“In him all things hold together…and through him God was pleased to reconcile all things to himself.” Colossians 1:17, 20

Perhaps it goes without saying but it needs to be said anyway: the future of Christian spirituality will, of necessity, be Christocentric but with some sorely needed fresh insight into what that actually means. One of those fresh applications has to do with focusing on the deeper unity we all share rather than focusing on the differences that divide us. This unity can only be found in and through the Spirit of Christ working actively among us.  

I experienced a longing for this kind of wholeness long before I would have been able to express it the way I am expressing it here, and part of my story is how I sought that out in some very intentional ways. 

Choosing Unity Within Diversity

When it came time for me to enter spiritual direction training in 1998, I chose the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation precisely because of the theological diversity and the diversity of faith tradition lived out within an ecumenical environment. Tilden Edwards was an Episcopal priest, Rosemary Dougherty was a vowed Catholic sister who was exploring mindfulness within a broader context, and Gerald May, MD was a contemplative who was also a psychiatrist.  

My religious upbringing had been so conservative and homogeneous that I just wanted to be in the mix of their diversity. I was hungry to experience these three teachers together in one place; I wanted to simply bask in the unity they experienced within their diversity.  I had not had an experience like that before and I knew I was impoverished because of it. I hoped that witnessing and participating in their integrated wholeness would foster integration and wholeness within me.  So I invested a lot in the five years of training I received there—and it was worth every penny, for it has shaped who I am today. 

Bad News and Good News

The truth is, there has been a painful distance and even estrangement within the family of God that has gone on for way too long.  While this family truth is hard to admit, Richard Rohr’s observation that “A good journey begins with knowing where we are and being willing to go someplace else” is strangely encouraging because we can name the distance and (in some cases) estrangement within the family of God as where we are.  That’s the bad news. But the good news is that there is someplace else for us to go. There is a hidden wholeness that is still there for us on the other side of this great divide.  As siblings in the family of God, we belong together and the truth is, we just miss each other! Some of us are getting honest enough to say so and to seek a family re-union as part of our spiritual journey. 

As I pay attention to what the Holy Spirit is up to in our world, I cannot escape a deep sense that the future of Christian spirituality will include a focus on bringing back together what has been torn asunder—especially the rupture that took place in the Protestant Reformation.   Indeed, it is happening already. 

Phyllis Tickle in her book, The Great Emergence, observes that massive transitions in the church happen about every 500 years and that we are living in just such a time right now. She compares the Great Emergence to other “Greats” in the history of Christianity, including the Great Transformation (when God walked among us), the time of Gregory the Great, the Great Schism, and the Great Reformation otherwise known as the Protestant Reformation.  She names the time we are living in right now as the Great Emergence, which means that the Christian Church has entered a post-denominational mode. In her view, this is a sociological and cultural shift involving a change in sensibilities that we will not go back from.  “Christians today are going to keep moving towards being non-hierarchal, suspicious and afraid of institutions,” she says, “and they are going to want to spread out horizontally, they want to be communal, and they are going to be actively involved in social justice.”   And I would add—they/we are going to want a more unified, integrated existence on all levels because something in us knows this is what we were made for. It’s just taking us awhile to get there!

Beyond Dualism to Fruitful Synergy

Something Catholics and Protestants share in common is that we have inherited an ambiguous legacy of dualistic thinking that separates aspects of the human experience that seem very different but actually belong together in some fundamental way.  Because we have not always known how to hold these aspects of life together in fruitful synergy, we have torn them apart, convinced they cannot possibly exist together.   Then, we’ve elevated one as being better and “more spiritual,” while subordinating or diminishing the other. This habit of creating false bifurcations functions on so many levels that it is fruitless to try and list them all, but (by way of example) here are a few: 

• the spiritual vs. the physical/material  
• life of the soul vs. life in the body
• male vs. female  
• black vs. white 
• Catholic vs. Protestant
• sexuality vs. spirituality 
• being vs. doing
• community vs. cause 

I could go on and on, but my point here is that the future of Christian spirituality will move us all towards bringing these (on the surface) dichotomous elements of human existence back together, holding them in creative tension rather than pitting them against each other.  My story is just one living, breathing example of the kind of integration that is springing up all over the place. In that sense, my story is not unique at all.  

Participating in the Unity that is Ours  

But how will this integration happen on a larger scale, given the divisiveness of these days?  It will only happen in Christ because all things have already been reconciled in Christ at the cosmic level. Left to ourselves as mere humans, we will never find what it takes to heal all that has been broken inside us and among us. But IN CHRIST this unity is ours!   We can enjoy our unique and personal relationship with Jesus and the transformation it brings while at the same time opening to the Christ in whom all things hold together.  “He is the icon of the invisible God, the first born of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created…all things have been created through him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together… for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” (Colossians 1:15-20)

It’s not that we don’t know this; it is that we have not fully plumbed the depths of what it means.

 Our unity in Christ doesn’t mean we have to change where we go to church or change our creeds and statements of faith—although we may be led to that eventually.  We can experience differentiation as children in the family of God and at the same time experience the love, respect and cross-pollination among siblings that does the soul good.  We don’t have to be the same in order to seek and experience the deeper unity we share in Christ. Rather than seeing ourselves as “defenders of the faith” as though everything depends on us, we can rest in the peace of what Christ has already done and is doing, thus participating in the unity of the family we are a part of. We know this is what Jesus wants for us and it is why he came.  (John 17)  

Spirituality that is Distinctly Christian 

This is not just any kind of spirituality; this is distinctly Christian spirituality.  This is our present AND our future. It is what already exists in Christ at the cosmic level, and it is where we’re going.  Our only choice is whether to participate in what the Spirit is doing or to resist it. What God has joined together, let no man or woman or child put asunder. 

© Ruth Haley Barton, 2024. Parts of this article were first presented at The Future of Christian Spirituality Conference in honor of Fr. Ron Rolheiser in 2019.

• Introduction: A Protestant’s Journey Toward a More Unified Faith
• Part 1: The Role of Desire in the Spiritual Life
• Part 2: The Charism and Practice of Spiritual Direction
• Part 3: A Spirituality that is Practice-Oriented and Practice-Based
• Part 4: A More Welcoming Stance from a Rooted Depth
• Part 5: Profoundly Justice Oriented