CT: It was mentioned in the talk that many people these days are not even looking for the spiritual answer in the Church anymore – do you think the Church has lost its spirituality?
SH: Well to some extent it may have done, as what the Church has been called to do, from my position in an Anglican tradition, when we ordain someone we say that your calling is to proclaim the gospel afresh in every age. In a sense this is what we are talking about.
We have now been through an age where science and rationalism was driving out the whole understanding of the spiritual, and so the Church found itself engaging in the world that wanted scientific reasoning and arguments. And to an extent the Church did adopt this way of speaking about Christianity, and so many of the mystical sides of the faith were driven out. I don’t mean to say that this is true about everything in the Church as there are still sources to draw from, but I think the church did drive it out to engage more, now only to find it all coming back in again.
CT: So what is left for the Church to do then, and what action can the Church make to move forward and bring people to their churches?
SH: Well I would advocate taking the church to the people, and it is an important difference. As Christians, we tend to lay on our events and say come to this and say it will be good. But we have to actually get out and be with people.
We also have a great amount of spiritual people in the Church itself, and I think people will find the things they are searching for here. However, to a certain extent I also think that we have to relearn our own faith and learn to be more comfortable to speak about it rather than be embarrassed about talking about spiritual things, and do this alongside them. So when they speak about their spiritual things we can also talk about ours but then reveal that God is at work in the process. So God is present, and as I share God is working in that.
Also as I have done, Christian can set up stalls at some New Age fairs. There are over 150 of them in UK now, and you will find most communities have them. So churches, of course after investigating them fully, can go to them. People are often stunned that Christians are there and then they come to see that Christians are in fact spiritual and find there are things in the Christian traditions they can relate to and find attractive, much to their surprise. So even if you only go this far it is good.
But also we need to find ways to worship and use language that really engages with people. It is a learning process, unless it comes with real engagement to the people we preach to then it will only be our idea of what is effective, and it will not really connect.
But Christianity and the Church has done this before, it is a global faith as it has successfully gone out and gone into other cultures and made itself relevant, and I think there are many things we can learn from this as we go into our own cultures today.
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