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<DIV>Thank you, Jim. What a rich report. I'd like to respond with a witness, or
sorts.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>After Fred died (1/31/08), I decided to simplify my life by going to church
with my mother. It was not easy to return to the fundamentalist Church of Christ
that I grew up in, but it was easier than trying to juggle dropping her off,
going to the Presbyterian church where I was a member, than picking her
up.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I loved the a cappella singing of gospel hymns, participating in communion
weekly and the <U>very</U> sweet people in the congregation. I couldn't stand
the theology, but was able to tune out the sermon and either meditate or read
scripture during that time. I was listed as a visitor in the bulletin every week
for at least 3 years.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>After Mother died in March, a friend and fellow D.Min. from
University of Creation Spirituality, came for Mother's memorial service,
which was on a Sunday afternoon. Mia, my friend, and I went to worship that
morning at the church of Christ. (We were borrowing chairs for the service
at Mother's apartment building later.) I was a little apprehensive. Mia
grew up in a wealthy Episcopalian family in Philadelphia, had never been to a
fundamentalist church. This would be very strange for her. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>After worship, she turned to me, her face glowing and said, "The energy
here was so sweet that I had a major breakthrough on an issue I've been
struggling with internally."</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>That wouldn't have happened if she'd pre-judged it all a
"crock" because it wasn't post-modern theology. Open your heart just a little,
Wes. Go to your own experience of deep spirituality, not some chart from 40
years ago, if you want to understand why the Vineyard Christian Fellowship and
other congregations like it are bursting at the seams.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>My two cents:)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Grace and peace,</DIV>
<DIV>Jann McGuire</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 8/19/2012 7:59:49 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
jfwiegel@yahoo.com writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>Seems
quite intriguing. Has anyone read this book?<BR><BR>Hearing the voice of
God <BR><BR>When an anthropologist studied how evangelicals pray, says Jill
Wolfson, she came to a surprising realization. <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>“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.” <BR><BR>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.”
<BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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.
<BR><BR>“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?” <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>“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.”
<BR><BR>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.” <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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.”
<BR><BR>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.” <BR><BR>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?” <BR><BR>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.” <BR><BR>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.” <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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.” <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>“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.”
<BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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.
<BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>“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.” <BR><BR>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.”
<BR><BR>Reprinted with permission from Stanford magazine, published by
Stanford Alumni Association, Stanford University. <BR><BR><BR><BR>– Sent from
The Week iPad edition – <BR>All You Need To Know About Everything That Matters
<BR>Download the app and try The Week for free:
http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus <BR><BR><BR>Jim
Wiegel<BR>Jfwiegel@yahoo.com<BR><BR>“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<BR><BR>Partners in
Participation Upcoming public course opportunities:<BR>ToP Facilitation
Methods, Sept 11-12, 2012<BR>ToP Strategic Planning, Oct 9-10, 2012<BR>The AZ
Community of Practice meets the 1st Friday- Sept 7, 2012<BR>Facilitation
Mastery : Our Mastering the Technology of Participation program is available
in Phoenix in 2012-3. Program begins on Nov 14-16, 2012 <BR>See short video
http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=55 and website for further
details.<BR>_______________________________________________<BR>Dialogue
mailing
list<BR>Dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net<BR>http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net<BR></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>