We Need Post-Church Churches: A Call for Modern Spaces of Community, Transcendence, Healing, and Growth

By Justin Wilford, PhD

Section Outline

1. An Introduction: Three Weeks After Burning Man (or, Three Unmet Human Needs)

2. We’re no longer OLD; now we’re WEIRD

3. Being WEIRD sucks, except for all the good stuff

4. We’ve lost our community

5. We’ve lost transcendence

6. We need personal growth more than ever

7. Let’s build post-church communities

8. Let’s nurture modern transcendence

9. Let’s support modern personal growth

10. Conclusion: Church after church

11. A post-church reading list

I. Introduction: Three Weeks After Burning Man (or, Three Unmet Human Needs)

Have you or someone you know gone away for a week (or two) to some unusual locale––the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, Costa Rica, Sedona, Bali––for a transformational retreat? Or perhaps you or someone you know has had a life-changing psychedelic experience? And did they (or you) come back into their lives feeling a new sense of energy, clarity, presence, flow, and love? Hell yeah! 

And by about the third week of re-entry into normal life, did most of those feelings fade? Were they (or you) back to feeling not-quite-right, easily triggered, slightly depressed, low-level anxiety . . . ya know, the modern person’s baseline? My hand is up. I know this cycle. 

“It’s funny,” people have told me (and I’ve thought to myself). “At the retreat, I had these amazing experiences of connection with others, practices that put me in touch with something larger, I learned new things about who I am and how I got here, but now I’m back in regular life and . . . what now?” 
Some people try to solve this problem by going on permanent retreat. There’s the hipster homesteaders, Burning Man nomads, the expat wanderers. I’m skeptical that this is an actual solution as much as an avoidance of one. Not only is this “solution” impossible for the vast majority of humanity, but it does little to help find solutions to the broader modern crises we all face. 


For the past 15 years, I’ve been thinking a lot about one part of the solution to the “modern person’s baseline.” Over a decade ago I published a book on the ways U.S. evangelical megachurches were trying to speak to this modern sense of mild depression and anxiety, aimlessness, and loss of meaning. I concluded that they were doing it through innovation in how they structured their campuses and regular church life. The book was a very secular extension of my very secular dissertation; my aim was not to help churches grow (or not grow). It was to gain a greater understanding of how  institutions in modern life are filling human needs for connection, transcendence, and meaning. I left with a sense that these megachurches were effective in slowing the secularization of American society, but that ultimately it was a lost cause. Modernity would continue to erode sectarian religion for the foreseeable future. 

I wasn’t wrong. Each year fewer Americans claim adherence to any religion (it’s called the “rise of the nones” among sociologists and demographers), following a trend of secularization that is nearly complete in Europe. But secularization is not de-spiritualization. Most of us stuck in the whirlwind of modern life feel a loss, and many of us are searching for a way out, or maybe a way back to something greater than our atomized, material existence.

Those of us who feel it manage it in different ways. But all of the ways we manage it are either through periodic escapes (like retreats or therapeutic psychedelic experiences), permanent escapes (like modern nomads or hipster homesteaders), or numbing and avoidance (the modern default). 
But what if there was a different way? 

__________

In the following essay, I’m going to argue that humans living in the modern world need institutions that promote community, transcendence, and personal growth, and we don’t have any institutions that can do all three. The solution I have in mind is a Post-Church Church.

Many people have been searching for their own solution. Some try to find it in religious institutions like churches, synagogues, or mosques. Others try to find it through personal development retreats and practices like psychedelic therapy. But I’m going to argue that they’re all doomed to fall short. We need institutions that are intentionally built with conceptual frameworks and tangible practices that support people in navigating the infinite complexities of modern life, repairing the psycho-spiritual wounds that modern life inevitably inflicts, and thriving in the face of dynamic, global challenges. 

The ideas I’m going to lay out are, I believe, important to every single person on the planet. They’re not mine; I’ve taken from many brilliant minds and have mixed them together, like a DJ of ideas. The “set” I’m about to “spin” (in DJ parlance) tells a story about how we got to the modern world we’re living in today, and how we might build a new type of institution that can support the better world we know is possible. 

For the time being, I’m going to refer to this new type of institution as the Post-Church Church, or PCC for short. I’m going to lay out a story, as concisely as possible, suggesting that humans living in WEIRD (an acronym coined by the evolutionary psychologist Joseph Henrich and stands for Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) parts of the world are suffering from a lack of at least one of three essential human needs: community, transcendence, and personal growth. For most of human history, we just had the first two needs, and we met them quite easily through the rituals and myths of our communities. There was no need for adult personal growth because our tight-knit childhood communities provided everything we needed: roles, values, worldviews, and meaning. 

Starting in the 1500s and 1600s, a totally new way of living began to emerge. Intellectuals call this new way of living “modernity,” and use a slew of concepts to describe everything that’s changed since the 1500s: industrialization, capitalism, globalization, the rise of science, nationalism, bureaucratization, urbanization, individualization, and secularization. There’s probably a few “isms” and “izations” I’m missing, but you get the idea. Instead of wrapping all of this under the term modernity, I’m going with Henrich’s term WEIRD (Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) because it has a few of the important qualities of modernity tucked into its acronym, and it also nods to the fact that “modern” does not always equate to better.

What I will argue in this essay is that human life has changed in fundamental and profound ways for anyone touched by the WEIRD world. We lost the unquestioned, immersive community of the pre-WEIRD world; we lost the old rituals and mythological framework that supported moments of transcendence; and because we now live in irreversibly diverse, dense, and dynamic societies, we have a new need that is largely unmet: the need for personal growth. 

I will go on to argue that churches (synagogues, mosques, etc) served as community-and-transcendence-promoting institutions that bridged the old world and WEIRD world. But they were always doomed to fail in the WEIRD world, and now we’re at the point where they’ve become obsolete. We need new institutions that can promote community and transcendence in ways that are also aligned with diversity, authenticity, and intellectual honesty. But we don’t just need community and transcendence; for the sake of building a better world with 8 billion people on it, we need these institutions that also promote personal growth.

In other words, we need a Post-Church Church. 

II. We’re No Longer OLD; Now We’re WEIRD

Religious institutions like churches, synagogues, and mosques give humans something they can’t quite get anywhere else: a large but tight-knit community infused with a sense of transcendence. We’ve had versions of such institutions likely for hundreds of thousands of years. But something happened with the rise of the modern WEIRD (Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) way of life that eroded the power of religious institutions to do what they’ve done for all of human history. 

In this section, I’ll describe a bit about what has changed and why it’s a problem. From the broad perspective of the history of Homo sapiens, we live in very strange times. Several things happened over the course of about 300 years, beginning sometime around 1600 and concluding with all the major features of the modern, WEIRD world by 1900. Of course a lot has happened since 1900: world wars, nuclear power, computers, and now AI. But all of these (save maybe AI—we don’t yet know where that one’s going) are just logical outgrowths from the massive shifts that happened in the previous 300 years.

Some academics call this the “discontinuist” interpretation of history. This interpretation says that human history fundamentally changed (i.e., discontinued) with the emergence of the modern era. Before then, there was a pre-modern way of life based in the old-world village and kinship networks, where all of our relationships were infused with common beliefs and worldviews. Our personal identity and social roles were not up for questioning, debate, or development. They were simply given. 

I will refer to this pre-modern way of life as OLD: omnipresent, lifelong, and dependent. It was omnipresent in that, in its ideal form, it pervaded every aspect of life and there were no alternatives. The religion, political organization, gender roles, rites of passage, promoted and forbidden activities, and so on were simply facts about the world. One sociologist described this pre-modern omnipresence as the “sacred canopy.” It covered the entire community in all aspects of life. 

The pre-modern way of being was lifelong in that this pervasive, omnipresent “sacred canopy” covered people from conception to the afterlife. People didn’t grow out of it. People also didn’t want to grow out of it because there was no conceivable alternative to want. They were also utterly dependent on the sacred canopy of their community. It provided everything—from protection and sustenance to meaning and care—and without it an individual would have nothing. A lone gazelle is a dead gazelle, the saying goes. And it might as well be true for the OLD way of life.

There are many other features of pre-modern life that social scientists have highlighted but its omnipresence, lifelong nature, and the utter dependence people had on their pre-modern communities provides us with enough detail to understand a little bit of what that way of life was like. Bonus points for providing me with a handy acronym.

