Learning to See God

When it comes to recognizing God’s everyday work, too few of us have eyes to see.

In the candles’ glow of Christmas Eve, or the celebration of Easter worship-in the midst of an anthem, or a familiar hymn, or the sermon, or when a person is baptized-then, in one or several of these moments, the Presence of God is felt or seen.

It may spill over into a sunset-a prayer from one’s own sickbed, or by the bed of someone you love-a burst of joy from a child, or the beauty of a first snowfall. In these events the Presence of God is often easily experienced.

It is a bit more difficult to see God in the midst of a church or family squabble-to feel God when a plan is defeated-or to find God in the midst of the common, ordinary events of life.

Perhaps one of the reasons a congregation has some difficulty with this is because we pastors are ambivalent in communicating the Presence of God, or even seeing it ourselves.

When the children gather at the bedside of a dying parent, we really cannot burst in and proclaim, “Say, are you aware God is here!?” About the most we can do is demonstrate that Presence through waiting with them, by taking the hand of the dying person, or perhaps by singing a hymn-then, those who have ears will hear. Those whose eyes have been opened will see.

We cannot assign the ears; we cannot force light into the eyes. We can only model the Presence, and then accept that we are not so wonderful or powerful that everyone will grasp and suddenly experience it.

I must confess right off that most of the time I do not see God’s Presence. It is only after I reflect on a situation that I suddenly realize how in that place, at that time, I encountered God. And more often than not, I find God is in the midst of that very moment of reflection and understanding as well as in the situation upon which I am reflecting.

The following stories I share as occasions in my own ministry when the Presence was experienced in the midst of seemingly common, ordinary events of life.

The Red Flower

I was walking along Montgomery Road early one Sunday last summer when I noticed a red flower on the sidewalk. Apparently, it had been pulled from the earth by an animal or human being and left on the sidewalk to die. Although the sun was barely up, the leaves were already beginning to wilt, and the dirt around the few strands of roots was rapidly drying. In a short time, the red flower would be dead, and perhaps even now it was beyond help.

I picked up the red flower, carried it to the sanctuary, and laid it on the altar. During Children’s Moments in the worship service, I explained where I had found the red flower and that it would die unless together we did something.

So there in the worship service, we took some good earth, put it around the roots, propped up the flower with a good stick, and watered it well. I warned the children that even with this effort, the flower still might not make it; but even if it should die, together we would know we had made an effort to save its life, even if someone else had tried to harm it.

Of course, the red flower fell off, and the plant had to be trimmed back considerably. Even at that, more leaves continued to die and fall.

From time to time, the plant would be brought back into the sanctuary and the children would be given a progress report. When more of the leaves died and fell, none of them said, “Let’s give up.” There seemed always to be hope that the red flower would make it and new life would show.

All winter it was watered and cared for, and then new leaves appeared and grew.

Not long ago, Lela Farmer came into my office and said, “Guess what, Grayson! There’s a new red flower. It’s blooming.”

The next Sunday, that red flower was on the altar, and the children joined in the celebration that this plant, which had been left for dead, had been brought back to life through their efforts and care.

Why does the church exist? To grow red flowers.

At its best, it never looks at other human beings and says they are too far gone. It picks them up and does what it can to restore life and hope. And sometimes, an almost dead red flower blooms again.

In Trabert’s Woods

I was with my father in Trabert’s woods last week. In the springtime when the sun is warm and the light rain has been falling, I must at some time get to Trabert’s woods, to stand there and, with luck, to find some mushrooms.

My father started taking me to Trabert’s woods when I was five years old. My hunt would last for five or ten minutes-while my father and grandfather could hunt for what seemed all the hours in the day. I would entertain myself breaking sticks, knocking down rotten trees, playing in the creek, and sometimes spying a deer.

I recall that one day after pestering my father quite a bit to go home, suddenly I saw this gigantic spongetop mushroom. Undoubtedly, it was bigger than any they had found.

My grandfather had walked right over it. My father had walked by it. My mother walked right by. But not me!

“Hey, look here! Look what you all missed. You walked right by this big mushroom-are you blind? Are you paying any attention?”

They all praised me for my good eye for mushrooms, and I continued to chide them for missing such an obvious super specimen.

Over the years, my father could have refused to take me because of my lack of interest-my noise and messing around in the woods-but he did not. Instead, by example he taught me the value of the woods, the subtle joys. Now forty years later, when the spring rain comes and the sun shines warm, I take a day and go to Trabert’s woods with my father-and I shall go with him as long as he lives, and then I shall still go there.

My dad and grandfather had a great ability to instill appreciation in a child for the woods and the hidden places of mushrooms. It didn’t sink in until years later that they had seen that giant spongetop-they had just left it there for me to find.

What a way to teach-in the woods, at church, or at home.

Why the Plum Trees Had Plums

An article in the church paper a couple of weeks ago noted that plum trees in the churchyard had an abundance of fruit. When we called the landscaping people, they told us the plum trees used for landscaping seldom produce fruit. We noted at the time that apparently no one had informed those trees of that fact; and being without that wisdom, they went ahead and produced plums. That, of course, was said with tongue in cheek. Now comes a more logical explanation of why the church plum trees had fruit.

With the wisdom available to us lately about the effect of tender, loving care (and even conversation) upon plants, it follows that our plum trees are in an extremely good position to catch a variety of life experiences.

The yard and the parking lot are places where children play, and the church has the welcome mat out for the children of the area. The plum trees experience the laughter and happy spirit of the children. Occasionally, groups of them sit under the trees for a picnic or to enjoy a Popsicle.

If this were not enough, the trees have witnessed a number of weddings and celebrations-a bride and groom coming happily out of the church, or a festive party for the work of a neighborhood youth director with free ice-cream cones for all the children. The trees were in on that, too.

They have heard a bell choir from Haiti. They have witnessed a Communion service on the front lawn of the church along with evening vespers. Senior citizens who meet in the fellowship hall every Tuesday walk by the trees

Many families pass by as they come to worship; and the trees watch the joy that comes as these folks leave to face another week after spending an hour in the worship of God. They have heard the singing of hundreds of hymns from the open windows of the sanctuary.

They saw one of their number carefully cut down after it had died. It was carried away tenderly by some thirty-five children during Children’s Moments in a worship service. The choir anthems have reached their leaves Sunday after Sunday, and those who practice on the church organ during the week have provided additional enjoyment.

They have watched the Christmas story recreated each year on Christmas Eve, right under their branches-the shepherds, the donkey, the wise men, Mary and Joseph and the Babe, and, of course, a street full of people who sing carols.

Any tree that has been a part of all this could not help but respond with a whole chorus of plums.

Dorothy

“I’m right here, Dorothy; right here in the room.” It’s Saturday evening, and the lights of the city are beginning to come on, and the new snow has made most everything white.

“I’ll be staying close by.”

Her breathing was shallow and there was evidence of considerable struggle, not pain-just the physical struggle that comes when the body is slowly shutting down.

It was about three months ago on a Sunday evening that Dorothy said she was afraid.

“Afraid of what?” I asked.

“Afraid I am going to die.”

“And how long do you want to live?”

“Just enough time to get some things done,” she said.

So a plan was made there in the room. Dorothy would make a list of all she wanted to get done. She would have it ready by the following day, and then together we would work on the list.

At the very top of the page was her desire to attend the Wesley Circle Christmas Party. Dorothy did not make it, but her friends sent a poster full of pictures taken at the party.

Ten of her friends at the church gathered at the hospital for a surprise birthday party December 21. Several purchased gowns and delivered them to her. Someone did her laundry. Many sent cards and called on her.

“I am ready to die,” she told me one day. “I am ready for my heavenly home. I am tired of this body and the illness.” She had decided she was not going to get well and therefore she was ready to die. “I don’t want you to tell anyone else just now,” she said, “because people say, ‘Oh, don’t talk like that; that’s nonsense.’ It’s OK if I want to die, isn’t it, Grayson?”

“Sure, it’s OK.”

Now, on this Saturday evening, in the hospital room, it was clear that Dorothy had made her message and desire clear. For in this room, there were no bottles for intravenous feeding, no tubes, no machines to sustain life. But there was dignity. The gowns from her brother and friends, a card delivered yesterday from her friends in the Wesley Circle, the people of the church, and a woman we called Dorothy-one who had decided that her time to die had come.

The nurses were in and out of the room to check, to help make her comfortable. They offered coffee and juice, and we told her stories and read to her, and she did not close her eyes throughout the night. Her response was to follow us with her eyes across the room, to squeeze our hands; and when we looked closely at her face, a faint smile would outline her lips from time to time.

All through the night someone was with her and then, as she had wanted, just in a moment, the breathing stopped.

It was Sunday morning. The lights of the city were beginning to fade into morning.

And from the oval-shaped hospital radio hanging on the back of the bed came the music, “Morning has broken. … “

… O, death, where is thy sting?

- More from Grayson Atha

Pastors

The Pastor’s Pre-Election Perils

Fred Smith

“A time to keep silence, and a time to speak,” said the Preacher of Ecclesiastes. This fall, as Election Day approaches, American preachers face the quandary of what to say and what not to say. Unfortunately, Solomon isn’t around for counsel.

I went to a large church this past summer and listened to a nationally known guest minister. A U.S. senator and several other political dignitaries were there as well, and before the morning was over, Christian faith had been thoroughly mingled with conservative politics.

I sat thinking about two or three friends of mine, members of that church, who are leaders in the “other” party. They are Bible-believing, spiritual men who love God, but they must have felt like foreigners that morning-in their own church. This is wrong, I said to myself.

But must pastors say nothing about political affairs? Is the whole subject taboo?

We have been tripped up by our labels. We’ve been talking about being conservative or liberal, right-wing or left-wing, rather than what Scripture defines for us: right versus wrong. Certain friends label me conservative, while others have decided I’m liberal; neither tag bothers me too much. What does concern me is my integrity.

I was playing golf with the pastor of a large church recently, and when the talk turned to politics, I said, “Are you conservative or liberal?”

He alertly responded, “On what issues?”

“Well, choose them yourself,” I said.

“I’m very conservative theologically,” he replied, “and therefore I’m very liberal politically.”

I was intrigued by his word therefore, as if the matter were automatic. I asked about that, and he said yes, the one dictated the other.

So I asked, “Are you for bureaucracy?”

“No, I’m strongly opposed to it.”

“Then how are you going to administer the liberal approaches? How are you going to contain human greed and avarice? How will you control people’s tendency to sin if you don’t have lots of bureaucratic structure?”

He paused for a moment and said, “Well, frankly I’ve never thought about that, but I will.” He is a sincere man and will think about it. I feel his choice of label wasn’t biblically based.

On the other hand, when the speaker that summer morning said Reagan was the greatest president since Lincoln, I thought of Kierkegaard’s statement about the church. The problem, he said, is that nobody laughs. We’ve taken our fanaticism seriously. Now I don’t mind telling you I voted for Reagan four years ago, and I’ll do so again next month-but not because he’s the greatest president since Lincoln.

I believe there’s a place for the fanatical right, in that they balance off the fanatical left. Our country has in recent times been like a high-wire walker with too much of his pole sticking out one direction. I’m delighted to see some people feeling strongly about adding to the short end. But my desire as a Christian is to be in neither fanatical group. The Devil doesn’t care whether Christians fall into the left ditch or the right ditch, just so they stay off the road marked out by Scripture and illuminated by the Spirit of God.

The personality trap

The first real danger for Christian leaders is endorsing personalities instead of principles. I am not saying, “Stay out of politics.” That is the same as saying, “Stay out of life.” The argument that would put politics out of bounds for a preacher can be used to put economics, social life, health care, and all the rest out of bounds, and you wind up restricting the preacher to the hereafter. That’s not what Christ had in mind, or he would have taken his followers to the hereafter immediately.

Every Christian leader should be involved in all areas of life. The big question is how?

I say, by enunciating the principles of Scripture and the mystery of God. Not by aligning with political personalities.

There’s nothing wrong with a pastor coming to a biblical understanding of the wrongness of abortion and preaching it, so long as persons and parties are not named. That pastor is simply declaring the whole counsel of God. But to attach one’s position to a given politician is courting trouble, not only in God’s eyes but also from government agencies.

But we must stand clear of this trap, and I will go a step further: We must preach our principles in scriptural rather than ecclesiastical terms. The Catholic bishops’ recent statement on nuclear policy said, in a sense, that if you’re a good Catholic, you’ll believe this way. Protestants have sometimes done the same thing: To be a good Methodist or Baptist, you couldn’t dance, or gamble, or see certain picture shows. The issue is not being a good organization member. The issue is being right or wrong according to Scripture.

The thirst for power

The second great danger is using our theological position to obtain human power and prestige. You don’t get power by enunciating principles. Power only comes by aligning with personalities.

As Christian leaders, what do we seek? Are we serious about stating the principles of God and letting the personalities fall where they may, or are we lusting to make friends in high places?

I was at another fast-growing church recently where the mayor showed up. The pastor, who is politically oriented, spotted him in the crowd and invited him to pronounce the benediction. Then the mayor, of course, had to make a few remarks about the greatness of the pastor, the wonderful growth of the church, and how God was blessing in such a mighty way.

Well, I doubt the mayor’s spiritual sensitivity to know what God was or wasn’t doing. But the crowd loved it regardless. They went home thinking, We’re important. We’re now being recognized by the political powers that be. Our pastor has good connections. And the glory of God was used for the glory of man.

Most of us have split motives: We try to accomplish black and white with the same act-an impossibility. Because there is some good in what we do, we tend to overlook the bad. But God sees through it all.

One of our great underlying temptations is to turn America into a theocracy, because then we theologians would be the natural leaders. If only we could get our hands on the levers of power, we could straighten this country out.

I believe there are good reasons for political leaders to be separate from theologians. When church and state become one, your enemies are either traitors or heretics, and if you can’t convict them of one, you switch to the other. The result is a lot of witch burning.

We can seek, with the best of motives, to take over the government “to save it.” Ambitious people have used that reasoning for centuries. Every military coup employs the same language, no matter how corrupt or ruthless its members: “We had to rescue this country from ______.” But what are the real motives?

Remember the slave girl who followed the apostle Paul all around Philippi saying, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved” (Acts 16:17). Which was true. Then why did Paul get irritated at this free public-relations effort? It came from an evil spirit.

I’m sure as soon as he called the demon out of her, she stopped her promotional campaign. But what happened? Her owners began losing money, went to the magistrates, and complained that Paul and Silas were upsetting the city.

They were doing no such thing. They were simply shutting off a few greedy individuals’ source of revenue.

People who are not in leadership positions have a great tendency to say such and such is badly needed for other people’s welfare, when what they are really concerned about is their own welfare. Does America “need” the conservative or liberal agenda? I think we very badly need to reestablish the Christian experience, out of which the Christian ethic and tradition come. Another way of saying that is we badly need a revival.

If the preachers currently trying to lead the political process can bring revival along with their politics, we’ll have a basis for restoring Christian principles in this country. But if all they accomplish is their political agenda, they will have left the highest calling known to humanity to go run bureaucracies.

This exchange tantalizes us by giving us a modus operandi for accomplishing our will. Ministers are often long on wishes and short on power to fulfill them. Once you get into politics, you can pass laws, institute penalties, fines, prison sentences . . . and you’re right back to heresy and treason.

Didn’t Christ urge us to get away from legalism? Then why are we yearning to take over the political structure? Ours is a minority religion, and if we become the majority, we fall prey to the same arrogance that haunts all earthly leaders.

The task this fall, as I see it, is to clearly explain biblical principles of right and wrong-ever conscious of our own human weakness, our temptation to power, to legalism, to self-righteousness. In the midst of a noisy campaign, let the pulpit speak only that which He puts in our mouth. That is the best contribution the church can make to a needy America in the eighties.

-Fred Smith

Dallas, Texas

- More from Fred Smith

Pastors

FROM THE EDITOR

Terry C. Muck

I flew in a ten-passenger Cessna 401-402 from Kansas City to Topeka last week, and I realized something had changed in my feelings about small aircraft.

I used to dread them. My Uncle Harold’s crop duster in northern Minnesota, the World War II-vintage aircraft I occasionally flew on softball trips, the helicopter across San Francisco Bay to Oakland one dark, windy night-all of them left me with a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. There was an element of exhilaration, I must admit, much like what I felt as a child when my dad accelerated our ’56 Chevy just before mounded railroad tracks on the blacktopped roads of rural Indiana. But the element of fear dominated whenever I climbed into the belly of a small airplane.

Thus I developed a standard rule of my traveling thumb: any airline that had to ask my weight at the check-in counter was too small to get my business, much less my trust. I stuck to that rule for at least a decade.

But on my trip last week, I realized those powerful fears had disappeared. Apparently five or six flights on a Beaver into the Canadian back country to fish for lake trout and muskie had removed the last vestiges of small-aircraft phobia. It was gone along with the fear of Ferris wheels, first days at school, and the first day on a new job.

As I flew over eastern Kansas (even after having to tell my weight when checking in), I realized I don’t fear too many things anymore. It was symptomatic of the flattening of life’s peaks and valleys that age seems to bring. My lows are less deep-but my joys are less joyous. Can this be a good thing?

