Animate: Week 2

Religion | Spirituality Is Not Enough • Lillian Daniel
What does it mean to be spiritual? Is it the same as being religious? Lillian Daniel pushes back at this question that has been stirring up the cultural conversation for a while now. She asks us to consider how the seeds of faith to take root and thrive. What role does organized religion play in helping—or hindering—growth? If religion is the problem, why has it held fast for thousands of years? In this age of religious pluralism, is it possible or even desirable to stick with our age-old traditions?

Thanks for a great conversation last week at our Animate Adult Education Class. I’ve been gone this week at a retreat, so just now getting to put up a short post. As I was thinking about our conversation on what religion is, what spirituality is, etc., a few things came to mind:

1. Sarah, who is getting her PhD in Christian Spirituality has defined spirituality as such: “Spirituality is the reception of, and response to, the Spirit (understood to be God at work in this world).”
2. The video below went viral on YouTube about a year ago, and currently has over 22 million views. It’s an interesting take on our question – someone who says that he hates religion, but loves Jesus. You might be interested in watching it. For many people, it’s very easy to separate the two. There are a series of books written by an emerging church pastor, Dan Kimball, and one of them is titled: “They Like Jesus but Not the Church.”

I’m interested in seeing if anyone else is comfortable sharing where they placed themselves in that drawing between the religious side and the spiritual side?

One of the questions we didn’t get to was where you would place Jesus on that same drawing. Where do you think Jesus fit if you had to place him between “religious” and “spiritual”?

As I shared during the conversation, I don’t have as many pleasant thoughts about tradition, like Lillian does. I do think that we need to be thinking beyond our own individual selves, I think it does mean something that we believe in something bigger than ourselves. But I think our tradition, and our traditions, have really screwed a lot of things up. We’ve hurt a lot of people. Our opinions, and beliefs, and theologies and doctrines…which have all been a part of our tradition, have caused scores of people to leave the church and not want to have anything to do with God.

So…I think that’s an issue. We are the church reformed and always reforming. I think that Presbyterians spend a bit too much time on the “reformed” side, and not enough on the “always reforming” side.

Anyway – would love to hear some of your thoughts, what have you been thinking about this past week? What questions still linger for you?