Sophia is Love and Wisdom, Goddess and Queen of the Universe

welcomes you with peace and love from our home in Richmond, between the mountains and the sea!

We are an autonomous local Gnostic parish family in Richmond, Virginia, in communion with the Apostolic Gnostic Church in America (AGCA). We are neo-classical Gnostics who believe in the power of human liberation through spiritual awakening, seeking to recover the religion of the early Gnostics who lived and worked in the generations after Yeshua the Christ's ministry, and focusing in a special way on maintaing the Gnostic tradition of incorporating feminine aspects of our relationship to God, particularly by revering our lady Sophia (Divine Wisdom), who serves as the counterpart to Christ in the pursuit of gnosis ("spiritual knowledge").

This website will give you some information about our church family, our Gnostic faith, and how you can become a part of our community in these early days of our journey together. If your question is not answered on this page, please feel free to contact us by e-mail at SophiaRichmondChurch@gnostic-church.org

A lot of people in the world today have heard the terms "Gnosticism," "Gnostic," or "gnosis," but are not quite sure what they mean. You may have encountered the phenomenon of Gnosticism in history classes, religious studies courses, or even in the popular writing of people like Dan Brown. Or maybe the term sounds like something weird you've never heard of at all! Many do not realize that Gnosticism continues to be practiced as a religion by thousands of people around the world. Whatever group you fall in, we would like to welcome you and thank you for taking the time to find out more about our spirituality!

Gnosticism is one of the smaller of the major world religions. Gnosticism separated from early Christianity from around the beginning of the second century; it has experienced a dramatic revival since the mid-twentieth century thanks largely to the discovery of many early Gnostic writings in Egypt (the Nag Hammadi texts). It may be easiest at first for you to think of Gnostic beliefs as being quite similar to some of the basic beliefs of Buddhism. We Gnostics believe that in the world around us we experience a material principle, which brings with it such things as suffering, pain, death, impermanence, and a spiritual principle that brings such things as peace, love, joy, beauty, connection, and what is eternal in the human soul. We further believe that these principles have different origins -- that the spiritual principle originates in the one true God, whereas the physical principle originates in a lesser and imperfect Creator, who produced a flawed Creation -- thus we would not consider the Creator-being in Genesis to be the true God, but what we just call the "demiurge" or "creator." However, we are not dualists, but rather monists, because we believe in only one true God, whom the early Gnostics often just referred to as "the One."

However, the spiritual essentially underlies and is panentheistically suffused into the physical world, so the purpose of life is to attain "knowledge" (the literal meaning of "gnosis") -- not factual knowledge, but experiential knowledge of encountering the spirit in yourself, in other people, in nature, and ultimately in God. Thus, we are not only monists but also in a sense pantheists, with a strong sense of the dignity not only of human life but of the whole circle of the universe and nature. We also believe in two major bridges or mediating forces between God and the human being who help us to achieve gnosis, Christ and Sophia. Sophia represents Christ's counterpart, and personifies the feminine side of our relationship to the wholeness of God. We speak of Christ and Sophia as divine in the same sense that we are all divine by the awesome gift of God's spirit within us, a gift that we can come to actualize in the course of our lives by the pursuit of understanding and compassion to others. Thus our church is dedicated to the beauty of Sophia Goddess-Mother of the Universe.

For a more detailed statement of beliefs, we ascribe to the American Gnostic Confession (2004), which is the main statement of beliefs for the Apostolic Gnostic Church in America. We can offer an easy download of the Confession in Word format through this link, or you can view it on the AGCA page by selecting the section "What We Believe."

This is in some ways a difficult question to answer, because it depends on your definition of the term Christian. We are and consider ourselves followers of Christ, as did the early Gnostics. However, many of the early Christians disliked Gnosticism, especially because it tended to question the authority of church structures and rules and various kinds of religious establishments. The Christian establishment, which eventually became the Catholic Church from which Protestantism later developed, came to condemn Gnosticism as a "heresy" that "deviated" from the "true faith." Gnosticism, like many alternative movements within Christianity, was actively persecuted and driven underground as the Christian establishment seized the power of the Roman state to turn against its enemies.

