Melissa Florer-Bixler, pastor at Raleigh Mennonite Church in North Carolina, is the speaker for Spiritual Life Week at Bluffton University this week. Her Tuesday Forum was titled “Becoming Atheists: Worship Among the Gods.”
Melissa Florer-Bixler photo by Olivia Tennefoss
“We wanted to have a topic this year that helped people connect their faith to their lives — and not just to their personal lives, but to the world, recognizing how complex and how hard the world feels right now,” said Florer-Bixler, who is also the author of Fire by Night: Finding God in the Pages of the Old Testament. “What does Jesus have to do with any of that?”
Spiritual Life Week events are centered around is Colossians 3:4, “When Christ, who is our life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”
Florer-Bixler said she wants to look at the early Christians and what they were writing about and going through. Her goal is to give reflection on how to be atheists to the many gods of this day, such as late-stage capitalism, white supremacy and religion-infused nationalism, in the same way that early Christians became atheists to Roman gods.
“We’re focusing on this passage from Colossians and how people in the ancient world were also asking these questions, I think that’s what’s really interesting about this is that it’s not as if somebody figured these answers out,” said Florer-Bixler. “What we get from the New Testament and from these letters is we actually get a glimpse at how other people were working this out.”
The theme speaks to living a faith-filled life in a world surrounded by other gods that are constantly being created. It’s also a world full of diverse people, cultures and religions. Through reflecting on the theme Scripture among other passages and biblical letters, Florer-Bixler explained how they can help students work through their own troubles.
“These are the kind of things other people did to figure out their lives and how to live among really diverse people when they were diverse themselves,” said Florer-Bixler. “But [they] also lived in cultures that sometimes did really terrible things to one another. How can we both resist those cultures and [have] a culture of care within ourselves?”
Through her experience in college, she could see how she was being pulled out of the world by being a part of a culture that separated Christians from the world. It meant one had to listen to certain music, dress a certain way and only be friends with other Christians. She felt like what she experienced at her college is still similar to what students experience now, and the more she reads the Bible, she feels that Christians have a lot to learn from others.
“I never had women pastors growing up, so I think it was one of those things growing up where you can’t be what you can’t see,” said Florer-Bixler. “I just thought that church was boring, but really being in churches that did some of the things we’re talking about, who are uniting all of life with faith and actually seeing faith as something that can animate or [make] real changes in our world was something that felt profoundly powerful to me to get to be a part of that in my work life.”
The purpose of Spiritual Life Week is to emphasize faith throughout the campus through many student-planned events and speakers. Florer-Bixler hopes to leave people with a renewed sense of hope and faith during this exhausting time of life.
“I hope that there will be a sense of freedom from the ways that we can imagine the difficult things happening in our world,” said Florer-Bixler. “I think we all are aware of the deepening climate crisis, and there is war everywhere and those things can often feel very paralyzing and overwhelming in addition to all the things that we’re working out with our own lives. It feels like everything is coming at you at the same time.”