The point I want to make up front is this: humans lived in OLD communities for hundreds of thousands of years. Our bodies and brains are adapted to the OLD ways of life. And we’ve been living in WEIRD ways for less than one-quarter of one-percent of our evolutionary history. The whiplash is so great, we have barely begun to take stock of what has happened. 

Although we modern WEIRDos have irreversibly left the OLD world, our bodies, hearts, and minds still require a few key ingredients from the past, namely deep and authentic community, and regular, communal transcendence. Furthermore, because we have pushed out into the diverse, complex, dynamic, and isolating modern world, we WEIRDos have a new requirement for living a whole, flourishing life: personal growth. The modern world offers us poor substitutions for the first two, and hardly anything lasting and sustainable for the third. 

In the next section, I want to focus on what we’ve lost and also what we’ve gained by becoming WEIRD. I want to do this to lay the groundwork for why religious institutions (churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) are continuing to lose members, why they’re not the answer to our problems, and why we need a new post-church church.

III. Being WEIRD sucks, except for all the good stuff

There have been many attempts to escape historical change. Some of these attempts have been aimed at ossifying society, represented in the call by one conservative thinker to “stand athwart history yelling stop.” Other attempts have been aimed at transformation or purification. The earliest known versions of the latter showed up in what some historians call “the Axial age,” a period from around 700 to 300 BCE. During this time, figures like Siddhartha Gautama, Lao-Tzu, Diogenes, and Israelite prophets rejected some if not all aspects of social change in their times. They all seemed to say, in one way or another, that society has become corrupt, we need to reject it, and return or transcend to some better arrangement.

Their modern counterparts can be found in parts of modern artistic or philosophical movements like Romanticism, religious groups like the Amish or various Christian fundamentalist sects, cultural movements like hippie communes, and today the hipster homesteaders and Burning Man nomads. There are also plenty of examples on a smaller scale of early modern individuals rejecting WEIRD life for an OLD life. The common thread is a  recognition that something is wrong about the WEIRD world and we need to return to a state of purity, whether that be nature or some version of godliness.

Who can argue against their diagnoses? From the earliest empire city-states to the present day, technological and economic advances have led to vast inequality and suffering. But they also led to an increase in what I’ll call the three Ds: density (humans living in close proximity to each other), diversity (humans from different communities living close to each other), and dynamism (increased pace of technological and cultural change).

Throughout most of the last 10,000 years, the three Ds came together very sporadically. But for many reasons, they reached a critical velocity in Europe by the 1600s to produce the WEIRD world we live in today. The advances of the last 500 years are obvious but it’s not hard to see that every advance has had a cost. We’ve lost tight-knit communities, the village-based ways of raising kids, the connection to nature, a sense of a divine world, a sense of transcendence, a slower, more natural pace of life, a clear connection between our work and our sustenance, and so on.

What’s fascinating, however, is that as strong as critiques of the WEIRD world might be, they have consistently failed to find broader followings. How many Amish and commune hippies do you know? Sure, you might like to camp and get out into nature, but you, me, and everyone else we know quite likes coming back to our WEIRD lives. Both left- and right-wing critiques of WEIRDness sometimes argue that most people haven’t rejected the WEIRD world because of either top-down imperialist control or a more subtle imperialist brain-washing (called “false consciousness” by leftists in the mid-20th century or rightists today call “mass formation psychosis”).

A more obvious explanation is that the vast majority of people who come into contact with WEIRDness like it and see its obvious benefits. There is something in behavioral economics called “revealed preference” where we can see what people truly want by simply observing their behavior, not what they say. The WEIRD world is inexorable not because of some imperial force or because people have been fooled to act against their best interests; the WEIRD world is here to stay because it’s an improvement in many ways on what came before.

Let’s briefly count the blessings of the WEIRD world. It is unquestionably true that the WEIRD world has led to a substantial:

• increase in life expectancy

• decrease in infant death

• decrease in maternal death

• increase in education levels for everyone

• decrease in violence

• improvement in living standards through technology for the vast majority of people

• increase in access to protection of human rights

Thanks to WEIRDness, our lives are unquestionably better than what came before. They are not perfect. We obviously have not reached utopia. And in fact, I want to argue that things are very far from perfect:

• We are living in the midst of several environmental catastrophes

• Most of the 8 billion people on this planet are not reaping the benefits of WEIRDness

• We are experiencing waves of reactionary, anti-democratic movements

• Relatedly, we’re seeing waves of viral conspiracy-inspired, paranoid thinking

• Despite material abundance, children and adolescents in the WEIRD world are suffering from rising rates of mental and emotional health problems

• Human rights are being rolled back in the heart of the WEIRD world

• We’re lonelier than ever

The solution to all of these has been technocratic and piecemeal. Don’t get me wrong: we need those solutions! But we also need institutions that can support humans as we make our way through this current phase of WEIRDness. We need institutions that can support a sense of community that is also diverse and flexible; practices of transcendence that are also humble and anti-dogmatic; and most of all, we need frameworks for personal development that increase our internal awareness and autonomy that also increase our sense of interdependence.

These are reasons why the Post-Church Church is not just a wonderful luxury to add to our already amazing lives; it’s something we need if we are to hold on to the gains we’ve made and continue to improve not just our own WEIRD lives but the lives of everyone on the planet.

In the next section, I’m going to dive into the first aspect of a “Post-Church” solution—community—and why churches (or synagogues, mosques, or any other religious institution) can’t deliver on this in a truly WEIRD world.

IV. We’ve lost our community

With the decline of the OLD world (omnipresent, lifelong, and dependent) and the rise of modern WEIRD life (Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic), we’ve lost two necessary things for human life, and we’ve also gained a new unmet need. The two things we’ve lost are community and a regular access to transcendence; the new need we now have, I’ll argue, is adult personal growth. In this section, I’m focusing on the loss of community. 

When intellectuals in the late 1800s and early 1900s thought about what’s changed in their world, social life was an obvious place to start. Many were still close enough to an older way of life where people lived in the same place and had the same economic and social roles over countless generations. People related to each other based on lifelong, personal ties, shared the same overarching worldview (what I referred to above as a “sacred canopy”), and never once had to question or build a self-identity. 

Of course, this is an idealized view of the old village way of life, but it captures an important and indisputable point: for most of human history, people lived in tight-knit communities that were neither dense, diverse, nor dynamic. Our personal identities and social roles were never up for questioning, (which might seem like a bummer to our WEIRD minds), but this also meant that we had a deep sense of safety and security. Our communities were not just safety nets, they were webs of acceptance and meaning that grounded and directed us. 

In Europe, these communities slowly began to erode in the transition from the medieval to early modern era. Here’s an example of how these OLD communities fell apart. In medieval England, most people lived in OLD communities as serfs, working the land generation after generation. But with the rise of globalization, that land (owned by the few elite) became more valuable to raise sheep on than grow crops. Landlords began kicking peasant communities off their land in favor of sheep and thus began one of the forces that contributed to urbanization. Families moved to cities, scattered and intermingled with other families from other areas with other worldviews. Their daily interactions were no longer with people sharing long inter-generational ties, but rather were with strangers. Money, contracts, and bureaucratic rules began to shape most social interactions. 

Within a few generations we can see the breakdown of OLD community by the three Ds of WEIRD modernity: dynamism (in the form of globalization, capitalism), density (in the form of urbanization), and diversity (a fact of city life and also a primary reason for bureaucratic rules). This was a multi-generational shock for people connected to the OLD world. Urban poverty, alcoholism, and domestic violence were well documented in England from the 1600s on. And it’s evident in every metropolitan city in the world. 

The best and most enduring solution to these early modern social problems was the rise of the bureaucratic welfare state which produced better working conditions, housing regulations, public health initiatives, and universal education. Living conditions and quality of life improved, and now we’re all Westernized, educated, dependent on market-driven industry, rich (relative to our ancestors and the non-WEIRD parts of the world), and at least somewhat democratic. 

But with the loss of OLD community, we have a massive hole in our social fabric and our individual lives. Without that longstanding, multigenerational web of acceptance and meaning that the OLD world gave humans, we’ve become lost, lonely, depressed, anxious, desperate, confused, angry, and paranoid. The most convincing scientific research shows that humans are naturally altruistic, giving, caring, empathetic, and cooperative. And when we experience these qualities, we have dramatically lower rates of mental and physical illnesses and we live longer. This is our birthright when we are in a safe and supportive community.

