Columba and the SBNR

We are off to Iona this morning with Bishop Kevin and Elspeth for the 1450th Anniversary of the arrival of St Columba. Iona is one of my favourite places and I am fascinated by the reaction of people when it is mentioned. George MacLeod’s comment that it is a ‘thin place’ is obviously well understood – meaning, I think, a place where the veil which separates earth and heaven is particularly thin.

Which leads me to the article I read this week in the Alban Institute material about the SBNR group – Spiritual but not Religious. That’s very much of our [post-modern] times – people do not ‘do’ religion but they perceive themselves as being spiritual and interested in spirituality. That shapes into a challenge – which is how ‘organised and institutional’ religion can engage with such people. I think that much of Casting the Net is actually about that – the Mark of Mission which is ‘worship which renews and inspires’ is about the aspiration to produce worship which has a helpful ‘thinness’ about it.

And I can’t help make a comment about current thinking on Hospital Chaplaincy in the NHS – certainly in the unhelpfully radical form in which we experience it here. There seems to be spiritual care – which can be delivered by almost anybody – and there is religious care which is perceived as being what churches do. When I suggest that what churches do – and what my own long experience in hospital chaplaincy was about – is spiritual care for SBNR people with an absolute minimum of formal/organised/institutional content, there doesn’t seem to be an answer.