By Dr. Robert K. Johnston|Published Date: August 05, 2010

What do they have in common?

Prayer and athletics?
Tanya Luhrmann, who was involved with the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Chicago, has written a provocative article with a mouthful of a title: “The Absorption Hypthesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity”[i]

A trained anthropologist now teaching at Stanford University, Luhrmann began her investigation about how we might hear God by asking the question, could it be that “hearing God speak and having other vivid, unusual spiritual experiences that seem like unambiguous evidence of divine presence might be, in some respects, like becoming a skilled athlete”?

That is, is prayer like athletics? Isn’t training, or practice, necessary for both? And what about natural giftedness, or to use her term, “proclivity”, that is “a talent for and willingness to respond to practice”? Or again, what about the understandings, or cognitions, that we bring to the experience?

Certainly it mattered in the World Cup outcome that soccer is understood as the national sport of Spain. In an analogous way, does our experience of God also depend on understandings of God that we hold (that is, our theologies)?

It turns out, not altogether surprisingly, that the answer in all three instances is “Yes.” The analogy with sports works. When reflecting on our own experience of God, it is probably the case that we can identify how our theological interpretations, our natural proclivities, and our practices all shape how we continue to experienced the God we love and who continually reveals himself to us.

Experience and imagination in prayer
Luhrmann focuses her analysis particularly on the practice of prayer, on how evangelicals speak personally to God, on what is often labeled “conversational prayer.” Most evangelical Christians have, or desire to have, intimate conversation with God. And this involves both our private and public prayers.

In Luhrmann’s context at the Vineyard Fellowship, for example, their worship services started with 30 minutes of prayerful singing and at the end of the service “prayer teams” were at the front to pray with congregants. As Luhrmann documents, some in her church were also recognized as especially gifted in prayer. It was obvious to all in that church that some members were special “prayer warriors.” (I remember as a boy in my own church, Olie Roth was known as a woman of prayer. So was my mother. Even though my father was equally committed to Christ and a spiritual leader in the church, his prayer life was not something people noted about him.)

The question Luhrmann raised in her article was this: why are some Christians particularly skilled, or comfortable with, or “effective” in their prayer?

Certainly part of the answer has to do with the fact that some had more experiential learning in conversing with God. Prayer was a skill they had developed. And though all Christians pray, some within the fellowship had a theology that emphasized the value of prayer more than others. This also proved significant. But it was in the area of giftedness that Luhrmann chose to focus her attention.

With those who experienced God most often in their prayers, there was discovered to be a high correlation with a heightened imagination, a willingness to be “absorbed.” Luhrmann gave the Vineyard participants a questionnaire with 34 items on it that tapped a person’s willingness to enter fully into imaginative experiences in nature and music (for example, have you been deeply moved by a sunset? Or, have you sometimes felt the presence of someone not physically there? Or when you listen to organ music, do you sometimes feel lifted into the air?)

Interestingly, those who said they did not experience God in a vivid way in their prayers scored low on this inventory, and the woman in the group who was identified by everyone as the “best” example of a prayer warrior responded positively on 33 of the 34 questions! Her comment after taking the inventory was, “The man who created this scale lived inside my head.” The correlation overall was high between those who had a naturally rich imaginative life and those who had a rich prayer life. The use of one’s imagination, that is, proved a crucial component in one’s ability to hear God (not to imagine “a make-believe God,” but to actually experience God). Those willing to use their imagination to encounter God, to be absorbed by God, to revel in God’s presence, were also those who had a richer conversation with God.

Hearing God’s voice in film
The same seems to be true in our movie going. Those persons with a more active and practiced imagination, those more willing to be absorbed in their moving watching, to revel in the story on the big screen – seem to have a greater proclivity to see that God might even be present to them in and through the stories that they see, hear, and feel on the screen. They are more likely to experience God at the movies. In the classes which I teach at Fuller, this group of Christians is approximately one third of the students taking my classes.

But such activity – finding film to be spiritually engaging – also takes practice. Some see so few movies that their experiential learning is meager. Viewers can develop their skill in hearing the Spirit of God speak through the images, words, and sounds at the Cineplex. Many of my students who take the theology and film class reflect that after taking the class, they will “never look at movies the same way again.” They have been provided skills for film viewing and listening that enable them to experience a movie’s spiritual power and meaning in new ways. It is a skill to know when one is “reading into” a movie something not there, and when one is “taking from” a movie what the film invites.

And lastly, how one thinks about how God reveals himself to us also matters. In Christian theology, the church has always spoken not only of special revelation, but of general revelation. But how God’s revelation outside the church is understood differs within the Christian community. Is God’s revelation through creation, conscience, and creativity but a trace, something largely unnecessary for the Christian given our relationship with Jesus Christ? Is it hopelessly clouded and compromised by sin? If so, then film-going will remain a theologically questionable activity, at least with regard to the possibility of finding God there.

Or is art, despite our sin, a continuing source of God’s gracious, revealing Presence – a Presence that can even point out our theological mistakes, affirm and strengthen our right understandings, and challenge our blind spots? Christians are increasingly recognizing the importance of God’s still small voice in all aspects of life. As they do, movie watching will continue to grow as an arena for hearing God speak.

For more insight to this topic, get Robert’s book, Reframing Theology and Film, from our online bookstore. Or read the article, “Hearing the ‘Music of the Spheres’” by Steve Beard.

[i] Co-written with Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted, American Anthropologist 112, issue 1 (2010): 66-78.