Abstract
Several times a week, I ask myself why so many people are turning their backs on ‘organised religion’ to give themselves over to New Age spirituality, yoga, meditation or even to a cafeteria-style menu (a little bit from the Bible, a helping of Hinduism, a smattering of Buddhism)? Where has the church failed?
This year, I read T. M. Luhrmann’s book When God Talks Back, which, without meaning to, shed light on my questions. Luhrmann analyses the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a family of evangelical churches, from the viewpoint of psychological anthropology. Vineyard churches assume that, just as young children have to learn to move beyond the confusion of their psyches and take their sensory inputs as being from really present objects and other human beings, and have to learn how to live in relationship with them, so also, and all the more so, with God. Where God is concerned, our predicament is more like autism. God is omnipresent, but we suffer from a perception disorder that makes it extremely difficult to recognize our surround as loving personality. Vineyard churches confront this diagnosis with strategies for teaching people how to perceive God as really present in their lives and how to enter into relationship with God. There are classes on how to pray, prayer groups in which the more and less experienced put recommendations into practice, spiritual exercises (e.g., pouring a cup of coffee for Jesus), and there is training in how to read the bible as God speaking to us in particulars: how to recognize which unprompted thoughts and ‘coincidental’ events are communications from God. Vineyard churches are realistic: learning to live in relationship to the really-present God requires institutional initiative, individual commitment, and social reinforcement. The need for pedagogy is lifelong.
Now as ever, people are hungry for connection with transcendent realities with whom they can live in relation. What they want from religious institutions is help in overcoming our common human perception disorder. They want to be taught how to perceive such realities as really present. They want concrete instruction in how to cultivate the relationship. New Age spirituality, yoga, and meditation promise to teach people how to do this. Truth to tell, all of these methods ‘work’ to enable many to ‘connect’.
By contrast, mainstream churches are embarrassed to admit the need for this, much less mount training programs to address it. These churches cannot survive unless they reinvent themselves as schools. Of course, pedagogy will be shaped by theology. But, at a minimum, three ingredients will be required: people who visibly embody the connection with really present Godhead, a community culture sending the message that nothing is more important than growing up into the knowledge and love of God, and a lifelong syllabus of concrete practices to frame our relationships with God and one another.