Tuesday Night Book Study: How Western Christianity Got It Wrong

Beginning Tuesday, October 13, Dr. Casey Church will lead a study of Randy Woodley’s How Western Christianity Got It Wrong: Replacing the God of Fear with a Spirituality of Healing (Broadleaf Books, 2026). We’ll meet on Zoom at 6:30 PM Mountain Time, and we’ll go at the pace the conversation demands.

Randy Woodley, a Keetoowah Band (Cherokee) descendant who has spent years writing about Indigenous wisdom and the way of Jesus, asks questions many of us may have but may have been unable to express. How did a teacher who lived in close connection with the whole community of creation end up used to justify empire and the harm done to our ecology? Where did the ideas about sin, salvation, and atonement that shape so much of Western church life come from and why does so much of it seem to betray the character of Creator that we see and experience? And what would it look like to hear Creator Sets Free (Jesus)’s message apart from those frameworks? Woodley draws on Indigenous knowledge that was flourishing on Turtle Island long before missionaries arrived, and he writes as someone who has spent a long time inside church walls but has since moved outside of those walls to spend time in creation alongside Creator.

Woodley spends the first half of the book critiquing the Western church and its theological provenance while spending the latter half offering solutions based on an Indigenous approach that many of us may already be familiar with but have been dissuaded by the church from practicing.

This study is about learning in community. Stories get told, questions get asked, and we listen to each other, even though the circle is held on Zoom. Whether you’ve already read the book or are just curious, you’re welcome among us.

Details: Tuesdays, 6:30 PM Mountain Time, beginning October 13, over Zoom, open to anyone. To get the link, email GMW4ABQ@gmail.com.