Seeker Sensitivity

On my layover in LA airport, I browsed the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine. It had an interesting article on Faith Church, a megachurch in New England.

From the magazine's website:

In this issue of the magazine, Frances FitzGerald writes about Faith Church, in New Milford, Connecticut, and its charismatic pastor, Frank Santora. “Megachurches are rare in New England—there are less than a dozen in the region—but there are more than twelve hundred and fifty of them across the country,” FitzGerald writes.

This is interesting because it's a megachurch in a region where megachurches are not common. Something like this can help to shine a light on someone who has understood the underlying principles and how to apply them in a different setting, rather than someone who has simply aped the same actions in the same settings, with the same results.

In the article Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, two pioneers of megachurches and the "Seeker Sensitive" approach, are cited as influences on Faith Church Pastor Frank Santora.

The Seeker Sensitive approach is to take into account the people that you are dealing with, and adapting your initial presentation to them.

I assert that Srila Prabhupada is himself a pioneer of this approach, and that if we had captured this earlier, we would be much further along than we are.

Being in LA I couldn't help thinking about Srila Prabhupada's desire for the New Dvaraka temple. He told the devotees to leave the chairs in the main temple, and put the marble floor temple and Deities where the prasadam room is. Instead the devotees pulled all the chairs out.

I remember when we started to push to have chairs for the Sunday Feast in Brisbane. One old-timer said: "But people like to sit on the floor. It's exotic. That's why people join up."

No, you're just a hippy.

What people think when they have to sit on the floor (if they don't think that it's weird and uncivilized), is that it is "a novelty". That means that it's something different and interesting, sure, but it also means that: "it's not something that I could do all the time."

The last thing you want to do is condition your contact with people on this. Contemporary preachers know that today we need to spend three or four days a week with someone to help them make the paradigm shift.

The beginning of spiritual life means to sit and to hear:

For beginning you have simply to give submissive aural reception. That is the first beginning. Sthane sthitah sruti-gatam tanu-van-manobhih.

- Srila Prabhupada, Conversation May 31, 1974

sthane-sthithah - to sit still (SB 10.14.3). If you don't facilitate people to do that, then why are you surprised if no-one takes to it or advances through the process to bhajana-kriya? People practice the hatha yoga postures - the yoga asanas - for years in order to be able to sit (asana) comfortably without the assistance of a chair.

Back in the 60s and 70s when you had huge numbers of young people looking to do anything and everything completely differently from the way it was done before, "rejecting the system", sitting on the floor was attractive, at least to them. That was not the case among the older generation of responsible persons, whom Prabhupada also wanted to reach. Today it is not the case in general.

Srila Prabhupada saw through the situation of the time. Srila Prabhupada was not conditioned by his cultural setting, as some people have mistakenly thought. He was sensitive to it.

Am I advocating having people sit on chairs? Is that what this is about? We have 40 chairs at Atma Yoga, and four couches. We sit on those chairs and couches with up to 200 people, six days a week. But that's a detail. It's an important one, but it's still a detail. The point is to change the mode of thinking to match Srila Prabhupada's. He was angry when he found out that the chairs had been pulled out in Los Angeles. That's not seeker sensitive, and he was.

It's not about "compromising". It's about understanding what we are actually about, and not fanatically accepting or rejecting things.

If we had started with the chairs back then, and understood the mood and method, how much more developed would we be now in our ability to effectively deliver Krishna Consciousness in a time, place, and person sensitive fashion?

That's the key to the megachurch "success formula" - understanding the difference between the mutable trappings of form and the unchangeable essence of the teaching and practice, and sensitively adjusting the former while remaining faithful to the latter.