So, why can’t religious institutions give this to us? For many people it still does. Quite a bit of research shows that people who regularly attend a religious institution are happier and healthier. But nevertheless, attendance at these institutions declines year after year.

Ryan Burges, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (Fortress Press, 2021)

The reasons for this steady secularization are several:

• We all grow up in a diverse society and eventually see that our childhood religion is just one of an infinite variety of worldviews

• We don’t need a religious institution to do anything necessary in life like get a job, have a home, raise a family, etc.

• Science has explained the material world and no faith or deity is required

• The wealthier people get, the less dependent they feel on religious support

• We can meet spiritual needs in a private, individualistic way (meditation/prayer, wellness/development retreats, psychedelics, art/music/nature)

As one founder of modern sociology put it: “If there is one truth history teaches us beyond doubt, it is that religion tends to embrace a smaller and smaller portion of social life.” He went on to say that eventually, in modern life, religion will have no practical purpose at all . . . except to support a sense of community. 

Of course, we have non-religious forms of community: family, friends, bowling leagues, and book clubs, to name a few. But research shows that these have all declined as a source of social support as well. One of the reasons for this is that we WEIRDos still haven’t figured out how to “do” community in a diverse and dynamic context. Our community institutions in the recent past––whether they’re churches, fraternal organizations, or bowling clubs––were largely ethnically homogenous and stratified by gender and class. How do we build community in the diverse WEIRD contexts most of us live in?

Another reason that our non-religious community organizations haven’t been able to hold together is that they don’t have practices of transcendence that help bind people together. We’ve lost deep community as we’ve lost religious institutions, but we can’t get community back through friend groups and book clubs. Our modern, WEIRD lives are too diverse and our current practices lack the transcendence that helped bind people together in religious institutions. 

In the next section, I’ll explore the modern loss of transcendence, which does more than bind people together, although that’s one of its key functions. It also lifts us out of our isolated, individualized mode of thinking. We need this just as much as we need community.

V.  We’ve lost transcendence

Have you ever rooted for the home team at a football game, and a big, game-changing play was made? And the entire stadium––including you––rose and screamed for joy? Remember that feeling in your body?

Or have you ever been to a concert and the artists play a song that everybody knows and you start singing along with countless other people? Do you remember what that felt like in your body?

That feeling in your body is what one famous sociologist called “collective effervescence.” I’m going to call it transcendence. It’s a non-ordinary state of consciousness in which we feel lifted out of the mundane, humdrum of everyday life. It’s why people go to concerts and sporting events—both of which can be better seen and heard in the comfort of home. Yet people pay a lot of money and go through a great deal of hassle to get a little transcendence, together in large groups. And it’s not just through sports and concerts; we also get this through political rallies, raves, and group retreats.

Humans have likely had these practices of communal transcendence for hundreds of thousands of years. The capacity for this transcendence is one of the key factors that helped Homo sapiens dominate the planet because it brought us together and helped us coordinate in large numbers, far larger than the bands of 30-50 our nearest primate cousins could bring together. 

Communal transcendence bound us together in large groups through singing, dancing, and other ritual acts, but it did much more than this. When these moments of transcendence are woven into our lives, humans become transformed. Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology wrote:

“The worshiper who has communed with their god is not only a person who sees new truths that the unbeliever does not know; they are a person who is capable of more. They feel more strength in themselves, either to cope with the difficulties of existence or to defeat them. They are raised above human miseries because they are raised above their condition as humans; they believe they are saved from evil in whatever form they conceive of evil.”

One of the defining features of modernity is “disenchantment,” which refers to, among other things, a loss of such transcendence. As modern science and technology explained the world and solved many of our problems, practices of transcendence (like chanting or rhythmic dance) were seen as primitive actions that whipped up childish passions. The experience of such transcendence was seen as irrational and dream-like. 

Rejecting these old ways is what helped humans leave the dark ages and step into “the age of enlightenment,” which one famous modern philosopher defined as discovering and knowing the world through the light of reason and rationality, rather than dogma and tradition. And it’s a good thing we did! In section three, I outlined just a few of the amazing benefits of modernity. 

But in exchange for these benefits, we’ve lost access to the vital forces that connect us to a larger community, the world and the universe, and also open us up to something inside that makes us capable of feeling and doing more. As Durkheim noted above, transcendence raises us above the human condition. 

When the forces of modernity disenchanted life, we gained much better health, far more comfort, and immeasurably greater knowledge. But we also lost our ability to connect to each other as well as connect in the presence of something outside our daily, mundane lives. OLD (omnipresent, lifelong, and dependent) religion still survives but its days have been numbered for centuries. Europe has long since secularized, and the United States is well on its way. 

Rejecting OLD, religious methods of transcendence came with benefits (like science and technology, but also reason-based ethical and moral frameworks) but the costs have come in a loss of sacred meaning and sacred community, as well as the loss of vitality and strength that came with such sacredness. There are many different efforts underway today to bring transcendence back into our lives, but I think they’re all either doomed to fail or will only succeed in transient, partial, and fragile ways. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Recovering old-time religion. The desire to return to the origins of one’s religious traditions is at the heart of WEIRD modernity. Some historians locate the beginning of modernity with the Gutenberg printing press in 1439 or with the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. The printing of the Bible contributed to the Protestant Reformation, which was among other things a call to return to the roots of Christianity. 

Over the next hundred plus years, various Protestant sects arose and wars were fought over this idea. This should give us a clue as to where religious-based methods of transcendence lead: to sectarian splintering, in-group fighting, and between-group warring. Religion gives us no way out of this. For hundreds of thousands of years, religion was an amazing way to bind humans together in communities through practices of transcendence. But it cannot work in the modern WEIRD world, on a planet of 8 billion people, in social contexts that are unavoidably diverse, dense, and dynamic. 

Furthermore, transcendence based in religion cannot meet the requirements of WEIRD modernity: religion demands intellectual dishonesty by asking its adherents to believe things that are not open to interpersonal, empirical examination and deliberation. Faith is taken as a virtue in religious traditions, rather than as a problem requiring radical humility. 

Art. Since the rise of Romantic artistic movements in music, painting, poetry, and philosophy, some WEIRDos have argued that art is our way back to transcendence. No doubt, art can certainly lift us above ourselves, but it cannot create a stable community, and the moments of transcendence seem to be the most fleeting. The virtue of transcendence through art is that it doesn’t seem to lead to tribalism and inter-group conflict. But it also doesn’t seem to have enough power to extend beyond a moment, connect individuals together in a stable way (fan clubs are pretty weak sauce), or do the third thing that a post-church church should do: support personal growth and development. 

Nature. Communing with nature is a tried and true modern method for accessing some sense of the transcendent. Wild nature was seen in the pre-modern European world as dangerous. But as nature became subdued by modern technology, it became a source of spirituality, sacredness, and transcendence. But it has the same challenges that art does: the feelings it produces don’t seem to contribute to a stable, vibrant community and it doesn’t seem to produce a lot of personal development. In fact, it seems to me that transcendence through nature is an escape from WEIRD modernity, rather than a solution for integrating transcendence into it. 

Psychedelics. The virtue of psychedelics as a thoroughly modern method for accessing transcendence is that you don’t have to believe anything (like you do in religion), have any special knowledge (like you do for most art), or have a special affinity for it (like for people who LOVE nature). If you ingest enough psychedelics in a safe setting, you will be reliably lifted out of our your ordinary consciousness and experience a sense of transcendence. Perhaps the transcendence is terrifying; perhaps it is blissful. But it will certainly not be mundane and ordinary. 

The problems with psychedelics as the only tool for transcendence is 1) they are fleeting, with the experiential glow lasting from several days to several months (and it is probably not advisable to do them weekly); 2) we haven’t figured out how to use them together in stable, healthy communities (outside of sporadic group therapeutic use); and 3) in my experience they have the most value as individual therapeutic tools, rather than tools for communal transcendence. I write this with a lot of humility and awareness that we’re at the early stages of understanding how to incorporate psychedelics into modern life. So, I’ll just put a pin in this for now. 

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So, what do we do now? In following sections, I’ll lay out what I think are a few modern, reliable methods for communal transcendence that do not rely on shared (religious) beliefs, special knowledge (like in art), or an escape from modernity (like with nature transcendence). But first, we need to talk about the third leg of the post-church stool: personal growth.

