In almost any conversation about the church’s future, the elephant in the room, the thing everyone is aware of but no one wants to talk about, is God. Perhaps it’s because people take God as a given, needing no discussion, but I don’t think so. For some it may be that they would feel too awkward or embarrassed. But I think the main reason God is “off the table” is that people know it would open a can of worms. It would reveal that people are all over the map on who or what God is, and that few adhere to the church’s “official” position.

It’s been well over a century since the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead … and we have killed him.” Despite hysterical distortions by his opponents then and since, Nietzsche was basically reporting a historical fact: the notion of God common in the ancient and medieval world was no more. That God was “killed” by the creation of a science-based world that has no place for such a God. That God is now homeless and unemployed, since heaven has no place in the universe and the universe has no need for God to keep it going.

Are a scientific worldview and the idea of God incompatible? Well, yes and no. If God is a being in some extraterrestrial location called heaven, who intervenes in the operation of the universe and the affairs of humanity, then yes, you have to choose one or the other. And if you choose science, then no God. This, of course, is the fundamentalists’ assumption and the reason for their hostility to the modern world.

Yet most Christians (including most fundamentalists to a degree) want to have their cake and eat it too. They accept science and the marvels it has brought to modern life, yet somehow also want to keep a personal God existing somewhere out there. Thus, Christians live with their religion and their science-dominated daily lives in separate compartments, with interaction between them rare and, when it does happen, awkward, if not explosive.

Or at least, that’s how it’s been. For I think we have reached a tipping point where most people now find this an impossible and unnecessary juggling act. The one bond above all others which has held people to the church is finally dissolving, and that’s a belief in a theistic God, God as an extraterrestrial being somewhere out there.

I say both impossible and unnecessary because people are discovering that, despite the church’s age-old denial, there are other ways to understand and experience God. Furthermore, many Christians are discovering that within Christianity there have always been alternative viewpoints, expressed by the mystics but also more than a few theologians, not to mention countless ordinary clergy and lay church members.

The growing number of those identifying as “spiritual but not religious” is the most tangible sign of this movement. These are people who have abandoned the theistic deity of traditional religion yet maintain a belief in an essential spiritual and sacred dimension to life. As surveys have shown, many may still express a belief in God, but often this is not the God of the church’s creeds and doctrines. This is often a God of experience rather than of theological belief.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post called “God Has Left the Building” and discussed how spirituality is rapidly displacing traditional notions of religion like Christianity.

Spirituality is now in broad use to refer to the experience of the sacred and of mystery in life and in the world. Many teachers and authors of various religious traditions, and of no tradition, commonly use the term to identify this dimension of reality. Spirituality is being seen as a way to reestablish our connection with the natural world and stem our abuse of it. And, being a religiously “neutral” term, spirituality is also providing a new opening for interaction with the sciences, especially psychology and theoretical physics.

Unfortunately, traditional Christianity is largely left behind in all this. The church cannot let go of “the Big Guy upstairs”, with its hymns, prayers, and rituals still directed to this imaginary being somewhere “above” us, imploring his forgiveness for our misdeeds and intervention in our many problems. While such piety still has some appeal, it is shrinking by the day, as evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of empty pews.

The biggest thing missed by today’s distressed church leaders is that the church’s decline is largely a rejection of worship and the theistic God worship is centered on. Shrinking worship attendance means that millions of people have realized that they can get along fine without it and its weekly reconnection to the God-out-there. This is the reason the pandemic lockdown was such a blow. Forced to stop their worship practice, many discovered they didn’t really miss it and found other things to do with that time.

The pandemic lockdown was a missed opportunity, for this was when the church could have recognized that worship’s time is over. As I go on to say in the post I quoted above, the problem with worship is the church’s problem with God. The theistic God in heaven, the “sky God” as he’s sometimes been called, or God as Batman as Sam Harris described him, swooping in to rescue us from disaster, simply doesn’t work in the world today. As long as it clings to such a notion, the church can’t say anything intelligible, let alone meaningful, about such a God.

As I have shared these ideas in various places and settings, I rarely if ever get any pushback. While some raised in the church still cling to its traditional notions, the vast majority of people, both inside and outside the church, have moved on. Yet the church has hardly budged. Especially in worship, its hymns, liturgy, prayers, creeds, and preaching still assume this yawning gap between God, reigning in heaven, and the world and each one of us.

Spirituality is the recognition that there is no gap. God, as Paul says in Acts, is the one “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Or as St. Augustine said, and many spiritual teachers have repeated over the centuries, “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” And as Meister Eckhart says, the man who 700 years ago spearheaded the greatest effort to redirect the church toward this orientation:

Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God.

Churches measure their vitality by how many people are in worship, yet it is worship that is dragging down the church. It is like an addiction, a habit the church can’t let go of. That many people, especially clergy, would be astonished, and even outraged, at such an idea shows how difficult breaking this habit will be. They don’t see that culture is breaking that habit for them, as churches close by the thousands.

No doubt many repurposed churches will retain a regular community gathering, though hopefully called something other than “worship”. But here is the great learning opportunity: let members reexamine church traditions and decide how they can be reimagined and repurposed, or that they just need to go. What opens us to recognize God’s presence here and now? How do we recognize the holiness of this time and place, of everyone present, and of the world around us? And how do we tell the story of Jesus, not as the Son of God, but as a child of God who lived to show that this is the identity of every person?

For this, finally, is what a repurposed church is about: following Jesus as the revealer of our oneness with God, of our true nature as Spirit, of each of our beings as a unique embodiment of God’s own Being. In that light, much of what has passed for “essential” church life will fade away or be radically reimagined. The church will no longer proclaim the “story of salvation” as Christ’s deliverance of the world from sin. Rather, the church will be a place to “experience salvation” as the awakening to our true nature, revealed in Jesus’ life and teaching.

A repurposed church will be a place to learn from spiritual masters of past and present, whatever their religious label. Here people will be guided to follow the “pathless path”, which leads them to where they already are by discovering they have never NOT been apart from God, but only lost in their egoic mind’s delusions of separateness. In a repurposed church they will be supported in a journey inward, to discover both their true selves and the God who is the core of their being. As Meister Eckhart taught,

There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.

This may be the most difficult of the lessons a repurposed church must learn, but it is crucial. That after a centuries-long obsession with words—scripture, creeds, doctrines, theology, sermons, hymns, prayers, liturgy—God is not found in them. Rather, as Elijah learned at the mouth of his cave, God is in our silence. And in a repurposed church, silence will be its sacrament.

 

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