March 17, 2026
I go to Swannanoa Christian Church. I want to start by saying that clearly, because what follows isn't a critique. This church is alive. Young and old and everywhere in between, coming together around Christ in a way that feels genuine. The worship isn't stiff. The people aren't going through the motions. There's a warmth and energy in that room that I haven't found anywhere else.
But why haven't I found it anywhere else? Why is it so hard to find a church that actually serves its function?
Most of us came to church carrying everything we are. Our doubts, our anger, our weird questions, our real lives. And then somewhere along the way, we learned to leave parts of ourselves at the door. The intellectual parts. The wounded parts. The parts that don't fit neatly into a worship set.
Forrest Landry, a philosopher whose work I've been studying for years, puts it plainly:
"We cannot sustainably find ourselves in an honest worship where we all leave very large aspects of ourselves at the door. This creates a schism of self that is anathema to what true religion must become — an acknowledgement, pathway, and affirmation of our individual and collective wholeness."
Wholeness. That's the word. Wholeness. Bringing everything you are into the room and finding that God meets all of it, not only the presentable parts.
Landry uses a phrase I keep coming back to: re-wilding religion. Not abandoning the tradition. Not gutting the theology. Re-wilding it. The way you'd re-wild a river — let it find its natural course again after decades of being channeled through concrete.
"It is time for us to find our next right relationship to God. As individuals and collectives evolve, so must our conceptions and devotions to the Divine. To fail to do so is to lose coherence in the relationship to self, other, and world."
He's not saying God changes. He's saying we do. Our worship needs to match where we actually are, not where we were in 1950 or 1550 or 325. Creeds still hold. Trinity still stands. Our approach to the living God has to be alive too.
Think about it this way. A child knows God as the big friendly presence. A teenager argues with God about whether he's even real. A young adult discovers God in other people, in justice, in beauty. A person in midlife discovers God in silence, in loss, in the parts of themselves they spent twenty years avoiding. Each stage is real. Each stage demands a different posture. A church that only serves one stage leaves everyone else standing outside.
Here's the part nobody talks about much. Going deeper with God is expensive. Not in dollars. In self.
Landry writes about this directly:
"The deeper one seeks to go, the more one must give up. Each level of greater intimacy with the subjective demands a corresponding increase in the cost of approach. This cost is not primarily material. It is a cost of surrender: the releasing of assumptions, of egoic identity, of the expectation that what is encountered will be translatable into familiar terms."
Read that again. The deeper you go with God, the more of yourself you have to let go. Not just the bad parts. All of it. Your assumptions about who God is. Your comfortable image of yourself as a good person. Your expectation that the experience will confirm what you already believe.
Jesus said the same thing. "Whoever wants to save his life will lose it." That's not a threat. It's a description of how intimacy works. You can't hold on to who you think you are and also meet the God who is actually there.
If this is true — if genuine encounter with God requires progressive surrender — then a church that is ego-enhancing rather than ego-diminishing will never get past the surface.
"If genuine encounter with the deepest dimensions of the subjective requires the progressive surrender of egoic structure, then any approach to spirituality that is ego-enhancing rather than ego-diminishing will necessarily be limited to the surface dimensions of subjective experience."
Uncomfortable, right? Because a lot of what passes for church growth in America is ego-enhancing. Bigger stage, better lights, you're special, God has a plan for your success. People love it. It feels good. But feeling good and going deep are different things.
Going deep looks like silence, not spectacle. Confession, not confidence. A man who doesn't know what to say next, not a man who has all the right words.
I don't have this figured out. Nobody does. But I can tell you what I'm seeing in my own community, in the small group of men who meet at a coffee shop in Swannanoa on Tuesday mornings.
Bringing everything. Doubt and certainty. Questions that don't have answers yet. Reading scripture and actually wrestling with what it says instead of skipping to the application.
Sitting with someone who is in pain and not trying to fix it. Just being present. Because presence is what the Spirit does, and the Spirit is the part of God who shows up in the space between people.
Admitting that the deeper you go, the less you know how to talk about it. Being OK with that. God is not a concept to be explained. God is a person to be encountered. Encounter doesn't fit neatly into a sermon outline.
"To maybe come into the process of even the possibility of knowing God, we must therefore know and accept all that is in and within our subjective, in its totality, loving and accepting each part, and each aspect, without judgment, without division and divisiveness, of any kind. In effect, we must fully accept our animal, our child, our wild selves."
Our wild selves. That's the re-wilding. Not being reckless. Being whole. Letting the river find its course. Trusting that the God who made rivers can handle the flood.
This post draws on two essays by Forrest Landry: On Re-Wilding Religion (March 2025) and Cost and Intimacy (February 2026). Both are part of a larger body of work connecting the Immanent Metaphysics to Christianity.