No sooner had I talked about how churchy the Sunday Assembly is/isn’t then news breaks that several of the New York organizers have left the brand to form the Godless Revival.
It sounds mostly amicable, with a difference in emphasis being the primary difference. The Sunday Assembly is moving slightly away from the atheist brand, while the New York contingent is hoping to play up atheism and mock religion a bit more.
…we have [had] our first organizational division and it is at Sunday Assembly New York. The chief split is between those who are more on the atheist side of the fence, and then those who want to have a more inclusive message. This division has meant that the inclusive contingent resigned from the board. This then led the remaining gang to start a new group called The Godless Revival.
In the non-religious marketplace of ideas, the more the merrier. I’m happy to keep working with Sanderson and Pippa’s model that has evidence for its appeal (at least in secular Britain) but will wish well to the Godless Revivalists.
Sanderson will still be visiting the New York Ethical Culture Society (who have an incredible building that I hope to one day visit) to (re-)launch Sunday Assembly New York, and I look forward to hearing of their success.
One thing worth noting is that Sanderson is quite supportive of each group going their own way and the web-based infrastructure that will be crowd funded for later this month will eventually be used to help build godless congregations of all sorts (not just Sunday Assemblies).
Nevertheless, I guess one characteristic of churches I missed earlier was the tendency to schism over (a)theological differences.
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