LRC, Houston - the weekends-free church in Houston, Texas

I grew up in a denomination that did not believe in speaking in tongues. It should therefore not surprise anyone that we also didn’t believe in drinking wine, dancing, co-educational swimming, or a hundred other things that seem so silly to me now. And we we definitely had to cast demons out of anyone with a homosexual tendency, while not paying too much attention to the head deacons misgivings. More seriously though was the lack of power because while their was a nod of agreement with the concept of a trinity, there was little mention of Him- the Holy Spirit.

Baron von Hugel wrote decades ago that religion has three dimensions. If a religion was to be found healthy ithe intellectual, institutional, and mystical concepts. The church has majored on the institutional, moved in and out of teh intllectual, but largely ignored the mystical.

Until now!

More and more Christians are discovering that they can be both “spiritual” and “Christian“. The term “spirituality” was first used by Christians but it’s been largely ignored for a thousand years. With the advent of the New Age movement and it’s spiritual nature, the church ran and hid more deely in it’s institutionalism. It’s not working!

Christians seem to connect spirituality with something other than a relationship with God: a do-it-yourself kind of salvistic paradigm. Unfortunately anything that doesn’t look or talk like we do, (whoever the “we” might be), gets rejected. Trashed is a better word for it.

Therefore many reject God without knowing it!

Spirituality or mysticism is at the very heart of religion. Spirituality is not an alternative to Christianity; however, it will become that unless the church begins to lean a little more on the heart and spirit and not so much on their intellect, which turns out really isn’t anyway. And above all we’ve got to tone down the institutionalism that very few care about, except those at the head of it.

May we not forsake either trinity!