In my most recent post, “A Progressive Christmas,” I pondered the possibility that progressive Christians might reclaim the word “miracle.”  Freed from the tyranny of reacting against the “modern” affirmation (fundamentalist) and denial (liberal) of miracles, based on their mutual fixation on supernatural understandings of divine activity, progressives can reclaim the miraculous in terms of wonder, beauty, and possibility – and the affirmation of quantum leaps of divine energy emerging from the dynamic interplay of divine and human call and response.  Miracles represent signs of God’s lively presence, flowing in and through our own creativity – and the creativity of communities – to transform mind, body, spirit, and relationships.

Today’s progressive theologians need to be, as Martin Luther King asserted, a headlight rather than a taillight in their openness to the “varieties of religious experience.”  This is especially important in light of the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life Report (December 10, 2009) indicating that nearly 50% of Americans claim to have had a significant religious or mystical experience.  This report invites progressives to awaken to more lively theological reflections and spiritual practices.  While mystical experiences are often a matter of unexpected grace, they also occur more with greater frequency when persons are open to their occurrence and place themselves in a position to experience “more” through worship, contemplation, and prayer.  Although progressives claim to have overcome dualisms of mind and body, God and the world, and humanity and nature, we still struggle with the dualism of contemplation and action.  In reality, contemplation and social action both reflect openness to and encounter with the ever-present God.

As my friend and innovative theologian Philip Clayton asserts, we need to be about the business of “transforming Christian theology” so that we can ground our theology in lived experience of heart as well as hands.  In Holy Adventure: 41 Days of Audacious Living (Upper Room, 2008), I presented a progressive theo-spiriuality or a spirit-centered progressivism, open to and in dialogue with the mystical elements of life through practices such as spiritual/biblical affirmations, imaginative prayer, and spiritually and theologically-centered social concern. 

I believe that spirit-centered progressivism will inspire new experiences of the wholly/holy and reach out those who calls themselves “spiritual but not religious.”  As progressives, we no longer need to live by our denial of outmoded theologies or the opposition of the horizontal and vertical dimensions of life; rather, we can claim a deeper naturalism in which the vertical reflects the ubiquity of God’s presence in every moment of experience.  In so doing, we can claim a variety of “naturalistic” spiritual practices and experiences as reflective of God’s intimate presence in Jesus of Nazareth and our own lives. We can create 21^st century progressive spiritual practices, congruent with the positive and constructive insights of progressive theology. In so doing, progressive Christianity can respond creatively to 21^st century mystics, seekers, and persons who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”

As you consider your own spiritual adventure, what progressive spiritual practices nurture your experience of the wholly/holy? Where do you experience the interplay of progressive theology and spirituality, mutually shaping each other?

Bruce Epperly  is Director of Continuing Education and Professor of Practical Theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary and co-pastor of Disciples United Community Church in Lancaster, PA.  He is the author of sixteen books, including “Holy Adventure: 41 Days of Audacious Living.” (Upper Room, 2008)