Do You Feel the Spirit?
Is the Holy Spirit a bit grabby?
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.
Ethnography 3: Grave Stone Stories
We would take walks through the Salford church cemetery, with stones dating back to the mid-18th century. John spoke of these people as if he had known them personally.
Then Joshua said to the Israelites, “In the future your children will ask, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Then you can tell them....(Josh. 4:21)
In Sparks, Sorens, and Freisen’s new book, The New Parish, they use the phrase “above place”. “’Living above place,’ names the tendency to develop structures that keep cause-and-effect relationships far apart in space and time where you cannot have firsthand experience of them” (Sparks, 2014). Each place and every place has a story. The stories of place create subcultures, understandings of the world, and rules with expectations.
In two of the congregations I served, I was privileged to have some significant mentors. In my first congregation, I had Louis. In my second congregation I had John. Louis and John were storytellers. They let me know what and who had been in those places long before me and how those stories affected the people who now lived there.
Nearly every Thursday, I could look forward to his truck driving up to the church office. He’d enter, wander around the building, as if he were looking for something to fix. I remember once looking at the cemetery log with Louis. As we looked, he told me stories about the families listed there, he filled in some of the blanks. The “blanks” were the unnamed in the cemetery log. A wife and mother had died and was listed as “Mrs. Abraham Schmidt” (not the real names). Or young children listed as “child of Mr. Abraham Schmidt”. These individuals were nameless. As if they had no story of their own. Louis would tell me as much as he could about these stories and about those days.
In my second congregation there was John. John was an historian. We would take walks through the Salford church cemetery, with stones dating back to the mid-18th century. John spoke of these people as if he had known them personally. He could see umbilicals connecting his story and the stories of others to larger and larger connected stories. When I asked him about being a historian he corrected me and said he was a storyteller.
Discovering the stories beneath surface can give direction, trajectory even. Once when working with a congregation experiencing rapid ethnic change in its neighborhood, rediscovering their history opened them to the possibility of new mission. Recognizing the increasing numbers of immigrant families seeking work in the orchards and fields nearby, the church felt detached, too middle-class, too mono-cultural to connect. However, as they re-told the stories of how their previous generations had left the Dust Bowl of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, they began to understand a deeper story. Their families, generations before, had come to the region as farm laborers, too. As these immigrants are now, they as a community once were. The faith community had stories leading toward connection, empathy, and understanding.
I recall standing near John’s farm, at the Branch Creek (likely his favorite place on earth) as he told vast stories covering centuries.
The Branch Creek
He pointed out wildlife trials that became hunting trials for the original inhabitants. Pointing to hills and roads he would explain which battle had come that far, or what war among which parties had come how far. The battles between different nations, Iroquois, the Delaware, the French, the British, and the Civil War. Once with reverence and gratitude while standing on the banks of the creek, he said, “and this place has never known war”. That was the story of that place. A story he has given his life to undergird in that community. A story of peace.
What are the stories told by the stones, the roads, the street names, or the buildings in your community? How does the community of faith begin to grapple with stories to undergird, to overturn, to reclaim, or add new chapters to?
References:
Sparks, P. S. (2014). The New Parish: How neighborhood churches and transforming mission, discipleship, and community. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Ethnograpy 1: Living the Strories We Tell
The stories we tell create the reality we experience and the future we move toward.
“You shall make this response before the Lord your God: ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labour on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm (Deuteronomy 26:5-8a, NRSV).”
The stories we tell create the reality we experience and the future we move toward.
Every culture has its own stories, icons, and images. Icons, images, and stories weave together into a fabric, so familiar to those who live in it, that it is not even noticed or seen to be remarkable. Often one can find codes of behavior which become an unwritten code of right and wrong – lists of dos and don’ts - which result in limited imagination and possibilities never considered.
For several years I worked with Church Innovations Institute as an Associate Consultant. One of the skills I learned there was doing ethnography. We would ask a congregation to use a process of appreciative inquiry to develop an understanding of the ethnography of the congregation. Ethnography is the fancy word for finding out about a people’s culture through the stories they tell.
Rather than asking questions which would elicit a simple “yes” or “no” response, appreciative inquiry prompts people to tell stories. These prompts were planned in order to uncover some key areas of the congregation’s shared life. A team of listeners would invite a number of participants to engage in telling their own stories. The listeners would carefully record the responses to the prompts. The stories were compiled and then shared with a third-party group to identify key words, repeating themes, frequently alluded to events, names, and other elements. But unlike a simple tally, the “right” answer wasn’t necessarily where the majority of responses echoed each other. We always had a sensitive openness to the odd, unique, and isolated “voice crying in the wilderness” by itself.