On the flat plains below I could look ahead and see Lawrence, the plane’s first stop, and beyond that, Topeka. The prairie stretched unbroken as far as I could see. Bad weather would have been easy to spot and avoid. Life is safer, more predictable, I mused, on the flat plains.

Yet when it comes to human psychology, I wonder how many of us could live consistently on the flat plains. Aren’t peaks and valleys a necessity? Something dies in us if we eliminate the risks. We need opportunities to achieve or to fail, to run a great race or fall flat from the starting blocks.

Like most people, a couple times in my life I have achieved far beyond what I thought possible. Paradoxically, in every case a corresponding low followed the temporary high. “Reactive depression,” the psychologists call it.

I also have been deeply depressed for no apparent reason, and the six-month battle with valium, MMPI’s, and counselors left me shaken. Yet I emerged even stronger: although life had come at me with the force of a hurricane, God somehow helped me weather the storm.

God uses valleys to teach me lessons of great value. I learn far more from them than from the more mundane annoyances of traffic tickets, unbalanced checkbooks, and missed deadlines. I stare in wonder at those who question, Does God really teach through suffering and fear?

A nagging thought as I approach the age ripe for mid-life crisis: if my immature, neurotic fears are one by one being eliminated-like my fear of small aircraft-what will be my teachers of the future? If God works best on the edges of my psyche rubbed raw by fear and uncertainty, in what situations can I expect him to shape me in the future? I don’t know for sure. To dogmatically predict would be arrogant, I suspect. But if I were forced to guess, I’d say it will happen most often in my relationships with people.

Personal relationships seem to grow more complicated as the years go by. Most grade schoolers view their classmates as a pool of potential companions. They simply pick the ones they want to befriend and do it. It’s like picking the ripest, juiciest apple from the orchard. It never occurs to children that there might be years when the apple tree won’t bear a very good crop, or they might lose the capacity or desire to pick.

The years teach differently. If surveys of American adults, particularly males, are any indication, friends become a rarer commodity as the years go by, more like gold than apples. Many of us are forced to treasure the few we have and become less optimistic, frighteningly skeptical about making new ones. It becomes a fearful process to bare bruised feelings and memories to strangers-the very process that establishes fellowship. It fascinates me that what is a commonplace experience for children becomes fertile ground for growing and stretching as adults.

After landing in Topeka, I discovered the flatness of the plains is something of an illusion. People live on plains and hills and in valleys. To meet them and fellowship with them, I must climb emotional inclines and descend into hidden hollows.

It is in people that my greatest experiences will come in future years. Fortunate, isn’t it, that people are God’s work.

Terry Muck is editor of LEADERSHIP.

- More from Terry C. Muck

Pastors

Practicing & Malpracticing the Presence of God

Eugene H. Peterson

Five pastors completely bungled George Fox’s search for spiritual direction, but their mistakes point out the essentials of pastoral care.

Five pastors had a turn at providing spiritual direction for George Fox in the first months of his religious awakening. Each of them blew it.

Fox was in his late adolescence when he ran into this discouraging sequence of spiritual misdirection. He does not identify the nature of the trouble that prompted him to seek out the pastors. Sometimes he refers to it as “despair and temptation.” It is clear, though, that he was seeking for God. And not one of the five pastors noticed.

That the five did badly is not surprising. George Fox was complex. Spiritual direction is difficult, and pastoral wisdom is not available on prescription. Every person who comes to a pastor with a heart full of shapeless longings and a head full of badgering questions is complex in a new way. There are no fail-proof formulae.

Fox, who later founded the Society of Friends, tells the story in his Journal. Reflecting on these five unsuitable but representative responses from our pastoral colleagues of three hundred years past, we learn not only what not to do, but their glaring oversights suggest what we must cultivate in order to provide sound spiritual direction.

Nathaniel Stephens

After some time I went into my own country again, and was there about a year, in great sorrows and troubles, and walked many nights by myself. Then the priest of Drayton, the town of my birth, whose name was Nathaniel Stephens, came often to me, and I went often to him; and another priest sometimes came with him; and they would give place to me to hear me, and I would ask them questions, and reason with them. And this priest Stephens asked me a question, viz, “Why Christ cried out upon the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ and why He said, ‘If it be possible let this cup pass from me; yet not my will, but thine be done.’ ” I told him that at that time the sins of all mankind were upon Him, and their iniquities and transgressions with which He was wounded, which He was to bear, and to be an offering for them as He was man, but died not as He was God; and so, in that He died for all men, and tasted death for every man, He was an offering for the sins of the whole world. This I spake, being at that time in a measure sensible of Christ’s sufferings, and what He went through. And the priest said it was a very good, full answer, and such a one as he had not heard. At that time he would applaud and speak highly of me to others; and what I said in discourse to him on the week-days he would preach of on the First-days; for which I did not like him. This priest afterwards became my great persecutor.

Nathaniel Stephens turns a conversation of spiritual direction into theological inquiry. He talks like an intellectual dilettante, collecting opinions and savoring nuances of flavor (“the priest said it was a very good, full answer, and such a one as he had not heard”). The conversations were, no doubt, stimulating. Neither Stephens nor Fox would have spent so much time talking if they had not found the exchanges interesting. But regardless of the seriousness of the subject matter-God, the soul, temptation-the conversations themselves were not serious. Dialogue degenerated into chatter.

Stephens gives his game away when he preaches on Sundays the material he gathers from Fox on weekdays. Fox was his bin of illustrations. This inquirer, brimming with insights, is plundered for the purpose of sermonizing. Did it never occur to Stephens to ask himself or Fox why the questions were important or what difference they made in their actual living? Apparently not. He does not deal with dignity and respect toward a person asking serious questions and seeking answers of God.

The attraction of Stephens’ approach for pastors is enormous. Everyone who comes for help is a fascinating case study in living theology. We raise our heads from studying theology in a book and meet theology in the shape of this woman, the profile of this man. We shift our attention from book to person easily enough, but no corresponding shift takes place in us-we “read” the person as impersonally as we read the book. The effect is disastrous. To treat someone as a theological butterfly, no matter how much care we convey in pinning them to the mounting board and studying the markings of identification, is a violation. If we reduce a person to sermon material, we are agents of alienation.

This theological/intellectual relationship was not without attraction for Fox (“I went often to him”), but it finally failed. Can I remember this? If a person who has dared to think with personal passion about God realizes I see our encounter as only a spiritual diversion from the humdrum of duller parishioners (and a source of preaching material), disillusionment is certain. When someone comes to me for spiritual direction, it is not to enter a theological discussion but to find a friend in a theological context.

The Ancient Priest at Mancetter

After this I went to another ancient priest at Mancetter, in Warwickshire, and reasoned with him about the ground of despair and temptations; but he was ignorant of my condition; he bade me take tobacco and sing psalms. Tobacco was a thing I did not love, and psalms I was not in a state to sing; I could not sing. Then he bade me come again, and he would tell me many things; but when I came again he was angry and pettish, for my former words had displeased him. He told my troubles, and sorrows, and griefs to his servants so that it was got among the milk-lasses, which grieved me that I had opened my mind to such a one. I saw they were all miserable comforters; and this brought my troubles more upon me.

The ancient priest at Mancetter is a clerk in an ecclesiastical drugstore. He has a stock of folk wisdom that he mixes with churchly admonition and then dispenses like an apothecary. He probably thought of himself as a font of cracker-barrel remedies, respected in the community for his common sense.

The problem was not only his “tobacco and psalms” advice but also the intent with which he gave it. He reveals his motives when he gets angry at Fox’s refusal to buy. Fox, a stubborn customer, refuses the prescribed medicine. That constitutes a rejection for the priest; the salesman has lost a customer. Anger is the appropriate, if tactless, response.

The priest doesn’t see Fox as a person to be directed but as a consumer of spiritual goods. The relationship is based on the buyer’s potential acceptance of the priest’s commodities. Rejection dissolves the relationship. After Fox refused the advice, not liking tobacco and not able to sing psalms, he knew by the priest’s anger that he had been depersonalized into a customer, a bad customer at that. The priest rejected Fox, refusing to tolerate such unresponsiveness. Fox was aggravating evidence of the priest’s incompetence. Best get rid of him by deriding him. The easiest way out is to hint among the milk-maids that there are matters of concern here about stability, immaturity, or neurosis.

Priest Living about Tamworth

Then I heard of a priest living about Tamworth, who was accounted an experienced man, and I went seven miles to him; but I found him like an empty hollow cask.

The daily difficulty for pastors in the work of spiritual direction is the insufficiency of technique, skill, and reputation. These can carry us through many a routine, but when a genuinely troubled person shows up, wrestling with the angels, grappling with the demons, our souls are on the line, tested in the desert. If we are unprepared to engage in honest, open, shared inquiry after God, then we are of no use: “an empty hollow cask.”