VI. Personal growth is more important than ever 

So far, I’ve laid out an argument that we modern WEIRDos (Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) have lost spaces in our lives for deep, rich community and regular moments of transcendence that support community. As humans, we need these types of community and transcendence, and their loss has come with steep costs. But we also have a third need––personal growth––that has only arisen in the modern age. 

We modern WEIRDos need spaces in our lives that can support all three of these—community, transcendence, and growth—simultaneously, but without the baggage of OLD, pre-modern religion. We need post-church spaces.

In the previous two sections, I described the modern loss of community and transcendence, and in this section I’m going to describe the modern need for personal growth. What I’m calling personal growth can be divided into two different processes: psychological development (i.e., growing into ever more effective and nuanced ways of relating with the world), and emotional healing (i.e., growing into ever more compassionate and liberated ways of relating with oneself). Psychological development encompasses activities like psycho-spiritual education, self-development trainings, and diverse life experiences. And emotional healing encompasses activities like therapy, retreats, and certain spiritual practices. 

I’m going to argue that the need for personal growth has only emerged in the modern era; for the vast majority of human history we only needed to psychologically and emotionally develop to a stage where we’re able to blend with our tribe (what we now achieve in adolescence). But with the rise of modern WEIRD life, we are now forced into more advanced levels of personal growth. And if we reject this modern demand for growth, then we’ll be left behind in nearly every way imaginable: career stagnation, dysfunctional relationships, isolation, depression and anxiety, and a sense of confusion and despair toward modern changes. 

Personal growth in the modern world is not optional, and yet we have only fragmented and sporadic resources for it. Could post-church churches be the answer?

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For 99.9% of the last 250,000 years—as long as Homo sapiens have been on this planet—adult personal growth only needed to reach a stage where we had the capacity to bind together into tight-knit social groups, follow and enforce social norms, and commit our lives to the good of others in our group. The psychologist Robert Kegan calls this stage of personal growth “Social Mind,” but I think “Tribe” more completely captures this stage. Our ancestors achieved the Tribe level of personal development with flying colors. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here. 

Stage 1 of adult personal development: Tribe

What’s important to note is that they did not need to psychologically and emotionally develop any further than this. They didn’t need to discover themselves, construct an authentic self-identity, heal emotional wounds, or self-actualize because nothing in their physical or social environment demanded it. They lived only around people who looked like them and believed the same things as they did. As long as OLD-world humans had rituals and myths that tied them to a community and produced a sense of communal transcendence, they were successfully adapted to their environments. In other words, for 99.99% of human history, we had no need for growing beyond the level of Tribe. 

Things change, however, when the WEIRD modern world starts to spread. Nearly every force of modernity disrupts the OLD world community by forcing people into diverse social contexts, bureaucratic institutions, and transactional relationships: early in their lives with schools and universities, and later with corporations and governmental and legal institutions. These institutions force us to interact not through family and personal ties nor religious and social norms but through anonymous, contractual rules AND with a wide diversity of people with different worldviews. It is no longer enough to achieve the developmental stage of binding together in tight-knit communities. Modern adults need to grow beyond this into a stage where they can follow and enforce anonymous, bureaucratic rules in diverse contexts, regulate their mental and emotional states on their own, and commit to their own well-being.

This is what it means to “grow up” in the WEIRD modern world. We also have a new word for it: “Adulting.” 

Stage 2 of adult personal development: Adulting

This is not the final stage of adult development, as we’ll see, but it’s necessary and important. However, there are some obvious problems with the modern “Adulting” stage in personal growth. 

First, it’s disconnected from community and transcendence. How many movies have been made about the teen to 20-something confusion and dissatisfaction with growing up? Following and enforcing bureaucratic rules, regulating ourselves, and committing to our well-being lacks a certain appeal (or we could just say Adulting is boring). It’s disconnected from the family and friend community we grew up with but doesn’t re-connect us to a new and nourishing community outside of the nuclear family. And it lacks any practices or even acknowledgement of transcendence (i.e., that there could even be anything more than this modern, capitalist, bureaucratic system). 

Nevertheless, if I reject the Adulting stage of growth, I’m in trouble. I will not be able to find stable ways to make money, get a partner and build a family, and achieve some material and emotional security in the modern world. So, for all its drawbacks, this adulting stage of growth is not optional in the modern world. But, like all stages of growth, there is a big upside for seeing it through. There is a personal growth stage beyond Adulting, which Kegan calls “Self-Transforming,” and I’ll call “Wisdom,” where community and transcendence come back in, but in deeper, more authentic, and dynamic ways. To make it to Wisdom, however, we need support to make it out of Tribe and through Adulting.  

The second problem with the Adulting stage of personal growth is that we don’t have effective institutions dedicated to helping us move in and through this stage. Schools and universities, therapists, and self-development retreats do this to varying degrees. But they all do it in fragmented and partial ways. Schools and universities help us move into Adulting but cannot help us move beyond it. They give us technical knowledge to participate in the post-industrial economy, but more importantly, they expose us to a diversity in worldviews. I think it’s this latter function that is most important for Adulting because it encourages us to distance ourselves from our childhood religion, politics, and social norms and begin the difficult journey of building an identity of our own. 

Psychotherapy and self-development retreats help with Adulting by giving us containers and tools by which we can examine and heal childhood and adolescent emotional wounds. This is perhaps the most important part of Adulting because without it, our thoughts and actions are driven by unconscious, young, wounded parts of us. As Carl Jung wrote, “Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Unacknowledged and unhealed, these wounds end up sabotaging our careers, relationships, and mental health. 

But most therapy lacks community and transcendence, and it often doesn’t have a framework for personal growth beyond healing old wounds. This is certainly not a knock on therapy! It’s a necessary part of Adulting in the WEIRD world. But it needs to be woven into practices that build deep community, support transcendence, and point us to personal growth beyond healing. 

Self-development retreats share a similar role as therapy in modern life but are more of a mixed bag. Quality control is a huge issue, but even the best ones leave their attendees adrift after they return to their regular lives. I attended an amazing five-day retreat in Sedona last October in which I had several important growth experiences (one which included spiritually grieving my grandfather’s death and walking him out of the bardo realm and onto the other side).  And I felt a glow that lasted at least a month after I returned home. I’m still in touch with several other attendees, and know that they had similar experiences. But now we’re all back in our everyday lives, wondering how to integrate these experiences into modern, WEIRD life.  

This is the best case scenario for retreats. There are many varieties of bad cases, like my friend who went on a retreat where the leader ended up being an abusive narcissist, or those retreats that are just step one into a cult. 

Finally, the Adulting stage of personal growth points beyond itself to the next stage of personal growth but there is no institutional support for this transition. Let’s say you’re one of the lucky ones. You made your way through university, found the right career for you, got the life partner and 2.5 kids, and even got into therapy and healed some big childhood wounds. Life’s perfect, right? Except that there’s a nagging feeling that there has to be more. You hear an inner calling to do more, to help more, with your lucky draw in life. The kids eventually go away to college, and then what? The only thing the Adulting stage can tell us about what comes next is that the Adulting stage is not the final step. The identity we built in the Adulting stage is not solid; the social, political and philosophical worldviews we built up are not sufficient and never will be; and focusing only on our own well-being is never going to fulfill us. 

These realizations push modern WEIRDos into a stage beyond Adulting.

Stage 3 of adult personal development: Wisdom

Many different thinkers in the last 80 years have started to characterize this stage. Carl Jung wrote about the “synthesis of the Self,” Abraham Maslow wrote about “self-actualization” and “being drives,” the psychologist Robert Kegan wrote about the “self-transforming” stage of adult development, John Vervaeke writes about “relevance realization,” and Ian McGilchrist writes about moving from a reductionist, materialist worldview to one that is holistic and relational. Obviously there are many different ways to think about the Wisdom stage of personal growth, but what these all have in common are

• An appreciation for nuance, multiplicity of viewpoints, and relativity

• A cosmopolitan concern for all of humanity, and a desire to work on behalf of humanity

• A recognition of the interconnectedness of one’s being

• An acknowledgement of each person’s unique contribution (or calling) to the song of the universe

• An openness to a post-religious spirituality that is humble, pragmatic, and non-sectarian 

There are exactly zero institutions in modern life that support the move from adulting to wisdom. Those who make this leap seem to be doing so through an ad hoc mixture of personal growth practices and sheer luck. However, most who claim to have made this leap to wisdom seem to me to be still carrying a lot of unhealed, emotional wounds from the adolescent “Tribe” and “Adulting” stages of growth (see the sectarian splintering of spiritual groups and the countless cases of dishonest and abusive behavior by “gurus”).

