The mission of the church, of religion, is to facilitate the development of spiritual intelligence in its members. What is spiritual intelligence?
Spiritual intelligence is the awareness and workings of the Transcendent Source of all creation. This Transcendent Source goes by many names none of which do the idea of Transcendent Source justice. Some call it “God.” Some call it “Tao.” Some call it “Mother Nature.” Some call it “The Force.” Some call it the “Oneness.” Some call it the “Eternal Nothingness.” Some call it the “Eternal Infinite.” The names we call it vary from culture to culture, from religion to religion, and from one developmental stage of life to another.
When people would tell John Buehrens, a Unitarian Universalist minister and former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, that they didn’t believe in God, John reportedly would ask, “What god is it that you don’t believe in?”
Giving up the belief in God of our youth is like giving up the belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. It comes with a developmental growth in cognitive processing. With this understanding of developmental growth, the idea of spiritual intelligence comes with the idea of stages of understanding and belief systems. What kind of understanding was present at one stage of growth is outgrown and subsumed within later stages of growth. A good church, a good religion, understands this developmental and evolutionary model and is able to address the needs of its members at their various stages of growth.
What are the stages and where are you presently in the developmental model?
No comments:
Post a Comment