These inquirers are always an implied threat, for we never know when their relentless searching will expose some undetected shallowness, some unexamined platitude in us. We devise stratagems and roles that allow us to function smoothly and successfully, without pain, anguish, and undue expenditure of psychic energy. But none of this can be sustained in an acutely personal spiritual encounter.

A faddish interest in pastoral counseling is sometimes (not always) a role-the acquisition of a new technique at the expense of becoming a new person. A rigorous discipline aimed at excellence in the pulpit is sometimes (not always) a role-public performance that avoids the pain of praying with people. Instead of living ourselves into an integration of person and pastor, we learn techniques that give a facade of expertise in spirituality and a reputation for caring. It only takes a single George Fox to perforate the image.

Reputations do not count in spiritual direction. “Experience” is not enough in the pastor’s study. The stories we trot out to illustrate an experience, the insights we use to illuminate personality development, however impressive, will not survive the restless probing of a troubled soul. Seekers such as Fox will spot the “empty, hollow cask” every time, even if “accounted an experienced man.” Only a life committed to spiritual adventure, personal integrity, honest and alert searching prayer is adequate for the task.

This means our primary task is to be pilgrims. Our best preparation for the work of spiritual direction is an honest life. Prayer and the developing capacity for adoration and joy are the qualifications that matter.

Dr. Cradock of Coventry

I heard also of one called Dr. Cradock of Coventry, and went to him. I asked him the ground of temptations and despair, and how troubles came to be wrought in man. He asked me, “Who was Christ’s father and mother?” I told him, “Mary was his mother, and that He was supposed to be the son of Joseph, but He was the Son of God.” Now, as we were walking together in his garden, the alley being narrow, I chanced, in turning, to set my foot on the side of a bed, at which the man was in such a rage as if his house had been on fire. Thus all our discourse was lost, and I went away in sorrow, worse than I was when I came. I thought them miserable comforters, and saw they were all as nothing to me; for they could not reach my condition.

Dr. Cradock is concerned about orthodoxy, not only theologically but peripatetically. His concern is that Fox think straight and walk straight.

His anger when Fox stepped off into the flower bed was not an unfortunate lapse but a telltale expression of his mentality. Deviation from the straight and narrow is the cause, in Cradock’s mind, of what is wrong with the world. For him, human despair is rooted in wrong thinking. Fix a person’s theology, and you solve the person’s problem.

A dogmatician, Cradock’s response to a despairing inquirer is to ask the testing question. He operated as an examining professor, searching out what was wrong with Fox’s belief structure. When he found it, he would be able to instruct him in what to believe so that he would be whole again. He had only to find out how Fox diverged from the model of orthodox Christianity in order to set him straight.

Cradock’s progeny in the twentieth century are as likely to have psychological presuppositions as theological. Freud has preempted Calvin as the father of orthodoxy among many pastors. Today’s question has changed from “who was Christ’s father and mother?” to “what do you think of your mother?” but the intent is the same: get material for diagnosis, data to compare with the orthodox mode.

Fortunately, Fox did not have to endure the inquisition very long-Cradock showed his hand, flaring in anger over the garden trespass. Fox, an impossible candidate for any procrustean bed, sorrowfully went looking for other help.

Orthodoxy cannot be imposed. The spiritual director is in an enviable place to observe the endless variations of grace, the fantastic fertility of the divine Spirit bringing faith into creation. But as Bonhoeffer said, “We can never know just how Christ will be formed in another.” If we should mistakenly do our work in the dogmatic schoolmaster style of Dr. Cradock, we will well deserve the epitaph “miserable comforter.”

Macham

After this, I went to another, one Macham, a priest in high account. He would needs give me some physic, and I was to have been let blood; but they could not get one drop of blood from me, either in arms or heart (though they endeavored it), my body being, as it were, dried up with sorrows, grief and troubles, which were so great upon me that I could have wished I had never been born, or that I had been born blind, that I might never have heard vain and wicked words, or the Lord’s name be blasphemed.

Macham is an activist. He will not waste time with idle talk or useless listening. Something has to be done. No matter what, do something: “Give him a physic, and take some blood.”

The suggestion to do something is nearly always inappropriate, for persons who come for spiritual direction are troubled over some disorder or dissatisfaction in being, not doing. They need a friend who will pay attention to who they are, not a project manager who will order additional busy work.

Precipitate actions are usually avoidances. They distract for the time being and provide temporary (and welcome) relief. The attraction for “giving a physic and letting blood” is nearly irresistible in a highly ambiguous situation. The sense of definition provided by clearcut action provides tremendous satisfaction. But there is no growth in the spirit, no development into maturity.

Pastors are particularly imperiled in this area because of the compulsive activism, both cultural and ecclesiastical, in which we are immersed at this time in history. It takes wary and persistent watching to avoid falling into the activist trap.

George Fox needed a pastor who was secure enough to absorb, reflect, and tolerate the ambiguity of his troubled despair and temptation and strong enough not to do something to him or for him. That would have provided space for the Holy Spirit to initiate the new life. That might have made a difference.

Avoiding Such Malpractice

Is there anything that I can do to avoid perpetuating the malpractice of George Fox’s five pastors? Are there ways to prepare myself for the next George Fox who waits after a meeting until everyone has gone and ventures a shy question? Or catches me on the street and asks if she can have a few minutes over coffee? Or writes a letter? Or, more deliberately and formally, arranges for a series of conversations to “get at what’s bothering me”? The negatives of Fox’s experience suggest some positives.

For a start, I can cultivate an attitude of awe. I must be prepared to marvel. This face before me, its loveliness scored with stress, is in the image of God. This fidgety and slouching body confronting me is a temple of the Holy Ghost. This awkward, slightly asymmetric assemblage of legs and arms, ears and mouth, is part of the body of Christ. Am I ready to be amazed at what God hath wrought, or am I industriously absorbed in pigeonholing my observations? Is what I see enhanced by faith-instructed imagination or reduced to what can be sorted and fit into the file folders of biology and psychology and sociology?

Why is it, the minute a person comes to me whose face is an unconvincing image of God, or whose body is a parody of the Holy Ghost’s temple, or whose words and actions show no evident coordination with Christ’s body, that I so quickly abandon the spiritual orientation and the texts I have pondered and preached and taught for all these years, and take up half-digested slogans and formulae that I pick out of the air of contemporania?

My basic orientation as a pastor is that the significance of what I see before me is not what I see before me but what Christ has said and done. Far more relevant than what I feel or think, or what this person feels or thinks, is what Christ has said and done. This is a person for whom Christ died, a person he loves: an awesome fact! This is a person preserved alive until this very moment in a world of hurtling automobiles, ravaging diseases, and psychotic menaces. Am I prepared to admire? Am I prepared to respect? Am I prepared to be in reverence?

When I am cast in the role of spiritual authority, only incessant vigilance prevents me from responding with condescending paternalism. If they are going to look up to me, how can I keep from looking down on them? Not in contempt, to be sure, but in a kind of I-understand-what-is-best-for-you reductionism. When I do that, they leave benignly belittled.

For many years now, I have paid special attention to pastors when they talk about the people they baptize and give the Word and body and blood of Christ. What do they really think of them? How rarely do I hear any awe or marvel in their speech; how seldom I detect any applause for the glories no one else notices, the grace everyone overlooks. George Fox was a remarkable person, a sensitive soul, but not one of his five pastors had the faintest inkling of it.

Every meeting with another is a privilege. In pastoral conversation I have chances that many never get as easily or as frequently-chances to spy out suppressed glory, ignored blessing, forgotten grace. I better not miss them.

Second, I can cultivate an awareness of my ignorance. There is so much about this person that I don’t know. There are layered years of experience that I have no access to. There are feelings of anger and joy and faith and despair that will never be articulated. There are dreams and fantasies of vanity and accomplishment, sexuality and adventure, that will never see the light of day. Bits and pieces will be hinted at in conversation, but most of it will remain uncharted territory. One gets the impression that George Fox’s five pastors had him figured out, and God’s will for him figured out, in the first ten or fifteen minutes.

It is difficult to retain an awareness of my ignorance. Pastors have passed so many examinations, heard so many lectures, read so many books, and have so much experience in the raw material of truth-death, grief, suffering, celebration, guilt, love-that we easily assume a posture of all-knowing. But there is so much more that we don’t know. We are barely across the threshold of comprehension.

