Seeking the Spirit: How to Create a Community of Seekers

PREFACE

There are many religious people worldwide who are inspiring examples of what it means to live compassionately. They’re willing to love, serve, and accept others without judgment. We appreciate the goodness these people contribute through their attitudes and actions. It’s important to acknowledge at the beginning of this book that traditional religion has worked—and continues to work—for millions of people, bringing them into a closer relationship with God and with other human beings.

But just as religion serves millions of people and brings them in contact with the Divine, there are also millions whom the church fails to serve. At Journeys Community, we think it’s important to represent the views of spiritual seekers for whom religion hasn’t worked. This book is written for those people who feel they’ve been overlooked, unrepresented, or unserved by traditional religion. We know there are people like us who want to deepen their connection to the Divine but have found religion to be either irrelevant in their lives, too laden with dogma, or too limiting in its view. Many of us at one time or another have been regular church members but have come to regard the traditional church as intolerant of our need to seek God in less conventional ways.

The occasional unfavorable representation of religion in this book isn’t meant to be a criticism of all religions. Nor is it meant to convince people who are already well served by religion to change their spiritual paths. But it’s important to acknowledge the perspective of millions of people who are uninterested in church, or who have resentments against the church that may keep them from a deeper spiritual life. We wish to reflect the opinions and experience of those spiritual seekers who fail to see the relevance of religious practice and doctrine in contemporary society, those who have suffered from the effects of church dogma, church politics, intolerance, judgment, and religious exclusivism—and even those who have simply come to disagree with religious beliefs.

When we refer to traditional religion or the traditional church in an unflattering light, we are primarily referring to fundamentalist Christians, whether evangelical or conservative, as well as extremists of other religions who insist that there is only one true path to God. In America, where religion has been hijacked by the extreme right and turned into a political force, the word fundamentalist is a catchall term for conservative Christians. As Bruce Bawer notes in Stealing Jesus, Conservative Christians, unlike liberal Christians, tend to define the word ‘Christian’ in such a way as to exclude others—in most cases, a large number of their fellow conservative Christians.¹ It’s unfortunate that religions worldwide have suffered the negative associations of fundamentalism. The peace and goodness that a belief in God can bring into a person’s life through religion has been overshadowed by the message of exclusivism and intolerance that fundamentalism preaches. Unfortunately, the church as a whole has been stigmatized by fundamentalism, preventing it from becoming a viable spiritual path for many seekers.

So the traditional church has turned a blind eye to itself, unable to see itself clearly—unable to see itself as the larger non-churchgoing public sees it. But this book isn’t a comprehensive study of the failings or successes of the contemporary church, nor is it meant to analyze ways the contemporary church can reach out to seekers and attract them into traditional congregations. Though this book takes a look at the effects of modernism and postmodernism on spirituality, it’s only to point to the changing views of our times.

Our hope is that the church will recognize that it can’t possibly serve everyone with its message—nor should it—and acknowledge that all people have the right to live out their spiritual beliefs as they see fit. Many more people are served on their spiritual paths by a mutual attitude of love and acceptance.

The personal stories in this book represent the experiences of many of us as spiritual seekers who have been searching for ways to grow in our connection with the Divine. In describing the process of developing Journeys Community, we offer a model for building a seeker community that is meant to inspire other spiritual seekers and organizations that wish to create a community of their own, where people can worship the God of their understanding without being told what they should believe or how they should experience God in their lives.

The views of this book come from our personal experience. It’s a chronicle of our growth and, we hope, an inspiration for seekers everywhere.

CHAPTER 1

WANDERERS WHO

ARE NOT LOST

There’s a bumper sticker that reads, Not all who wander are lost, a quote from J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings. This bit of wisdom describes an attitude that many spiritual seekers share: a sense that the wandering is an essential part of the spiritual journey. It’s almost a cliché to say it: life is not about the destination, but about the journey. The journey and the experience of one’s own life are what hold meaning for us. Tolkien’s sentiment honors the art of wandering; it’s a lighthearted response to the expectations of a more traditional society.

But the phrase also recognizes that the mere act of wandering labels us as lost. Unfortunately, in this society, the notion that people are lost also implies that they’re somehow unknowing, unstable, or irresponsible. In traditional religions—and fundamentalist Christian churches in particular—the word lost assumes the need to be found, the need to be saved, the need to be turned in the proper religious direction. Every spiritual seeker can tell you a story—or a hundred stories—about attempts by Christians to save their souls. With alarming frequency, we’re forced to defend our choices and methods of searching for our own relationship to the Divine. It’s a shame we need to defend our spiritual paths at all!

Some people, of course, have no sense of meaning in their lives and are truly spiritually lost. But to label all people who are not part of organized religion as lost is to misunderstand the lives and aspirations of seekers. We aren’t lost or unstable or unknowing. We’ve just chosen a different path, sometimes taking a long, meandering route through the church before we discovered that it simply didn’t serve all our spiritual needs. We don’t fit into a tidy demographic—our spiritual wandering cuts across all boundaries, denominations, ages, and races. And we’re not anomalies or misfits. In fact, we’re the majority of the God-seeking public. Each of us—at some point in our lives—is a seeker.

