The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life

This is a dangerous book.

As I read The Liturgical Year (The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life) by Joan Chittister, I was reminded of an earlier book that has now become a favorite to give to others--though always with the warning, "Don't read it until you're willing for your life to change, because you might not be able to avoid it after reading this book." So it is with The Liturgical Year.

Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun and award-winning author, sets out to explore the meaning and value of the liturgical year, beginning with Advent and climaxing in the celebration of Easter. She not only convinces, she woos. She makes the reader hungry for the benefits she extols. And she does it all with a clear and deep appreciation of the great story God tells every year through the feasts and fasts of the Church. I was a little surprised that the book didn't give more insight into the prayers and practices of the liturgical calendar. I think it would have been even more compelling (especially for readers from non-liturgical backgrounds) if the author had given the reader a sense of what the "spiraling adventure" of the church year looks like and feels like.

Still, as the pastor of a very non-liturgical church (though we all have our "liturgies," to be sure), the book made me long for the rhythms and routines she describes. If you're not careful, it will do the same for you.

A Friend Who Cares

I read these words, written by Henri Nouwen, not only as a pastor, one who gives care, but also as one who needs it:

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it. As busy, active, relevant ministers, we want to earn our bread by making a real contribution. This means first and foremost doing something to show that our presence makes a difference. And so we ignore our greatest gift, which is our ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer. Those who can sit in silence with their fellowman, not knowing what to say but knowing that they should be there, can bring new life in a dying heart. Those who are not afraid to hold a hand in gratitude, to shed tears in grief and to let a sigh of distress arise straight from the heart can break through paralyzing boundaries and witness the birth of a new fellowship, the fellowship of the broken.

When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.

Get Up Outta That Funk...Emotionally

10-04-09 "Get Up Outta That Funk Emotionally" from CHRIST'S CHURCH OF THE VALLEY on Vimeo.

Wow. Just Wow.

Perry Noble has been posting an article on his blog entitled, "Five Mistakes I Made as a Young Leader." It's all good stuff so far, but #'s 3 through 5 even more so. I've learned each of these lessons (I think) the hardhardhard way:

#3 – I Spoke In Absolutes, Saying That We Would Always Do Certain Things and “Never” Do Other Things.

If you want to make God laugh…tell Him about all of the things you will and won’t do…and watch over time how He will cause you to eat your words!

When we first began NewSpring I said that I would never teach on giving…because it made people uncomfortable. Until I actually begin digging into Scripture and realized that Jesus talked about giving more than He did prayer…or faith…or heaven…or hell! (And I also realized the only people who were really uncomfortable were the ones who were not giving!)

When we first began I said we would not do a public invitation because they didn’t work anymore. I had a place in the program that people could check if they wanted to know more information about Christ…and asked people to fill that out and that someone would follow up with them. BUT…THEN GOD pressed in on me DURING a service to offer an invitation. I tried to explain to Him we didn’t do that…then He explained to me that it wasn’t my church! So…I obeyed (relunctantly) and people responded!!!

THEN I began to declare that we would ALWAYS do a public invitation…which, once again, was a phrase I would have to eat. I

I could go on and on with this one…the thing I would warn leaders about is this…be VERY careful when making absolute statements…they probably will come back to bite you.

(And…for the record…we do an invitation when HE leads us to…which is often!!)

#4 – I Had The “Not Us” Mentality.

I heard a statistic when we planted NewSpring Church that within two years that 50% of the people who started the church would be gone.

When I heard that I said, “not us…we’re different…we’re commited…we’re going to be the exception.”

Uh…we weren’t! In fact, it didn’t take me two years to lose about 50% of the core team…it took about two months!!! The lessons I learned in those days were hard…but real…

* You will lose people!
* Whenever you call for sacrifice…you will lose people! (See John 6)
* Whenever the church grows you will lose people!
* Whenever the church makes a major move you will lose people!
* Whenever things seem to be going well you will lose people.

I hate it…but it’s true!!! There isn’t a ministry on the planet that hasn’t had to deal with the painful reality that people leave…even when you feel like you are being completely obedient to God and doing what He says!!! (I actually heard someone say once, “If people aren’t leaving then you are not leading!” That statement is painfully true!)

#5 – I Thought I Could Control What People Thought About Me!

I remember the first time I read something negative about me on the internet. It literally destroyed me…seriously, it was like someone took a knife and jabbed it into my soul!!! I read it about four or five times…and for the next several days I hyper focused on that particular website and had this thought, “If this person and I could only meet and chat I think I could change his mind.”

It didn’t take long for me to realize that no matter what I did…no matter how many conversations I had…no matter how many olive branches I extended…that there were going to be people who hated me, slandered me and despised me…and there was literally nothing I could do about it.

Church leader…you CANNOT control what people think about you…and you can’t worry about it either. Jesus had a group of people who HATED Him and followed Him everywhere He went, pointing out His “faults,” yet He stayed true to the VISION His Father placed inside of Him and didn’t engage in trying to change their minds about Him.

If you want to silence your critics then you must…

* Keep your eyes on Jesus (Craig Groeschel says that becoming obsessed with what people think about me is the quickest way to forget what God thinks about me.) Let HIM, not “them” define you!
* Live a life of integrity!! (I Peter 2:15)

The rest is in God’s hands!!! You cannot shape the opinions of others…you can only be true to who God called you to be!!!

Wow. Just wow.

Every Pastor Should Go to Israel

God has worked in my life by many means over the years. Concerts and conferences like Ichthus and Urbana. “Spiritual days” in my ministry training years, not to mention daily prayer and Bible reading, of course. Books by authors like Eugene Peterson and Henri Nouwen. Retreats at the Abbey of Gethsemani. And many more.

