Rooting Out Self-Spirituality
Sam Reimer · Tidal Church Moncton · October 5, 2025
Sam Reimer explores how Canada's inward turn toward self-made spirituality is shaping the church, then points to Luke 6 and the wise builder. He invites us to follow Jesus as Lord and build our lives on the solid rock of His Word.
Topics: Faith, Identity, Discipleship
Transcript
[0:00] Well, good morning, everyone. It is indeed a privilege to be with you here today. Thank you, Pastor Jeremy, for inviting me, and I ran into some previous students, and I want them to know that this is one of the first times you hear me talk without a test at the end. At least not on this earth, right? All right, there might be a test later on. Yeah, so I spend a lot of my time trying to figure out the ways in which our Canadian culture is shaping or possibly misshaping our faith. The way the culture around us works is, we're not even aware that it's shaping us, right?
[0:45] It's, we're not purposely absorbing it, but we're like fish in water, and we're constantly being influenced by our culture, whether we know it or not. So my task today is to help us understand how the culture views religion, actually really spirituality, and how that might even be entering into our churches and affecting you and me. Okay, so let's get started. I want you to know that there's lots of good things about our culture, but I'm gonna be pointing out the ways that it is shaping our faith in ways that actually matter to us following Jesus today. So here is the transition that I'm talking about today. It's a change in the locus of authority, and I want you to look at the picture on the left, which is sort of the old idea of authority and where it came from, and the picture on the right, which is where we are moving: into internal authority.
[1:46] And now it is about me and what I believe. Please read both the dark print and the light print on the right. So what's happening in our churches? Unless you've been living under a rock, you know very well that church is changing, that our society is changing, that religiosity is actually declining, and we know that church attendance is declining, probably to the point where we're at single digits. Studies say it is less than 10% of Canadians are in a church at any given time. In fact, it just happened in the last couple of years that we actually have a minority of Christians in Canada. We are a post-Christian nation. This has meant also that there's changes in orthodoxy.
[2:34] People aren't aligning themselves with the traditional truths of the faith, those captured like in the Apostles' Creed. Instead, they're finding their own beliefs and choosing to accept what they think is right instead of what the church has taught. And it's becoming increasingly difficult for us to pass our faith down to our children. Faith transmission is becoming harder. It's harder for us to see our kids actually stay in church. And this is happening not only in Canada, but across a lot of the Western countries. There's an increase in the number of people who claim no religious affiliation. We call them nones, with an o, not a u. All right? They don't have any religious affiliation at all.
[3:21] They don't claim to be Christian or anything else. They just say that, I don't have any faith. That actually might almost be a majority in Canada. Now, what is the cause of all this change, this rapid change, secularization, whatever you want to call it, that is driving this change? I think the most important cultural change probably in the last 80 years has to do with what I call the inward turn. Not just me. Lots of philosophers and sociologists have been seeing this for quite a while. The inward turn is a move from external authority, on the one hand, where teachers and pastors and parents shape, or are encouraged to shape, what I believe, to now where we have internal authority, where people are their own authority, their own inner voice guides them.
[4:20] Brothers and sisters, we are all on a continuum here between external authority and internal authority. If you are older and have been in church for maybe a very long time and are committed, you might be a little bit more toward external authority. If you are younger and maybe haven't been in church as much, you might be a little closer to internal authority. What I'm saying is that the culture is pushing us all toward internal authority, you and me both, in ways we probably don't understand. So how do I illustrate this move from external authority to internal authority? Well, one of the ways that we can do this is by looking at recruitment for the US Army back in World War I, and, too, it seems like a natural choice for a pacifist Mennonite to choose this good example.
[5:11] Back in the World Wars, this was the way they recruited new people to join the army. It was Uncle Sam representing the US government, pointing a finger and saying, "I want you to join the US Army." Notice the assumptions of this advertising. The assumption is that there is an external authority, the US government, which is obliged to tell you what you should do, and it's your job to defer to that external authority and to serve selflessly if you like your country. After about the 1960s, they began to realize that this wasn't working for young people. Some of you remember what happened in the 1960s. The hippie movement was largely rebellion against wars, other authorities, external authorities.