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We need post-church spaces not only to bring rich, nourishing community and deep, profound transcendence into modern WEIRD life, but we also desperately need them to support personal growth. In our WEIRD world, we are all forced to grow beyond Tribe and into Adulting (and then eventually into Wisdom). Some of us make our way through in fits and starts, and some of us get stuck. But all of us are making the journey alone. 

We need post-church spaces that are built with an awareness of this need for personal growth in the modern world. Growth is not optional. Those who don’t make their way from Tribe to Adulting become angry and suspicious toward modern WEIRD life, and fill the ranks of paranoid, confused political and social movements. Or they just withdraw and lead “lives of quiet desperation” (as one famous WEIRDo put it). And those who see nothing beyond Adulting can easily succumb to an insular, avoidant materialism in an effort to distract from that nagging calling to keep healing and growing. 

VII. Let’s build post-church communities

Are you with me? Do you agree that we modern WEIRDos need a new type of space that supports a sense of community that is also diverse and flexible? Practices of transcendence that are also humble and anti-dogmatic? And frameworks for personal development that increase our internal awareness and autonomy that also increase our sense of interdependence? 

I get excited at this point because now we get to talk about what Post-Church Churches (PCCs) might actually look like. First, I’ll lay out some basic requisites of PCCs in bullet-point form. These are the structural contours of PCCs, without which they will fail to meet the needs I’ve outlined above. The requisites are:

• They must be physically embedded in communities. They can (and should) have an online component to assist in administration, scheduling, marketing, educational resource collection, and communication. But a PCC must necessarily be in the flesh, geographically accessible to a local community. Ideally, these spaces would be geographically situated like regular churches, typically within a 30 minute commute from people’s homes.

• They must take a page from contemporary megachurches and offer amenities that have nothing to do with its central purpose. Food, coffee, a play area for kids, concerts. They must be multi-purpose so that they can be woven into multiple aspects of our lives.

• They must be thoroughly post-religious. This does not mean that words/ideas like god, prayer, spirit, the divine, etc. can’t be a part of PCC programming. It means that the PCC is radically non-sectarian and uses “spiritual” terms and ideas in a humble, provisional, and playful way. The reasons for this are:

• PCCs are necessarily pluralist (i.e., they take diversity as the natural state of modern human coexistence, and not as something to be tolerated or eventually overcome). PCCs are spaces for everyone who is ready to fully move into a fundamentally pluralist WEIRD life.

• An intellectually honest and transparent approach to ultimate questions must necessarily lead to humble and provisional commitments. PCCs would encourage dialogue as an end in itself, rather than as a method to reach an ultimate truth. 

• Of the three legs of the PCC stool, community and personal growth can obviously be approached in non-religious terms. But just as easily can transcendence be approached non-religiously. Recall that transcendence is being lifted out of one’s ordinary, mundane consciousness. Getting into these states requires no religious belief or practice, and neither does their interpretation or integration. And committing to non-sectarian, non-religious practices and dialogue allows for a diversity of people to come together around what matters most: our authentic experiences and a deep human need to connect, share, and support others. 

• Any spiritual, intellectual, or practical wisdom from religious traditions can be fully articulated and understood in post-religious spiritual terms. The idea of grace in Christianity, for example, can be understood in transcendent “oneness” experiences that people can have in holotropic breathwork, ecstatic dance, meditation, and psychedelics. In such experiences, people have a felt sense that they are part of the universe and their particular failings and miseries fade away. For me, this grace is even more obvious with my Internal Family Systems practice, with the compassion and total acceptance I feel from my Core Self toward my inner parts. In any case, the main idea is that if a religious concept is valuable, it can be felt and understood in non-religious terms. And I’ll go further to argue that if a religious concept can’t be understood in non-religious terms then it’s not valuable.

• All religious traditions have an ethnic heritage and cannot ultimately be separated from that heritage. If we want to move beyond ethnicity as a meaningful source of difference, then we have to move beyond religion.

• Finally, as I’ve argued up till now, at their core PCCs must support a flexible and pluralist community; non-religious, experiential moments of transcendence; and practices for personal growth.

For the remainder of this section, I’ll explain how I think a post-church space would support a flexible and pluralist community. 

How Post-Church Churches Can Support Community

Community-building might be the most complex of the three PCC pillars because such community needs to be: 

• Flexible: in the sense that it will need to provide different levels of social connection at different times. This is actually not that different from what many contemporary churches have become, with their variety of service times, online services, week-day small groups, etc. The PCC would expect people to come in periodically for intense, community-bonding sessions, but fade when life gets hectic, only to come back around when life permits. Also, a member of one PCC should be able to travel and attend other PCCs and connect with others in the PCC movement.

• Open: in the sense that you can join as you would a fitness studio. You can easily sign up, pause your membership, and re-join. Unlike a regular church, you don’t have to believe in anything, take a series of membership classes to join, or feel bad when you’re on pause.

• Pluralist: in the sense that the practices that support community are practices that are thoroughly respectful of difference.

What sorts of practices are flexible, open, pluralistic, AND support community? Wouldn’t such a community just fall apart? For most of human history this type of community would be impossible. Humans never grew past the adolescent “Tribe” stage of personal growth (see the previous section) and so couldn’t possibly interact peacefully in a flexible, open, and pluralist manner. 

But today, as we WEIRDos have progressed into the “Adulting” stage of personal growth, we have new capacities for relating to each other as independent agents who are fundamentally worthy of respect for simply being human. This makes no sense in the Tribe stage because individuals are only worthy of respect insofar as they belong to my tribe. 

Over the past 50-60 years, as more WEIRDos have grown into the Adulting stage of growth, there have been different efforts in psychotherapy and personal development contexts to create practices that support this new type of community. In the same time frame, academics have built intellectual rationales for these practices. I won’t dive deeply into these rationales here, but I’ll point interested readers to Jurgen Habermas’s work on communicative rationality where he convincingly argues that communication, at its core, intrinsically leads people into non-coercive communication, equal participation, sincerity, a drive for mutual understanding, and an openness to critique and argumentation. The fact that we rarely get to experience this communicative rationality is a result of pathological social institutions rather than a signal of human nature. 

I’d also point readers to Michael Tomasello’s work that shows that humans are naturally altruistic, compassionate, and cooperative. Anthony Giddens also shows how forces in modernity have led WEIRDos to become deeply invested in interpersonal relationships as the primary way of building trust (as opposed to the pre-modern modes of trust that arose from long-term family and village ties that were simply facts of life). 

Together, what this intellectual work shows is that in our WEIRD lives we need social containers that support communication practices infused with all of the qualities to which Habermas, Tomasello, and Giddens point: non-coercion, equal participation, sincerity, a drive for mutual understanding, open to critique/difference, assuming a natural drive for altruism, compassion, and cooperation, and assuming a need in modern life to invest in and build relationships for their own sake. 

Authentic Relating (AR), I believe, is the perfect set of tools for this job. AR is like a laboratory for building and maintaining modern “Adulting" relationships. It has diverse sources in Rogerian person-centered psychotherapy, the Esalen Institute and the Human Potential Movement, Nonviolent Communication, rave culture, and Burning Man culture. 

AR is an evolving answer to the question: how can I discover, build, and maintain my own authentic self while also deeply and sincerely connecting to the authentic world of another person? AR answers this question through the following set of ideas: 

• Slowing down our communications allows us to feel, hear, and see more of ourselves and each other.

• If we welcome everything happening inside of us and inside of others (thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions), we can can connect more deeply inside with our own truth and outside with others in our lives. Welcoming everything is not condoning or approving; it’s rather a radical willingness to engage with what is here.

• When we acknowledge, reveal, and let go of our assumptions about the other person in front of us, we can start to engage with the unique spark of that person. And when we engage with the actual human being in front of us, we make more room for their authentic expression and our own.

• As we slow down and welcome our own experience (no matter how challenging), we can openly, authentically reveal our experience to others. AR provides us with a few tools and practices for doing this in a variety of different relationships, from our most intimate to the most casual.

• With this slowing down, welcoming everything, and letting go of assumptions, and revealing our experience, we make more room inside to own our projections we put on to others. These projections take the form of assumptions, stories, judgments, and values. We own them by recognizing them and claiming them as ours and not objective reality that we’re simply reporting. By owning our projections, we can check them with others, which gets us closer and builds intimacy.