“In no other century of our brief existence,” writes Lewis Thomas, “have human beings learned so deeply, and so painfully, the extent and depth of their ignorance.” All the same, it is hard not to be impressed about what I do know. I have read and studied the Scriptures for years and am ambitious to share what I have learned. I have been taught and trained in theology and am eager to pass on what I know. Given the stimulus of a question, I spill out answers and commentary. I want to get the fullness in my head into the emptiness in the other head. But what if it is not heads that are involved here but hearts, lives? There is far more, then, that I don’t know than I do know. “It is the mark of an uneducated mind,” says von Hugel, “to be more dogmatic than the subject allows.” I had better be quiet for a while and listen and watch. There is more here than meets the eye. There is a lot that hasn’t been said. What is it?

An even more sobering dimension to my ignorance regards God. What has God been doing with this person before he or she showed up in my study? What messages have been received, distorted, missed? God has been at work with this person since birth. Everything that has taken place in this life has in some way or another taken place in the context of a good creation and an intended salvation. Everything.

When this person leaves my presence, the good creation and the intended salvation will remain; God’s grace is in operation and will persist. My words and gestures and actions take place in the midst of a great drama, the details of which I know little or nothing. In no way does that mean that my part is unimportant. I take with absolute seriousness whatever part I play, but I am a supporting player, not the lead. I do my very best but in no way speak or act so that the person’s response to me is the center stage action. God wants to meet with this person; this person wants, unfocused as the want may be, to meet with God. I must not manipulate the conversation or the setting so that I am perceived to be in charge, or I merely delay the things of God.

Third, I can cultivate a predisposition to prayer. My undergirding assumption in all pastoral encounters is that what the person really wants from me is to learn how to pray or to be guided to maturity in prayer. That assumption is not always confirmed by later developments, but less is lost in making the assumption wrongly than in not making it.

It is easier to talk about ideas or people or projects. For the moment it is usually satisfying enough. But if it is God with whom the person really wants to deal, all I have done is divert the search or delay the meeting. I have mistaken myself as the primary partner in the conversation when what the person is really looking for is conversation with God. If I dominate the conversation, either ignoring God’s Word and presence and mercy, or consigning him to a merely ceremonial position, then I am getting in the way.

It is God with whom we have to deal. People go for long stretches of time without being aware of that, thinking it is with money, or sex, or work, or children, or parents, or a political cause, or athletic competition, or learning that they must deal. Any one or a combination of these subjects can absorb them and give the meaning and purpose that human beings seem to require. But then there is a slow stretch of boredom. Or a disaster. Or a sudden collapse of meaning. They want more. They want God. When a person searches for meaning and direction, asking questions and testing out statements, we must not be diverted into anything other or lesser.

Clement of Alexandria called prayer “keeping company with God.” Keeping company involves gesture and silence, relaxed musing and intent speaking. Other persons can join and leave the company without disrupting the company. More often than we think, the unspoken, sometimes unconscious, reason that persons seek out conversation with the pastor is a desire to keep company with God; if they are unlucky enough to come to a pastor who is not active in the company, they are going to be disappointed as George Fox was, for whom none of his pastors gave any direction in prayer or was perceived to be a person of prayer.

This does not mean the pastor’s task is to get people on their knees with the least possible delay. It doesn’t mean we have an instruction manual on prayer from which we assign lessons. Many times there will be no formal or verbalized prayer. Often there will be no explicit reference to prayer. But there must be a predisposition toward prayer, a readiness for prayer.

Spiritual direction, then, is conducted with an awareness that it takes place in God’s active presence, that our conversation is conditioned by his speaking and listening, his being there. This cannot be reduced to procedure or formula. It is not accomplished so much by what we do or say to another, but in the way we are when we meet another.

- More from Eugene H. Peterson

Pastors

WHY SOME SERMONS WORK BETTER THAN OTHERS

William M. Kruidenier

The difference in preaching isn’t always what you think at first.

On any given Sunday, whenever a sermon seems to fall short of what we’d hoped for (realistically or otherwise), we quickly look for a reason. Our notes (or manuscript) were flawed. We didn’t deliver the message powerfully enough. We didn’t get enough sleep the night before. The sanctuary was too hot. Or too cool. People just aren’t as hungry for spiritual growth as they should be. …

I think there is another explanation, perhaps more common than many of the above. It has to do with the match-up between the message and the group.

One helpful insight of the past decade is that not all groupings in a church are the same. Thinkers in the area of church growth have pointed out that when you put the saints together on Sunday morning, you have a celebration. In medium- and large-size churches, the individuals don’t all know each other personally, but that is not the focus; they are rather caught up in worshiping God.

Break into groups of anywhere from twenty to a hundred, and you have a congregation-people who know one another and view themselves as a special brand (e.g., a choir, a “mini-church,” a permanent Sunday school class). The fellowship is lively, the relationships mainly horizontal. (Smaller churches maintain this closeness even on Sunday morning, which, in fact, is one of their assets.)

To take a quantum leap in intimacy, however, limit the numbers to ten and call for serious commitment and accountability. This is the cell.

A fourth kind of group is the class, where people gather not primarily to worship, fellowship, or grow personally, but to learn a new skill or body of information. An elective course on evangelism or the Pentateuch is a good example. The focus is on the content, and any worship or fellowship is a by-product.

How Shall We Then Preach?

Most of us are familiar with this. But only recently, as I’ve been immersed in the challenge of starting a new church and thinking through its formative structures, have I faced what all this means for homiletics.

Each kind of group has its own dynamics. What works in one setting will not necessarily succeed in another. But all too often, I have failed to match my proclamation with the dynamic of my particular audience. I’ve just stood up and done the single specialty I was taught in seminary: expository preaching.

What happens when parishioners hear expositions of Galatians on Sunday morning, 2 Timothy on Sunday night, and something from the Old Testament midweek, all in the same basic style?

They rarely sense that the pastor’s message is for now-for this group, this moment in time. They go home with a vague feeling of If you’ve heard one sermon, you’ve heard ’em all. So why go to another service for more of the same?

Here is another problem. Suppose in the worship (celebration) service, I come to a text that mentions the training of children. From the pulpit I go into detail on techniques of child discipline; I even venture some comments about spanking. Many young parents who are listening appreciate the information-but go away frustrated because they weren’t able to raise their hands and ask follow-up questions. Meanwhile, the non-parents present (middle and older adults, singles) gaze out the window.

Certain types of scriptural truth raise certain needs in an audience that can be met only in certain group settings. That is why I have come to adopt the following guidelines:

Choose Appropriate Texts for the Setting

Before opening the Bible, first ask, “What is the focus of this group?” If celebration, it is God. If congregation, it is social fellowship and kinship in Christ. If cell, it is personal growth and accountability. If class, it is skill or information.

Next question: What portions of Scripture originally spoke to these kinds of needs? Some obvious examples:

The Psalms, Romans 9, parts of the Major Prophets, and others lifted the attention of the original readers to the transcendence of God. Thus they make excellent choices to be expounded in celebration or worship services.

In contrast, much of the Pauline corpus dealt with problems in the Christian community. Proverbs and many of the Minor Prophets also speak to community issues. These can be used to promote the same results in a congregation-sized group today.

For the cell, where personal religion is the focus, books such as James, Proverbs, and the life of Christ from the Gospels are highly appropriate. They concentrate on personally living out the faith. They convict us; they promote self-analysis and confession.

The class works best when a task attitude is established: “We’re going to survey Romans,” or “Let’s learn the best way to do a word study in personal Bible investigation.” This is not a license for boring teaching. But it does allow us to speak more technically, less personally than in the other three groups.

Emphasize Truths Appropriate to the Group

This is not entirely in line with my seminary homiletics classes, which urged me to discover at all costs the main thought of any passage of Scripture (in the mind of the original writer) and then convey that same thought to my listeners. While I was always encouraged to know and read my audiences, I was not taught very effectively how to apply the Scriptures on the basis of what the group dynamic would allow.

Some truths from a passage will connect with a particular group like lightning hitting a radio tower, while others barely sputter over the front edge of the podium. The preacher’s task is to select those that will strike hard and fast.

If I am working through the Book of Romans and come to chapter 8, verses 26-30 (“The Spirit helps us in our weakness. . . . We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him. . . .” etc.), I can emphasize different aspects depending on the group.

Celebration: the overarching sovereignty of God over his creation.

Congregation: a lighter, less theological, more humorous treatment, full of instances from my life and others’ of how God’s sovereignty has worked itself out in daily and family living; a “hang-in-there” message.

Cell: a hard look at my personal attitudes and actions when the situation demands that I depend on God’s sovereignty; counsel, exhortation, confession, forgiveness, a time of building and healing.

Class: here I tackle the thorny subject of predestination from the perspectives of biblical, systematic, and historical theology.

Plan for the Appropriate Response

Just as each of the four groupings has a different focus, each is different when it comes to response. The preacher does well to think this through ahead of time.

