Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – New Age, New Mission? Evangelism and the Rise of “The New Spiritualities”

By Steve Hollinghurst
June 2009

Until recently, Christian literature on the New Age was not geared to equipping Christians to share their faith with its followers. This has been changing as Christians have come to view those involved in such spiritualities as people with whom we are called to share faith in cross-cultural evangelism. What are the issues this raises for evangelism in our day? How might we approach people involved in such spiritualities?

Changes in Culture and Spirituality in the West
Within the context of Christian countries, New Religious Movements were often based upon a revision of Christian understanding. The Latter-Day Saints or the Jehovah’s Witnesses would be classic examples. Others emerged from esoteric beliefs and occult practices. Christian responses to these sought to show their error or warn of their danger and were primarily geared to protecting the Christian majority from adopting them.

When the New Age Movement and Contemporary Pagan groups began to gain a following as part of the late 1960s counter-culture, it was very easy for Christians to view these in this way.

By the start of the twenty-first century it was becoming clear to many that something quite different was happening. These new movements, unlike others, did not define themselves from within a Christian framework, and while clearly influenced by other faiths and occult ideas, they did not actually adopt those systems.

Rather, they represented a new postmodern and post-Christendom approach to spirituality that was increasingly becoming mainstream. In the U.K., one sign of this was the way the “mind-body-spirit” section in bookstores containing titles on subjects ranging from self-help to meditation to tarot to complementary medicine became much bigger than the religion section.

Those doing evangelism as cross-cultural mission have gained a number of insights, many of which are likely to be applicable for other areas of our culture.

Surveys in the U.K. have also shown changing beliefs so that half of those who believe in life after death believe in reincarnation; and while twenty-six percent of the population believe in a personal God, forty-four percent believe in some kind of spirit or life force nearer to the force in Star Wars than the ideas of traditional religions.

However, it was also difficult to classify and measure the numbers of followers of these new movements. This has not been helped by the dropping of the label “New Age” by most of those who once would have identified with it with no real alternative emerging. One can talk of New Age and Paganism as two ends of a spectrum from which contemporary spirituality has emerged and this still offers some helpful distinctions.¹

However, beyond that, one has to talk vaguely of “The New Spiritualities” or a similar phrase, there being no agreement among observers or practitioners on a term to use. Indeed, all this is an expression of the highly postmodern nature of such spiritualities, which means they tend not to be organised groups with clear doctrines but more fluid collections of people who tend to be focused on what works for them rather than developing belief systems.

Rev. Steve Hollinghurst is a researcher in evangelism to post-Christian culture at the Church Army Sheffield Centre in the U.K. and a member of the Lausanne Issue Group on New Religious Movements. He came to faith in his late teens after involvement in the occult and alternative religions. He is also involved in Elemental, a venue offering Christian spirituality at the Glastonbury Festival and in running Christian stalls at Mind, Body, and Spirit fairs.