[Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God

[Ellie Stock]

very interesting--thanks for sending.
Ellie


-----Original Message-----
From: James Wiegel <jfwiegel at yahoo.com>
To: Colleague Dialogue <dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net>; Order Ecumenical Community <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Sun, Aug 19, 2012 9:59 am
Subject: [Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God


Seems quite intriguing.  Has anyone read this book?

Hearing the voice of God 

When an anthropologist studied how evangelicals pray, says Jill Wolfson, she 
came to a surprising realization. 

On a Sunday evening in Palo Alto, Calif., around 50 members of the Vineyard 
Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula gathered in a rented room above a popular 
coffee shop. Before the occasion got under way, the conversation was a friendly 
and exuberant mix of the mundane and the heady: the gorgeous weather, Christian 
writer C.S. Lewis, the lusciousness of the strawberries set out as a snack, 
someone’s car trouble, the problem of demons. Lead pastor Alex Van Riesen, a 
tall, informal, open-faced man, got everyone settled and quiet. 

“For those of you who haven’t been to our church, this is the way it is,” Van 
Riesen began cheerfully. “Everyone hangs outside eating, drinking coffee, and 
talking. Then, when you hear the voice of God, you come inside.” 

There was a burst of laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical Christian 
audience. Van Riesen then segued to the main event. “Have people been asking you 
about the book?” he asked the group. “I’ve been getting lots of email about it.” 


The book in question, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American 
Evangelical Relationship With God, is about the people in this very room. On the 
makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat its author, Tanya Luhrmann, who spent two 
years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at a Vineyard church 
in Chicago. She knows these believers well. 

Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried, and raised 
their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer 
groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them directly. She hung 
out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews, and “tried to understand as 
an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God 
as real and personal and intimate.” Members told her about having coffee with 
God, seeing angel wings, and getting God’s advice on everything from job choice 
to what shampoo to buy. 

After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to people 
who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her book does not 
weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her research focuses on “theory 
of mind,” how we conceptualize our minds and those of others. In this case, she 
investigated how the practice of prayer can train a person to hear what they 
determine to be God’s voice. 

“I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the human 
mind,” she explained. “As an anthropologist, I feel I can say something about 
the social, cultural, and psychological features of what that person is 
experiencing. I came into this project wanting to understand the question: How 
are rational, sensible, educated people able to sustain faith in an invisible 
being in an environment of skepticism?” 

Luhrmann’s provocative theory is that the church teaches those who pray to use 
their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by holding 
conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy 
conversations they’d have with their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell Him 
about their problems, and imagine His wise counsel and loving response, they are 
training their thoughts, much as people use weights to train their muscles. The 
church encourages them to tune in to sounds, images, and feelings that are 
louder or more intense or more unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret 
these internal cues as the external voice of God. 

“I came in with a set of stereotypes of evangelicals—the kind that you’d expect 
from someone in the academy,” she said. “I came out with more respect for the 
religious process...how private and precious the experience of God can be for 
people.” 

She read from her book’s final chapter: “I have said that I do not presume to 
know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of this 
journey, in my own way, I have come to know God.” 

Luhrmann’s work has roots deep in her intellectual and emotional past. She 
describes herself as an anthropologist with one foot in psychology. She could 
easily add that her other foot is in theology and both hands have a firm grasp 
on philosophy. 

Her upbringing was that of a “spiritual mutt.” In the book’s preface and 
acknowledgments, she writes that she has been thinking about God ever since her 
maternal grandfather, a Baptist minister, “walked across the park with me when I 
was 6 and tried to explain who he thought God was.” His daughter—Luhrmann’s 
mother—took her children to the more free-form Unitarian church. Luhrmann’s 
paternal grandfather was a Christian Scientist whose son—Luhrmann’s 
father—became a medical doctor, a psychiatrist. The eldest of three children, 
Tanya was raised in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood, where she helped 
Orthodox Jewish neighbors as a shabbas goy, a gentile who assists with 
activities that are restricted on the Sabbath, such as turning on light 
switches. “I came from this background where I knew smart, good people whom I 
loved, but who came down on very different positions on the existence of God—not 
only on the yes-no dimension, but on who God was.” 

As a Harvard freshman, she had thoughts about Immanuel Kant that, in many ways, 
set the course of her career. She decided that the philosopher was “cheating” 
when he “explained away” the irrational. “I’ve always been intrigued by myths 
and stories and the way people construct their world. People live in the 
narrative, and that is more important than their logical sensibility in many 
ways. So I switched from philosophy to folklore....I was just so curious about 
people and about the way they come to hold their beliefs—even in the face of 
evidence to the contrary.” 

An academic mentor encouraged her to pursue graduate studies at the University 
of Chicago, but a chance encounter with a volume in the Harvard bookstore sent 
her in a different direction. “It was a book that told you how to be a witch,” 
she recalls with a laugh. “I was amazed by this. You can learn that?” 