In the celebration event, my chief end is to bring individuals (both Christians and non-Christians) into contact with a transcendent, personal God. That means they need an opportunity to respond to him in repentance and faith. If I do not provide that before the end of the meeting, it is incomplete.

So there must be ways for non-Christians to meet Christ as Savior and Lord. There must be ways for Christians to repent of waywardness. Some of the methods to accommodate these are invitations, staffed prayer or counseling rooms available at the close, and allowance for individual responses such as hands raised in prayer or praise. These all show that we have not forgotten the goal of a celebration service: to bring men and women into contact with God.

My presentation in such a service is necessarily a lecture (one speaking to many without dialogue). But in a congregation-sized group, this should never be true. In a true congregation, the people know each other well and have developed the social skills of communicating with one another. This greatly aids the learning process if we take advantage of it. Therefore, we structure to allow discussion, dialogue, and even disagreement, so the body of Christ can hammer out the application of the Word to their lives together.

A well-designed congregation group, over the long run, is probably the most effective evangelism agent among the four types. It lets non-Christians hear and observe a loving community of Christians dialoguing together about Christ and their relationships to him. After the meetings, social interaction over refreshments or a meal lets the Word continue to be a stimulus for discussion.

The structure of a cell meeting must be the most flexible of all, since we never know what personal needs lurk behind the members’ masks of contentment. A properly structured cell group gives the Spirit of God freedom to leave the teaching outline after only the first point is covered if it raises a need in someone’s life. The cell leader can-and should-say, “Let’s pick up here next week,” whenever an unforeseen but worthwhile diversion comes along. This is acceptable pedagogy.

The class, of course, cannot just hand out information; it must discern whether the skill or content is being comprehended. Laboratory practice sessions (for students to use skills) or else quizzes (to measure retained information) must complement the teaching of the Word in a class group.

Train Specialists for Each Kind of Group

One of the discouragements we pastors bring on ourselves is attempting to excel in all four group situations. We assume that, having completed our training in homiletics, we ought to be consummate communicators at any level of group dynamic in the church.

Not so. Certain personality types and sets of gifts or abilities function much better in certain group situations than in others, and even seminary graduates are not exempt from this fact. We all need help discerning which roles in the body of Christ we might best fill. Then we could benefit from separate training, both exegetical and homiletical, tailored to the group dynamic best suited to us.

Far more lay teachers as well can be trained for local-church effectiveness if we align our training more closely with the needs and focuses of group dynamics.

Don’t Cross-Mix the Techniques Unless You Mean To

The above discussion is not meant to say that worship can occur only in a celebration service, fellowship in a congregation, growth and accountability in a cell, and instruction and training in a class. But it does say these goals are the easiest to accomplish in the various settings.

There are times when it is good to attempt to worship in a cell, or to encourage one another on Sunday morning. But such mixing should be done intentionally and intelligently, not accidentally. We must understand first what the best setting is for such a practice, and not expect as great a result if we choose to go ahead in a less than optimum context.

The things I have said here about preaching and teaching, like the four group classifications themselves, are not really new. The group dynamics have existed for centuries; only recently have we put names and definitions on them. So also, pastors long before me have sensed instinctively what worked best in one setting or another, and have gone about their ministry accordingly.

What is new here is, I hope, a clearer statement about why they succeeded. If we understand the kinds of groups a church needs to function well and meet the worship, fellowship, intimacy, and instructional needs of its people, and if we grasp how to narrow the focus of the Word of God in those groups to more effectively capitalize on their dynamics, then the net result should be more specific needs in more people’s lives being satisfied. And that is what ministry is all about.

William M. Kruidenier is pastor of Emmanuel Christian Fellowship, Atlanta, Georgia.

- More from William M. Kruidenier

Pastors

None of Us Are Sinner Emeritus

Dean Merrill

An interview with Bruce Larson

Bruce Larson is back in the pastorate now, after twenty-one years of traveling, speaking, writing, and serving as president of Faith at Work. He has thus put himself on the receiving end of his own exhortations about fellowship and community in the church. Seattle’s well-established, block-long University Presbyterian Church is the scene where Larson is working out what he urged in such books as No Longer Strangers, The One and Only You, and The Relational Revolution.

LEADERSHIP wondered how the man who invented the phrase relational theology would view the current state of church fellowship. How far have we come? Have we made progress over the past three decades? Are we closer to one another, more honest, more caring? Senior Editor Dean Merrill went to Seattle to ask.

You grew up in a solid church in Chicago. When did it first dawn on you that Christians were missing something in the area of fellowship or intimacy?

I was a student minister at a little church up on the Hudson River-I’d go up every weekend from Princeton, where I was in seminary. I met my wife in that church, in fact. “Fellowship” consisted of a monthly meeting of the women’s association and an occasional men’s breakfast, where you had a baseball or football player come in and give his testimony.

Then one weekend, I found out some shocking news: a teenage girl in the congregation had left town to go to her older brother’s. She was pregnant. I said to the dear woman who told me, “Could I go and see her?”

“Oh, no,” she replied. “You’re the last person she wants to know what’s happened.”

Suddenly it hit me: That’s what’s wrong with the church in our time. It’s the place you go when you put on your best clothes; you sit in Sunday school, you worship, you have a potluck dinner together-but you don’t bring your life! You leave behind all your pain, your brokenness, your hopes, even your joys.

How much have we changed since then? Have we made progress?

I think in almost any church of any size there are now at least some people trying to be real, asking, “What does it mean for me to belong to Jesus Christ and also to belong to his family?”

You see, God asks us three questions when we try to get close to him. They are not true-or-false questions; they are yes-or-no. Lots of people say “True” to the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, but that’s like saying, “True, I believe in marriage.” Not until you say “Yes” to a person are you actually married.

So God’s first question is not “Do you believe in the concept of discipleship?” It is rather this:

1. “Will you trust me with your life, yes or no?” That’s what he said to Abram: “Will you leave the familiar, sell your house, pack up your goods, and move out?”

He didn’t ask Mary whether she assented to the doctrine of the Incarnation; he said, “Will you be the unwed mother of the Messiah, even though you’ll probably never be able to convince your parents, your neighbors, or the rabbi that you didn’t have an affair? Will you trust me?”

As a church boy growing up, I said “True” a lot of times. But it wasn’t until one night in 1945, while standing guard duty in a bombed-out building in Stuttgart, thinking very hard about my life and what I’d be going home to, that I finally said “Yes” to God.

2. Next God asks, “Will you entrust yourself to a part of my family, yes or no?”

I was in seminary when I sensed God saying, “You know, you’ve never told anybody what your inner struggle is like. Only I know.”

“I’m looking for somebody good enough,” I said.

And God seemed to reply, “What do you mean?”

“Well, I can’t just trust my secrets to somebody like me. I’m a gossip, I’m irresponsible, judgmental, critical. If I could find somebody really good, I’d open my life.”

I remember God saying, “Well, Bruce, you’re about average. A few people may be a bit better than you, and a few a bit worse. But the deal is this: Will you, as an act of faith in me, entrust yourself to somebody like you?”

I said, “You’re kidding.”

But eventually I said, “OK, I will.” And when I did, it was like Pentecost for me. The power of God was suddenly released when I gave up being invulnerable.

To whom did you reveal your inner self?

Another fellow in seminary. He now teaches New Testament at Drew.

When I came here to Seattle, I said to this church, “Let me describe myself. I have an extraordinary measure of the gift of faith; I believe anything is possible with God. I also have a great gift of hope; I really believe tomorrow is going to be the dawn of the Christian era. But where I got shortchanged is in the area of love. I’m insecure, I’m touchy, I’m critical, I’m fault-finding-help me! I’m not a very good lover at all.”

That, incidentally, is why I write so much about love relationships-because I’m so poor at them. My life is strewn with broken and painful relationships. That’s why I’ve become a specialist, I guess, in these things! I’m basically selfish, a hermit. Before I came here, I lived six years on an island in the Gulf of Mexico; that tells you who I am. I preach intimacy and community because I need it so badly.

What’s the third yes?

Finally God says, “Will you get out and be involved someplace in the world? Will you try to walk my love, my Word, my character to somebody? Will you lose your life? Yes or no?”

Years ago Johannes C. Hoekendijk wrote much the same thing when he portrayed the kingdom of God with three New Testament words: kerygma, the proclamation that Jesus is lord; koinonia, the family fellowship; and diakonia, our service to the world. When people say “Yes” to all three, we have an alive church.

Why is church still a lonely place for some people?

First of all, I need to explain something: Loneliness is really a gift. It’s like pain. If we didn’t have physical pain, I’d take my wife to the beach for a picnic, step on a rusty nail, and say, Oh, I don’t want to interrupt the fun, so I’ll keep quiet. I’d soon be dead of lockjaw.