• Finally, in AR, we consciously set intentions to honor oneself and honor others by recognizing that authentic relating is a balance between authentic, honest expression of oneself and coming into relationship with others’ authentic, honest expression. In AR, neither self nor other is prioritized. The relationship between self and other is the aim.

A typical AR event is a series of short lessons on listening and communication interspersed between “games” done in pairs, triads, or larger groups. These events are not only extremely fun and engaging, they are like real-world laboratories for learning how to build rich, deep, and nourishing relationships in the modern, WEIRD world. 

My vision for PCCs has AR as a central practice, with weekly workshops and AR game events that can be done on their own or as part of larger PCC events. I’m exploring this right now, with my conscious dance events in Savannah, Georgia. The main action at these events is of course dance. But I weave in AR games at the beginning to connect people and build a sense of togetherness before we bust moves on the dance floor. It’s been a lot of fun and it’s actually challenging to get people to stop the AR and move on to dancing!

AR is also important as a cultural foundation for PCCs. As members become introduced to AR ideas and practices, the community-building culture in a PCC should organically take care of itself. Community in WEIRD, modern society cannot be forced; it must be . . . authentic. Habermas shows us why: in a diverse context, to truly connect we cannot be coerced and we must be sincere. Otherwise, our relationships devolve into a transaction (what can I get from you and what can you get from me) or conflict. 

Fortunately, our human nature is to connect, even in diverse contexts. All we need are social containers that support us in this connection. I believe the PCC, powered by Authentic Relating, can do just this.

VIII. Let’s nurture post-church transcendence

Thus far, I’ve argued that Post-Church Churches (PCCs) in addition to community, transcendence, and growth, need to:

• be physically embedded in communities similar to regular churches;

• take a page from contemporary megachurches and offer amenities like restaurants, coffee shops, and concerts that have nothing to do with its central purpose; and

• be thoroughly post-religious.

The reason for these requisites is that PCCs are not “retreats” from modern life, but must rather be integrated into modern life. With these requisites in mind, I described what I thought would be the backbone of flexible and diverse community in PCCs: Authentic Relating. In this section, I’ll describe what I think should be the backbone of the second pillar of PCCs: non-religious, experiential moments of transcendence.

As I argued in section five, the modern world has become disenchanted. OLD world humans had the wind at their back when it came to experiencing transcendence because for them the world was infused with spirit. Myths were not fictional but were descriptions of how things came to be, the way things are, and, most importantly, the way things should be. Angels and demons, gods and anti-gods were everywhere and potentially responsible for every occurrence, action, thought, and feeling. If transcendence involves a sense of being lifted out of one’s ordinary, mundane consciousness, then humans were much closer to transcendence in the OLD, pre-modern, mythical world. 

The topic of modern disenchantment has been explored by many brilliant minds. Below are the three most common reasons why experiences of transcendence have become much harder to come by for anyone sucked into the vortex of WEIRD modernity:

• We no longer live under a “sacred canopy,” as Peter Berger described, in which every aspect of our lives is connected to a sacred, transcendent order;

• Every conventional aspect of modern daily life has a materialist explanation, from an astronomical explanation of the lights we see in the sky to meteorological explanations of the weather, down to neurotransmitter explanations of our highest and lowest subjective experiences;

• Because most transcendent experiences for humans in the past came in groups, the loss of community leads to a loss of potential transcendent experiences.

This loss of transcendence, however, has come at a cost. Here are three reasons why modern WEIRDos like you and me need to bring transcendence back into our lives:

• Transcendence is mentally, emotionally, and physically therapeutic insofar as it helps us get out of our heads into our bodies;

• Transcendence is communal in that when we do practices of transcendence together, we experience connection with others in deeply profound ways;

• Transcendence, as a break from everyday consciousness, helps us grow as people by showing us new things about ourselves and our relationship with the world.

So, yes, it would be lovely to have some of this transcendence in our lives, but perhaps the most important reason transcendence is so hard to come by in the WEIRD world is that we don’t have the conceptual framework or social containers for them. Providing such frameworks and containers would be one of the most important services PCCs can provide us.

By conceptual framework, I mean a way for a diverse, flexible, and dynamic community to access and make sense of experiences of transcendence. Below are six ways PCCs can provide such a conceptual framework:

• PCCs would provide and support practices that reliably produce transcendence AND also do not require any prior belief system (such practices include ecstatic dance, group singing, and holotropic-style breathwork, which I’ll outline below).

• PCCs would discourage reifying visions, messages, and feelings from transcendent experiences (that is, we wouldn’t try to turn visions, messages, and feelings into objective reality or the way things “actually are”).

• PCCs would encourage visions, messages, and feelings from transcendent experiences to be treated as personal, poetic, and provisional; they would be seen as experiences to be processed, examined, and held with care.

• PCCs would differentiate practices of transcendence from their historical traditions so that these practices can be integrated into diverse, dynamic modern contexts (I can already imagine the resistance by many who get a lot out of connecting transcendent practices back to their historical heritage).

• PCCs would aim for transcendent experiences that produce greater individuation, maturity, and more complex communal ties, rather than a simplistic enmeshment in a communal whole.

• PCCs would recognize that transcendence has levels—“mild” transcendence (like nature, singing, or art) can be experienced everyday and easily integrated into our lives; moderate transcendence (like a big group ecstatic dance or breathwork) needs more time to integrate and so weekly or several times a month might be more appropriate; and big transcendence (like an intense holotropic breathwork or psychedelic experience) will need even more time to process and integrate and so might be more appropriate to do it quarterly.

This conceptual framework would support the Post-Church “social container.” A container refers to culture, norms, and relationships supported by facilitators in a particular context. The container a PCC provides would normalize practices of transcendence and also help process and hold space for such experiences.

So, what are these practices that can reliably produce experiences of non-religious transcendence? Recall that I defined a transcendent experience as one that lifts us out of our mundane, ordinary consciousness and into an experience of something greater than our individual existence. In section five, I mentioned a few of the ways we touch transcendence in modern life: at concerts and sporting events, and in nature and art. One problem with these is that insofar as they are communal, they lack power, and insofar as they have power, they lack community.

I believe that there are practices available to us that can give us both community and power, while also fulfilling all of the requisites I laid out above.

Modern transcendent practice #1: Ecstatic/conscious dance

The first is what is today called “ecstatic” or “conscious” dance. It’s freeform dancing to a DJ set of often organic, tribal, world, electronic dance music. Sometimes there is live drumming involved. To me, it’s like a sober rave with way less electro/techno/trance music. The focus is on freely moving one’s body in a community of others to rhythmic beats.

Dancing in groups to rhythmic beats is likely as old as Homo sapiens and played an important role in ritualistic group bonding. Dance also is likely to have pre-dated human language. When we dance together in groups, especially to rhythmic beats, I believe that we tap into something deep in our bodies and hearts. To share a rhythm with others is to connect deeper than our minds. We wordlessly share in something bigger than our individual experience.

PCCs would prioritize ecstatic/conscious dance, holding smaller ones several times throughout the week as connecting, transcendent forms of exercise, but also hold bigger ones each week, and even bigger ones each month.

Modern transcendent practice #2: Sacred karaoke (group singing)

My father was a pastor and I grew up in “the church.” I never had any religious experiences in church EXCEPT for overwhelming emotion a few times, starting in adolescence, when singing hymns alongside other people. I remember, I would choke up and almost cry. I knew it wasn’t the words (which were maudlin and boring to me) and I didn’t feel like it was the holy spirit (the feeling would go away as soon as I stopped singing). It became clear to me that something special happens when humans sing together.

I remember getting a Facebook invite a decade ago to an event called “Beer & Hymns.” It was, unsurprisingly, a gathering of people who drank beer and sang hymns. Although my father was a pastor and I grew up in “the church,” I do not like hymns and beer makes me drowsy, so I never went. But I knew what these people were up to. They saw the power of singing together in groups. The beer likely didn’t hurt.

Like dancing, singing in groups is as old as old as Homo sapiens and likely much older. There is some evidence-informed speculation by scientists that singing played a role in early hominid hunting and group bonding. There’s also good evidence that singing pre-dated and provided the building blocks for language.

When we sing together—and I don’t think it matters exactly what we sing—we tap into a deep, emotional human connection with one another. The feeling is transcendent in the sense that we feel lifted out of our individual selves and brought into something bigger.

I would like to see PCCs develop something like a “sacred karaoke,” where individuals choose songs they love, and would also love to sing in a group, and they lead other members in song. Beer may be included.

Modern transcendent practice #3: Holotropic-style breathwork

The term breathwork covers a wide variety of conscious, controlled breathing techniques. Some techniques like box breathing or 4-7-8 breathing are designed to create calmness and focus and might last no more than a minute. When I think of breathwork, however, I mean a longer, more intense style of breathing that can cause unusual body sensations and altered states of consciousness. 

There are a lot of different names this more intense style of breathing goes under. But they all have their origin in “holotropic” breathwork, developed by the psychiatrist and transpersonal psychology pioneer Stanislav Grof, MD. What holotropic-style breathwork (HSB) methods have in common is that they involve deep, rapid breathing for an extended amount of time, usually 60 minutes, and it’s done alongside evocative music (which is unique to each facilitator). Breathing like this (also called hyperventilation or overbreathing) for that amount of time causes hypocapnia, a decrease in carbon dioxide in the blood and brain.

The result of just a few minutes of HSB is tingling sensations, dizziness, and numbness. But prolonged HSB can put people into altered states of consciousness. As two researchers write in a 2007 research paper on HSB: 

Manifestations of altered consciousness emerging after approximately 8 minutes of hyperventilation have included ringing/roaring in the ears, clouded vision, and feelings of lightness, astonishment, and/or euphoria. More dramatic changes in consciousness, including perceptual distortions and subjective “visions,” have been reported after periods of hyperventilation exceeding 15 minutes.

That’s right. A transcendent, psychedelic experience is available to us right here and now, for free. All we gotta do is breathe in this particular way for an hour. Today, there are HSB facilitators and group sessions available online and, if you live in the right city or know the right people, you can find a group event near you.

In my own experience, doing HSB alone can be powerful. But doing it in a large group, in the presence of energy medicine facilitators and other guides, is a very powerful experience. I could write a lot more about this, but I’ll end this section by saying that I believe HSB should be a cornerstone of PCCs. Perhaps it’s done weekly in small groups and less intensely, and then monthly in large groups and more intensely. Anyway it’s done, HSB fits all the criteria for modern transcendent practice in the PCC.

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Transcendence is hard to come by in the modern, WEIRD world. Nevertheless, we need it because it is part of our evolutionary human heritage, and as such, transcendence is therapeutic, connects us more deeply with each other, and helps us grow as people. PCCs recognize the challenges of bringing transcendence back into our modern lives by creating a conceptual framework, a social container, and a set of practices that support thoroughly modern, non-religious forms of transcendence. The cornerstone practices of transcendence in PCCs would be ecstatic/conscious dancing, group singing, and holotropic-style breathwork. A key role of PCCs would be to help process and integrate visions, messages, and feelings from these practices in a humble, exploratory, and non-objectifying way.

IX. Let’s support modern personal growth

The third and final pillar of what Post-Church Churches (PCCs) need is personal growth. In the previous two sections, I laid out what I think are the best frameworks and practices for the first two pillars of PCCs, community and transcendence. For community, I believe that Authentic Relating and Circling provide the best set of ideas and techniques for nurturing and growing PCC communities that are fundamentally diverse and dynamic. For experiences of transcendence, I argued that ecstatic/conscious dance, group singing, and group holotropic-style breathwork offer the best practices that allow for moments of transcendence that are also communal, non-sectarian/religious, and encourage greater self-awareness and personal growth.

Let’s talk about this personal growth. First, I define personal growth as made up of two parts: emotional healing (i.e., seeing oneself in ever more accurate and nuanced ways) and psychological development (i.e., seeing the world in ever more accurate and nuanced ways). I’ll elaborate on these below, but the important thing to note up front is that neither component of personal growth is optional for modern WEIRDOs. As I argued in section six:

In our WEIRD world, we are all forced to grow beyond Tribe and into Adulting (and then eventually into Wisdom). Some of us make our way through in fits and starts, and some of us get stuck. But all of us are making the journey alone.

We need post-church spaces that are built with an awareness of this need for personal growth in the modern world. Growth is not optional.

I believe personal growth is the necessary third leg of the PCC stool because, like community and transcendence, modern humans need it, but we don’t have modern institutions that are built to support it. First, let me briefly outline why personal growth is so important in modernity.

Three reasons personal growth is necessary in modern WEIRD contexts:

• We are all forced out of the “Tribe” level of psychological development when we begin interacting with large, diverse, bureaucratic institutions. For most of us, this begins in childhood if we went to public schools, but got super-boosted when we went away to college and eventually entered the corporate world. This move into diverse, modern bureaucracies encourages us to see our childhood family/religious/political tribe as just one arbitrary tribe among countless others. The move pushes us into creating our own self-identity because we now must choose between various worldviews/philosophies/frameworks. We must build our own internal compass once our childhood tribe’s compass is seen for what it is.  This is the psychological-developmental move from Tribe to Adulting that I wrote about in section six. It’s not optional for anyone who wants to live a materially secure, socially adequate life in the WEIRD world.

• We’re all emotionally wounded by being raised in the modern world. Humans did not evolve to grow up in isolated nuclear families. We evolved to be raised in large, extended kin networks that ensured we were constantly cared for by a variety of caretakers. This level of care and communion cannot possibly be shouldered by one or two people. Throw in the demands of modern, market-oriented employment alongside the emotional wounds people carry into their parenting, and we are virtually guaranteed to receive and pass on a load of emotional wounds from childhood. This is no one’s fault. It’s just a byproduct of modernity.

• If we’re lucky enough to leave the Tribe level of development and begin to consciously do our healing work, then we begin to notice an intrinsic mechanism in the human heart/mind to continue growing and healing. From a developmental lens, as we expand our self/other awareness, we become more sensitive to the contradictions and paradoxes that are trailheads into the next levels of our development. And from an emotional healing lens, the more we excavate the burdens and liberate the exiled parts of us inside, the easier and more attractive it becomes to heal subtler wounds and experience an even greater sense of liberation.

You might be thinking, “Hey! We have therapy and personal development retreats that handle this. What do we need PCCs for?” Yes indeed. But both therapy and retreats (which I love and am currently involved in!) are missing critical ingredients. Therapy usually only touches on the healing side of personal growth (and mostly individually) and rarely on the developmental side. And retreats have the virtue of being done in groups, but they’re usually one-off weekend-long events that can feel transformative, but rarely support sustainable, long-term change.

What we need from PCCs are rooted places that provide frameworks, practices, and actual physical space for us to connect, heal, and grow together, week after week, month after month, year after year. PCCs wouldn’t be focused on individual healing or one-off transformations (everyone should still go to high-quality therapy and awesome retreats), but rather on emotional healing and psychological development that slowly follows the arc of our lives.

So, what would this actually look like? Below I’ll offer two conceptual frameworks and two practices that could support personal growth (i.e., healing and development) in a PCC. At the outset, I want to add that neither conceptual framework needs to be taken as doctrine or dogma, but I rather offer them as a few potentially helpful conceptual tools that allow us to make sense of the structure and practices that would be most useful for modern personal growth. Also, I’ll add that the community-building and transcendence-producing practices I’ve already mentioned (like Authentic Relating, holotropic-style breathwork, etc.) also support personal growth.

Conceptual Framework #1: Kegan Stages of Adult Psychological Development

This one deserves at least a couple thousand words to do it justice, but I’m going to attempt to do it in a couple hundred. Robert Kegan is a developmental psychologist who made his greatest mark in developmental theory. He argues first that human psychological development doesn’t end in late adolescence, which is where most well-known developmental theories end. We don’t just achieve logical reasoning by age 18 and stop there. Kegan argues that humans continue to develop throughout their lives in the way they make meaning of the world.

What’s important for us is that Kegan’s developmental stages (he argues for five stages beginning at birth and progressing throughout our entire lives) fit perfectly into the challenges and opportunities of the modern WEIRD world I’ve outlined. For our purposes we can zero in on two aspects of Kegan’s model: first, the way humans grow from earlier stages to later stages, and second, the key stages 3 and 4 in Kegan’s model.

