St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Newnan will host a live Webcast of the 2007 Trinity Conference Monday through Wednesday, Jan. 22-24.

“This year’s conference, ‘God’s Unfinished Future — Why it Matters Now,’ brings together some of the world’s brightest and best theological thinkers to share an alternative to a widely held, but not universal understanding of God’s plans for our future,” said the Rev. Hunt Priest, associate rector of St. Paul’s.

“We’ll spend Monday evening and the two following days listening to speakers and roundtable discussions and also will discuss among ourselves an alternative to the ‘Left Behind’ books,” Priest said. “The theology leaves all but a chosen few outside God’s mercy and love. Scripture and the church have much more to say about those topics than Tim LaHaye and others write about. Those books are works of fiction.”

Trinity Church in New York makes its annual conference available to people around the globe through Web casting. For the second year. St. Paul’s is the regional site for the Webcast.

Conference organizers say that today in America there is a battle over Christianity’s vision of God’s future.

“Popular apocalyptic works such as the Left Behind series pit the forces of good and evil in an imminent showdown where God will defeat the forces of evil, the earth will be annihilated, and the saved lifted up,” say organizers. “The claim of this conference is that this vision is a massive and dangerous distortion of the biblical picture of God’s purpose. This apocalypticism, in our tradition and others, supports a politics of polarization, violence, and extremism.”

Conference organizers also have planned a variety of speakers including Jürgen Moltmann (Theology of Hope, The Coming of God).

“In a lifetime of teaching and writing, Moltmann has championed an alternative to contemporary renderings of apocalypticism,” organizers say. “His perspective is rich in its biblical grounding as well as socio-historical analysis, underscoring the political implications of all theological visions about ultimate things. Now at the pinnacle of a significant career, he offers a powerful story in which God is truly all in all and no life, no aspect of God’s good creation is abandoned.”

To shed a particularly American light on these questions, theologian and author The Rev. Barbara R. Rossing, Th.D. (The Rapture Exposed) will trace the development of the prevailing narrative and propose a reading of the text that is both more life-giving and more faithful to Christian tradition.

The Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes, best-selling author, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church at Harvard, will reflect on how a vision of God’s future has served as a source of hope and direction in the African-American struggle of liberation.

All interested persons in Coweta, Fayette and surrounding areas are invited to attend.

While there is no charge for the conference itself, the church is charging $20 to help offset cost of lunch and snacks.

Reservations may be made by phoning the church office, 770-253-4264.

The conference is scheduled for Monday evening and all day Tuesday and Wednesday, and participants are welcome to attend all or part of the conference. Additional information is available at www.trinitywallstreet.org/institute.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, on Roscoe Road in Newnan is a growing parish of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta and offers numerous activities and programs for families, single people, teenagers and retired people.

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