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

[LAURELCG at aol.com]

Thank you, Jim. What a rich report. I'd like to respond with a witness, or  
sorts.
 
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.
 
I loved the a cappella singing of gospel hymns, participating in communion  
weekly and the very 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.
 
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. 
 
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."
 
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.
 
My two cents:)
 
Grace and peace,
Jann McGuire
 
 
In a message dated 8/19/2012 7:59:49 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
jfwiegel at yahoo.com writes:

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. 



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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

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