In the weekend, I was reading an article about intimate relationships and there was a quote from a relationship expert responding to the common experience of two people feeling a spark when they meet. Their relationship grows. But, years later, the fire diminishes and they ask, “How do we get that spark back?” The reply from the expert: “You don’t! Stop wanting to. I beg you!”
Of course, some people (many people?) abandon such a (now-sparkless) relationship to go off to find the spark once again, the feeling of butterflies in the stomach, the experience of “falling in love” once again.
The same dynamic is true in our faith journey. For many people, there’s a falling-in-love-with-Jesus experience, with God; a passion to read the Bible; the joy of worship, prayer group, Bible study,…
And then comes the year-after-year plod of the faith journey, the disappointments of prayers not answered, the shock of discovering church leaders have feet of clay, religious scandals, tragedies, violence and contradictions in the Bible, … Some people, then, move from one faith tradition to the next – encouraged, I might add, by churches’ tendencies to the commodification of “God”, the promotion of “finding the right denomination for you”, “finding the appropriate worship style for your personality”, “seeking the faith tradition that fits with your personal beliefs, your list of values”…
There are faith communities and traditions where there seems to be much more emotion expressed (charismatic, pentecostal…) and others where there seems to be much more formality (Roman Catholic, Anglican,…). A founder of a (by NZ standards) mega-church (in the former tradition) came and talked to me when they had done statistical analysis of their church. They found that, on average, people stayed 5-7 years and then left. And when they left, they (again on average) didn’t go on to another church. His congregation was predominantly young. Anglican congregations are well-known for being predominantly older. He realised all the points I made above (crises, waning enthusiasm,…) and was looking for the structures, the theological foundations, the spiritual disciplines that would sustain people for a lifetime of faith and relating to God.
So whilst I regularly encounter people in the liturgical tradition deprecating, say, the charismatic as “happy clappy”, and, on the other hand, those in the non-liturgical looking down on liturgy as “formalism” and “religion rather than relationship”, I contend that we need both-and. We need the space for people to fall in love with Jesus, and we need the maturity of communal and individual spiritual disciplines and deeply academic theological study to sustain a life-time of growing into unity with God.
In the early days of being chaplain at an Anglican secondary school, I challenged (at synod) ageing Anglican parishes to abandon their comfort and come and join our (open-to-the-public) Sunday services. They had few to no young people to mentor, we had over 600 young people with a small number of faithful adults who could be role models to these young people at this significant time in their lives. Only one community took up the challenge, interpreting it as coming along to one service to see what we did. That community, by the way, now no longer exists.
We need to help people, gently, to realise that their “in love with God” butterfly-in-the-stomach-like feelings are NOT God, is not union with God. Just like strong feelings of infatuation is not a sign of a deep relationship with another human being! We need to help people distinguish between feelings and thoughts about God and God. We need to teach about stages of faith, the Problem of Evil, deep biblical criticism and holding onto faith, science and religion, the apophatic,… We need to practice and teach spiritual disciplines that last a lifetime. And we also need to remind people who have been longer on the journey to remember how they were in the early days of their relationship with God. And to remember that wherever we encounter beauty, truth, and goodness – God is there, such are experiences of God.
We need to be enthusiastic when people fall in love with God and express all the seemingly-naive reactions that any person expresses in the first spark of a relationship. And, when that spark begins to fade and people are wondering “How do we get that spark back?” they need to realise that for most of us: “You don’t! Stop wanting to. I beg you!”
Worship and Mission
This week, Mark Chamberlain (the Archdeacon for Regeneration and Mission in our diocese) asked me about the connection of worship to mission:
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I like this a lot, Father. But there is no way I will take anything from the charismatics, the fundamentalists. Not anymore. Fundamentalist teachers cornered me in high school and told me I was going to hell in front of their classrooms. I’ve lost too much to be happy clappy anymore.
Thanks for your point, Darrell. I’m sorry for such dreadful experiences. I wonder if we can distinguish between some form of infatuation/falling-in-love with God/Jesus and the “you are going to hell” fear-mongering-into-faith approaches (acknowledging that there is, often, a large intersection)? I have a passion for helping people find a positive spirituality and escaping from the type of Almighty-Punishing-Orgre-in-the-sky imagery that I grew up with. Blessings.
How quickly ‘Divine Mystery’ will degenerate to ‘cult’.
No one of us knows everything, the most learned even do not and sometimes the simplest acts of kindness reveal God’s highest glory and the teachings of Jesus.
Sorry you were beset by some misguided people Darrell, but someone probably taught them poor proselytism; there was a movement in the UK a few years ago where people would greet other Christians with ‘how many people have you saved today?’ I thought (mostly quietly) ‘how many people have you put off today?’
There is only one unforgivable sin in the Bible. People might do better to treat faith with the reverence and humility it requires in practice. Jesus talked about the ‘secret ownership of the initiated’ in Luke and Matthew: ‘whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.’
He came not for the righteous but to call the sinful to repent. In my current workplace church we repent each week, and remind ourselves that it is sinful to believe we are without sin ourselves. But that can easily become its own sanctimony. None of us are perfect, we are all a work in progress.
‘We need to practice and teach spiritual disciplines that last a lifetime. And we also need to remind people who have been longer on the journey to remember how they were in the early days of their relationship with God. And to remember that wherever we encounter beauty, truth, and goodness – God is there, such are experiences of God.’
Very true Bosco. And to remember that unfailing enthusiasm- for anything- comes and goes, constancy takes commitment and character! ‘Every valley shall be filled And every mountain and hill brought low; The crooked places shall be made straight And the rough ways smooth’.