Radically Welcoming Spiritual Seekers with Radical Love

It takes a lot of time and attention to put on a show. I haven’t posted here on my website for a while as I’ve been focused on building a new ministry at my church. For those who follow me on other media, I’m sure you’ve seen my dozens of posts about the development of the live event series and podcast we call Radical Love Live, based out of the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in NYC.

We’ve been working on this innovative series devoted to “exploring spirituality beyond ideologies and institutions” for nearly a year. Now, we are 2 days away from our premiere. As we see the final pieces coming together, I wanted to take a moment here to reflect on what the program is about, how it came into being, and what inspired us to develop it.

As many people who read my work know, I am a lifelong Christian. I was raised in a deeply religious family, and my faith is still a huge part of my everyday life. Even through my seasons of doubt, and struggle with traditional ways of reading the Bible, several failings at being a good witness in my words and actions, and my time in the metaphorical wilderness when I wanted to believe but needed the intellectual reasons to allow myself to, I followed the old saying, “Yet I believed.” [I wrote more about my spiritual autobiography here.]

The tradition I grew up in was a conservative, evangelical tradition in the Midwest (back then we may even have called it Fundamentalist). Now I work and worship in a very welcoming, progressive Episcopal congregation here in New York City. I didn’t start there as a congregant—I actually started as a sound technician. But after 20 years in the sound booth, listening to hundreds of sermons, I was finally confirmed in the Episcopal Church 2 years ago. [I wrote more about my confirmation here.]

I love this church for many reasons, from the ritual of the liturgy that creates both a solemn sacred space and an intimate community of believers, to the seriousness with which the ministers take on Biblical interpretation and scholarship, to the focus on embodying the love of Christ in our community and the world. The thing I think I love the most is the sense of radical welcome. The doors are open to everyone, no matter what they look like or who they love or even what they believe.

My church often challenges me. Over the years, it has pushed and pulled my own limited views of what Christianity is and should be, and we don’t always see eye to eye. But having been in some churches where I wanted to stand up in the middle of the sermon and tell the preacher that no, I didn’t think the Bible supported that theology at all, I am grateful to go to a church that is bigger than me, and that welcomes intellectual challenge, questioning, and even doubt.

That room for doubt is one reason that drove my original thinking behind the creation of Radical Love Live. I realized that there were many people out there who, like me, had struggled with doubt, questions, and identity. People who had left their traditions behind because they couldn’t express themselves honestly and authentically.

At first, I envisioned a series of events that would let these religious “refugees” know that there was a place where they are welcome to be and to explore meaning as their authentic selves, whether they are imperfect, uncertain, wounded, resentful, human.

The idea started with the concept of a simple music-and-speaker program. However, the more I read about the current state of the religious landscape today, about how drastically membership in churches is dropping, about the growing numbers of the religiously unaffiliated and the “spiritual but not religious,” and saw how much things are changing, I realized that the real-world challenges that many people were having with traditional religious institutions were bigger and deeper than an awesome rock band could solve.

Add to that the increasingly tense culture war in our society—where one contingent is trying to move past a culture that is historically dominated by Christian tradition and one contingent that is passionately committed to preserving that culture and not getting lost in the mix—and one can see that talking honestly about our relationship with religion and developing an approach dedicated to achieving positive change and peaceful coexistence is of utmost importance.

After talking about these ideas with Father Steven, the Vicar of our Congregation, he told me that I should talk with Mark Dilcom. Mark is a fellow congregation member who I got to know a little bit during my Confirmation class a couple of years ago, but we only really got to know one another through this work. I found out that Mark was a “spiritual wellness teacher,” with a focus on leading contemplative prayer. I also learned about Mark’s story, how he had been hurt in church at a young age because of his identity and how those experiences sent him on a long journey through addiction, sobriety and recovery, and ultimately a newly discovered connection to spiritual practice.

Together, we realized that we both had a desire to reach out to people who might be craving a connection with spirituality, but who were wary of church or even religion altogether. So, we asked what would happen if we developed a ministry that didn’t focus on “religion” so much as on spirituality. And thus, the current version of Radical Love Live began to take shape: a series of live events and podcasts featuring discussion, music, and spiritual practice, designed to build a safe space to explore spirituality. And with the help and support of the Cathedral and its resident Congregation of St Saviour, this project has begun to become a reality.

At first, the notion of spirituality that crossed religious boundaries gave me serious pause. My first thought was, “Man, my family and friends are all going to think I’ve gone Neo-pagan.” I am first and foremost a Christian, and I follow Jesus alone.

When it comes to other faiths and traditions, I do believe that a God who wants to reconcile God’s self to everyone in the world can and does speak to everyone in their own language—including religious languages. Although I am not yet in a place where I can make a completely certain pronouncement about how the different belief systems live side by side (including those belief systems that don’t focus on a divine entity), whether they are all different paths up the same mountain, or are distinct and authoritative in their own right, or some other mysterious reason why the human family has so many different beliefs.

What I do know is that I believe that people can only do what they know, and if someone has done the best they can based on the truth that’s been revealed to them and keeps an open mind to new learning, I don’t see where I can expect more from them than that. I believe that what we know about the divine is uncertain, that we walk by faith, and given those parameters, I see no reason not to treat everyone on their separate spiritual journeys with love and dignity.

I believe the Kingdom of Heaven is and will continue to be full of surprises.

However, the biggest learning for me through building this series is that my initial concerns about whether I was diminishing my own faith or watering down others by imposing some common goal on them was not actually the point of this exercise at all. Through further study and my conversations with Mark, I began to realize that while spirituality and religion are intertwined, they can actually be intersecting but separate domains.

While many religious traditions historically incorporate spirituality, the terms spirituality as it is used today is not always about the supernatural or the divine. If we think about spirituality being about the human spirit, enriching it, looking for meaning and fulfillment, achieving its highest potential, suddenly the idea of how someone can be “spiritual but not religious” or engage in spiritual practice without adherence to a creed starts to make sense, even as spirituality also makes sense within religious contexts.

The goal of the series is to create a space where we can talk about all of these things—the state of religion and spirituality, the reasons why people have left religious institutions or never approached them in the first place, the ways we can look at the different ways that people earnestly approach religion throughout the world and try to find ways to coexist with peace and respect, and practical approaches to a world that is embroiled in conflicts over truth and belief—with an eye to achieving positive change. (We suspect the act of radical love has a role!)

And if in doing so, someone once again feels welcome in a sacred space, this effort will have been worth it.

Thanks for taking the time to get to know what we are doing. If you are in the NYC area, stop by on the 4th Sunday of each month at 7pm (our premiere is January 26th!) Otherwise, you can find the Radical Love Live podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the Radical Love Live website. The Cathedral of St John the Divine is at 1047 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10025

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash