We Need Post-Church Spaces, Part 7: Let’s Build a Post-Church Community
Luca Barberini, Folla (2009)
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? Hell yeah! Let’s go!
Ok, I’m getting a little excited at this point because now we get to talk about what post-church spaces might actually look like. First, I’ll lay out the requisites in bullet-point form. These are the basic structural contours of a post-church space (PCS), without which it will fail to meet the needs I’ve spent the last several posts outlining. 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 PCS 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. This means they must be multi-purpose.
They must be thoroughly post-religious. This does not mean that words/ideas like god, prayer, spirit, the divine, etc. can’t be used in PCSs. It means that the PCS is radically non-sectarian and uses “spiritual” terms and ideas in a humble, provisional, and playful way. The reasons for this are:
PCSs are necessarily pluralist (i.e., they take diversity as the natural state of human coexistence, and not as something to be tolerated or eventually overcome). PCSs are spaces for everyone who is ready to move on from traditional religion.
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 that 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 true self toward my 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 through the last 6 posts, at their core PCSs must support a flexible and diverse community; non-religious, experiential moments of transcendence; and practices for personal growth.
For the remainder of this installment, I’ll explain how I think a post-church space would support community.
How Post-Church Spaces Can Support Community
I’ll put my main argument about PCS community right up front and then explain it. I think that Authentic Relating (AR) is the perfect set of ideas and practices to support the flexible and diverse community that PCSs require. 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. At its heart, AR helps people practice how to connect to each other in authentic yet caring ways.
Why would AR be the perfect practice to support community in PCSs? I think community-building in PCSs might be the trickiest of the three PCS 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 PCS 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 PCS should be able to travel and attend other PCSs and connect with others in the PCS 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 can be flexible, open, pluralistic, AND support community? Wouldn’t such a community just fall apart? For most of human history the answer would be: this type of community would be impossible! Humans never grew past the adolescent “Tribe” stage of personal growth (see Part 6 in this series) 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 weigh down this post with the academic stuff, but I’ll just point interested readers to Jurgen Habermas’s work on communicative rationality that shows that communication in a pluralist context intrinsically leads people into non-coercive communication, equal participation, sincerity, a drive for mutual understanding, and an openness to critique and argumentation. And 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).
In our modern WEIRD world we need social, communication practices that are infused with all of these 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, I believe, is the perfect set of tools for this job. 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 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 “games” that can be done in pairs, triads, or larger groups. They 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 PCSs 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 PCS 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 PCSs. As members become introduced to AR ideas and practices, the community-building culture in a PCS 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 PCS, powered by authentic relating can do just this.
I’d love to hear what you think of this! And be sure to tune in next week as I write about practices of non-religious transcendence in Post-Church Spaces.