This semester at seminary I'm taking a class in Spiritual Direction. Being that I was raised Southern Baptist, I am familiar with two types of personal pastoral ministry: Pastoral Counseling and Discipling. While Counseling seeks to help/heal/fix/prevent and Discipling aims to teach/instruct/model/mentor....Spiritual Direction is an ancient practice that is slowly making its way back into the realm of Protestant ministerial practice. There are a plethora of definitions for Spiritual Direction, but here are the two that I feel most adequately represents it: Spiritual Direction "takes place when two people agree to give their full attention to what God is doing in one, or both of their lives and seek to respond in faith..."(Eugene Peterson). The second definition is more pointed toward the relationship of spiritual direction in the believer. Jeanette Bakke, in her book Holy Invitations writes "Spiritual Direction is a way to give caring attention to our relationship with God--attention that is focused on life's foundations underneath ordinary busyness. We offer ourselves and our hopes and fears to God in an openness that affirms our intention to listen,.....[when] we take time to listen intentionally to the Holy Spirit, our actions have the potential of becoming truer expressions of who God has created and called us to be. In this way, contemplation and action become a unified whole..."
All of the above is a segue into what I really want to vent about...while I think that spiritual direction, contemplation, soul-searching and the like are invaluable components of the Christian faith experience, I think many have taken it too far. Too many christians today find every reason they can to only concern themselves with their own walk with God and nothing more. I am constantly frustrated and pained by the number of people I encounter on a daily basis who think that Christianity is all about them and their own walk with God. Our faith is not a two-way relationship!!! It's not just us and God, it's us, God and others!!! If you really want to see God's activity in your life...serve someone! If you want to understand the character of God...then WHAT MATTERS TO GOD SHOULD MATTER TO YOU!!!! God cares about people, not just some people, all people...yeah, sure, we as baptists have the whole Calvinism/Arminian/double-election/God's chosen debate going on....y'know what....it doesn't matter! You as a follower of Christ, no matter what you believe about election, have an obligation to serve everyone and should have a burning desire...a pain in your heart that can't go away....to see people come to know Christ as their Lord and Savior. We as the church have turned what should have been a hospital for the sick and dying into a sanctuary/fortress for the "well" the "healed." You are not well or healed! Not by any means! In many ways, given the current spiritual health of Western Christendom, you and I as the church are worse off on the inside than those on the out You are saved! You still have sin!!!!!! You're no better than anyone else!!! The only worth that we have is the fact the God in His amazing benevolent, mind-boggling, love beyond reason kind of way humbled and sacrificed Himself to the point of a mocking death on a cross in order that you and I could spend eternity with Him.
I meet seminary students all the time that tell me that they don't really have a goal or calling in ministry. They have come to seminary, a place where people are trained in MINISTRY LEADERSHIP, that they are not really sure what they want to do, but seminary is a good place for personal enrichment/spiritual growth.........if you want personal enrichment...a life-changing, mindset-altering, worldview shaping experience of faith in the presence of God...join in His activity....find where He is at and go to town serving Him. I don't care if you do it as a pastor, teacher, evangelist, missionary, small-group leader, spiritual mentor, workplace witness, whatever...if you do it for the glory of God based on His call on your life...you will have an experience greater than any book you can read, class you can take, devotion you can complete or sermon you can listen to. David Augsberger wrote a book called Dissident Discipleship. His main point it that our faith has focused on what he calls a be-polar spirituality: God and us. How we can love God, and how God loves us. He portends that the only hope for Christianity in a post-modern world is to abandon the bi-polar mindset in favor of a "tri-polar" spirituality. God, us, and others. I agree wholeheartedly with his prediction, because it seems as if in the rest of the world, the church is flourishing, growing, experiencing God in an amazing way, and yet the western church, with its self-seeking, self-focused, self-righteous idea of our relationship with God has become a modern-day Israel. We spend all of our time worried about appeasing the law of God, maintaining purity and hoping that we can draw people into our little synagogues and temples with our amazing righteousness. In truth though...we really only want people like us to show up....outsiders can fend for themselves. It breaks my heart to think that we have treated the sacrifice of Christ to selfishly. We have taken the divine and made it human and trivial. We have taken the blood of Christ, shed for all....and we have laid claim to it, as our own personal right, rather than a gift given to be shared.
As I get ready to dig deeper into Spiritual Direction, I hope and pray that we will not spend too much time focused on an "inward journey," but rather we will seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit in directing our paths, and not our own inner desires or motivations. We as Christians say we want God's presence, we want personal revival, we want depth of faith etc. If we really want that, we need to find the presence of God, we have to seek Him wholeheartedly in the way that he want us to seek Him. Matthew 10:39 says "... anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." He said it again in Matt 16:24-25 "Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it "Brothers and sisters, we should abandon ourselves for the sake of others, we should foget about our own needs and worry about the heartache and pain that others are going through. In serving others, we serve God, in the way that He commanded us. He told us that two commands were greater than all the rest: love and obey God with all our hearts, body, soul and to love others as ourselves. He said that the whole of the law, the entirety of God's commands could be summed up in this: love one another. (Romans 13:8-10)
When we seek to follow Christ, we should follow the Father in the way that He did....all the way to a cross.
2 years ago
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3 comments:
Your picture made me chuckle. haha.
I can tell. You're going to be a prolific blogger.
I don't think that I want people to come to church who are necessarily like me, but I don't want any difficult, draining, crazios to walk through our doors either.
It's like that comment I made when we were outreaching, that I didn't want to talk to homeless people, mainly because I thought it was a waste of time. I think that's where my heart is. Homeless people will be too time consuming, make me feel uncomfortable, too needy, or whatever.
I hate the cookie cut mold of today's modern day Christian, khaki pants//polo shirt. But I'm too selfish to truly want everyone to walk in through the doors of our church.
Good post, made me think.
Great post, Wayneman. I too feel that the western church will soon be charging for prayers. The only hope for us now is selflessness and discernment against the "Doctor Billy Bob's"
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