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Second, God must be experienced in relationship. Such churches invite congregants to experience God in their imaginations as a person. Again, this violates a basic psychological expectation: persons have faces to observe and hands to shake. Human relational interactions are based on sensorial response. Churches like the Vineyard explicitly suggest that one should imagine a sensorial response from God and encouraged congregants to participate in a kind of let’s pretend play in which God was present. The pastor suggested one Sunday morning that congregants should put out a second cup of coffee for God, and sit down with him to chat. People went on “date night” with God. They would get a sandwich, and sit down on park bench to talk with God as they imagined his arm around their shoulders. They would ask God truly trivial questions like what shirt they should wear in the morning and what movie he thought they would like. These behaviors were clearly play-like. One congregant remarked: “I definitely do that. When I can’t decide what to wear. Like, God, what should I wear?” Then she laughed. “And you know, then I kind of forget about the fact that I asked God. I think God cares about really, really little things in my life. I mean I know God cares, but I don’t expect him to tell me what to wear. I’m like, Oh, I think I’ll wear that and forget I even asked God!” This invitation to play was C.S. Lewis’ explicit contribution to twentieth century Christianity: “let us pretend to turn the pretense into a reality.” In churches which encourage such play, heresy fades in importance. The pastors and the committed congregants worry about “deadness,” not flawed imagining.

Third, congregants must learn to respond emotionally to God as if God is real. If God is real, a Christian (at least, the modern evangelical Christian) should experience the emotions that one would feel if one were loved unconditionally. Most do not. It is, in fact, difficult for humans to experience themselves as unconditionally loved because no matter how warm and loving a parent may be, at some point the child is expected to control his or her behavior and parental love will becomes contingent. The task of feeling unconditionally loved imposes upon the congregant not only the burden of identifying and relating to an invisible being, but experiencing emotions in response to that being’s love which the congregant rarely, if ever, truly experiences. Congregants talk about the experience of unconditional love as rare: they speak of “those moments” when one really feels God’s love.

I was driving home from grocery shopping in the car and I stopped at a light and suddenly for no reason that I could come up with, I was weeping and I felt a massive and awesome sense of the presence of God in the car with me. It just came and I had absolutely no control over it. I pulled over to the side of the road—I remember thinking that I was so in love with Jesus at that moment that no one else on the planet could come close. After about twenty minutes of real intensity the feeling subsided somewhat, but the presence of Jesus stayed with me. I drove home not really ever able to fully express what happened without sounding like I’d taken something illegal.

The more immediate aim seemed to be to experience what Galatians 5:22-23 calls the “fruits of the spirit”: love, joy, peace, patience and so forth. The social life of the church was rich in emotional practices which sought to reshape the

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