Do You Feel the Spirit?

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. Ezekeil 37.1

I used to teach Art History.  I actually had to explain to my students, my background was in History.  So I would teach my class as a history class with lots of pictures.  Frequently I would teach about the historic events and the prevailing philosophy of the different periods in history. 

When I was teaching about the rise of the empirical method and the loss of mystery in the Age of Enlightenment, I looked for art to display the dialogue that took place.  While the world became more and more tame, Caspar David Friedrich saw the sky, sea, ice, fog, the earth as a place of metaphysically ineffable mystery.  Watching the fog roll as the monk stands on the shore always leaves me with the opportunity to perceive the fog as rolling away to reveal the emerging sky above. Or, sometimes the sky is being swallowed up by the oncoming mist.

Today I was thinking about the Holy Spirit.  We often have internal associations with the way God's spirit works with us. We seek a feeling inside. We yearn for motivation and empowerment from within.  Inspiration, a very personal encounter with the Spirit seems to rise within us.  The prevailing hymns, songs, and talk about the Spirit of God touching us seems to imply the Spirit rises within us.  But I wonder rather than being a Being contained within, the Spirit moves from the outside, moving us along to wider and wider circles of the reign and realm of God?

Certainly experience speaks of the internal work of the Spirit. Even the Apostle Paul defended the view by asserting the Spirit resides within our bodies as in a temple (1 Cor. 6:19). And the way the Spirit intimately understands us seems to imply a deep connection as it even understands our sighs and groans (Rom. 8:26-27). But what about the outer, in the world experiences of God's Spirit?

I was once told (and I like to think it is correct) that Ezekiel 37:1 can be interpreted as "the hand of God was upon me and he cast me into a valley of dry bones."  God does not merely lift, but tosses, Ezekiel.  Might seem a bit violent. But it doesn't sound like God was awaiting motivation, a warm heart, or inspiration, to rise from within Ezekiel. No. God grabbed him.

Interestingly, when the prophet John saw his vision of heaven in the Apocalypse of John, he does not tell us that the Spirit was in him.  Instead, he was in the Spirit.  Which I don't really understand other than to say, the Spirit was somehow outside of John.  Similarly, when the Apostle Philip has had his encounter with the Ethiopian, the Spirit comes from outside him and whisks Philip away to Azotus (Acts 8:39).

The Holy Spirit seems a bit grabby.

Are you looking for the Spirit's work in your life? Looking for the Spirit to give you some direction? I wonder if we have been looking in the rightplaces? Could the movement of the Spirit be outside us?

Heads up! Look around, the Holy Spirit is out there.

Up is Gone: The Sky Has Fallen

Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years. Genesis 1:14-15

Several years ago the sky fell. 

The debris field of sky-pieces goes unnoticed until, tripping, one falls into a sky. Chunks of blue, fragments of lightning, drops of thunder clouds smeared here and there, scraps of cumulonimbus at your feet.  Bits of sky, having fallen, confuse birds, sunflowers are anxious about which way to turn their sunny heads, trees grown vine-like upwards and downwards and sideways trying to find up.  Up is gone. The sky has fallen.

It seems an apt description.

The famous fable begins with Chicken Little getting a thump from falling acorn. Fear turns to panic, turns to social movement in preparation for the end all things.  But what if it were not just one acorn? Roxburgh writes in The Sky is Falling, “discontinuous change is an all-out acorn assault…the attacks seem to come from all angles and all directions.” And now Chicken Little is right, the sky is falling, or at least metaphorically, it all seems to be changing rapidly.  Roxburgh goes on, “It exhausts our physical, mental, and spiritual resources by sheer magnitude…” these changes force us to “deal with changes on every front simultaneously…making it difficult to know which to pay attention to and what to do next (Roxburgh, 2005).

I had thought this awareness was pervasive, now a decade after Alan Roxburgh wrote that.  However, today, Faith and Leadership promoted the idea that our expectations of clergy need recalibrating.  As a stalwart of the mainline church, Faith and Leadership, the new home of The Alban Institute should not be surprised that the definitions, expectations, and measures of effective pastoring have changed.  But now that they have, a list of issues emerges that many mainline churches are unprepared for. For instance, how do we educate clergy? How will they be mentored, coached, and shaped in professional ethics? Should we expect less because of the daily jobs, competing priorities, and need for balance and health?  How is education for clergy to financed, who will pay the student loans?  And what would content even be of such an education? Seeing how the ministries for which modern clergy prepared have changed so much that their education is partly irrelevant to today's ministry needs?

At a meeting several days ago, sitting with a number of judicatory leaders of mainline churches in our area, there was description of heaviness hanging over the clergy they supported.  They told of clergy whose skills no longer matched the ministry needs of the context; how many of the things these folks had learned were no longer as meaningful, how generations of pastors and priests had been shaped as ministers for christendom.  Now that christendom, like the sky, has fallen, these leaders are anxious.  Maybe even desperate.  

Reorient to a New Constellation

At The Missionplace, we have worked for over a decade to train and prepare people for ministry.  Through Seminary Without Walls, we have prepared lay leaders for credentialed ministry in Lutheran, Mennonite, Evangelical Quaker, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Episcopal congregations and parishes.  We have realized that we function best when learning from each other in an atmosphere of "generous orthodoxy" allowing for uniqueness of multiple communions to inform and form leaders.  Seminary Without Walls has worked to provide three foundations for ministry: intellectual growth, practical skill development, and spiritual formation through courses, continuing education events, and spiritual retreats.  Through Seminary Without Walls, we can provide training far below the cost of seminary, provide continuing education for clergy, and train new generations of bi-vocational and missional leaders.

So, the sky fell. We have known it has been coming down now for quite sometime.  We have the experience and the resources to adapt to the new world of mission in which the older world of ministry doesn't work as well any more.