Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Colossians 3:14)
Today's churches are exiled in complexity, not unlike the
disorientation expressed in many of the Psalms: "How can we sing the Lord's
song in a foreign land?" (Psalm 137 RSV). Yet people still come to our
churches hungering for ultimacy --- for meaning in their lives, and for
intimacy --- with people, with God.
If the twentieth century's big church mistake was to focus on structures while ignoring spirituality, then much of what is happening now seems to be focusing on spirituality while ignoring structures. To split the two misses the miracle of Incarnation. While structures that ignore spirituality are lifeless, spirituality that disregards structures is disembodied.
John Wesley spoke of spiritual practices as "methods," from which his followers were dubbed "Methodists." Methods have no value in themselves, except, like conduits in a desert, to carry the life-giving Gospel of love to places of need.
My intent is not to create another program but to highlight the love that emerges in the weaving. The great distortion of mystical experience is to make idols out of techniques --- a word I avoid. "Techniques" sound so mechanical: use this lever and out pops God for this occasion; use that one for another. We can be addicted to dead forms or dead functions, and miss the new life.
"Practice-oriented" faith communities will wed tradition with experience. Robert Wuthnow writes: "[They] will strive to give members both roots and wings --- roots to ground them solidly in the traditions of their particular faith, wings to explore their own talents and the mysteries of the sacred."1
Weaving Five Ministry Functions & Five Spiritual Aptitudes
The goal is to allow the form of Jesus the Christ to take shape in the believer and the believing community. It is to experience the soul of Christ's integrity, passion and wholeness in these five basic functions of community: worship, administration, education, soul care, and outreach. In varied forms, these are the foundational mandates of ministry, so let us view these as the warp, the vertical threads in the tapestry. Interfaced with these are five horizontal threads --- the weft of essential spiritual aptitudes that open us for God to restore the soul of ministry; there can fewer or more, yet these five reflect the pattern of Christ's life as contemplative threads are woven into the warp of active ministry. The pattern created is a twill, known for its durability, flexibility and potential variety of horizontal threads.
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Spiritual Aptitudes Prayer «» Discernment-Vision «» Faith-Stories «» Silence-Presence «» Hospitality |
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Ministry Functions Worship Administration Education Caretaking Outreach |
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Sabbath Practices ---
Ministry Sources
Sacred Knowing --- Contemplative Leadership
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Service Programs --- Ministry Functions Secular Knowledge --- Inter-active Leadership |
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1. Prayer is the contemplative thread woven into every aspect of the life of the believer and the believing community: Turn to God in all things, in all things to see God.2 While prayer is especially part of worshipping, it is also part of educating ("Lord, teach us to pray" Luke 11:1), administering, caring, and reaching out.2. Discernment becomes the basic means for personal and corporate visioning and decision-making. It is listening attentively with one ear to the voice of God through scripture, tradition, reason, and experience --- and with the other ear to the cries and hopes of the world. Discernment is the essence of administration, but it is woven throughout all the other ministry areas too, for example, discerning appropriate worship and music styles for a congregation.
3. Faith-Stories are the fruit of finding traces of God's presence in joy and pain --- or the longing for God's presence. Faith-finding and faith-sharing become an "educational habit" in all contexts of church, work, family --- and personal life, too, through using a journal. Incorporating faith-stories in community will require the sacrifice of give and take by leaders and members especially in the heart of public worship and the myriad of administrative meetings.
4. Silence and presence are the contemplative bedrock for listening to divine Love in order to love. The ballast of stillness balances the latest technological novelties, church growth techniques, and information explosion --- all of which threaten to veer the church off its charted course. Silence enriches personal life, but also has a corporate dimension in the church's ministries: it is the key in discernment for planning and decision-making. Silence is the prerequisite for meaningful presence, and simply being present to God and another brother or sister grounds any authentic soul care.
5. Hospitality is "giving-receiving" in a simultaneous, creative interaction; it also means we are never in mission alone. It is the essential habit of mutuality at the core of the life-giving community: "No church entered into partnership with me in giving and receiving except you only" (Philippians 4:15 RSV). "Giving without receiving is always a downward gesture," goes an anonymous proverb. It is a danger of missions to act out of a subtly superior position. In the spirit of St. Francis, simplicity needs to permeate every sphere of community: "It is in giving that we receive."
Community and Solitude: Front and Back of the Tapestry
I invite you now to allow the Spirit to begin to weave these five threads of prayer, discernment, faith-stories, silence, and hospitality into every context of your life and your community, until you experience their tones while worshipping, organizing, educating, caring for one another, and reaching out to the world.
The aim is to make space for contemplative practices in the active life of community, while at the same to cultivate them in solitude. As the Christ-life takes form in us, so this tapestry's public dimensions (the front side) and private dimensions (the back side) are interfaced. The trumpeter who does not practice has trouble playing in the band, yet the band also helps the trumpeter to practice.
Standing Back from the Loom
The weaving metaphor conveys a work in process that returns spiritual formation to its Re-formation roots, that essential bedrock of grace: simply placing ourselves in a context where the divine Weaver can create and recreate the work of art. Then church growth and spiritual growth can engage each other.
And every tapestry needs a background, a context so it can be appreciated and responded to as a work of art. Our background is a global context --- one that calls us to listen simultaneously to the cry of God's love and the cry of the world. Hospitality is embodied spirituality. And the new wine of spiritual experience needs the messy membrane of community to embody it in the world of action.
1 Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality Since the 1950s,
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 17.
2 I have set these words of Mechtild of Magdeburg as an original chant in Active Spirituality (Bethesda MD: The Alban Institute), 175. The words are universal: used by Benedict, Ignatius, Teresa of Avila, and many others.
3 See Kent Ira Groff, Spirituality Matters for Committee Meetings (Decatur GA: CTS Press, 1996), available from Faith@Work.
Selected Quotes from: The Soul of Tomorrow's Church: Weaving Spiritual Practices in Ministry Together (Upper Room Books, Oct 2000). Used with Permission. Check out all of Upper Rooms Resources or call 800-972-0433.
Kent Ira Groff is founder and director of Oasis Ministries for Spiritual Development, Camp Hill PA. For a complete list of Kent's resources carried by Faith@Work check out Groff Resources.