This process lifts interesting insights and stories. Which when shared back with the congregation often provides information they had not noticed before. There were two congregations with whom I worked that had interesting stories revealed to them through this process. One was a congregation in a quiet rural area of Kansas. The other in a suburb of a major eastern US metropolis.
The Kansas church told stories of the diminishing number of children, of young adults not returning after college, of a looming death. The stories were similar to many in rural communities. They had trouble seeing a mission that would motivate them forward. As they told other stories, generated through appreciative inquiry, they still were not able to see the larger narrative in which they were living. The smaller, individual stories were about gifted young people, who upon graduation did not return to the community, yet began living generative lives, contributing to their communities, and serving to make God’s reign known. The congregation then discovered a new story: they were a sending church, a missionary incubator, preparing people to leave and share God’s love. They unearthed their mission and ongoing motivation.
The suburban church had a similarly discouraging story they were telling themselves. While they were not a diminishing congregation, they were a sheltered congregation seeking sanctuary in a violent neighborhood. Again using appreciative inquiry, we discovered that the some of the experiences of conflict in their shared past had turned them into a congregation deeply educated and practiced in many conflict resolution and peacemaking skills. Skills that transcended congregational politics, and could transfer to families, work, and school. As this story emerged, the congregation began to struggle with their sheltered posture in the neighborhood and began to believe God had been gifting them to make a positive impact in a conflicted neighborhood.
Our futures are shaped by the stories we tell. Oddly enough, often the life-giving stories have been there all along, untold.
Digging up icons in stories
Doing anthropology through ethnography (or archaeology by digging up buried stories) at the local congregational level uses a mixture of conversations, statistical measurements, and a view to the trajectories of history. Usually a community “norm” emerges. Frequently, what is called “normal” may not be normal to anyone else. Granted there may be shared commitments, and a shared language for articulating faith, but that does not mean each community is meaning the same things. The shared meanings of the community are not external measures, but rather “meaning systems-- rules, common intra-cultural understandings, shared aims, etc.-- in which they are imbedded” (Feinberg, 2006). We don’t create these meanings so much as we discover we have been swimming in them. As a fish is the last to discover water, we are often last to discover the meaning, language, and cultures in which our imaginations and ethics have been formed. Frequently, we can be at odds with the meanings in which we are embedded and the actions and choices we make.
Several years ago, while consulting with a group of churches within one specific denomination, we discovered high levels of conflict. Many congregations had chosen to adopt a popular set of assumptions about church being promoted by publishers, authors, and leaders outside the denomination. As congregations proceeded down that path, the problems were not with the results, it was with the meaning of the results. As the saying goes, “dance with the one who brought you”, these congregations were dancing with someone else. The result was an incongruity between espoused belief and the behaviors of the new adaptation. It didn’t fit. Even though everyone else was doing it. Moving forward meant moving backward, to understand, re-embrace where possible, and retell the stories of their theological heritage. Recovering their community of faith origins provided context for the new realities to which they had come.
Ethnography enables one to discover the way in which the beliefs held are matching with the beliefs espoused. Time and again, belief changes, and the content of belief needs to be considered with the way a belief is carried out. Sometimes, the discontinuity between what is professed and what is acted out is too great to not be addressed. The meaning of the community life requires belief strong enough to hold it together, but also a flexible belief in order to adapt, to grow, and to develop (Martos, 2010).
What are the stories you hear, or tell? If the only stories told are those of problems and struggles, things that need fixing, then we can become focused on problem solving. Problems become the story and the story of hope and mission and imagination are left underground and unheard.
What stories are being told to move you forward in to God’s preferred and promised future? How many unearthed stories are waiting to provide a new future, and do you know where to dig for them?
References: Feinberg, W. (2006). Philosophical Ethnography: or, How Philosophy and Ethnography Can Live Together in a World of Educational Research. Educational Studies in Japan: International Yearbook, No.1, pp.5-14.
Martos, T. B. (2010). It’s not only what you hold, it’s how you hold it: Dimensions of religiosity and meaning in life. Personality and Individual Differences, 49.8: 863-868.
Fowler's stages and postfoundational practice
...a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity... Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’ Luke 10.33, 37b
"mankind [sic.] is knit together with a holy knot ... we must not live for ourselves, but for our neighbors", John Calvin's Commentary on Acts 13
My friend, Beth, recently posted on Facebook a blog by Brian Zahnd, Beyond Elementary School Christianity, and in which he brought up the old classic by James Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning , and old classic that I recently put into a box of books to NOT sell to a used bookstore. Maybe I’ll have to pull it out of the box again since a friend of mine posted a response to Zahnd on her Facebook page. She asked “Do you think it's because leaders themselves are mythic-literal or are they simply fostering that viewpoint?”
