Sermon and Worship Resources

In a culture where even the atheists claim to have a "spirituality," it's time for the church to soul out.

Until March of 1997, the approaching Third Millennium sneaked up on us like some great, fun adventure. For intrepid entrepreneurs, the year 2000 promises huge sales in commemorative junk. Party planners have been plotting big New Year's Eve blowouts for years. Except for those nerdy computer types who are wringing their hands and predicting crash and burn for all computer systems that use just two digits to designate a year, there has been a generally jovial, party atmosphere about the whole event.

But the deadly, misguided, apocalyptic-steeped visions of the "Heaven's Gate" cult have suddenly brought us up short. Thirty-nine sad, strange, purple-shrouded figures have forever tinged our frivolity with fear. What will the approaching end of this millennium really hold in store? How many other "Heaven's Gate" groups and "end times" individuals are out there? Should we be looking at this approach of "MM" or "2000" or "21C" as a hinge moment in history? Or is it just a good excuse for a big party, a sigh-of-relief celebration that we somehow managed to survive 20C?

What the tragedy of Heaven's Gate has brought into sharper focus is the spiritual hunger that is consuming our culture in these latter decades of this century.

The Search for Soul

Postmodern culture is entheogenic, which means "the birth of the divine within." There is a massive Soul Search, a huge quest for personal spirituality, a "widespread turning inward across the land," as sociologist Wade Clark Roof puts it ("God is in the Details: Reflections on Religion's Public Presence in the United States in the Mid-1990s," Sociology of Religion, 57, 1996, 149-162, 153). People want to grow spiritually above all else.(See George Barna, The Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators [Word, 1996]; Alan J. Toxburgh, Reaching a New Generation: Strategies for Tomorrow's Church [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993].) Experiences of "good sex" are now taking a back seat to "good soul" experiences. "Great Soul" is the Holy Grail of postmodern culture.

Postmodern culture is one of the most God-besotted cultures in the history of the planet. But the waters of superstition rise as high in postmodern culture as anyone could wish. We are less a culture of "seekers" than a culture of "believers." People believe in everything and anything mind reading, witches, ESP, crystals, spells, UFOs.

A spiritual tsunami is coming and is already being felt. People no longer want to know about God. People want to know God. People want to experience "the Beyond" in "the Within." It was this kind of spiritual quest that led the Heaven's Gate cult to combine the technology of the Internet, the science of Hale-Bopp, the science fiction of Star Trek, the theology of New Age and the hope of UFOs to create a new sacred reality for themselves.

The strange amalgam the Heaven's Gate cult pieced together points out to this entheogenic culture that the spiritual quest can be dangerous. As one marketing expert writes, "If the '80s were the decade when nothing was sacred, then this is the one when everything is" (Cyndee Miller, "People Want to Believe in Something," Marketing News, 28, December 5, 1994, 1). And when we allow the label "sacred" to be affixed to everything from crystals to UFOs, we are treading on hazardous ground.

Al Winseman, an Omaha pastor, tells his congregation that "we are living in a secular society but a spiritual culture." We are one of the most religious nations in the industrial world, yet at the same time one of the most secular (Thomas Reeves, "Not So Christian America," First Things, October 1996, 16-21). This double ring can be confusing, as it was in The New Republic (September 12, 1994), where on the same day, and on the same page, one story read "Spiritual Renewal Flourishes" while another story was headlined, "Religion's Influence May Be Fading."

Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps predict that "the search for soul will accelerate and move from the individual and family to organizations of all sorts and sizes" (The Age of the Network: Organizing Principles for the 21st Century [Essex Junction, Vt.: Omneo, 1995], 232). C. Jeff Woods adds a voice that should make Christians who call the church their home sit up and take notice: "Society is not disinterested in God; society is disinterested in the institutionalized church .... Society has not detached itself from spirituality; it is just rebelling against the ways that the church has sought to guide spiritual experiences" (C. Jeff Woods, Congregational Megatrends [Maryland: Alban Institute, 1995], 88).

Hollywood Spirituality

Indeed, "society has not detached itself from spirituality," as Woods points out. One of the hottest television shows for the last couple of years has been The X-Files, which proclaims in its opening trailers, "The truth is out there." The culture says that the "truth is out there," and that is why God is "hot" with Hollywood. In looking at last year's PBS fall lineup, which includes five religious specials, The New York Times declared, "God is Hot." All The New York Times needed to do to learn this was look at their own best-seller list: Seven in 10 were about spirituality and personal growth.

A USA Today feature article on "Hollywood immersed in a Spiritual Rebirth" announced that "as movie makers are being bashed more than ever for glorifying wrongdoing at its lowest levels, new films are reaching more blatantly than ever into religious imagery to harvest heavenly heroes" (Ann Oldenburg, "Hollywood Immersed in a Spiritual Rebirth," USA Today, November 1, 1996, 1-D).

For example, take our fascination, even fixation, with haloed heroes, as Oldenburg suggests. The ever-growing angel attraction of the last decade (Denzel Washington is an angel, Whitney Houston a preacher's wife in the Disney movie The Preacher's Wife; Greg Kinnear is a post office angel in Dear God; John Travolta is an angel who drinks beer in Michael) has at last come to a head in prime time. CBS's Touched by an Angel has become one of the most popular prime-time shows and the first explicitly religious drama to break into the Nielsen Top 10 in the ratings service's 46-year history.

The first big movie of DreamWorks SKG, the powerhouse studio run by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, is a biblical, animated telling of the story of Moses called The Prince of Egypt.

And since our cultural and spiritual pivot is increasingly in the East, there is Kundun, a Martin Scorsese film about the Dalai Lama's life. Not to forget Brad Pitt's film, Seven Years in Tibet, the story of the spiritual changes that come after climbing the Himalayas and meeting the Dalai Lama.