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.   

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.