The mythic-literal approach is also a mythic-linear way of thinking. When I think of myth, it think of imaginative stories of giants, gods, creation and destruction, and other grand over-arching narratives. Myths are meant to be widely interpreted and have the capacity to infiltrate multiple aspects of our lives, precisely because they are not literal. Literalism narrows and defines with precision the interpretation of the myth, and actually makes it no longer a myth but a literal instruction. Even literal and historical events can become mythic when they are interpreted widely and appended to our understandings of many events, relationships, and decisions we need to make.
Beth asked if leaders in churches that reflect Zahnd’s characterization of possessing a mythic-literal faith are that way because they are reflecting the viewpoints of the congregation, or if this faith position is that of the leaders themselves. Huge question. Basically, the answer is yes, no, and there’s more to it than that.
Conflicted Leaders
I know of leaders who do not share the opinions of the congregations they serve. These pastors maybe trying to lead their congregations to a new view of faith and life, but the congregation is not quite there yet. In conversations at conferences, coffee shops, and pubs, they confess the dissonance in which they live – trying to communicate at a level the congregation can grasp, but still trying to move them forward. I used to practice a ministry of storytelling. I’d use any good story. Legends, fables, short stories. I would weave these into my sermons. My first congregation appreciated it. But in another congregation, the chair of the elders reprimanded me, “we don’t need stories, we need facts”. They didn’t get it, and I failed in getting them there. The resistance was threatening and passive aggressive. There are pastors that feel vulnerable for their livelihood and may not have the social capital to challenge the mythic-literal viewpoint of their congregations. And they may have elders or other leaders to deal with as I had to.
Mythic-Literal Congregations
To a great extent, I suppose mythic-literal congregations would call, or lift up, a mythic-literal leader to be a pastor. They might not mind a synthetic-conventional (stage 3), since that is like a concrete-operational developmental stage. It is not likely that these congregations would choose a person in the individuative-reflective stage (stage 4) because they aren’t always sure what they are trusting in, the conjunctive faith (stage 5) sounds to ephemeral, and the universal stage (stage 7) would strike them as odd as a Buddhist koan.
Mythic-Literal Leaders
This is a breed I wish was rare. The trouble is that this is a terribly reassuring viewpoint. It sees the world as controllable, prayer as currency to get what you want, suffering as a sign of failure, and success as a sign that God’s favor is with you. You can make millions selling that kind of trust to people. As people eat up this simplistic god-talk, it merely reinforces leaders and prevents them from having to change. As Zahnd puts it, “We can preach the certitude of Proverbs, but not the paradox of Job; we can make sense of the maxims of Deuteronomy, but not the mystery of John.”
Advanced Stages is not “Progressive” or “Liberal”
Zahnd steers clear of the tendency of some, in which the assumption that progressing through the stages is equated with becoming a progressive (a.k.a. “liberal” in some quarters) Christian. Zahnd instead characterizes the higher stages of faith as abilities to enter contemplation and compassion. These are two characteristics are available to conservative and liberal Christians. But the Christians who reside in the post-conventional faith zone, are also less likely to describe their faith as a conservative or liberal position. In fact, they are likely to not think of faith as a position being held as much as a life being lived. A life which encompasses questions, doubts, and people of contrary views.
Postfoundationalism
Stanley Grenz was a friend who got me started on understanding, from a theological perspective that conservatives and liberals are more similar than they are different. Liberals trust the individual perspective, conservative trust the specific Greek words (carefully parsed and clearly defined). Both liberals and conservative build on a foundation of enlightenment epistemology: liberals on a Cartesian assurance of reason; conservatives on the assurance of empiricism. The foundation shared by both is that we can figure it out clearly, rationally, and absolutely. Grenz wanted to create a different foundation to measure what is normal – worship in a community gathered around scripture (as the “normalizing norm”) being led by the Holy Spirit. That’s a Christian foundation.
So to answer Beth...
My hunch is that with the foundational practices Grenz lifts up, mythic-literals of both stripes, liberal and conservative, might skeptically try out. But, if clearly practiced in behaviors of worship, Eucharist (sorry Quaker friends, I think the act is important), acts of mercy, and community reflection on scripture and the neighborhoods in which we live, even mythic-literals can be ushered into growing faith. These acts change both parties, both the recipient of mercy and the one who gives it are different, and closer. The wounded Jew and the Samaritan (Luke 10) certainly looked at each other differently, challenging their previously black-and-white understandings of each other and their cultures. But we have to leave the old foundations, separations, clearly defined "issues" and divides behind. The degree to which both leaders and congregations become self-absorbed and live only within the narrow confines of the familiar and habitual, the greater the difficulty there will be for them to grow in faith. Conversely, the degree to which leaders and congregations enter into scripture, worship and the lives of real people (not "issues") with an intention toward compassion, the greater the likelihood of spiritual growth.
Beth, I hope that answers your question.