DOJOS
(Posted 2007-09-20 22:15:54 by ArchPaladin)

Dojo - lit. "the place of the way" - A term applied to a location for
martial arts training, but originally was used to describe a location for
the carrying out of spiritual practices.

I don't believe I have mentioned here that the website for Iron Lotus has
been running [ http://www.iron-lotus.com/ ] [iron-lotus.com] for a little
while now.  So I'll say it now: the website for ILMA has been up and
running for a little while now.  There are still a couple of things that
could stand to change (ie. font sizes bigger/keeping the text from running
into the black hangul) but apart from that it's basically in its final
form.

Most everything else about ILMA is going rather well.  We sign up a new
student or two occasionally, but so far we don't seem to keeping more than
four of them at a time.  I have yet to go around and post advertisements
everywhere (which should help with the student problem), and there may be a
significant lack of instructors available depending on how many students we
bring in at once.  However, I would very much like to have this problem. 
Apart from that, I am enjoying running a business, and I recognize it as
one of God's blessings for me.

As I mentioned previously, I have been spending time with one of the summer
interns at the church lately.  Well, this last Tuesday we went to one of
the many cafes present in Manchester to meet up with a group of people from
The Dialogue Church [ http://www.thedialoguechurch.com/ ]
[thedialoguechurch.com] to participate in an open forum on religion in
today's world.  I found this to be a very interesting group, and it kind of
gets to the core of what I wanted to mention in this post.

The church's intern and I have been discussing things that we think need
inherent changing about spiritual practice in the world today.  We believe
that a lot of what people experience as Christianity is pretty flat and
meaningless: visitors come into a church building, meet a bunch of people
that they may never really see or have much interaction with, have some
flat discussions in which everyone is doing ok and no one really seems to
be discussing matters of any great importance, and then everyone leaves to
come back and do the same thing next week (or maybe a couple times a week,
if you're really devout).  We think this is sorely lacking, because
Christianity is supposed to entail a very personal relationship between God
and individual, with the church body as a loosely organized network of
individuals that meet regularly to teach each other and bolster one
another's faith.  The formalities of the church service and church
"culture" stifle that relationship and cripple it unless the people of the
church actively get involved in one another's lives.  Often, that
participation does not happen, and it can generally be attributed to never
having formed relationships with fellow church members very well (ie.
because of that whole list of experiences I gave above).  This whole thing
becomes a cycle, with new people not getting involved, and thus not
motivating the ones that come after them to get involved.

So we found in the Dialogue Church a group of people with similar mindsets.
 From what we could tell through one meeting (about two hours) was that
they kept close to Christian doctrine but threw out most all of the
remaining established traditions that make up the worship services that
most people think of when picturing Christianity.  What is left (if our
assumptions about them are correct) is a group of individuals who are
focused more on interpersonal connections, building a strong relationship
with God, and the development of groups that have enough courage and unity
to really help each other on the path to growing spiritually.  We couldn't
quite tell if they had a uniform set of doctrinal beliefs or not - this
will be something to assess later.

I'm not about to go jumping churches, but I do find this exciting.  We
intend to establish a better connection with these people to see more of
where they're at, and depending on what we find, get involved with the work
they're doing.  I may continue to mention what happens in posts here.

So why do I mention all of this?  Obviously it's my blog so I can say
whatever I want, but that's hardly much of a reason.  It excites me, so I
figure people should know about it.  Mainly though, I think I mention it
publicly because I have a number of friends who are very turned off to the
whole organized religion scene for various reasons - either because they
don't like the idea of mass conforming to doctrine, or because they find
church services boring or stifling, or everything feels very impersonal, or
whatever the case may be.  Depending on what we find in this group, this
may be something that interests those people, and if so I think it would be
inappropriate to not say anything about it.

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