Chapter 17

Seeking a Sense of Spiritual Community

Each of us ultimately faces the questions about our identity, our worth and our security. Many turn to religion for the answers. Some turn to cults. Jim Jones was initially considered to be a pillar of his community as he built his congregation in Indiana. Later he moved to California and became eccentric and controlling, ultimately moving his congregation to Guyana. His ministry ended with murder and mass suicide.

Charles Manson also had followers who were looking for answers. They invested themselves in him to gain identity, worth and security. Yet others assembled to be met by alien spacecraft that were to whisk them away before the end of the world. While not all of us have answers we consider acceptable, we are each faced with the questions. Because we are taught so little about spirituality we are extremely vulnerable to those who prey on us and our needs.

I’ve seen clergy within traditional religions tell their congregations that God intends for each of us to be financially prosperous and that if we pray and are faithful, it will come to pass. Others perform acts of faith-healing, some of which are proven to be fraudulent upon investigation. Others will claim that the validity of the Bible can be proven mathematically. Still others will claim the Bible to be the inerrant word of God, not knowing who wrote it, who translated it, when it was written, why each of the books was chosen to be a part of the Bible, or who it was that selected them. This claim raises the question of whether these people have inerrant interpretive skills also, so that the meaning they take from the scriptures is pure and absolute.

Just as parents are the most significant messengers we encounter in terms of messages about ourselves, religious organizations are perhaps the most significant messengers we encounter with respect to beliefs about God. Some religious leaders and organizations speak more to religious conformity than they do to personal relationships with God.

Is it conceivable that organized religion could ever hinder us in the pursuit of spiritual health instead of helping us? It is if there is any reason to believe that religion could ever encourage us to depend on anyone or anything more than we depend on God for our sense of identity, worth, or security. It is, also, if there is any reason to believe that religion could ever, in any way, discourage us from seeking and maintaining a personal relationship with God.

How does organized religion deal with society’s denial of its spiritual needs? All earthly institutions, religious and secular, operate in an environment that encourages spiritual denial to flourish. It’s the way of the world. If organized religion employs any of society’s messages of denial in either its teachings or practices, then it suffers self-betrayal.

Religious organizations, like all others, are concerned with membership, economic solvency, and survival. Though their original purpose was to expose the folly of spiritual denial and to encourage personal dependence on God, they must do it within an environment that not only embraces spiritual denial, but also denies the dependability of God. If religious organizations challenge people to take their spiritual needs seriously, then they will obviously alienate many in society who refuse to confront their denial. The organization may then be forced to choose between being faithful to God and their purpose or being successful in terms of growth. If they opt for success instead of faithfulness, the religious organization will make decisions and take actions that are contrary to the goals of its founders and God. It runs the risk of becoming more of a hindrance in the pursuit of spiritual health than a help. When religious organizations opt for success in terms of growth at the expense of their stated goals, they, too, must openly deny what they’re doing. At the conscious level, they will argue that teaching faithfulness is impossible if the organization is not available to teach. Therefore, the immediate need may be viewed as the perpetuation of the organization. This is sometimes done by encouraging faithfulness to the organization more emphatically than faithfulness to God. Though they must subconsciously concede they are being dishonest in the pursuit of either survival or growth, they will believe this dishonesty falls within an acceptable level of dishonesty.

Spiritual health is not a matter of maximizing our good and minimizing our bad through personal or organizational success. It is a matter of faithful dependence on God, allowing him to do his work through us. When anyone or anything, religious leaders and organizations included, teaches by word or action that anything is more important than personal dependence on God, then they are hindering our spiritual growth rather than helping it. When religious organizations stray from faithfulness in pursuit of an illusion of security they reinforce the false belief that God is not dependable to sustain us in our faithfulness.

Many mainline religious organizations and televangelists have expressed their need for greater involvement (both financial and otherwise) by their members and viewers. This has, of course, brought the concepts of stewardship and tithing to the forefront in many religious organizations and publications. The leadership of religious organizations too often begins its stewardship education with the assumption that all members of the congregation, by virtue of their membership, have functional and personal relationships with God. The role of this education is then simply to educate the members in what their proper response to God should be in terms of their time, talents, energy, and money. This premise is one that has consistently failed both administratively and spiritually for many organizations in the past. Administratively, it has not generated adequate levels of funding. Spiritually, it has done nothing to encourage dependence on God. What these organizations seem to fail to understand is that people are frequently being asked to surrender something on which they depend a great deal—money—to something they may depend on very little—religion. If the organization dwells on its own need for money more than it does on the member’s need for a personal relationship with God, then it is simply reinforcing the importance of money in the minds of its members.

If the leadership of any religious organization simply assumes that all members have functional and personal relationships with God by virtue of their membership in the organization, then the members will learn to equate a relationship to the organization with a relationship to God. In believing that, their God will have no more power than the religious organization has. In believing that, their God will be no more faithful or nurturing than the organization is. In believing that, their God will ask nothing different of them than the organization does. In believing that, they may be discouraged from ever seeking or knowing the joy of a personal relationship with God, having been led, however inadvertently, to believe “this is as good as it gets.” In believing that, they may eventually view the organization as having somehow failed them, and regrettably attribute that failure to God, as well. In believing that, they are easy prey for religious leaders who want to manipulate, control, or abuse them, no matter how blatant the abuse may appear to the casual observer. Does organized religion consistently confront spiritual denial, perpetuating the message concerning our need to depend on God more than we depend on anyone or anything else? Or does it sometimes stray from that and simply perpetuate itself as a messenger? Is it possible to focus on both without compromising either? If not, then which is being compromised on those occasions?

If religious organizations quit providing food to the hungry, there are many others who would continue. If they quit clothing the naked, many others would continue. If they don’t confront spiritual denial, then who will? If they fail to nurture spiritual growth, who will?

A sense of community is important to each of us. But we need to be cautious about where we find that community. If the organization is more emphatic about faithfulness to itself than it is about our need for a personal relationship with God, then we need to be cautious. If its leaders speak for God more than they speak about our need to know God personally, then we need to be aware of that. If the organization simply plans its own agenda without obvious dependence on God for guidance—regardless of how altruistic that agenda may be—then we need to be concerned. If the organizational leaders either tacitly or expressly accept membership in the organization as equating to a personal relationship with God, then we need to question our further participation. Look within the organization for those with whom you can identify in your common dependence on God. Or look somewhere else.

It sometimes helps to look at religion from a historical perspective. The Jewish prophets and the Christian saints had one thing in common: they were generally rejected by the religious communities of their day.

Spiritual growth can be encouraged by a community that stresses our need to depend on God. Spiritual growth can be discouraged by organizations that stress religious conformity more than they do the need for a personal relationship with God. A group of two or three people who know and love God is more conducive to spiritual health than a larger community if that community is complacent with a tradition of religion but denies the healing power of God.