Jenny McIntosh – A Spirited Exchange continued
Interviewed by Paul Fromont [04.06]

As you lead and develop Spirited Exchanges, what, for you sustains the vision?

The interactions with people. One of the things that I am about is helping people grow, both emotionally and spiritually. I think the two are intertwined. I started out, career-wise, as a nurse, and while nursing is primarily about physical wellbeing, it’s also concerned with the whole person. The Spirited Exchanges vision is sustained by a desire to see people become spiritually and emotionally whole, and to see that wholeness and aliveness integrated into every area of their lives.

The other critical way, in which the vision is sustained, is through my trust in God, and my holding to the realisation that God is still the most important reality there is. It is God who gifts to me a sense of meaning, identity, freedom, and purpose. It is God, in contrast to much that passes for church, who enables me to become all that I’m created to be and become over the course of my lifetime.

So often I see and experience ‘churchianity’ as doing the opposite. So often church has an unhealthy knack of diminishing people and reducing their potential. I don’t believe that’s what God is about, and it doesn’t have to be like that. I believe we all have a God-given uniqueness that longs to grow and flourish. Deep down we all long to be whole, to live hopefully, and to be more fully alive in every sense. I often imagine a church that honours, nourishes, and encourages those longings and desires in peoples lives; and as I imagine those things the vision for Spirited Exchanges is sustained.

How do you assess the continued need for Spirited Exchanges and its continuing usefulness?

As long as it has resonance for people, then it will remain useful.

Another dimension of Spirited Exchanges is our understanding of James Fowler’s “stages of faith” (see also Alan Jamieson’s book, A Churchless Faith). We are about helping people in faith stage transition, a helping and a supporting that is rare in many church contexts, contexts that typically see people in faith stage transition as “backsliders,” and either leave them to it, or intervene inappropriately and insensitively. This is an area where my energy is stimulated and I rise to defend people in this space, to offer support, and to be an advocate.

If Fowlers stages are universal then I believe there will be ongoing need for Spirited Exchanges until churches can arrive at this understanding of faith and are able to provide the same sort of care and support that we are for people transitioning faith stages. I am quite happy for groups to start up and shut down as they have outlived their usefulness. It isn’t about building an empire; it’s about being on the ground with people.

One couple recently described Spirited Exchanges as the vehicle that helped them connect with God when the more traditional pathways failed to do that for them – they likened it to the story of the paralysed man being lowered through the roof to get to Jesus below (Mark 2: 1-12) when he couldn’t access the normal pathway.

The Spirited Exchanges (“SE”) website mentions that SE “doesn’t try to lure people back into a church fellowship.” How would you then describe the relationship between SE and established church congregations?

Sadly there is very little relationship with established church congregations. Relative to the total number of churches in New Zealand we have had very few invitations to speak about Spirited Exchanges.

Typically I sit with the realisation that for people, for whom church and faith “work”, there is little or no understanding of what’s happening for those for whom church and faith aren’t “working.”

As a consequence, Spirited Exchanges is seen, at best, as irrelevant to their own understanding of church and faith. At worst, I guess, some might possibly, and I would add, mistakenly see Spirited Exchanges as somehow trying to take people away from church rather than in fact helping them to stay on their faith journey.

While a response will necessitate generalisations, I wonder if you could describe in broad terms what's often happening for people who are drawn to Spirited Exchanges?

Two slightly different groups of people are drawn to Spirited Exchanges:

1. Those who have left their church because they are disillusioned, hurt, or angry with the church per se, and
2. Those who have left because of broader issues and questions that have penetrated to the very heart of their faith in God.

Both groups come to and are welcome at Spirited Exchanges; however, our emphasis is more weighted toward the second group for whom there are very few, if any, resources. The first group will often remain connected to Christianity by way of books, events, Christian radio etc. The second group have no interest in those things, nor do they typically have anywhere to turn for help and support.

Broadly speaking people in this latter space are uncertain about their faith or unsure that they want to continue holding onto it. They have a lot of questions and doubts and are developing a different way of thinking and relating to their faith. They are examining the components of their faith in relation to their experience. No longer do they accept the faith as popularly presented and ‘packaged’; instead they are thinking more independently and also exploring what in fact they do believe.

For many, their experiences can be helpfully understood as a faith stage transition (which I’ve briefly touched upon above). There’s also a lot of grief for many as they struggle with loss at a number of levels, so Spirited Exchanges seeks to provide a safe, respectful, and hopeful place during what, for many, is a very scary and lonely experience. When they take this journey they have no guarantee of what kind of faith, if any, they will have at its end. Spirited Exchanges offers the support of others who are in a similar place or who are on the journey.

At Spirited Exchanges, people are encouraged to take responsibility for their own faith development. It’s okay to critique the “package”, to explore and to journey in a way that’s very open-ended. We let God defend God. We offer, in a very tentative way, resources, ideas, and possibilities. As you noted, our website makes it very clear that there is no agenda “to lure people back into a church fellowship.”

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