Until the Western church learns to read sacred Scripture as it was meant to be understood, the traditional church will continue to lose members and attendance. The GOOD NEWS though is that whatever "religious loses" there may be. George Barna confirms that there is a greater offset in "spiritual gains". People want SPIRIT-not LAW. People want LIFE- not LECTURES.
The Christian Bible was written in an <strong>EASTERN </strong>setting!
Jesus was not a Westerner nor Roman or Greek. Jesus was from an Aramaic environment and he thought with Eastern pictures, parables, and symbolism. It doesn't matter if Jesus spent some of the "lost years" in India or Tibet or not, he was Eastern in thought. Nicolas Notovitch, and others, claim that Jesus spent several years at the lamasery or monastery of Hemis in Ladakh. For me that is irrevelant to the point I am making.
Is say "Biblical re-ORIENT-ation" because ORIENT means EAST! :-)
The Western church has taken an analytical, rational, and literal approach to that which was not meant to be such. We must get back to interpreting the sacred Scriptures with a spiritual, holistic, and metaphorical approach- not that everything is metaphorical; however, it's the context within which the Scriptures were written. And we need to begin with the Old Testament Scriptures as well.
How much more exciting is the is the Promised land that Moses was searching for when we see it as the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Light, and not some outer physical kingdom. And so on.
Pope John Paul said it well when he noted that the church is like our lungs with two chambers. Unfortunately, too much breathing has been done with only one, the Western, lung. We must go beyond print on paper, beyond the Biblical thinking that the world was flat and that the sun evolved around the earth. We must go beyond an angry retributive God who would send people to hell for all eternity for temporal, finite sins.
And we must go beyond SINS being specific ACTS and instead see sin as the state of separation that the ego has staked out- with the support and help of the Western church. Enough of the " Go West young man". More of the Go East you children of light (that would be everyone!). :-)
As a spiritual-futurist, I interpret current events in light of possible macro-universal forces at play leading up to 2012, but not limited to it.
