Spirituality: Do we look like Jesus?

October 1, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

“When people stop believing in God, they don’t belief in nothing,” said my friend Dr. Shelby Lee, who was pastor of a large Congregational church in Phoenix a generation ago. “They believe in anything.”

Something keeps drawing me back to a subject I first publicly opened several years back in a support group: the difference between religion and spirituality.

Religion has a bad reputation these days — not only because evangelicals and fundamentalists have attempted to define (read: re-define) and interpret the Christian faith for the general public. Islamic terrorists and other angry young men in the Middle East (terrortoryists?) who kill themselves and hundreds of others don’t exactly draw new people to Islam, either. A few years back, it was the so-called Protestants and Catholics killing each other in Northern Ireland. You get the picture.

I have been trying to voice some of the distinguishing characteristics of religion and spirituality out of my own experience, rather than resorting to the experts who have written many volumes, I’m sure. Here are a few observations:

• Religion doesn’t actually need a God who is still working and creating, or a Savior who will return. Religion is a self-sufficient empire.
• Religion gives lip service. It is richly ornamented with costumes, architecture, music, potentates, doctrines and rules.
• Spirituality is a lived awareness of not only God but of the inner spirit and its capacity to be open to God.  An indwelling spirit signifies that the two have come together, converged.
• The holy books of many world religions, including the Bible, contain both religion and spirituality, but they can and should be distinguished in these writings.
• Religion may preserve and offer a wonderful spiritual core , but not necessarily.  If the spirit simply dies or “goes out” of a religion, the loss of it may or may not be noticed by anyone who practices that religion.

In our times we see many people experimenting with new- age religion or some old stuff brought back from the dead, like neo-paganism. Ironically, the distinction between religion and spirituality is applicable to these groups as well. Many of their new adherents seem to enjoy the religious trappings of Wiccan, Druid or other systems, but may be so caught up in the ritual that the spirituality is neglected or forgotten.

It seems that both religion and spirituality are completely innate to the human experience. What amuses me are those contemporaries who have no use for, or who have fled from, Christian churches, saying that they were just full of a lot of meaningless rituals and un-spiritual hypocrites. Yet some of these people walk right into the arms of another faith, or make up one of their own, and dive right into the rituals.

Religious ritual, and all that comes along with it, is not in and of itself bad, dead or useless.  It can be distracting, however. It may hide or obscure the true spiritual core of the faith. This is certainly true with the Christian faith, where for years we have made a careful distinction between the religion of Jesus (his inner spirituality, unity with God “the Father”, and compassion for all people) and the religion about Jesus.  In a recent publication of The Barna Group, for example, young people ages 16–29 are more and more disinclined to have anything to do with the Christian church. And one of the chief reasons identified by the new study by David Kinnaman is that the Christian church does not resemble Jesus.

When young people were asked to identify their impressions of Christianity, one of the common themes was “Christianity is changed from what it used to be” and “Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus.” These comments were the most frequent unprompted images that young people called to mind, mentioned by one-quarter of both young non-Christians (23%) and born again Christians (22%).

Even to raise this question about the resemblance of the Church to the model we have in Jesus is at least the beginning of a search for deeper spirituality, not more religious trappings and ornamentation.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Fundamentalism, Spirituality | Print | No Comments »