Christian disciples. This God is both intensely human and intensely supernatural. In these churches, God is understood as so person-like that he becomes someone to joke and argue with, someone one chats to when walking down the street, about the little trivial things that matter only to the congregant. Coming to know God in such a church is described as to hear God “speak.” Dallas Willard, a beloved evangelical’s intellectual, puts it baldly: that God’s face-to-face conversations with Moses are the “normal human life God intended for us.” I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at a church that exemplifies this approach to God, a Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Chicago and then on the San Francisco peninsula (there were eight such churches in Chicago and four on the peninsula). For three years I went to Sunday morning gatherings. I joined three small groups, or housegroups, each for a year; I went to conferences and retreats; and I interviewed many congregants casually and also more formally about the way they experienced God.
Overall, what I observed was that the process of coming to know God in such a church could best be described as a mapping process in which the congregants learn to use the familiar experience of their own minds and bodies to give content to the abstract experience of God. This is the way that humans learn most commonplace abstract words, in effect cognitively mapping from what we know to what we can only imagine. God speaks: so congregants learn to infer from their own experience of inner speech the way in which God talks to them. God relates: so congregants learn to imagine a relationship with God based on their
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own experience of relationship. And God loves: and congregants use their own experience of being loved by a human as an example of the way they are loved by God. But unlike learning about time, congregants also map back. They build up a model of God by interpreting out of their own familiar experience into a representation shaped by the social world of the church and the narrative of the sacred text, and then they seek to re-map their own interior emotional experience by matching it to this representation. This demands constant effort, continual work on the way one pays attention and interprets one’s experience. As an ethnographer, I could see three kinds of work.
First, God must be recognized as present. What congregants learn to do is to cherry-pick mental events out of the everyday flow of their awareness, and to identify that moment as other than themselves, as being of God. God was said to speak in several different ways. He spoke through the Bible, so that a verse “jumped out” at a congregant, or in some way drew their attention. For example:
“T was reading in [some book] and I don’t even know why I was reading it. There’s a part where God talks about raising up elders in the church to pray for the church. And I remember, it just stuck in my head and I knew that the verse was really important and that it was applicable to me. I didn’t know why. It was one of those, let me put it in my pocket and figure it out later.” How did she know that it was important? “Because I just felt it. I just felt like it really spoke to me. I don’t really know why. And a couple of days later a friend asked me to be on the prayer team and it was like, wow, that’s what it was.”
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