Different Ways of Finding God

For people who are actively searching for God and meaning in their lives, there seem to be three distinct ways of approaching the journey. There’s the way of mainline churches, where members find solace in their faith and have made peace with religion and ritual though they may not believe all of it. They enjoy being part of their tradition and would rather overlook certain disagreeable aspects of dogma to remain in their church as part of a community.

There’s also the way of fundamentalists, who require strict adherence to the literal interpretation of Scripture and sacred writing and the principles of faith to know God and experience redemption and salvation. They believe themselves to be the keepers of religious truth and view anything outside their established belief system as wrong.

Then there’s the approach of spiritual seekers, who continually remake their spiritual paths to experience the Divine in their own way and in their own time, incorporating everything along the journey. These are the wanderers who aren’t lost.

Not surprisingly, fundamentalists are least apt to understand the art of wandering and are most likely to dismiss the spiritual paths of seekers as misguided, invalid, and unworthy. Fundamentalists and conservative Christians believe that God loves only the saved as His true children; to them, spiritual seekers are the unsaved people of the secular world.

Obviously, there’s a pronounced ideological difference between spiritual seekers and fundamentalists. A clash between the two occurs when conservative evangelical church members incorrectly assume that their religion will work for everyone as a means of connecting with God. Or when they press their religious beliefs into areas of political and social reform. Some church members, often condescendingly, consider it their duty to set the rest of us on the right path to God.

Unfortunately, there is a near total lack of understanding between seekers and fundamentalists. But seekers aren’t without fault in this debate. They often fall back on old resentments against the church, citing bad decisions and unfortunate actions the church has taken a disasterous part in over the centuries. Seekers are often happy to recount their negative experiences, disillusionment, and disappointment in the church. But in the midst of resentments, they overlook or disregard the good that it has done—and continues to do.

In a country founded on the principles of religious freedom, there’s a conspicuous lack of tolerance on both sides that only accentuates the rift between us and fails to emphasize our shared beliefs. On both sides of the fence, tolerance is a noble spiritual ideal that’s difficult to honor. It’s easy to forget that many seekers have been served by the church in one way or another, and many churchgoers practice true compassion and tolerance toward others. But fundamentalism or any type of religious extremism that assumes a moral superiority is divisive and intolerant. Narrow thinking doesn’t leave room for free will or allow the spiritual freedom to find a path to the God of our own understanding.

Barriers That Keep Seekers from the Traditional Church

Some seekers admit that one of the barriers that keeps them from joining a church or leads them away from congregations is the fear of being judged or excluded. They feel they must clean up their act before going to church. Others are put off by internal church politics that disrupt congregations and keep seekers from becoming—or staying—involved. Some carry a lot of anger in relation to the idea of church. As one seeker, Carolyn, says, What does religion have to do with my life? The people are so fake, I wouldn’t fit in. Her friend J. P. agrees. Church is full of hate and hypocrisy. He says, Fundamentalism scares me. It seems like it’s crossed the line from Christianity to insanity. I don’t want to have anything to do with that kind of hate. I like what Gandhi said: ‘God has no religion.’ That’s what I believe.

Some seekers are put off by the church’s lack of relevancy to the contemporary culture. The language, liturgy, and dogma, and even the formality of the church setting, seem outdated and stifling rather than enlightened. Some seekers find church services repressive, irrelevant, and unsupportive. Colleen, a single mom, has frustrations that run deep. What keeps me away from traditional church are its homogeneous messages, which are not only less than meaningful for me, but they erode the meaning I make of my life. The traditional church maintains antiquated legalisms in marriage and divorce, family planning, birthing children, schooling them, and providing for their financial well-being. I see the church as generating mass misogyny. Sally says it this way: When I wanted to get remarried, the Catholic Church wouldn’t marry me. In fact, the priest had encouraged me to stay married to my previous husband, a man who was not treating me or my daughters well at all. I had no support from the church when I needed it.

The dynamic of belief is another divisive barrier that turns many seekers away. An unquestioning belief that Jesus is the only path to God and to salvation has become a litmus test to determine whether or not one is a Christian. Members of some traditions, afraid that failing to believe the literal truth of Scripture will call their faith into question, are unwilling to read the Bible as history or as metaphor or as a collection of stories and parables. They assume that if you don’t believe all of it—or at least most of it—you’re not a Christian.

For seekers, the claim of the Christian tradition—or any tradition—to be the exclusive path to God, the only right way of being in relationship with God, is difficult to accept. We find it impossible to believe that the Creator of the universe, would choose to reveal its divine presence in only one religion—to us that seems both suspicious and unlikely. When polled, most people believe there has to be room for other paths to God. In a 2002 survey¹ Americans were asked to respond to the statement, My religion is the only true religion. Only 17 percent answered affirmatively, while an overwhelming 78 percent