Will Spirituality Survive in the New Millennium?
by E. Glenn Hinson
A few weeks ago, a Korean editor asked me to write an article commenting on whether spirituality will survive in the next millennium. The question took my mind back to two visits I made to the Soviet Union just before it dissolved in 1989.
On the first of those, in 1984, our Intourist guide in Minsk, Ukraine kept commenting on how the state took care of people. At one point I asked her how she and others handled crises such as prolonged illness and death. She didn't answer immediately because someone else interrupted with another question, but she returned to the question and made this comment. "My grandmother was a believer, and I loved my grandmother. My father was not a believer; he was a party member and the state took care of him. I am not a believer, but I am not a Communist either"
"What about your children?" I asked.
"They may become believers," she said. "And that would be all right."
Despite seventy years of efforts by the communist party to stamp out faith, it still lived through believing grandmothers and grandfathers.
Four years later, on the thousandth anniversary of Christianity in Russia, I took part in a consultation of western Christians with Russian Orthodox. After we had talked for two days in Pyatigorsk, we traveled by bus to Stavropol to worship on Sunday in the church which Gorbachev's mother attended. On the way, as we passed through wonderful farmland, the Intourist guide commented, "We raise fine horses here. One man sold a horse to someone in Lexington, Kentucky for $15,000,000."
My ears pricked up at the mention of Kentucky. I went forward and said, "I'm from Kentucky."
When we got to our hotel at Stavropol, the young guide asked me if I would take a walk with him in the Town Square. He signaled that the hotel was bugged so we couldn't talk safely.
In our walk he indicated that he wanted to talk about faith, how he and his wife could help their nine-year old daughter, Olga, respond to teachings of atheism in school. I explained that the Bible doesn't attempt to prove God; it assumes God is. I quoted Pascal’s, "The heart has its reasons, the reason cannot understand." And Augustine's, "Thou hast made us for Thyself, to praise Thee, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in Thee."
During the Sunday worship the next day, I saw him crossing himself. Just before we left Russia, he reported that his wife had given birth to a second daughter. Someone asked him what they would name her. He replied, "We're thinking of naming her Kentucky." I sent back word that it would be better W they named her after another of the Russian saints. St. Olga was the first Russian Christian!
A believing father and mother were keeping faith alive. Churches, too, all the repression notwithstanding, were doing so. We've seen it blossom since the collapse of Marxism in eastern Europe.
What about the West? Signs of surging secularity among "Baby Boomers" and Gen)(ers" have made some observers pessimistic about the future of faith in materialistic western culture. Western style materialism may pose a greater danger to faith than Marxist. Yet there is hope in the same pheel saw it in the former Soviet Union--in believing mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and churches forming children spiritually. Some studies indicate that the prospect of touching people with faith drops off precipitously after age fourteen, but it can and does happen. God doesn't give up.
Actually, even though church involvement is waning, interest in spirituality is booming. People are finding that we "cannot live by bread alone," that is, without the Transcendent, just as people in eastern Europe found when their system collapsed.
Spirituality will keep growing in the new millennium.
Author and theologican, Dr. Hinson is a retired professor from the Baptist Theological Seminar at Richmond, VA. He lives in Louisville, KY and is a member of the MTM Board of Trustees.