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Welcome back to the Journey Podcast! In this episode, Lianne, Terry and Sarah discuss how you don’t need to be spiritual or religious to go through Journey Coaching. The material was carefully created in a way that both spiritual and non-spiritual individuals can benefit and grow from coaching.
Transcription of Podcast
Lianne: Hi, welcome back to journey. We’re having a great conversation today. I’m here with Terry and Sarah, and I’m going to let Terry let us know what we’re going to talk about.
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Terry: Oh, this is a really interesting conversation I think that we’re going to have today. I’m really excited about the way it lays out. One of the questions that we’ve been asked is, is Journey Coaching spiritual? Rather than answer it myself, I’m going to throw this over to Sarah see how you answer it.
Sarah: Thank you. Thank you. My answer to that question is that you do not need to be spiritual. You do not need to be a Christian to go through Journey Coaching. Journey Coaching was written because we saw pain points, and the society, or the authors, saw pain points in the society with connection and with connection with people, and that’s really key. Journey Coaching is very much about building intentional relationships and connecting with others, whether you are a Christian or not. Whether you believe in one god, multiple gods, you’re an atheist, agnostic, it does not matter. You can believe whatever you want to believe to go through Journey Coaching.
Terry: I think that’s a really good way of responding. When we were looking at developing the material, that was one of those things where when we said it’s written from a Christian perspective, it’s just our being honest. That’s our worldview. That’s the direction we come from. I don’t want to exclude people.
Terry: When Mike and I were going through this, and Jeff, and we were working on the outline for the material and for all the stuff that we were trying to decide, the goals that we wanted to accomplish, we said from the very beginning, we don’t want to make this about pushing our faith or our Christianity down anybody’s throats. We also felt like we didn’t want to leave it out either because it is part of a lot of people’s worldview.
Terry: For instance, one of the things you’ll notice as you go through the workbook, we have a disclaimer in every section where we talk about things from an everyday kind perspective, but then we get to something from the Christian worldview perspective, we’re talking about strengths from a Christian perspective, or weaknesses, or worldview. We give this little disclaimer and it says something like, if you’re interested in comparing your worldview with a healthy Christian perspective, this section will be helpful. If not, skip to the next steps section later in the session. If somebody says, “Nope, I’m really not going to go through that,” they’re not going to lose anything from the Journey Coaching.
Lianne: I have this question then, because I think that our listeners would have this question, why would you even bring up your Christian – You are a Christian, you have a Christian worldview. Side note: every single person on this planet has a worldview. It’s how you look at the world, so we all have a worldview. You have a Christian worldview. Why would you even mention that when you’re writing this? If you don’t want this to be just for Christians, and you want it for non-Christians too, why wouldn’t you write this without talking about your Christian worldview at all?
Terry: Well, I think there’s a benefit to both believers and nonbelievers, Christians, or people who have other faiths. There’s a lot of misconceptions out there when you can go through the internet and you can find all kinds of different misconceptions about Christianity, and obviously I can’t speak about other faiths, but I can speak about that one.
Terry: I think one of the things I wanted to do is is I wanted to give people a perspective that might help them someday. Let’s say you’re not a believer, you’re not a Christian, and you’re working with Christians. There’s a lot of people who’ve asked us what are they thinking? Where do they get this information? Why does a Christian believe this, or what do they believe? This book, if you want to, you can go through, and that’ll give you some insight on that. I think it’s great for Christians who are going through the material because it helps them to see that the world view that I have is not the only one out there. There’s a lot of people who believe that they’re Christians, and yet a lot of their world view is very secular. It’s very non-faith based.