This is one reason we usually don't describe ourselves as "Christians." In fact, there are some significant differences between mainstream Christianity and neo-classical Gnosticism. In the interest of "full disclosure," we will highlight these briefly:

We don't identify God primarily as the originator of the material world, but rather as the creator of spiritual reality. Many mainstream Christians generally don't like our idea of the demiurge; they prefer a mythology based on a perfect world that went bad due to some human action, which is now revisited generation after generation by the same God who didn't want the people to have any spiritual knowledge in the first place ("don't eat from the tree of understanding right and wrong"). Our Gnostic mythology is one that speaks of systemic flaws in materiality, similar to the basic ideas expressed by Buddhism in the Four Noble Truths. In other words, we have a substantially different cosmology. We look at the world differently in some basic ways.

Another set of important differences has to do with where we look for spiritual meaning. For many of our friends in conservative Protestantism, the bible is elevated as the prime source of truth. Gnostics, while we respect the bible as a collection of venerable texts, also use many other sacred texts from the early centuries after Christ's life, especially the set of texts known now as the Nag Hammadi scriptures. Whatever text you are speaking of, however -- Nag Hammadi or the regular bible or anything else -- we do not look at any book as having the absolute meaning of life written in its pages. No books, not even the bible, just fell full-formed out of the sky to land on people's heads and tell them what to do. What we now think of as scriptures were just texts written by regular people, struggling, doubting, finding their way toward faith and understanding just like we are today. Furthermore, the accepted Christian bible that seems so complete today was the result of lots of arguments, debates, and slow decisions about what books would be let in and what books would be kept out which went on for centuries. As the mainstream Catholic Christian faction won out, it put its own texts into the bible and kept the Gnostic and other alternative texts out. This part of religious history is known as the "formation of the canon." At any rate, virtual worship of the bible can become its own form of idolatry -- bibliolatry, worshipping the book instead of the God who the book is supposed to direct you toward. In Gnostic gospels like the Gospel of Thomas, we read Yeshua telling us clearly that the basic key to understanding God and the meaning of life is within us -- we have the amazing gift of God's light within us, in our spirits, in our innermost beings. Books can help us, but only in the "light in the person of light," to use Yeshua's words. We are God-believers, not bible-believers, although we respect the biblical texts for their beauty and insights.

Our Catholic friends, on the converse, often emphasize the role of the "one true Church" as the final arbiter of truth. We respect the emphasis this gives to the family and community of the church, but we do not follow this path either. Overemphasis on the role of any particular church structures can often threaten to become just as consuming as worship of a book, and actually threaten to turn into yet another form of idolatry, which we might coin the term "ecclesiolatry." Early Gnostics understood that church structures can grow so big and important that they actually start blocking people from God, or as Yeshua joked about the religious leaders of his time in the Gopel of Thomas, "They lock up the kingdom of heaven, and they won't let anyone else in or even go in themselves!" Ultimately Gnosticism is about the dignity and the liberation of the individual. We need churches and spiritual families because we need to reach out to others; we need to hold ourselves as part of a group of people who are making the same journey we are; we all need support and guidance at different times in our lives. However, the church -- whether local or a denomination -- must never become bigger than the message. We look for spiritual meaning first in ourselves, because we are imprinted with the "likeness of God," our spirits; we look for spiritual meaning in others and in the natural world, also imprinted by God's breath; we look at books and churches to help us, but not to rule over us in a despotic way.
Finally, we have a different conception of the role of Yeshua the Christ. Much of conservative Christianity looks at Christ as being a "God in human form," a sort of avatar, and emphasizes the "sacrifice" of Christ's death which was necessary to take away human sin and appease God. Our understanding of Christ is in some ways 180 degrees different from this kind of view. We believe Yeshua was a man like any of us, with a mother and father who loved him -- but he was destined to great things because he was spirit-filled and came to understand his deep connection to God. Over the course of his life, he attained the process of "gnosis" or spiritual knowledge, and transformed his being to such an extent that he experienced a great metamorphosis of being, the Resurrection, a force that even overcame physical death, since he lives on in our hearts and our spirits today. We think it might be appropriate to speak of Christ as divine, but only in the sense that we are all divine, not in the sense of say Zeus or some Greek god popping down onto the earth for a stroll. Because of this, we also look at Christ primarily as a teacher and a role-model, or rather a gateway who, through his life and teaching, holds his hand out to us, inviting us to follow him down the same path of the resurrection and the life. We reject the idea that some sort of angry and sadistic God needed a bloody human sacrifice for "sin." We do not look at Christ as a sort of pagan sin offering, but rather as the greatest of many spiritual teachers, who, similar to people like the Buddha, laid a path that we can follow over the course of our own lives.

