CR spoke with Dr Roger Bretherton about experimenting to find God

The way I translated blessing, is as Jesus says it in each of these eight blessings, it's God's thumbs up to us really. Its God saying, you're ok by me. I'm looking at you, I'm accepting you as you are and each of these individual blessings that I give to you is really a window by which you can accept that good intention I have towards you.

One of my beliefs would be that when we come to God in love, what we discover is that God is actually in love with us. God isn't self obsessed, he's constantly giving to us and therefore what these beatitudes and the experiments do is that they allow us to get into that zone of receiving those things from God.

Rebecca: Can the experiments be tried on their own or is it a cycle that it's best to get into them that way?

Roger: One of the things I say in the book is that for me they did lead from one to the other, so it felt like it was a developmental pathway; what psychologists might call developmental milestones, like learning to walk, or speak. The more I have spoken about it though, quite a few people said to me that it hasn't worked that way for them and so almost every chapter could stand on its own. You could jump straight into the middle of the book and say, 'I want to do the experiment on being sorted' and it would probably stand on its own. I would say for me I developed and have seen some progress from each one but that's not necessarily the case for everyone.

Rebecca: If people are searching, is this the sort of approach you would recommend? Instead of giving them the answers, it's more about going and finding the answers for ourselves.

Roger: Yes, I guess for me it's a change from the traditional model of evangelism that I was brought up with, which was it's our job to get out there and take Jesus to people. This approach came to me as I work as a psychologist and spent a lot of time listening to people's problems. Quite often I found that people, who were some distance from the church and wouldn't necessarily call themselves Christians, were still describing quite profound spiritual experiences. I began to get this idea that God is up to a lot. Then when I started reading some of the research that's done on spiritual experience, what I found was that about three out of every four people who you spoke to on the high street would say, 'I've had a spiritual experience of some sort'. They say, 'I've had a prayer answered, I've had a coincidence, I felt the presence of God, seen the unity in nature' and people describe a lot of these kinds of things.

The other thing that's interesting about people's spiritual experiences is that generally most people don't want to speak about them. It seems to be for two main reasons; one is that most people are scared they'll think they're mad if they started publicly talking about it. The other side of the fear is that if they speak to someone religious about it then they will use it against them and make them jump through loads of different hoops.

What my book is saying is listen, these are the kind of experiences I've had, and they are linked to Jesus in quite a traditional way and is it the same for you. The book is a question mark; it's a conversation starter, but it doesn't try to impose a framework on people. It says this is the framework from which I've worked things out; does it fit your stuff too?

You can buy The God Lab from Cross Rhythms Direct for only £8.54 + p&p.