The Spiritual But Not Religious Annoy a Pastor

“[H]is marriage ended, and he began to feel that the church was more his former wife’s than his,” writes Lillian Daniel in the Christian Century of a man who’d told her “”I’m spiritual but not religious” and insisted on explaining why he didn’t go to church. (The article appeared in 2011 but I just stumbled across it.)

He told Daniel, a Congregational minister, that “I worship nature. I see myself in the trees and in the cicadas. I am one with the great outdoors. I find God there. And I realized that I am deeply spiritual but no longer religious.” She writes:

He dumped this news in my lap as if it were a controversial hot potato, something shocking to a minister who had never been exposed to ideas so brave.

Of course, this well-meaning Sunday jogger fits right in to mainstream American culture. He is perhaps by now a part of the majority — the people who have stepped away from the church in favor of running, newspaper reading, yoga or whatever they use to construct a more convenient religion of their own.

I was not shocked or upset by the man’s story. I had heard it many times before — so many times I could have supplied the details. Let me guess, you read the New York Times every Sunday, cover to cover, and you get more out of that than the sermon? Let me guess, you find God in nature? And especially in sunsets?

After telling a revealing and grumpily entertaining story about the way the SBNR people keep thinking they’ve found God in their children, she explains why we need each other and indirectly why we need a revelation, something by definition corporate and objective.

[I]n the church we are stuck with one another, therefore we don’t get the space to come up with our own God. Because when you are stuck with one another, the last thing you would do is invent a God based on humanity. In the church, humanity is way too close at hand to look good.

It’s as close as the guy singing out of tune next to you in your pew, as close as the woman who doesn’t have access to a shower and didn’t bathe before worship, as close as the baby screaming and as close as the mother who doesn’t seem to realize that the baby is driving everyone crazy. It’s as close as that same mother who crawled out an inch from her postpartum depression to get herself to church today and wonders if there is a place for her there. It’s as close as the woman sitting next to her, who grieves that she will never give birth to a child and eyes that baby with envy. It’s as close as the preacher who didn’t prepare enough and as close as the listener who is so thirsty for a word that she leans forward for absolutely anything.

. . . With the humbling realization that there are some things we simply cannot do for ourselves, communities of human beings have worked together and feuded together and just goofed up together. They come together because Jesus came to live with these same types of people. Thousands of years later, we’re still trying to be the body of Christ, and we are human and realistic enough to know we need a savior who is divine.