How a Canadian church hired an atheist to serve as its minister in the first place is apparently beside the point. Nevertheless, United Church of Canada wants one of its ministers, who calls the Bible and Jesus Christ “mythology,” gone.

gretta vosperIt’s unclear, as well, why a person who denies a set of beliefs, refuses to stop leading people who adhere to said beliefs.

“I don’t believe in…the god called God,” West Hill United’s Rev. Gretta Vosper tells the Globe and Mail. “Using the word gets in the way of sharing what I want to share.”

Vosper believes “the idea of an interventionist, supernatural being” belongs “to an outdated world view.”

The “reverend” thinks her views are more in line with “Christianity’s beginnings,” when she claims people focused more on “how one lived” and less on Jesus and the Bible and all that oppressive stuff.

“Is the Bible really the word of God? Was Jesus a person?” she wonders.

“It’s mythology. We build a faith tradition upon it which shifted to find belief more important than how we lived.”

Vosper’s controversial actions began 15 years ago, when she elected to do away with the Lord’s Prayer during her Toronto church’s services.

According to the paper, she lost two-thirds of her 150 members. Then this year, she wrote an open letter stating that a belief in God can motivate “bad things” — and referenced the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris by Muslim terrorists.

“That didn’t go over well,” Vosper tells the paper. “(But) if we are going to continue to use language that suggests we get our moral authority from a supernatural source, any group that says that can trump any humanistic endeavor.”

Vosper released a video earlier this year in which she further explained her beliefs:

In many traditional congregations, those ideals are represented by the word ‘God,’ by stories from the Bible, by the person Jesus who is often spoken of as the person who lived the best life that a human could ever live. We’re not that convinced because we think that Jesus was a compilation of a number of stories over time and we didn’t come up with that idea ourselves. It came from critical contemporary scholarship — much of which I learned when I was at theological college.

She adds  in the video — which has a not-so-subtle her church is “barrier-free” — which means they “don’t privilege the Bible.”

For example, she says, “We don’t talk about God because there are a lot of people who don’t believe in God. And we don’t tell stories about Jesus very often either because we don’t even know whether he was a real person … ”

Now, the United Church denomination wants to “investigate her fitness to be a minister.”

Nora Sanders, general secretary of the church’s General Council, created a review process that will judge whether Vosper is remaining true to her ordination vows, which include a belief in “God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

Vosper has refused to leave the church and during that process, will hold to her “humanistic” views.

“If the cost of that is that we are no longer welcome within that denomination, it will be because that denomination has defined us out of it, not because we have defined ourselves out of it.”