[6:01] And so that advertising didn't work. Come around 1980, they began to advertise this way. Notice the assumptions in this advertisement. It is no longer about who you should serve. It is now us that should serve you. This is a you-centered message. This is a message where we are here to help you reach your goals, not the other way around. The locus of authority has shifted. It is now located inside of you. So external authority looks like this. External authority looks like leader authority, leaders of our major organizations, institutions, and society. It could be pastors and priests, it could be parents, it could be teachers, it could be doctors, it could be whatever.
[6:47] They largely prescribed how we thought and what we thought. Society encouraged us to follow what the external authorities were saying to us. We deferred, at least this is what we're pressured to do, encouraged to do by society. We deferred to those external authorities, and we served the institutions around us. Our beliefs, our practices, our values, our aspirations were largely prescribed. Society was encouraging us all to sort of believe the same things. And so our identities, that is, who we viewed ourselves to be, was largely something that was ascribed to us, often at birth. So it was pretty typical for me or you to follow the lead of your parents.
[7:36] Your religion would follow that. Your religion was prescribed, your occupation sometimes, who you would marry. A lot of those things were prescribed, and you kind of knew where you were going based on where your parents were going. That all changed with internal authority, this massive move in Canada and around the world toward internal authority. Now, I'm my own authority. My own inner voice guides me. I have a consumeristic attitude toward organizations. They can serve me to the degree that I think they can serve me. I'll go to church if I think I'm benefiting from it personally. It's not me that's there to serve the church. It's the other way around.
[8:23] And so I'm selective on the way I draw from the church or any other organization in ways that I think is working for me. So beliefs, behaviors, and aspirations are now discovered. If I have an internal locus of authority, I have to figure those things out for myself. Other people can't tell me what I should believe. And identity then is much more self-created. Who I am, I actually have to discover who that is, what I, my occupation, who I'm going to marry, what my religious beliefs will be, what I believe in at all. Who I am is shaped by my own journey to try to find myself. So we've moved, I'm suggesting, from external to internal authority in our culture, and we're pushed by our culture toward internal authority.
[9:16] This massive change has shaped all parts of Canadian culture, society, and definitely around the world, but it has also shaped our spirituality. In fact, religion isn't very popular at all in our society. Religion has a negative connotation, right? If you're religious. Now we're spiritual, but not religious. We've replaced our religiosity with personal spirituality, a spirituality that I myself have created and curated, presented to other people. It's a self-curated spirituality. When I started doing research in this area of spirituality in Canada, I thought what I would find would be diverse spiritual paths that everybody would randomly be following, their own inner lead.
[10:07] That is exactly what I did not find. What I found was that we are in a society that powerfully prescribes its scripts, what we believe and what we're supposed to believe in our spirit, what our spirituality should be like. It has a very clear means how we get to the end. And it also has a very clear end goal that we all should be striving for in our society. We're all on a private journey. Remember, I am describing here, I'm not prescribing. Everybody still with me? Okay? I'm describing what the general idea of spirituality is. It's an inward journey. It's a private journey that I am on my own path. No one is exactly like me. So I have to find my own way.
[10:53] I might accept a little bit of guidance here and there from people who are authentic, but in general, it's up to me to find my path, not follow other people's leads. All religions do the same thing. This is called perennialism. For those of you who like big words. The idea here is that at their core, all religious paths are equal. I can find my way through any religious path, because all religions basically are doing the same thing. They're trying to make me nice and kind and accepting of other people, and they should make me feel fulfilled. They're helping me in my path toward fulfillment. So any religious path will do.
