What is spirituality? This short video contains the reflections of a number of people on spirituality and what it means for them.
So what does it mean for you? Do you agree with what they say? Disagree? What do you think this is saying back to Christians? What do you think Christ would say to them?
Curious Christian 
It is interesting that your latest blog is on apologetics. Christians have a fortress mentality. They are interested in the world beyond it, but are not interested in breaking down their walls, only extending them.
Christ would commiserate with the people on the video. The Church is a good antidote for civilization, but totally unequipped to deal with the vast, diverse spiritual reality and experience beyond it. It is a complete blank.
The Natives understand Jesus far more than Christians do, simply because their knowledge of spiritual reality consists of more than just civilized humans and ‘God.’ It would strike at the pride of the Church to admit this. And it takes a lot of courage to leave the group and find this out. The Church prefers to see the light of Christ standing in the darkness, instead of seeing what He is actually standing in.
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Christians have a fortress mentality… that is a huge generalisation… I won’t argue that it is not present, but will argue that there are significant numbers of Christians who are actively seeking to engage in meaningful dialogue with people of other spiritualities and faiths…
I honestly believe that we do too much church bashing and not enough church encouraging, it is all too easy to take the negative view and not to seek to educate and enable … in doing so we erect barriers and walls of pride of our own and we divide christians from christians by declaring that we have the understanding and knowledge that is needed- back to the Corinthian situation!
I like the way the lady in the final clip talked about listening to peoples hearts… a great challenge to all of us!
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Perhaps the Church needs to see itself as closer to secularism, with the amount of mental labor involved, than it is with non-religious spiritualities. It is interested in wisdom for the individual. This confinement to the lonely individual living in objective matter, trying to reach ‘something’ is a dominant impulse of Christianity’s child, secularism. It may reach out, but it is unwilling to ‘fall.’ Religion remains security for the most part. The Church has few vehicles for the scary experience of ‘letting go.’ Missions into hostile territory is always tethered to a presupposition. It reinforces the faith in God, but doesn’t help to break humans out of their belief that reality is only God, humans and inert matter. So we stay human-centered, and Creation remains unknown. It is hard to find God when Creation is unknown.
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The Church has few vehicles for the scary experience of ‘letting go.
100% agree, and this is a way forward we need to find…I’d love to hear you unpack the thought that Christian belief is only God and humans and inert matter…
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Its quite simple. What life do humans hold in equal regard as human life? Everything is below us, that we must manage… err, be stewards of. So there is only the God-human pipeline. Spiritual reality consists of only God, Jesus, souls and the devil (if you believe in it). Everything outside of this defaults to the latter. Everything outside of the pipe devolves to science.
We mine our experience with these components for wisdom. That’s life. That Creation. That’s all. We are humans, alone in an inanimate universe with just God and other humans. Rather lonely place. That is why Christians look for God in their fellow humans, if they don’t get some adrenelin from an electric encounter with Christ or God.
There are critical belief structures that we take for granted that keep us from even considering this limited cosmology. Even if we can imagine outside of this box, one still has to experience it before things start to really crumble.
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What a joke? I have lived in the Muslim world, Mulims do not have any sense of peace or assurance in Islam. When I listened to people tell me their belief, i would listen and listen but all the time knowing that they were totally lost without Jesus. I can’t imagine Jesus listening to a hindu and aching in his heart for this person to follw him as the way the truth and the light, not as an option or an afterthought but as the creator maker of all things. This lady is totally lost.
Tim
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