Christianity Beyond Tribalism

Why We Still Need Christianity

If we adopt a posture of growth in our lives and seek to continue to evolve in learning, practicing, loving, and more, we will discover one of the core principles of development: evolution moves toward greater inclusivity and greater complexity.

Fortunately, this direction of evolution will ultimately be the end of tribal religion—religion that is defined by its hard boundaries of saved and unsaved, believer and nonbeliever, holy and heathen, sacred and secular. The fuel for religious wars will run dry. Persecution and ostracization will be replaced by harmony and welcome. The lion will lay down with the lamb.

This beautiful utopia of the future is possible (if we have enough time to get there as a species), but some people believe the way we arrive at such a place is through the conglomeration or unification of spirituality into a synchronized path for all. That dissolving the boundaries leads to not only no separation, but also no distinction.

But this homogenization is not in keeping with the principle of complexity. And sometimes our hopes . . . .

MysticismLuke HealyDecember 29, 2019evolution, Teilhard, Mystical, worship Comments

A New Christmas Story – God in 3D

Christianity’s familiar and beautiful Christmas story depicts a heavenly father sending his son to be born into the world to save people from their despair, and then later sends the Holy Spirit to comfort and guide them. This is a warm image of God as a loving father, a self-giving son, and an ever-present, encouraging Spirit.

However, this traditional story only portrays a one-dimensional God – where the metaphors of personal relationship are limited to the male images of father and son and a gender-neutral “spirit” (although feminine in both Hebrew and Greek). It is true that God is revealed in these images. It is also partial. Today’s cosmically informed world longs for a God who is bigger than “the man upstairs,” closer and more real to us personally than just an ancient story, and more like us than only a heroic figure from the past.

Integral Christianity gives us a God, not only beside us in the personal dimension, but also a God who is at the same time in the transpersonal dimension—beyond us. And at the same time a dimension of God who is within us—being us. This is a God in 3D!

JesusPaul SmithDecember 22, 2019worshipComment

Embodying Incarnation

Spiritual Knowing Part Three: Feet and Legs

Jesus — God being us with a human body

Did Mary realize the baby she held to her breast was one that John would later write about as “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14)? Notice John does not say the Word came to live “in the flesh.” Rather, this profound prologue to John’s Gospel makes the astounding claim that the Word, God, actually became flesh!

The Christmas season is an excellent time to talk about bodies, flesh, and earthiness as we celebrate God with us in the body and person of Jesus. . .

Practice, JesusPaul SmithDecember 15, 2019Jesus Comments

Transcendence

Part Two: Spiritual Knowing—Transcendence

Three primary outcomes of Whole Body Mystical Awakening are:

(1) Deep connections with God, Jesus, guides, and one another

(2) The emergence of our spiritual gifts

(3) Transcendent consciousness.

Transcendence is the loftiest and most difficult dimension to describe. It is, most simply . . . .

Practice, MysticismPaul SmithDecember 8, 2019transcendence Comment

Spiritual Knowing—Then and Now

Part One: Spiritual Gifts as Windows of Wisdom

What is the goal of the Whole Body Mystical Awakening practices that Integral Christian Network advocate? Is it just to have mystical experiences? Or feel peace and bliss? The reason to do Whole Body Mystical Awakening is far bigger than just these things. Any reading of the Bible and the foundational writings of many spiritual traditions will find a stream of mystical experiences providing unique knowing, guidance, encouragement, and transformative transcendence. As Paul describes in detail, these mystical experiences often happened with one another in the early gatherings of Christians. They have continued down through history in the writings of the mystics.

These mystical experiences seem to take the three primary forms of (1) personal presences or guides (including God and Jesus), (2) gifts, and (3) transcendence or union with God. We’ve written several articles about guides recently, which you can read here. Next week we will explore transcendence. This week, let’s look at spiritual gifts from the standpoint of their function back then in the Bible and how they are emerging in today’s understanding.