[11:41] The authority has shifted internal. So now my heart tells me what is right. I have an inner epistemology, for those of you who like the big words, okay? I myself am my own spiritual guide. I sense my own inner voice, and that directs me in the direction I should go, because I'm on my own path and where I go is up to me. I need a lot of liberty and freedom to find my own way. Other people cannot tell me what to do. See, one of the problems is that these external authorities are trying to conform me to what they want. They're pressuring me to be someone I'm not really, am, in the common view out there. And so I need freedom from those oppressive forces so that I can become who I really intended to be.
[12:34] Okay? I need lots of freedom to investigate a variety of identities and beliefs and values. God has moved in the societal spirituality. God is no longer on the throne in heaven, but is now living inside of me, and probably in all of nature. The small g god that I follow is my own inner voice. It's really handy that god is now inside of me, because if I have internal authority, then my own voice is imbued with supernatural significance. I am my own god. Small g, the end. Our end goal here is to find our authentic self.
[13:22] Isn't that a buzzword in our society? Everybody's looking for authenticity. That means that there's a false self. There's a false self that is trying to be shaped by people around me. People, external authorities, trying to tell me what to do or who I should be. But I have to find who I am. I have to be true to myself. I have to find the real me in spite of people trying to conform me to their image. How do I know when I reach my authentic self? Well, it's kind of hard to say because everybody's destination is different, right? But I can tell because I'm good. When I find my authentic self, I'm caring, I'm kind, I'm accepting of other people.
[14:11] I'm tolerant. And another way I can tell is because I found my inner power. Actually, my inner power has been revealed to others. My supernatural abilities are being recognized. The third part of this, and probably the most important, is I have found inner peace. I'm like the swan confidently sailing calmly on the waters, and nothing external can buffet me because I found my authentic self. That's how I know I really have found my own home. So society is prescribing that. They're prescribing a means and they're describing an end.
[14:56] So the next thing I was wondering about was, will I find that in the church? Will I find the power of society beginning to come in, infiltrate, if you like, in the church, and we're beginning to change our minds about our orthodox or our historical Christian way that we've been taught? So I talked to 125 pastors and active Christians in a whole bunch of churches in both Britain and Canada. Sorry about the little picture of, uh, here talking to American. Some of you are with me with that old illustration. Yeah, it's a little different than that. It was a little more in depth. But all the people that I talked to, all the lay people that I talked to, were selected by their pastors as regular participants in those churches.
[15:49] So these are not fly by night people who come occasionally to church. These are people who are in our pews, like you in the pews. I found that three quarters of the regular attending evangelicals that I talked to showed signs of inner authority. So yes, it does seem to be coming in the church even when we don't know it. What does this internal authority look like in the church among the people I interviewed? Well, it has shaped beliefs. Maybe misshaped our beliefs in a variety of ways. We can expect that if the cultural pressure is getting into our churches, that in areas where the culture is not supportive of our beliefs, that's gonna be the place that's gonna change.
[16:37] And that's what I found. Particularly, there's been softening views on sexual ethics and on exclusive claims. These are not popular, okay? If I say that what you believe is actually wrong because I have an external authority like God, that's not a popular thing to say, 'cause everybody should be free to find their own path. Another way that I saw this was a willingness of the people to disagree with the teachings of the church in the church that they participated in. They were happy to disagree with the very church doctrine in the church that they were participating in. Yeah, I'm not sure I agree with the church in this area. Sometimes they were quite aware of this.
[17:23] They even spoke it to me and said, "Yeah, our church believes this, but I don't." So we've moved to intuitive beliefs. At least that's the pressure in our society. My heart tells me. So my own inner voice is what I listen to, but it has also changed our practices. It's no longer the practices that church prescribes, like regular church attendance and prayer and Bible reading. It has now become increasingly about what works for me personally. I don't want to do the guilt-ridden pressure that my church applies to me to do certain things. Instead, I do what I feel is right. And so my spiritual disciplines tend to be sporadic.