Loneliness is the psychic pain that drives us to do something about our isolation. God has made us for intimacy. It’s not our idea. He put within us a desire to belong to other people, whether we’re Christians or not. That’s just the way people are made. And Jesus Christ has defined the way to fulfill this deep need.

I would never risk sharing myself with somebody else unless I was driven to it by my pain. I can’t bear to be cut off anymore, so I finally open up in a small group or to an individual. Loneliness becomes the very ground of intimacy.

What are the reasons church people sometimes feel stymied with their loneliness?

The church, unfortunately, has become a museum to display the victorious life. We keep spotlighting people who say, “I’ve got it made. I used to be terrible, but then I met Jesus, got zapped by the Spirit, got into a small group, got the gifts and fruit of the Holy Spirit . . .” and the implication is that they are sinners emeritus. That’s just not true.

What we need in the church are models who fail, because most of us fail more than we succeed. We find success once in a while, and we praise God. But much of what we do is a flop. Every parent knows that. So does every spouse. We all fail our cities, our world.

We need to admit that. Even the biblical heroes failed. Abraham had only one puny kid; where was the great nation he dreamed of? Moses never entered the Promised Land. Jesus died saying, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Neither Peter nor Paul saw the full flowering of the church.

In the East African revival of the past forty years, the church has flourished because people have freely confessed their failures and sin. When we pretend that we once sinned but don’t now, we produce a church where loneliness is rampant, a place where I know I’m not making it but I assume everyone else is.

The church is not a museum for finished products. It is a hospital for the sick.

What are some of the quick fixes for loneliness being heralded today?

Christians think that if they read their Bibles enough or go to enough meetings and groups, they can be “cured” of loneliness. The Devil uses lots of cultural myths in this regard-for example, the idea that life is hard and cruel, but when the right guy with the glass slipper comes along in his Camaro, you’ll live happily ever after. So kids say, “Ah, marriage is the cure for loneliness,” and figure all the married people in church are problem-free. But when that doesn’t do the trick, they say they must have gotten the lemon in the grab bag of life.

The Playboy Philosophy says if you have sex with enough people, you won’t be lonely. The business world says success will do it. If I can become the president of AT&T or IBM, I won’t be lonely. In reality, the people at the top of any field are the loneliest of all.

Even Jesus on his last night in Gethsemane-he’s excruciatingly lonely. Has he taken the wrong road? If this is the right road, can he endure the crucifixion? He has only two choices: he can hide his loneliness or share it. He chooses to share it with three trusted friends . . . and they keep going to sleep on him.

Now we know Jesus is the model for the church. He is our supreme example. How many churches would welcome a pastor who, once in a while on a Saturday night, would call three elders or deacons and say, “Would you mind coming over to the parsonage?” They’d come, and then the pastor would say, “It’s been a tough couple of weeks. I haven’t prayed in ten days. I’m in the dark night of the soul. My wife and I aren’t speaking, I’m full of self-hate, and tomorrow is Sunday. I have to stand up and bring good news to the people, and I don’t have any good news. So I’m going to wrestle all night tonight, and I believe God can change me and deliver me-although he may not. I’m so terrified. I thought if you three came along and just kept me company while I prayed-the coffee pot’s on-you know, I really want to make it somehow. … “

A real New Testament church would say, “This pastor is just like Jesus.”

But we’re more prone to say, “No, you’ve got to have it all together. Smile a lot. Be successful.”

Our culture forces that kind of expectation, doesn’t it?

Certainly. We have two particular problems in this regard.

One, we are a nation built by people who kept moving on. They started on the East Coast and kept heading westward whenever a problem arose. Ellen Goodman, the columnist, says that now, with no more geographical frontiers to move to, we’ve begun moving away from each other. The frontier is within, and we move away from our spouse or our family whenever we don’t know how to solve something.

I urge premarital intimacy with every couple who comes to me for a wedding. I didn’t say premarital sex; I said intimacy. I tell them, “I hope you’re sharing deeply about whatever is happening in your lives. If you do, you’ll have a super sex life after you’re married. The physical will be an expression of the spiritual. But if you try to be intimate through the physical only, it will soon become very boring.”

Our other problem is our consumer mentality. We go to a school and say, “I’ll give you money; educate me.” That’s impossible. All the school can do is provide stimulus and resource. We go to a doctor and say, “Make me well. Here’s the money; give me the pills, the surgery.”

We come to the church and say, “Give me faith; give me God. Here’s my money.” Faith and wholeness and intimacy are not so easily purchased. You have to take risks, to come out of the shell and let God have you. Here are the three yeses again.

Is the whole desire for intimacy insatiable? Will there always be church members crying, “Nobody loves me,” no matter how hard the leadership tries?

Yes! This is the trick God has played on us. If my needs could be solved by human intimacy, I wouldn’t need God. My marriage and my small group would be enough. But God says, “No, you’re going to need me. Your wonderful spouse and church are never enough.”

Then some church leaders would say, “Why worry about it? The lonely you have with you always. … “

Yes, but it will kill you. The new word from the medical community is that loneliness is the number one killer in America. James Lynch, the Johns Hopkins researcher who wrote The Broken Heart, has ten years of charts to back him up on this.

What’s your answer to someone who says mission/outreach is what’s really important, and Christians need to focus on the urgent tasks rather than their own feelings?

That is like a person saying, “I don’t need to eat-just work.”

It is true that we are to be productive people. Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. But the branches must have nourishment through connection.

I think one of the failures of those who espoused great causes in the 1960s was that while their causes were just, the persons themselves kept breaking down, and so did their followers. They were unnourished. They became brittle and hard, and eventually cracked.

Christians, to be productive, need to be nourished, and we do this in community. We have no choice-God made us this way.

Jesus said in one place, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” What is he talking about? What is this power to bind and loose?

Well, if all of us fail and none of us are sinners emeritus, we must be forgiven-Jesus says here that my release comes at the hands of another. That is one purpose of a small group: to loose crippled people from the sins that restrict them, to call forth gifts, to set people free, to deploy them in the world.

How have you implemented this nourishment at University Presbyterian?

When I came, I said to the thirty-six elders at the first Session retreat, “Now I plan to leave here someday in my right mind, full of love for God and myself and all of you, not diminished but expanded. I want to be everything God meant me to be. To do that, I need a few of you to hold me accountable.

“I want to meet with a few of you once a week for an hour and a half to pray, read the Bible, and share our lives. If you’re interested, let me know.”

Well, six of the men-none of the women, interestingly-came up one by one and said, “Count me in.” For almost four years now, we seven have met here every Tuesday morning at seven o’clock. We don’t talk church business; we talk about our lives, our marriages, our kids, our jobs, health, sex, money . . . we read the Bible, and we pray for each other. I ask them to help me be the man I’m supposed to be.

If I didn’t have a group like that, I couldn’t survive in this very busy church. I’d become plastic. Here is the “binding and loosing” Jesus spoke about. I am loosed every week by these men.

In my appointment calendar for every Tuesday, my secretary writes “The Seven Dwarfs.” (She gave us that name, we say, because she thinks she’s Snow White.)

Now I’ve never advertised what we do, but you can believe this congregation knows its pastor meets for an hour and a half every week with some men to pray and share their lives. I’m sure that’s one reason why we now have four to five hundred small groups going in this church. People don’t do what a pastor tells them to do; they watch what you do and then copy it.

Do you lead your Tuesday morning group?

Oh, no, no! The leader is whoever brings the doughnuts. That person comes prepared to guide us in the next section of whatever book of the Bible we’re studying.

When it comes time to share needs, we pass around a little three-minute hourglass, and that’s how long you get to talk. After all, we have jobs to get to, so we can’t talk forever. Then we pray.

Last summer, after spending three years together, we said, “Let’s have a day-long retreat.” So we went up to Whidbey Island. We started around the circle that morning with the question “What is a fate worse than death?”

By learning what my brothers were really terrified of, I came to know more about who they were. The seven of us had seven very different fears.

Then we said, “What are your dreams? What do you hope to accomplish if you live ten more years?” Again, the variety was great, because two of the men are young, two are middle-aged, and two are retired. See, when I was with Faith at Work, pastors always used to ask me, “How do you get small groups going in a church?” There is only one infallible way. You start one group because you need it. You don’t whip up a program. You don’t say, “This will be good for our church.” You say, “I have said yes to Jesus and yes to the family of God. Therefore I need to be in a group.”

Most churches fail to have groups because the pastor either doesn’t belong to one or else has started them for an ulterior reason: to increase membership, for example. If you want a tithing church, you’d better tithe. If you want a praying church, you’d better pray. If you want a fellowshipping church, you’d better be in a group.

What about your other thirty elders?