MysticismPaul SmithDecember 1, 2019spiritual knowing Comment

WeSpace Whole Body Mystical Awakening

“WeSpace” is a new form of spiritual practice and community that is on the forefront of the evolving spiritual landscape of today. Recognizing the hyper-individualization of not only Western society and American culture, but also the individualization of the interior experience of the forms spiritual practice, many are seeing the need for a higher, more evolved “WE.” Various forms are emerging in many different places to more intentionally engage in collective wisdom and interconnected healing.

If you’re familiar at all with Integral Christian Network, you’ve certainly heard us talk about WeSpace. It is the heart of . . . .

WeSpace, PracticeLuke HealyNovember 24, 2019Mystical Comment

Gathered to the Transforming Heart of Jesus

Devotion for Cultural Creatives Part Four: Together

This is the final section of this six-part series that began with Why Christian Worship Doesn’t Work for Many Cultural Creatives—and What Might. We begin with a reminder about who cultural creatives are.

Paul Ray is co-author of The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. He has been researching their values, lifestyles and beliefs for 25 years. He says that Cultural Creatives are the carrier population for the emerging wisdom culture:

Across the planet, they are innovators for the culture, not so much in technologies as in beliefs, worldviews, values and ways of life. They are the opinion leaders, and the participants in all the new social movements of the past 60 years who have time and again shaped others’ views, practices and adoptions of these new ways. Their Green values and lifestyles and their values of inner development both psychological and spiritual are the key to the emerging new culture. New Cultural Creatives surveys in Europe, Japan and the US all show the same trends.

The Cultural Creatives care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about authenticity, self-actualization, spirituality, and self-expression.

Practice, WeSpacePaul SmithNovember 17, 2019worship, WeSpaceComment

Devotion for Cultural Creatives: Part Three - The Elephant in the Room

There is an elephant in the room filled with cultural creatives who find some affinity for evolved versions of Christianity. And hardly anyone is noticing it. Or, if they do, it is either too embarrassing or too difficult to talk about. This elephant is the gigantic clash of postmodern rejection of all hierarchies and the obvious hierarchy of surrender to God. Even more distasteful is devotion to a personal Jesus as someone who is more advanced than we are and invites us to die to our constructed self and follow him.

PracticePaul SmithNovember 10, 2019worship, DevotionComment

Seeing the Divine Through Icons, Art, and One Another

Integral Christian Devotional Practices: Gazing Part 2

David, king, poet, and prophet, revealed his deepest longings when he wrote: “One thing have I asked of God, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the presence of God all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of God” (Psalm 27:4).

Previously I said that the heart of spiritual devotion to God comes alive by gazing into the visionary or symbolic eyes of personal forms of God’s divine friendship. These can include God’s motherly-fatherly presence, the Living Jesus, Mary, other spiritual companions, physically present friends, and the beauty of creation itself whose cosmic eyes do indeed gaze back at us. We continue here to explore that theme.

Gazing upon the beauty of God in its many forms—deep, attentive looking—can be integrated into our lives as a spiritual practice.

PracticePaul SmithNovember 3, 2019worshipComment

Finding Freedom in Devotion for Cultural Creatives

Integral Christian Devotional Practices: Part 1 – Gazing

While cultural creatives often have mixed feelings about worship, many of them still long for something they can truly open up their hearts to. Many feel wonder at the vast, cosmic Mystery but perhaps have a desire (sometimes unconscious) to still connect personally to it in some way, to devote themselves to something—someone—beyond just than themselves.

The heart of devotion comes alive by gazing into visionary or symbolic eyes of God. This is the personal, 2nd person presence of the divine as expressed in the tangible other. While experiencing God as 1st person spirit is a vital part of our journey, devotion is awakened through “seeing” such personal forms of the Divine Mystery as God’s motherly-fatherly presence, the presence of the Living Jesus, the spiritual and physical beings around us, and the beautiful presence of creation itself whose cosmic eyes do indeed gaze back at us.

PracticePaul SmithOctober 27, 2019worshipComment