She headed to Cambridge University for graduate studies, from whence she could 
go “hang out in London with all these pagans and magicians—for the most part 
educated and middle-class people—and plunge into this really batty dissertation 
on modern witches.” 

The goal was not to rule on the validity of magic. Luhrmann was more interested 
in the magical process, in what happened in the minds of the practitioners. “I 
was really taken by my observation that something does happen. I didn’t quite 
know how to think about it, but they experienced something directly.” 

Luhrmann did “what anthropologists do” and participated in their world by 
joining their groups, reading their books, and performing rituals. For 30 
minutes a day for nine months, she practiced seeing with her mind’s eye, 
following instructions such as: Build up in imagination a journey from your 
physical plane home to your ideal room. 

What startled her was that her witchcraft self-training worked. Her internal 
awareness seemed to shift; her senses felt more alive and alert. She had her own 
supernatural experience: One night, after she’d done some pleasurable and 
immersive reading about the early Celts, six druids appeared outside her window 
and just as suddenly vanished. “Had they been there in the flesh? I thought 
not,” she writes in When God Talks Back, but the vivid, singular experience led 
her to wonder “for many years if something about the practice associated with 
magic made these supernatural experiences more common. When I encountered the 
same spiritual techniques in experiential evangelical Christianity, I was 
determined to find out.” 

In 2007, to better understand if and how spiritual practice impacts the mind, 
Luhrmann randomly divided Christian volunteers into groups: One listened on 
iPods for 30 minutes a day to lectures on the Gospels, while another 
participated in a more interactive, imagination-rich way, similar to the prayer 
style of Vineyard members. Their recordings invited them to see, hear, and touch 
God in the mind’s eye, to carry on a dialogue with Jesus. 

“I found that after a month of prayer practice, people reported more vivid 
mental imagery than those who listened to the lectures,” she says. “They used 
mental imagery more readily and had somewhat better perceptual attention, and 
they reported more unusual sensory experience. In short, they attended to their 
inner experience more seriously, and that altered how real that experience 
became for them.” 

The night before Luhrmann appeared at the Vineyard congregation, she read and 
answered questions at a Bay Area bookstore. She traced the modern history of the 
evangelical movement from its hippie, Jesus-freak roots of the 1960s to its 
current, mostly conservative, mostly middle-class state. She talked about the 
people whose stories give the book its narrative pull, people whose faith proved 
more complex than she had imagined. 

This was an entirely different crowd. A couple of atheists ranted about how 
people who talk to God must be nuts. Another person in the audience, a little 
more measured, wanted Luhrmann to address the impact that conservative 
evangelicals are having on the country’s political landscape. 

It is not a small impact. Of the many baby boomers who once stopped going to 
churches, half have returned to religious practices, but not to the mainstream 
services of their childhood. They have flocked to churches similar to the 
Vineyard. A recent study found that nearly 40 percent of Americans said that the 
main reason they practice religion was “to forge a personal relationship with 
God.” Some call this movement the country’s fourth Great Awakening—a reference 
to other eras in American history in which religious fervor shaped the national 
agenda. 

While Luhrmann intentionally avoided politics in the book, it comes up in 
interviews and reviews, as readers and critics wonder if the author “ever 
engaged her subjects in a lively conversation about gay marriage or evolution.” 
Her answer is that conservative evangelicals and secular liberals are at such 
odds politically because they think about life very differently. If political 
progressives really want to stop scratching their heads over why evangelicals 
get so upset about same-sex marriage and health-care reform, they need to 
understand how evangelicals think about God. 

“Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday 
people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad outcomes,” 
she says. “When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind 
of person they are trying to become—what humans could and should be, rather than 
who they are. From this perspective, the problem with government is that it 
steps in when people fall short.” 

Hanging out with believers—whom she found “smarter and more varied than many 
liberals realize”—has given her some insight that could double as political 
advice. “If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, they should use a 
political language that evangelicals can hear. They should talk about the kind 
of people we are aiming to be and about the transformational journey that any 
choice will take us on.” 

Reprinted with permission from Stanford magazine, published by Stanford Alumni 
Association, Stanford University. 



– Sent from The Week iPad edition – 
All You Need To Know About Everything That Matters 
Download the app and try The Week for free: http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus 



Jim Wiegel
Jfwiegel at yahoo.com

“One cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s 
morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the 
evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” – 
Carl Jung

Partners in Participation Upcoming public course opportunities:
ToP Facilitation Methods, Sept 11-12, 2012
ToP Strategic Planning, Oct 9-10, 2012
The AZ Community of Practice meets the 1st Friday- Sept 7, 2012
Facilitation Mastery : Our Mastering the Technology of Participation program is 
available in Phoenix in 2012-3. Program begins on Nov 14-16, 2012 
See short video http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55 and website for 
further details.
_______________________________________________
Dialogue mailing list
Dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net
http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net


 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue-wedgeblade.net/attachments/20120819/b49e1699/attachment-0001.html>