Sarah: On the opposite side of that, I do think that a lot of agnostics and atheists do exhibit some Christian worldview, and it would be interesting to dive into that, for people to realize, wait a second, you know what? I don’t believe in this Jesus person, but … Not realizing, they’ll say, I really believe in taking care of people and serving people, that’s a Christian worldview right there. That’s from a Christian worldview. On page 47 here, after you go through things, one of the questions is how did your worldview line up with what you just read about? This is part of the workbook or whatever, so to dig into that, and to realize, wait a second, maybe I’m an …
Sarah: One of our earlier podcasts talked about risking new relationships and how if you dive into relationships with people who you might think that you would be friends with, you’ll actually be surprised. I do believe that people put up barriers with each other and argue with others who they think are different than them.I’m going to go on a passionate rant here. This happens all the time on social media, that people are fighting against each other, and they’re coming from the same exact place. I think that if we dive into relationships, and ask questions more, and dive into what your worldview is and how that compares with other people’s worldviews, you’ll realize that you’re coming from a very similar place.
Terry: You find a lot of times that there are more similarities than there are differences, if you really take the time to have those conversations. Journey is designed to facilitate those conversations. That’s really all it is.
Lianne: To both of your points, I’m chiming in. How many times right now do you get an opportunity to sit down with anyone who doesn’t think exactly like you are, slow down, and take the time to cover the ground to say, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? That’s interesting. We have this common ground here. We don’t have this common ground here. How many times do you get that opportunity? Probably not on Twitter, to you.
Sarah: No, but on longer forums, on Facebook too. I’m very much an extrovert. I have in-depth conversations with people on on Facebook and stuff. You’re right. How often do you get to sit face-to-face over coffee, over breakfast, over dinner, sitting down with someone in a safe atmosphere where you can ask those hard questions that you don’t know who to ask of because you’re concerned. Maybe you grew up in a Christian home, and you don’t think that you believe what your family believes, and yet you don’t know where to go to ask those questions. Journey Coaching is that safe place to do that.
Terry: We’ve kind of established that Journey Coaching is not a specific type a church, it’s not as spirituality. It has at it’s root some explanation of what some of the Christian worldview, and that sort of thing, is, but it was designed for anybody to go through it. You don’t have to be a believer in order to go through it. What do you think, Sarah, as far as how can we explain that to someone who hasn’t considered doing something like this because of their…
Sarah: The big question I think that people would have is, and I mentioned it earlier, why even bring up Christianity? If you don’t need to be a Christian to go through this, why even talk about it? The answer that I would give to that is, because of my Christian worldview, that I think is a biblical view. God really does care about people, and he loves people, and he wants people to be in intentional, close, deep relationships with each other, and he cares about relationships. He wants to be in relationship with us. He wants us to be in relationship with each other. Out of that Christian, biblical worldview, Journey was born, so it’s really hard to disengage the Christian worldview from the motive that is out of that.
Sarah: It would have been really hard for you to disengage those two from each other, but just because it was birthed out of a Christian worldview does not absolutely mean that you need to have a Christian worldview to go through it.
Terry: The fact that it’s listed in there the way that we’ve listed it is an attempt to be totally honest and transparent. This is a full disclosure that this is what our worldview is, those of us who wrote the book and the material. I don’t want it to look like a bait and switch or any of those kinds of things. This is just a full disclosure. This is where we’re coming from, but we want everyone to be able to gain and benefit from the Journey Coaching.
Sarah: I have to nail home again. I mentioned it earlier in the podcast, but you’re not a project when you’re going through. People are not projects when they’re going through Journey Coaching. I went through Journey Coaching last year with Leanne, who is on the podcast with us. I’m a Christian, and I went through it, and Christians go through it, non-Christians go through it. You’re not a project to Journey when you’re involved in Journey. It’s about intentional relationships and growing in your strengths.
Lianne: Thank you so much for exploring this topic today. It sounds like there’s more to be explored about it, but this catches the highlights of it.
Sarah: Feel free to reach out to us with any questions or anything. You can DM us on Instagram, or send us a message on Facebook, or email or anything like that.
Lianne: I’m going to throw it back to Sarah to close us out today. Bye. Thank you all for being with us.
Sarah: Follow us. You can find this journeycoaching.org, like I said, Instagram and Facebook. We will talk to you later. Bye.
Terry: Bye.
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