming of age in the world of AIDS and living well as a long term survivor. Recently I’ve shared about a fairly brief experience of Bell’s Palsy (and the exciting and rapid improvement that followed).

I am not looking for sympathy (well, not from the masses...I have my personal sympathy providers and I’ll call them when I need them). I’m not looking for anything, actually. What I want to do is share that living a life of faith is not necessarily a life of constant ease, but it can be a life of constant hope and joy that is frequently renewed. I want to show that faith can help us find and employ tools that will enable us to conquer, survive, learn from, or reinterpret the challenges in life. Faith can even give us the power to laugh and laughter, as it turns out, is healing.

I simply want to be a credible witness to the truth that while experiences come and go, we always have the power to hope, to love, to laugh, to keep moving forward. We can demonstrate blessings in the middle of uncertainty, and we can experience love, peace, gratitude, and optimism regardless of the circumstances at hand.

I don’t always do it as well as I’d like. I can feel defeated or overwhelmed or afraid like everyone else, but I do try to remind myself that I don’t have to stay stuck in those feelings forever. And when I change my attitude about something, I almost always, to some degree, also change my experience of it. And I hope that is encouraging to others who may be facing difficulties.

So, forgive me for the overshares, but I offer them as gifts, and like all gifts, if they don’t appeal to you, “accidentally” leave them in the car and forget about them (possibly regift them later). But if they do encourage you, I am so glad and that alone makes it a blessing for me.

—Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins
Sunshine Cathedral
Ft. Lauderdale