From an interview here:
I happen to know the Bible pretty deeply and I didn’t reject the Bible when I rejected its literal frame of reference. I happen to be a believing, practicing Christian. I don’t go to church on Sunday mornings for show. I go because I want to be there and I need to worship. It’s not an option for me to sleep in on Sunday. My faith is deeper than that. I do not eat a meal that I don’t stop and say grace beforehand because that’s how I acknowledge the presence of God in my life at a regular time. I try to live a life of absolute commitment. I claim my Christian identity publicly.
This puts me at odds with my colleagues in the Jesus Seminar who are so scholarly but they are not devoted. They really think the church is a sick institution and they don’t want to be part of it. I think the church is the only place we’ve got, but we’ve got to transform and redeem it. If the church is not going to be the place where people encounter God and Christ I don’t see any other place in our society to do so. I work to transform the church. I don’t work to get rid of the church. I work to transform the meaning of what it means to be a Christian, not to get rid of that meaning. ...
I wrote a book once about reclaiming the Bible for a nonreligious world. I really want to take it back from those people who I think are ruining it. I don’t dislike those people. My mother was a fundamentalist. She had not finished the 9th grade. She knew no other way to approach the biblical story.
Spong was more inclined to wear membership in the Jesus Seminar as a badge of honor as recently as 2012, here:
In the 1990’s, Robert Funk invited me to become a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. I was the first Fellow not to be a professional academic. ... While being a successful author and possessing a number of honorary doctorates, I did not have an earned PhD, which was normally regarded as a pre-requisite for becoming a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. Nonetheless, the Seminar honored me by accepting me to its membership. I have loved my association with them over the years. I have participated in their debates and deliberations. I have been invited to address some of their largest gatherings, including the 2004 event called “The Jesus Seminar at Times Square.” The Seminar has adopted some of the perspectives that I have offered and they have under-girded my career with their incisive scholarship. I have previously been recognized by them in several ways. I was chosen for membership in the “David Friedrich Strauss Society of Biblical Scholars,” a society named for an early 19th century German New Testament scholar, who first brought the findings of the academy to the attention of the people of Europe. Later I was given the “John A. T. Robinson Award” for “Courage and Integrity in Theology.”
I was deeply touched by each of these honors. To close the gap between the academy and the people in the pews has been both the goal of the Seminar and the primary ambition of my career. The Jesus Seminar has been a major force in enabling me to fulfill that vocation. I have many friends today among the Fellows of the Seminar and I believe they have a new respect for the willingness of the clergy and lay people that I represent to be engaged in biblical scholarship.
