Your Body Has a Theology

You probably have beliefs you can name.

And then you have the ones you don’t know you have.

Ideas about God. Worthiness. Sin. Prosperity. Illness. Bodies. Prayer. Suffering. Obedience. Desire. Death. Spiritual growth. What good people deserve. What faithful people should be able to overcome. What it means when life doesn’t turn out the way we prayed, affirmed, visualized, or believed it would.

Some of those ideas were explicitly taught to us.

Others simply got into the water.

And changing our theology doesn’t necessarily make them disappear.

• We may stop believing in sin while continuing to believe something about us always needs fixing.
• We may reject divine punishment while quietly wondering what we did wrong when life falls apart.
• We may insist every person has inherent worth while feeling less worthy ourselves when we aren’t productive.
• We may reject religious dogma while becoming remarkably dogmatic about consciousness, energy, manifestation, surrender, or spiritual growth.

Different vocabulary doesn’t necessarily mean different architecture.

In this highly experiential two-part workshop, we’ll explore the difference between the theology we say we believe and the theology that actually operates in our bodies, choices, relationships, spiritual communities, and responses to other people’s lives.

We’ll examine questions like:

• What does my body expect God to be like?
• Which beliefs have I rejected intellectually but continue to live?
• What assumptions hide in my body beneath familiar spiritual language?
• What does my theology require me to explain when terrible things happen?
• Who gets blamed when a spiritual teaching doesn’t produce its promised outcome?
• How do beliefs about prosperity, illness, prayer, suffering, bodies, desire, obedience, worthiness, and spiritual growth affect real people?
• Can my theology survive reality without requiring someone to be spiritually defective?

Through experiments, case studies, body awareness, conversation, and what might best be described as a few theological brain fryers, we’ll make the invisible architecture of belief a little more visible.

This is not a workshop designed to tell you what you should believe.

You won’t leave with the correct theology.

You may leave much more aware of the one you’re already living.

Because theology doesn’t stay in our heads. Eventually, it lands somewhere.

In a body. In a relationship. In a hospital room. At a funeral. In someone’s shame. In someone’s freedom.

And that is why theology matters.