Bruce Reyes Chow is a consultant who served as founding pastor of Mission Bay Community Church, until May of this year, and was the former moderator of the General Assembly of the 2.3 million member PCUSA. He recently blogged about the importance of being both spiritual and religious.
In the post, he notes that the number of people who think of themselves as spiritual but not religious continues to grow as has been captured by research, including that done by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. For Reyes Chow, another alternative emerges as preferable:
For many traditions, the spiritual and religious lives of a person are not mutually exclusive, in fact they are dependent on one another. In my case, being a Christian means that my understanding of a spiritual life cannot be fully understood unless I am connected in some way to a community of people who profess similar beliefs and engage in common disciplines. As many put it, “one cannot be a Christian in isolation.” While it is difficult to live in community, we need one another to discover and grow fully into who God has created and called us to be. In community our spirituality and our religiosity converge.
So What?
I appreciate the balance Reyes Chow provides in naming the ideal then examining his family’s own recent practices in light of that ideal. After being a pastor for fifteen years, he and his family are now searching for a church home. Finding and joining that community is essential if they are to exit what he calls “the land of the Spiritual but not Religious” and reenter the experience of being both spiritual and religious.
What do you view as the relative strengths of each of the three options: spiritual not religious, religious not spiritual, or both spiritual and religious? Which best describes you currently?