This document discusses spirituality and mediation in a postmodern context. It explores themes of worship, implicit religion, and global awareness. Resources on Christian mission, postmodern values, and emerging forms of worship are presented. Spirituality is described as a personal exploration of meaning, sensitivity to others, and connection to God. In postmodernity, spirituality is constructed through temporary communal allegiances, consumer identity, and human interest stories of individual biographical experiences.

1. Mediation, and Spirituality in
the Postmodern Context
Joshva
Session 8

2. Main themes
• Worship
• Spirituality
• Image, Intimacy and Global Awareness
• Implicit Religion

3. Resources
• Peter Stephenson Christian Mission in the Postmodern World,
Some Introductory Thoughts. 2001
http://www.postmission.com/articles/pomisgen.pdf
• RANDY ROWLAND AND SALLY MORGENTHALER, A
MISSIONAL INCARNATION OF CHRISTIAN WORSHIP IN
POSTMODERNITY.
http://ekhardt.com/fresno.dome/pm723paper.pdf
• Roger Lundin The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the
Postmodern World. 1993.
• James W. Fowler, Faithful Change: The Personal and Public
Challenges of Postmodern Life. 1997
• Rowan Williams Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement.
Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000.
• Ursula King (Editor) Faith and Praxis in a Postmodern Age. 1998
• Don Cupitt Mysticism After Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell 1998.

4. Spirituality in a Postmodern Age
• Faith and Praxis in a postmodern age by
Ursula King pp.98-112
• Spirituality represents the move of
phenomenological studies of religion into a
new key stressing subjectivities and
experience as over against dispassionate
objectivity, the soul rather than the form of
religion. Spirituality is a hidden dimension
in a largely materialistic world

5. spirituality
• Modernity and loss of spirituality or private
mode of religious expression
• Spiritualitas – celebration of the Christian
mysteries particularly eucharist
• Spirituality is described as an attempt to
grow in sensitivity, to self, to others, to
non-human creation and to God, or as an
exploration into what is involved in
becoming human (U King)

6. Postmodern Spirituality
• Dialectic between the spirit within us and the
spirit beyond us – Ultimate Reality by reimaging
and renaming
• Samuel Rayan – three models of spirituality 1.
distributive spirituality where some follow a
spiritual life while others do not 2. alternative
model where the same persons alternative their
activities between spiritual practices and other
engagements 3. Interpenetrative model where
we all are spiritually engaged in all our actions
so that actions and contemplation are integrally
connected.

7. Mystic Spirituality
• Mysticism after Modernity, Don Cupitt
• Internalising God within the self
• Dissolving oneself into God
• Spiritual marriage
• Mystics play games with language and are
aware of the enemies who tend to seize
upon a careless word

8. Postmodern Mission through worship,
spiritual encounter and implicit
experiences
• Peter Stephenson’s article
• A Suspicion of all Big stories – Response
– Come clean with the church’s past (Ian
Paisley evangelical? Adams liberationist?)
- Examine ourselves for oppressive
tendencies (respecting rights of all?)
- Search ourselves for signs of syncretism
(uncritical of new technologies?)

9. Christian Mission
• Distrust of Authority and institutions
- Live for Today (too materialistic – having
life and having it to the full)
• Global awareness – ecological
destruction; human rights, destruction of
ethnic cultures, racial and religious
intolerance; sexual discrimination, abuse
of animals
• Longing for intimacy

10. Mclaren
• Brian McLaren in The Church on the Other
Side said, .If you have a new world, you
need a new church. You have a new
world..32 If we desire to be the salt of the
earth and the light of the world, we must
become an incarnation of the body of
Christ engaging our postmodern culture.

11. Postmodern Values and Worship
• Experience - Postmodern worship gatherings
are holistic experiences.
• Participation - A worship participant in an
emerging worship gathering can expect
opportunities to participate personally in the
experience, whether that be in dialogue, or
movement around the room to stations of
activity, or moments of quiet for personal
meditation.
• Dan Kimball, Emerging Worship: Creating New Worship
Gatherings for Emerging Generations (El Cajon, CAGrand
Rapids, MI: EmergentYS;Zondervan, 2004),

12. Postmodern Values and Worship
contd..
• Image Richness - These gatherings make use
of imagery in a way not valued by modern
churches. Art is often used as means of
expression, rather than an illustration. Art is
used as a doorway to understanding scripture.
• Connectedness – Kimball promotes a house
church structure, in which most worship
gatherings would be smaller intimate events.
Monthly, all of the churches would gather for
larger worship experiences.

13. • Holistic Approach to Scripture - Kimball
describes preaching as an invitation to take part
in the story of scripture. There is a renewed
appreciation for mystery. Sermons are more
likely to provoke thought and leave questions
than provide simplified answers.
• Organic Organization - Emerging worship
gatherings, while ordered and planned,
tend not to follow a rigid, linear,
predictable formula. A sermon, for
instance, may come in separate pieces
interwoven with other interactions with
scripture in any particular gather time.

14. Postmodern construction of
Spirituality
• Temporary Communal Allegiances
• People still seek community but with minimal
hindrances to commitment beyond one's comfort
zones. The notion of voluntary association has
become dominant with increased mobility and
the emergence of multiple and overlapping
communal allegiances.
• Communal allegiances in the postmodernist
perspective offer liberation from constraint
enabling a new impetus to explore diverse
religious expressions and worldviews. This
works simultaneously at global and local levels
• http://www.vcce.org.au/pdfs/indic_pomo_paper.pdf

15. Consumer Identity
• Postmodern religious construction occurs in a
consumer context because capitalism has provided
the buying power, which underpins the availability of
diversity and difference. Consumerism entered the
picture when it became easy to "shop".
• What has taken place is a process where religious
commitment has been supplanted by consumption
nurturing a person's spirituality. The deregulation of
religion has mutated into a range of spirituality
resources. Religion has become both a container for
cultural conservation and a source of radical change.
The realm of choice has opened up tremendously for
most people in the affluent societies, giving
unprecedented opportunities to chose lifestyles and
beliefs from a range of options.

16. Human Interest Story
• Spirituality can be seen as an aspect of the
autonomous subject where religious expression
becomes increasingly the product of individual
biographies, patterned after similar human
interest stories. Tracing individual paths of
biographical identity construction is done by
studying the actual practices that are adopted to
make sense of life. Needless to say,
autonomous spiritual subjects, who construct
their own religious identity through peculiar
patters of practices not only create new
questions for social analysis, but also for
ongoing religious activity.