Kegan notes that when we’re born, we don’t differentiate between self and other. We come out of the womb, and we and the world appear to us as the same thing. As newborns, we begin to differentiate self and other as we grasp objects (mother’s breast, a rattle, our toes, etc.). He shows how we continue to psychologically grow throughout childhood and later adulthood through the same process: turning what was our subjective self (what we “are”) into objective other (what we “have”). In childhood we “are” our feelings; as we mature, we “have” feelings that we can reflect on and talk about. In adolescence, we “are” our family’s or friend’s values/rules/culture; as we mature, we “have” values, rules, culture that we can reflect on and talk about.

It’s this move, from being fully enmeshed in a social group (friends/family/religion) to reflecting on the social groups of which one is a part, that is the crucial transition from Kegan’s stage 3 (“Social Mind”) to his stage 4 (“Self-Authoring Mind”). In previous newsletters, I’ve referred to stage 3 “Social Mind” as Tribe and stage 4 “Self-Authoring Mind” as Adulting. The move between these stages is, in my view, the most important developmental move facing everyone in the world today. And we don’t have adequate institutions helping us make this move.

The process of growing from stage 3 to 4 is the same fundamental process between all stages. It’s a process of expanding self-awareness. And I believe PCCs can play a crucial role here by supporting practices and providing social containers for expanding self awareness. At each new stage, we have a new and greater awareness of what is our “self” and what is “other.” One of the most important personal frameworks for gaining this awareness is psychotherapy. And one of the most powerful psychotherapeutic models around is Internal Family Systems. Which leads us to . . .

Conceptual Framework #2: The Internal Family Systems Model of Emotional Healing

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a psychotherapeutic model created by the psychologist Richard Schwartz. It maintains that each person’s mind is made up of a system of parts or sub-personalities. There’s a long history of “parts” in psychology, from Freud’s Id-Ego-Super-Ego to Gestalt and many other approaches. What sets IFS apart is its systems protocol for working with different types of internal parts and also its recognition of a spiritual core inside each person, which IFS calls “Self,” but could be referred to as spirit, essence, soul, core, inner knowing, and so on.

IFS should be a key framework for PCCs, in my view, because it provides a clear and systematic way to think about gaining greater self-awareness, which leads to psychological development. I think of my personal journey with IFS as giving me a 4k hi-def view of my internal system (before doing any therapy, I’d say I had a fuzzy 1950s TV-with-a-broken-antenna view).

IFS is also a powerful emotional healing therapy, which is the second aspect of personal growth. A few therapist friends refer to IFS as the precision surgery of psychotherapy. I’ve been through hundreds of hours of IFS training, I’m an IFS coach, I’m a client in IFS therapy, and can vouch for this. It’s powerful stuff.

What makes it even more impactful as a framework for PCCs is that it can be incorporated into all the other practices. I bring IFS into my Authentic Relating work, my conscious dance facilitation, and breathwork. It plays nicely with just about every modality a PCC could hold.

Personal Growth Practice #1: Psycho-Spiritual-Education (TED-style talks, i.e., post-church sermons)

So, how would these conceptual frameworks actually be practiced on the ground in PCCs? First, I think they would be woven into every other practice. But more explicitly, they would guide the types of talks (don’t call it a sermon!), panels, seminars, etc. that PCCs would hold. We can think of these presentations as “psycho-spiritual education.” PCCs would invite a diverse range of authors, speakers, practitioners, and public figures to talk, but it wouldn’t be an endless diversity. The presenters would have to demonstrate, in their work and public speaking, an alignment with PCC values of diverse community, non-sectarian modern spirituality, and flexible personal growth frameworks. Examples of ideal speakers at PCCs would include (just to name a few off the top of my head): Gabor Maté, Brené Brown, Richard Schwartz, Dr. Lisa Miller from Columbia University, John Vervaeke, and Loch Kelly.

Personal Growth Practice #2: Therapeutic Group Circles (healing circles)

Perhaps PCCs would have onsite individual therapist offices, but I don’t think this would be the best use of the space. We already have individual therapist offices in our communities (and many more online) providing one-on-one therapy. I think that PCCs would fulfill their mission (and an unmet need) by developing and supporting therapeutic groups or “healing circles.”

These groups would be limited in size (no more than 10) to keep it intimate and manageable, with each group being a cohort that would meet together once a week over 4-6 months. They would be led by therapists or trained coaches, and would use IFS and AR to help members gain greater self-awareness, heal emotional wounds, and develop an even deeper sense of social connection.

In my view, there would be dozens (hundreds?) of healing circles throughout the week, at different times, and also created for different affinity groups.

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In our WEIRD world, the choice to grow really isn’t a choice. To ignore the modern demand to grow beyond Tribe (Kegan’s stage 3 “Social Mind) and heal one’s childhood and adolescent emotional wounds is to be left confused, frustrated, and with limited options in every aspect of life. PCCs would be a shining light for those not only ready to grow and heal, but ready to be a part of a community of others stepping fully into modern WEIRD life, ready to “build a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible” (in the words of one contemporary WEIRDo).

X. Conclusion: A Church for WEIRDos

We are all learning how to live with the consequences of modernity. No one can avoid it. Moving off the grid, going nomad, going back in time to “better days”––these are still modern responses to a modern dilemma. The centuries-long forces of globalization, technological advance, capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, secularization, democratization, bureaucratization and so on have irrevocably changed the world for every single human on the planet. 

Responding to these long-term changes by hearkening backwards––whether to some simpler tribal life, a pure religious past, or some mythical moment when everyone knew their place and was happy with it––is a recipe for frustration, confusion, destructive conflict, and ultimately despair. Stepping fully into modernity is not optional if we want an economy, an environment, a political system, and cultural contexts that support flourishing for the 8 billion people on this planet. 

The Post-Church Church is certainly not an economic, environmental, political, or even cultural solution to modernity’s problems. It could be, however, a social container for individuals who want to be or are already involved in creating and supporting these solutions. It could be a place for those who are ready to face modernity head on, not alone but together, not in materialist withdrawal but with a sense of the sacred, and not stuck in the past or in stasis but are leaning into healing and growing. 

We do not need brand new solutions to modernity’s problems. Modernity has always produced its own solutions. We need social containers that connect people ready to support the solutions that are already here. But apart from responding to modern economic, environmental, political, and cultural challenges, we need social containers to replace what modernity has eroded: deep social connection and a sense of transcendence. 

Looking back to the religious institutions and traditions that once gave humans connection and transcendence cannot be the way forward. As I argued in sections four and five, we have gained more than we have lost in the modern march toward individualization and secularization. But the losses are nonetheless real and painful. The answer, at least partially I believe, lies in embracing fully modern practices for connection, like Authentic Relating, and fully modern practices for transcendence, like group breathwork, ecstatic dance, and group singing. 

In the modern erosion of community and transcendence, we also have seen a new human need emerge: personal growth. Every modern WEIRDo must create their own self-identity, choose their own worldviews, frameworks, and philosophies. We all must continuously answer the question: who am I? Such a question wasn’t even possible in the OLD world (save for the very elite, in ancient empires). Now it’s mandatory. PCCs can support us with frameworks and practices so we don’t need to find answers alone.

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Where do we go from here? How do we start building these PCCs? I believe the market will show us the way. I am far from a champion of the free market. There are many areas of life that should be only lightly touched or free from market forces. Healthcare and education are two of these areas. But I’ve come to see markets as a way to listen to what wants to come into being in contexts of diversity, uncertainty, and innovation. 

My hope is that PCCs take different shapes and forms as people experiment with supporting the three pillars of diverse community, non-religious transcendence, and personal growth. I also hope that the specific practices and frameworks for which I argued will be at the center of these attempts. 

For my part, I want to be a part of such efforts. If you’ve made it all the way to the end and you’re still reading, then I imagine you also want to be a part of such efforts. Please reach out and let me know what part of this vision feels most alive for you, and let’s see what we can do together. 

With love and gratitude,

Justin

XI. A post-church reading list

1. Bellah, Robert. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution.

2. Berger, Peter. 1969. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. 

3. Durkheim, Emile. 1912. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

4. Donald, Merlin. 1993. Origins of the Modern Mind. 

5. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. Consequences of Modernity.

6. Habermas, Jurgen. 1998. On the Pragmatics of Communication.

7. Henrich, Joseph. 2020. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.

8. Kegan, Robert. 1981. The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development.

9. Kegan, Robert. 1998. In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life.

10. Schwartz, Richard & Sweezy, Martha. 2019. Internal Family Systems Therapy, 2nd Ed. 

11. Tomasello, Michael. 2009. Why We Cooperate.