It was great to get to Blah last night and listen to Ben’s story and ideas. I was very fortunate due to a slow mind (I got the timings wrong and turned up early) and so got a chance to chat with Ben before many turned up.

Ben started by showing how ‘new age spirituality’ stuff is becoming mainstream. Most towns have an alternative therapy shop – even small towns like our Gillingham have a regular mind, body, spirit fair / psychic fair. People in the media are mixing different spiritualalites and, in some cases, re-defining and creating their own beliefs from the mix that is around them.

Ben introduced a term I am unfamiliar with, Occulture, to describe this process where all things new are being influenced by the new age. (The Occult part of this term refers to all new age spirituality, not the meaning that many of us may associate the term with). In a sense it’s like an underground movement slowly, and un-noticed, influences and changes culture so that their practices become mainstream and have an impression on everything. We are seeing this in music (listen to Sinead O’connor, Robbie Williams, Madonna and many others, in everyday language (karma, auras, therapy, clothing and everywhere we care to look.

Just for fun I thought I would do a google search on ‘spiritual clothing’. There are over 5 000 000 references! At number 4 is spiritual fitness wear who claim, to a background of calming pipe music tell you their clothes are designed especially for your mind, body and soul’ and that spiritual Fitness Wear is designed to help you believe in your unique mind, body and soul’.

This would once have given me a lot of concern – but I think my studies at the moment are causing me to think ‘is this really a problem?’. Does it matter how people connect with God. Don’t worry – I still see Jesus as God incarnate and the way to the Father … but I do question what seems to be the assumption that the church has the monopoly on that – God is bigger than the church and so he must be able to speak to people without using the church. Before you shout … yes I know the church is Jesus choice, he created it and all that blurb … but the church has done a crap job! Maybe God has got impatient and decided that despite the church he wants to connect with his creation and his people. It’s only a view! My view is also that there will obviously be some dodgy stuff at such places, not everyone is open and honest; but there is a difference between what is harmful, and what makes us uncomfortable due to the way we have been brought up.

Ben talked us through the sorts of people you meet at Mind, Body and Spirit Fairs. (quite normal people if you were wondering?). He chatted about what they did – which in essence is listen and pray and with people. Ben said something like ‘we offer free healing, we chat, we listen and our prayer with them reflects their concerns back’.

As I know with young people – we are not listened to anymore. Maybe like to tell their stories and be heard, these people wish to share their story and are looking for listeners. The church, us, can be and should be so good at that.

I found my mind flitting between two extremes, which for me, who can be quite stubborn and very committed to a cause, is quite unusual. The two extremes of ‘Yes, this is sooooo obvious, we just have to go for this; spiritual people are here, Christians aren’t and so we need more people involved in this – people like me!!’ to the other extreme of ‘My good evangelical upbringing has taught me to stay away from these things, and to pray that other people will stay away due to their extreme harm and extreme dodginess’. There is no obvious middle ground between those two points of view.

Ben shared his concerns and difficulties and was, I think, quite honest. People are prayed with at their stand, and then they go off to others to have auras read, or visit another healer and the question begs ‘should we be involved here?’

Our groups answer? It was a yes … as with sowing seeds, we do not know what God is doing in peoples lives. I can look back now to that time before I was Christian and see that God was clearly working in my life. I was connecting with God long before I was a Christian, yet I did not recognise that at all. Is it so bizarre to think that God can communicate through some other stuff as well.

I have come away with lots of thoughts and questions, probably more than I had before I listened to Ben and chatted with others their last night. There is, though, to me one definite opinion or view I have come away with … if Christians do not get involved at such places, what chance have these people got of ever connecting with their God?