But among the most impactful means of God’s grace to me has been the pilgrimages Robin and I have taken to the Holy Land. Our first was in 1987, when we borrowed money to make the trip, believing that initial investment would pay rich dividends in our years of ministry to follow--and it did.

There is no way to adequately describe the difference in perspective, appreciation, and understanding a person gets from discovering the land of Jesus, the apostles, prophets, and patriarchs. It is like the difference between reading about being born again...and BEING born again. It is such a big deal that I honestly believe every pastor should go to Israel, at least once, and as early as possible in his or her ministry.

Words cannot describe what happens to your Bible reading, studying, and preaching once you have sailed the Sea of Galilee, and been baptized in the Jordan. Or prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane and celebrated communion outside the Garden Tomb. Or taken an early morning journey starting at the Gihon Spring, in the City of David, and traversing the actual tunnel of Hezekiah (dug underneath the Ophel in Jerusalem about 701 B.C.) and ending up at the Pool of Siloam. Or the side trip Robin and I and a half dozen good friends took our last morning in Jerusalem, when we took a cab to the village of Bethany, and walked the Palm Sunday route Jesus took from the traditional site of Lazarus’s tomb to the Temple Mount (see photo above). The topography and scenery of that three-mile walk will stay with me forever, and springs to my mind, of course, every time I read of Bethany or Palm Sunday or Lazarus, Mary, and Martha in my Bible.

You can't imagine the way Scripture and the past come alive after you have stood on the teaching steps of the Jerusalem Temple (on which Jesus’ feet undoubtedly trod, and where he would have sat to teach on many occasions) (see photo above).

And there's just no way to convey the depth and emotion of such statements as "Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem" (Psalm 122:2) and "Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion" (Psalm 125:1) and "the city of our God, the mountain of his holiness" (Psalm 48:1) until you've encountered such things in the very places the Biblical writers experienced them. It is, for me, an indescribably rich experience that is renewed every time I read such passages.

And now we are excited at the prospect of another such experience—with an added twist—in early 2010. Leaving from Dayton, Ohio, on January 24, 2010, we will be flying to the Kingdom of Jordan, where we will begin our tour with a trip to the “Lost City” of Petra (above), the city cut out of rock by the Nabateans around 100 B.C., memorably shown in the movies Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Left Behind, among others. From Petra we will visit the ancient city of Jerash and cross the Jordan into Israel, where our Holy Land trip will include visits to Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, Jericho, Jerusalem, Caesarea, Capernaum--and much more--and includes an optional seven day extension to Egypt!

For all the richness of my educational and training experiences to date, I rank our trips to Israel as the most transformative of my ministry. They have made me a better reader, student, and preacher and teacher of Scripture. They have been worth many, many times the money I've spent on them. And I gain so much from every trip that I immediately make the next trip a high priority.

Our future plans are to make a "Journeys of Paul Cruise" in March 2012, and then again in 2014 to return to the Holy Land. If you haven't yet made either of those trips, consider making it with us! More information is available here.

Wine, Wool, and Wild Honey

Margaret Feinberg's latest book, Scouting the Divine (my serarch for God in wine, wool, and wild honey), describes her effort to look "for those ordinary and extraordinary moments when God intersects our world" with visits to a shepherd, a beekeeper, a farmer, and a vintner to uncover deeper and more sensory meanings to the Bible's frequent references to these vocations. She says, in the book's early pages, that these were "an intentional search for ways to move from reading the Bible to entering stories that can be touched, tasted, heard, seen, smelled, and savored."

She delivers on that promise, describing her search in a series of conversations that offer interesting insights and sometimes impactful applications of an agrarian way of life with which we have mostly lost contact. Her eye (and ear and nose) for detail often enlivens the experiences she describes, if at times the descriptions do go on a bit too long for this reader's taste.

Among my favorite portions was her exchange with farmers Aaron and Joe, speaking of John the Baptist's allusion to the coming Messiah who would gather the wheat into the barn but burn up the tares:

Joe piped in, "you can't tell wheat from tares just by looking at it. You have to grab, squeeze, and crush it to find out whether it's real or not. I think that's true of the spiritual life. Some people can look really good on the outside--they can seem more mature or look like they really know their Bible--but when it comes to the pressures of life and getting crushes, that's when the fruit really shows."

And again, when discussing with a Napa Valley vintner Jesus' reference in John 15 to the Father as a vinedresser who prunes the branches:

"It's the little cuts that are the most important," he explained. "You can't come in with a pair of shears and clip like crazy. You don't just look at what appears to be a dead branch and cut it off, and then look at a branch full of fruit and think it's fine. Over the course of pruning, you make a series of very precise, strategic cuts that will produce the healthiest, most robust vines."

"Which highlights just how intimately God is involved in our lives," I interjected.

"And also how God handles each of us differently," Kristof explained.

He explained that if a vinedresser chooses the wrong cuts, the vine won't produce fruit. That's why a vinedresser looks at each vine carefully. Every vine is unique. Even two vines planted next to each other may require significantly different pruning in order to produce fruit.

"One vine may have great soil and be strong enough to handle a significant pruning, but the next vine may be weaker, and the same pruning would leave it fruitless," he explained.

"Which may be one of the reasons Jesus chose to describe his father as vinedresser [and not owner of the vineyard]," I offered. "He's the only one who can make those judgments."

Scouting the Divine earns a place among such fine books as Phillip Keller's A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 and A Gardener Looks at the Fruits of the Spirit and Bishop K. C. Pillai's Light Through an Eastern Window in providing enlightening context to some of the Bible's most important figures.