This is a long way of explaining why for the most part contemporary Gnostics do not consider their religion to be a branch of Christianity. Having said that, there are some people who feel more comfortable seeing themselves as Gnostic Christians, and we certainly understand that. In general, however, we encourage people both in the movement, in the media, and studying Gnosticism to consider portraying our faith as a separate though small world religion, like Jainism.

In contrast to the sufferings of the past, which we do not forget, it is time to move forward. We Gnostics generally have a very good relationship with contemporary Christians, and we are eager to build on that relationship. Although there are some parts of the Christian community, especially fundamentalists, who consider our movement to be misguided and evil, most Christians have been very open to dialogue and conversation with us. We share many things, beginning with our love for God and our passionate dedication to the path of Christ. We also disagree on many things, but honest dialogue can help open up doors of communication between human beings, which is ultimately where true compassion begins. We want to especially invite any of our Christian brothers and sisters to visit our regular weekly services once we have secured church space. We also would be willing to do "exchange visits" in which a member of your community would visit our church one week and then one of our brothers or sisters would visit your church the following week. If you would like to arrange something like that, please send us an email.

We are in Richmond, Virginia, on the east coast of the United States. We do not currently have any physical facilities, so we are in negotiation about renting space for our services and classes. We hope to begin regular meetings in a rented or leased facility by the fall of this year. If you would like to help us find a possible facility, please send us a message at any time. We have sister churches in communion with the AGCA in Tennessee, Texas, and Las Vegas, Nevada.

Our main worship service is the Gnostic Divine Service of the Apostolic Gnostic Church in America. This is a liturgy that is derived from sources in a number of religions as well as from the practices of early Gnosticism, and involves the reading of sacred texts, prayers, symbolic rituals, and the Eucharist in which bread and wine are offered in honor of Christ and Sophia.

What makes the AGCA distinctive is that we practice what we call "radical open communion" and the "radical universal priesthood." To put it plainly, we believe everyone has the calling to function as a priest of Christ and Sophia, and because of this, we carry this belief out by inviting everyone not only to take part in liturgies but to actually perform and lead their own celebrations of Divine Service. You don't have to be a member of our church, or even consider yourself a Gnostic to perform our liturgies!

Generally, in our local Gnostic church community, we offer Divine Service as a group during meetings, and many of us celebrate Divine Service on our own in our homes; we encourage individuals to set up home altars if feasible for personal worship, or Divine Service can even be done outdoors in celebration of nature. Our Divine Service is also extremely flexible. There are sections that invite you to potentially use prayers that you have written yourself, readings that particularly appeal to you, ad so forth; moreover, in general we are entirely open to people revising or adding to the established rubrics of Divine Service as they see best to help them develop their spiritual journey. You can read the text of the Gnostic Divine Service online -- there are basically two forms, one for small groups and church families, and one for people celebrating a solitary ritual on their own. Please feel free to begin performing the rituals in your own home immediately, if you find them appealing. We find that a balance between group and private worship can be most conducive toward approaching the mysteries of faith and the beauty of symbolism as it can affect our lives.

