Immersion Experiences
Planned, dramatic settings provide the catalyst for change.
A conversation with Ron Martoia.
January 1, 2004
More than a ton of sand covered the floor of Westwinds Community Church in Jackson, Michigan. The make-shift desert, complete with cacti, was a solitary eremos place where worshipers could "thirst" for God. Pastor Ron Martoia and his team use dramatic experiences as a key for effecting personal spiritual transformation. It's part of a planned approach, encouraging people in a process, first to become part of the community, and eventually to believe in the God of the community.
How do you lead people from physical experience to recognizing spiritual need?
Our monthly Encounter services don't seem spiritual at first. They provide an entry point from which we provide a spiritual departure.
For our "Hungry" Encounter, we displayed tantalizing food commercials on stacks of televisions. We placed fresh baked bread and cookies, pizzas, and bubbling spaghetti sauce around the auditorium. It smelled great. People began salivating. After 20 minutes we asked, "How can we provoke spiritual hunger at a salivating level?" Suddenly, people realized, I don't salivate like this for spiritual things at all.
And that realization provokes change?
When people first come to Westwinds, they are looking to belong and to build better lives. So they tire kick some lives in the context of community, and say, "Your behavior is different than mine, and yours seems to get better results. I'm going to try your behavior." In time, they say the same things about faith. But that change is a process. We don't always have an altar call or point-of-sale to confirm it.
How do you confirm that change happened, even if you don't know when?
We surveyed the people who made public responses in a service, and 90 percent of them said, "That wasn't really the time I came ...
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