I spent some time yesterday with the Journey into Wholeness team from Newark at the BSSK Exhibition in Cedric Ford Pavilion on the Newark Showground. This is the seventh year the group have placed a stall into these exhibitions and yesterday they were using the Jesus Deck for the first time. I have been involved with the Journey Into Wholeness Group for almost ten years now, and am currently the National Co-ordinator for the teams, helping to provide training and advice for groups who wish to place stalls into the Spiritual Fair arena and facilitating net-working between the groups where possible. We have active teams in Newark, Lincoln, Colchester, and Woodbridge, other groups in Brighton, Cambridge, Royston and Kings Lynn, affiliated groups in Newcastle and are looking to set up a team to work in Leeds and York. and I have written about Journey Into Wholeness before and you can find my posts on the culture that lies behind it here:
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- Alternative healing -Engaging with Post Modern Culture
- Psychic Sisters-a response to Selfridges making space for Psychics, this created quite a discussion and you can find more here, and here !
- A brief history of how I became involved in Journey Into Wholeness in : Auras to Aliens...
- And a in Tarot Crystals and moreI have also written about The Jesus Deck.
- Early reports can be found here and here.
Even a brief glace at these posts will reveal to you just how positive I am about engagement with spiritual seekers and how I feel that it is important if not essential for Christians to be sensitively engaged with folk who are actively seeking spiritual truth but would probably not consider approaching the church. I must add that yesterday was no exception!
Yesterday was busy, in fact the whole weekend had been busy, more than that a chat with the Event Organiser revealed that this has been the case all year so far. Yesterday evening she reported that the footfall at the Exhibition was the biggest it had ever been! I also chatted to a number of other stall holders asking them if they'd had a good weekend and how they were feeling about things, they reported a real openness in people and a renewed interest in spirituality in all flavours and shapes, one of the angel card readers told me that she thought "people were seeking real light".
At the Journey Into Wholeness Stall we too noticed an upsurge in interest from folk, the Jesus Deck was popular and once again we found that through it the Gospel was speaking right into people's lives and situations. People were also coming forward for prayer and being really open about sharing their lives and experiences with us, there was a renewed urgency and depth to this sharing and many on the JiW team remarked on people's readiness to receive prayer.
BUT, and it is a big BUT, I was also struck forcibly yesterday by the number of folk I spoke to who were claiming to hold superior or secret spiritual knowledge, people who were puffed up with a sense of their own importance. One lady believed that she was the key to finding a lost race of angels, her story was fantastic- of finding her spirit mother ( a friend who had been given a spirit child to nuture), of how she had then become complete and set off on theis quest amongst others. There were others claiming to know the source of healing energies that would transform the earth, something only they could unlock; now none of this is unusual or new but I have to say that I found the intensity of it distressing yesterday. Also distressing was the sheer amount of money that was being spent, £40.00 for a Tarot reading, £30.00 for a 20 minute treatment, again this is nothing new but in a time of financial crisis, when we are told again and again that people need to be more careful about their spending habits and budgets it seems strange that these fairs are attracting people in increasing numbers...
It seems strange, but is it? Interestingly I think that next Sunday's Gospel reading might hold the key:
From Matthew 6:
You can't worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you'll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can't worship God and Money both.
"If you decide for God, living a life of God-worship, it follows that you don't fuss about what's on the table at mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds.
People may not be deciding for God, but they are deciding for spirituality, they are putting their spirituality above other things, and they are willing to pay for it. The trouble is that the MBS arena does not promote unfettered freedom where people can find themselves careless in the care of God. What they get is a distorted reality- an captivity that masquerades as freedom. Again there is an innate sense within some that "they count far more than birds", that they are valuable, and yet so often it comes with a distorted puffed up sense of why they are valuable, an almost Gnostic belief that they are the chosen ones in whom spiritual wisdom resides and if you haven't got it then you exisit on a lower plane!
Many folk are surprised when they come to a JiW stall and find that what we offer is free, the organisers are struck by the fact that we have different teams of folk in each place and that nobody is paid to do this work. The teams themselves are usually backed up by people praying for them, and prayer requests made or written at the stalls are all prayed for by a dedicated team of intercessors elsewhere.
We try to be aware of our practices and to ask hard questions of ourselves, to consider again and again why we entered this arena and ask why we are still there. Could it be that we might become so totally immersed in the culture that we fail to bring a real critique to it? Our introductory statements in the MBS programmes have changed subtly we are less likely to be overtly Christian, is this Incarnational or syncretistic? We hope that the answer is the former...
Would Jesus enter this arena, sometimes I am certian that he would, at other times when watching a documentary like the BBC's "The toughest Places to be" I wonder if we've all lost the plot and whether spirituality in this arena is a luxury devised by bored westeners....
I suspect the answer is that we are told to share the Gospel in all contexts and with all people, but I cannot escape the Gospels clear preference for the poor rather than the puffed up! While we offer prayer and consultations:
They eat Pagpag...
For the poor who live in slums around garbage dumps in Metro Manila, it is food – actually leftover pieces of chicken or morsels of meat swarming with ants and other impurities. Yes, it is food that they call ‘pagpag.’ (Pagpag means to shake off.) They shake off the ants but not the salmonella and e-coli that inhabit the left-over meat.
After being washed 3 times in murky water, the pagpag meat is boiled and mixed with loads of tomato sauce to disguise the rancid taste and hide the foul smell of rotten meat. Another dish is called ‘fried pagpag.’ Meat is deep fried in boiling oil so that no one can really tell the difference.