If you are a Christian, you will find many elements that you are familiar with in our prayers and activitie during Divine Service; if you are Catholic, you will see that Catholic Eucharistic (holy communion) elements of liturgy have affected our liturgical approach. On the other hand, other elements are drawn primarily from contemporary Pagan religious practices. We are a very eclectic and open kind of religion, and we want our liturgy to reflect that approach to life and the world around us.

How exactly is Divine Service conducted in Sophia Community meetings in Richmond? Because AGCA churches and parishes are quasi-autonomous, worship is not always handled entirely the same in every local church community. As mentioned already, Sophia Community has not yet had regular weekly worship services since we haven't yet located an affordable space, although we have had several meetings in people's houses and outdoors. However, we can give a good summary of how worship services will be offered once we have secured church space for our spiritual family.

A table is set aside as an altar, and chairs are placed around it. All members of the group sit in a semicircle or circle around the altar, depending on the size of the group. On the altar are candles, bread and wine, and other liturgical objects. The service may open with the singing of the hymn, and then the person designated to offer Divine Service on that particular day begins with a period of silent meditation. There are prayers, readings, and a period for a short homiletic talk on the readings along with a time of questions and discussion, especially for visitors. Water is ritually blessed, then each person in the congregation is invited to wash his or her hands symbolically in preparation for the Eucharist or holy communion (visitors who want to simply sit and watch are welcome to do so, but everyone is invited to participate actively in the Service if they choose to do so). We perform two symbolic rituals of communion -- a commemoration of the partnership of Christ and Sophia, represented particularly by the use of the light of candles, and then the celebration of the Eucharist in which bread and wine are consecrated, representing the briding of dualities in Christ, body and blood, spirit and flesh, gift and mystery, love and compassion. Everyone receives communion if they wish. After the Eucharist is celebrated, there are more prayers. At the end of the Service, after the people are all blessed, the celebrant and anyone who wishes will go outside and deposit the remains of water, bread, and wine out as a gift to nature with a short prayer.

Liturgies generally last less than an hour, depending on the length of time for discussion and questions.

Contemporary Gnostics are very eager to engage the communities and world around them. While we don't all agree on every political and social issue, we do have a general consensus that we should work for a progressive social justice agenda. Some issues that concern a lot of our members are:

Our pastor is Brother Matthew Ouroboros. He also serves as the Vicar of the Apostolic Gnostic Church in America, which we are an autonomous member parish of. However, we have a democratic church structure and all major decisions are made by the congregation as a whole. You can read more about Br. Matthew on the AGCA Website

We would be delighted to have you as a new member of our spiritual family! It is very easy to join our church -- all you need to do is be familiar with our basic beliefs and practices and feel that you want to be a part. If you have questions or are ready to join, please write us an email and in return we can provide you with a membership information form. Once you join the local community, you will automatically become part of the larger AGCA family around the world.

By now some of you may be thinking -- show me where they want me to give them money. Actually, we are very dedicated to avoiding letting our Gnostic mission be siderailed by constant appeals for money. We do not have any expected donations from church members. We will never actively ask anyone for money either individually or in our church services. We know that some people are having a really difficult time in this economy, and we will do our best to ensure that anyone who needs financial help to buy Gnostic scriptures or liturgical items like candles will get as much support as we can give. It will, of course, cost money for us to continue our ministry over the coming months and years. Starting in the fall, we will take small cash or money order love offerings at our services or through a P.O. Box we are in the process of setting up. These donations will be spent on direct parish costs. For any larger donations, or for credit card donations, we ask you to send your money directly to the AGCA, our international communion. The AGCA uses 100% of all donations for advancing the Gnostic message in the world today, for website costs, printing and mailing, planning for the national Gnostic conference in 2006, and the development of resources for our community and our sister churches and parishes.

To make it easy for you to donate to the AGCA, we have included a link at the bottom of this page. Donations are handled through Paypal, one of the most respected financial institutions on the Internet, where you know that your personal information will be kept safe and totally confidential. Although all donations go to charitable purposes, they are not tax-deductible at this point in time. Even if it is just three or four dollars, thank you for your sacrifice. We will do our best to reward your generosity by working to advance the kingdom in the world around us.