Spirituality in Secular Spaces: Constructing a Practical Missional Ecclesiology Public
Hardegree, Lindsey (Spring 2024)
Abstract
How are people outside of our church institutions experiencing God’s Presence in a spiritually meaningful way, and what implications does this have for the Church’s understanding of ecclesiology? Can the ministry of lay people bridge the gap between our increasingly declining church institutions and the robust spiritual expressions of people outside those institutions? In this paper, I construct a practical missional ecclesiology that seeks to inform our religious institutions on new, expansive ways to relate to people unlikely to self-select into an explicitly religious experience. This paper reframes Millennial secularity as a form of everyday spirituality, affirms the significance of these mundane activities by drawing on literature about spirituality and reflecting on the orientation of embodied spiritual practices, and proposes a missional posture and pedagogical approach which empowers lay people as central to the living out of missio Dei, thus engaging and supporting meaningful mundane spiritual practices and embodied spiritual formation outside of the institutional church structure. I provide an example of spiritually meaningful practice in a secular space with an ethnographic case study on the experiences of Certified KonMari Consultants, people working as professional organizers using Marie Kondo’s decluttering method. I then ground these explorations by demonstrating an implementation of this ecclesiology through a pedagogical curriculum I developed to equip lay people to engage in the spiritually rich spaces in their own lives which lie outside the church, fostering a deeper awareness of God’s Presence and a sense of purpose rooted in missio Dei for their own lives. As religiosity shifts in our contemporary culture, the Church must shift its perspective as well to ensure that an orthodox but adaptive future is possible.
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