Are churches becoming more religious and less spiritual?

Peter Smith, a reporter who covers religion for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, writes about that possibility here. An excerpt regarding a survey of more than 10,000 congregations shows that many, particularly "Oldline Protestant" churches, are tanking:

Many of these same churches, according to the Faith Communities Today survey, are also putting less emphasis on spiritual activities, such as prayer and Bible study.

Veteran religion writer David Briggs poses what could be called the "duh" question: Could there be a connection?

It isn’t hard, he writes, to connect the dots. Most people go to church because — surprise — of their own personal piety. The more spiritually connected people feel, the more active they tend to be in church, and vice versa, the research shows.

Briggs, blogging for the Association of Religion Data Archives, said that if churches are struggling, perhaps that’s because they’re becoming precisely the opposite of what many people are defining themselves as: religious, but not spiritual:

It’s challenging, he acknowledges, for churches to try to pump up their spiritual vitality when membership is down, money is down and everyone is stretched and stressed:

"The loss of morale creates an environment where many say: ‘It doesn’t feel as if God is in this place,’ said David Roozen, a lead researcher of the Faith Communities Today survey.

"But part of the issue is also the choices many church leaders have made to place greater emphasis on social service programs or church committee work than on promoting spiritual growth.

We will be the first to admit there is a lesson here.

Poetry and action

Sometimes, we can get so caught up in matters of social justice that we let our spiritual life slip, devoting more time to action and less to prayer. Deacon Walter Ayres, a member of the Commission on Peace and Justice, reflected on how poetry can be one way to enrich our spirituality in a recent issue of the diocesan newspaper The Evangelist:

One of my favorite poets is Mary Oliver, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In “Thirst,” a collection of poems, she addresses her discovery of faith and how she dealt with grief after the death of her partner of more than 40 years.

My favorite, titled, “Praying,” offers invaluable insight for anyone who has struggled with how to talk with God: “...patch/a few words together and don’t try/to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest....”

Another poem, “The Uses of Sorrow,” takes just two sentences to provide a lifetime of reflections: “Someone I love once gave me/a box full of darkness./It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”

For me, reading poetry is like the ancient practice of lectio divina, the reading of and reflection on the sacred Scriptures. We read the text, select a portion and then reflect on it. Just as God speaks to us through His inspired Word, He also can speak to us through the poems we read.

God’s Word does not just inform us or give us knowledge; it transforms us. Good poetry can help change us as well, if we appreciate it in the proper way.

The rest of the article is here.