[18:09] Instead of a regular quiet time in the morning, my spiritual practices might be checking my Bible app on the way to church, on the way to work. And my prayer becomes something that is sporadic and happens sometimes, particularly when I feel the need. Actually, particularly when I feel the therapeutic need. I'm not feeling quite right. I'm nervous, I'm anxious. And so I'll read a few Bible verses to help me feel better. So the Bible becomes not about instruction as much as it becomes about therapy. I call this cell phone spirituality. It's like an app on your phone. You pull out a devotional app or whatever and you use it like you would use your weather app, okay?
[18:55] Occasional as I feel the need, that's where society is going. So the question is, why do we care? Or do we, is this a problem in the church? The answer is I think it is a problem because the idea of internal authority actually is a myth. We are all shaped by external authorities. We are all shaped by the society around us. We are all influenced in ways that we don't even know, including me. And so what that means is that when we follow an internal authority, what we're actually doing is we're simply following what society is already prescribing to us.
[19:41] We're actually joining the bandwagon. Society is pushing us toward ourselves. Does this mean, does internal authority mean people are thinking for themselves? I'm suggesting maybe not. Maybe they're just conforming to the way society is pushing them. What we end up with is, I think, a problem with lordship. Everybody is following something. Everybody is being shaped by something. The question is, what are you attending to? What are you focused on? Where does your time go? Because you are following a lord.
[20:26] The question is, is your lord a benevolent and good lord? Does social media care about you? Do the algorithms you're getting on whatever, Facebook, YouTube, you name it, are those actually after your very best interests? Or is there a Lord that is worth following because He deeply loves you? Everybody's following something. Does my habits, does the time I spend reflect who my true Lord is? This all reminds me of a passage in Luke 6. Now, I am prescribing, not just describing.
[21:14] The passage goes like this. "So why do you keep calling Me Lord, Lord, when you do not do what I say? I'll show you what it's like when someone comes to Me, listens to My teaching and then follows it. It is like a person building a house who digs deep and lays a foundation on solid rock. And when the floodwaters, the powerful current of our culture, rises and breaks against the house, it stands firm because it is well built. But anyone who hears and does not obey is like a person who builds His house right on the ground without a foundation. When the floodwater sweeps down against the house, it will collapse into a heap of ruins." Let me paraphrase a bit, just in line with what I'm speaking about today.
[22:03] Two houses were built in the same subdivision. One builder decided that he was his own authority. He constructed a set of beliefs and practices built on his own intuition. He thought he was making his own decisions, but in reality, he was building on the ever-shifting sand of our culture. He was jerked around by the opinions of others around him, and he focused on what online algorithm sent his way and that captured his attention and his loyalty. When the trials of life came his way, his self crumbled since it was not built on a solid foundation. Another builder saw a house, saw the house that was built in the sand and was tempted to build just like his neighbor did, realizing that it was so much easier to build a house without a foundation.
[22:56] But after studying the manual written by the master builder himself, he concluded that a foundation was necessary. So he dug deep and followed the manual to the letter. He decided that the one who invented house building might actually know best how to make one that lasts. When the trials of life came, when the power of the culture beat against this house, it didn't budge because this house was anchored on the rock. Big R Rock. So who's directing our lives? Who's directing my life? Am I building on a solid foundation?
[23:41] Does my habits, what I attend to, indicate who my master really is? Because one hour on Sunday morning does not inoculate you against all the influences of society. We need to focus our lives on the Lord and follow Him closely so that we don't go adrift in our culture. Amen. Let's pray. God, we want to be Your children. We wanna follow Your lead. We want to be people who have a Lord, big L Lord, and follow that Lord in all areas of our lives. Help us to attend to You. Help us to focus on the truth of Your Word.
[24:27] And we see the living Word of Jesus in that Word. May it be not just something that we occasionally look at, but something that shapes our lives, 'cause we're focused on obeying You. Help us, God, to be Your bride, to be Your church, and to follow Your Son. We ask this in His powerful name. Amen.