We spend the first forty-five minutes to an hour of every Session meeting sharing and praying in small groups. I said, “Some of you may be in a small group outside of this, but your leadership in this church will be felt more by how we live together and model authentic life than by the decisions we make about budget and staff and program. We’re not just a board of directors. We’re here as the elected, ordained leaders of this church, and they trust us to be something together.”

The result has been that Session meetings now get done around ten o’clock whereas they used to go on till midnight. We took an hour we couldn’t spare-and we get our work done earlier.

How are the rest of the people organized into groups? Do you assign?

Not at all. We simply model the importance of this experience and let people sort themselves out.

For example, two of our members, Jean and Les McMillan, picked up on something I’d preached about in Acts 5:12-16, where it tells about the early Christians meeting in a place called Solomon’s Porch, and whole crowds came there for healing. This was a public place, not a church building. So they said, “Why couldn’t there be a place for people to just drop in and be with Christians?” They settled on a Burger Chef, and every Friday noon this group gets together to laugh, cry, share, and set one another free.

The only organizing we do is in the fall each year, when we say on a Sunday, “If you’re not now in a small group and would like to be, come to such-and-such a place.”

Two or three hundred people usually show up-those who are new to the church or have gotten bypassed along the way. Old people, middle-aged people, young people, singles, marrieds-they all come. Then we say, “All right, when are you available? Who’d like to be in a group on Tuesday night? Wednesday noon? Saturday morning?” They match up right there on the spot.

As you can tell, this cuts across all the barriers. We don’t say a group is for marrieds, or career people, or whatever. They’re just Christians together.

Maggie Kuhn of the Grey Panthers, a great friend of mine, says, “The only place people can have an intergenerational experience these days is in the church.” We’re the one place to be a family together.

Are you swimming upstream in this regard? Don’t people prefer “their own kind”?

Perhaps a few do, but more of them are hungry for the chance to be with different age groups. Some of our groups span three generations. We’re even integrating our summer deputation teams now. This church has sent teams all over the world for twenty-five years, but last year we sent a team to East Germany that was a college student, a middle-aged couple, and an older couple. This month we’re sending an intergenerational medical team to Haiti.

A week from Sunday we’re having a “Winter Picnic” on Sunday afternoon, where all ages can come-kind of like an old camp meeting-for food and fun.

What’s the average size of your small groups?

Under twelve. Beyond that, you’re not a group; you’re a meeting.

Do husbands and wives generally stick together in your groups?

Some do, some don’t. It’s up to the couple.

How do you prevent groups from becoming ingrown?

Getting together just to have sweet fellowship is no good. The goal is to produce whole people. A group is where we are loved and forgiven and encouraged and affirmed and sent forth into the world. We have spelled out three kinds of mission very clearly: ministry, evangelism, and prophecy.

Ministry is Christian-to-Christian. We are all ministers when we unbind our brothers and sisters, listening, caring, loving.

Evangelism is Christian-to-unbeliever. Here we introduce someone to a Person: “Want to meet somebody?” In order to do this, we may go across the street or around the world.

Prophecy is speaking for God about the structures of society. Every member is called to be a prophet in his school, his hospital, her shop, her business, her factory, Boeing, wherever. We are to be God’s creative change agent in that situation, letting the Spirit of God say through us, “This isn’t good enough; we can do better. Here’s a new way. … “

If we don’t move toward these purposes, then the small group becomes a sterile pocket. It is meant to be a deploying center.

How often do you become frustrated in this whole area?

About once a week! I say, “What am I doing here? It’s not working.” And then I discover God is working after all.

It’s like skiing, which is something my kids finally got me to try only about fifteen years ago. When you’re just starting, you look down that slope and think Oh, no, and so you try to hug the hill as you go down. What happens? Your skis go out from under you every time. You eventually learn to lean out where it’s dangerous, and the farther you lean, the more your skis bite into the snow, and the safer you are. But it means unlearning all your normal survival instincts.

All of us in the church have been taught to play our cards close to the chest-don’t tell people what you’re really like, because they’ll use it against you. And they will! But if you do that, you die. As Jesus said, the more you lay down your life, the more you find it. The more vulnerable you become, the safer you are.

What about the small-town or rural congregation? Does relationship building need any encouragement there, or do things just happen naturally? In other words, are they automatically ahead of city and suburban churches?

I’ve served churches in three small towns. Yes, everyone knows each other-in fact, they’re often related to each other. But that doesn’t keep those towns from being some of the loneliest places on earth. Everybody knows so much that people are terrified. There’s a conspiracy of silence: “I know your secrets and you know mine, but we’re never going to talk about them.”

In a large city like Seattle, you can hide-or you can choose intimacy within a church community. In a small town, it almost takes more of the grace of God to have a breakthrough. It can happen; I’ve seen it. But it’s more terrifying.

How does it come about?

The same as anywhere else: when people can’t stand the faade anymore. See, it doesn’t do any good to know someone’s secrets unless he tells them to you. That’s why we confess to God. He doesn’t need the information; he already knows our sins. But the forgiveness and healing can’t start until we say, “Here is my problem.”

It doesn’t work for me to say to you, “I know what your problem is.” That just destroys relationship. You have to come out with it first, and then I can minister to you.

In a small community, even though the hiding places are few, there’s no release until the person voluntarily says, “You know, I’ve been unfaithful, or I’ve defrauded someone, or I’m a closet homosexual,” or whatever.

It’s like when Jesus said to the man in the tombs, “What’s your name?”

The fellow said, “Well, I’ve got a lot of them. My name is Legion.”

Only then could Jesus start helping him. God doesn’t barge into a person’s life, and neither can we.

A church in whatever size town is to be a hospital where people can get well by the power of God. In order for that to happen, real community is a necessity. And you have to work at it.

Is it possible that small groups are just another fad? Will we remember them in the year 2000?

Certainly small groups are a fad, even a gimmick. They are an artificial step toward making the family of God a reality. But community is not a gimmick.

I hope the small-group movement dies out.

Seriously? What do you mean?

I hope we can make the whole church a place for God to heal people, to bind up their wounds and set them free. This requires a shared ministry, which requires intimacy, confession, openness, and the calling forth of gifts.

That’s what the Wesleys did with their class meetings. No more than twenty or thirty thousand Methodists changed the face of England by meeting in small groups and asking one another, “What is God telling you to change in your life?” They had deep koinonia, but from there they went out in deep diakonia as evangelists, ministers, missionaries, and prophets. Child labor laws were written, prisons were reformed, and slavery was abolished in the wake of these groups.

How many people change a nation, for better or worse? Maybe one percent. That’s all the Wesleys had. That’s also all Hitler had in the beginning.

As the pastor of a large church, you are now on the other side of the desk; you’re no longer the itinerant speaker/author encouraging small groups. Do you ever worry about what’s going on in all those living rooms without you? Do small groups erode authority?

A good question. (Pause)

If you are called by God to be a pastor, your authority is that he called you, not your perfection or brilliance. If your authority comes from pretending to be more than you are, that is the source of stress.

I am not adequate to be the pastor here or anywhere else. But I’ve been called by God to be here, and these people have called me here, so I go on.

I believe in proclaiming the Word of God with power. I believe that on Sunday morning I’m shooting with real bullets. So I declare what I think is God’s news for this part of his people in Seattle in 1984: “Here is what we should be and do and believe and act.”

But then I come down from the pulpit and say to them, “How in the world can we do that? How can I be that kind of father or husband or citizen? Help me! I’ve preached the blueprint, but we’re pilgrims in this together.”

If you pretend you’re doing everything you preach, people know you’re not, and you lose your authority. But if you let them help you, I think they respect you more.

Do small groups sometimes become power blocs?

Yes, if they want to.

How do you prevent that?

You can’t.

And that’s why some church leaders say it’s better not to have groups.

Or they say, “People have very serious needs, and if you turn them loose without a pastor in the circle, all kinds of weird things may happen.”

I respond by saying: What choice do you have, if you really mean to pastor them? Imagine a church of three hundred members. If you see all the people you can, spending an hour with five different people every day, that’s only twenty-five people a week. There’s no way you can tend to all their marriages and jobs and job changes and kids and . . .

Let’s face it: we’re in a situation like China under Mao, when they had to admit they lacked adequate health care for all those millions. The people were suffering, and the government had neither the time or the money to train enough doctors. So they invented the “barefoot doctor,” who, they said, could probably take care of 90 percent of people’s problems. The 10 percent would have to come into the city hospitals.

Was that the best way?

There wasn’t any alternative.

I believe with Paul Tournier that 90 percent of people’s problems are best dealt with by fellow strugglers, not psychiatrists, doctors, or clergy. Only about 10 percent need professional help. So we train people and turn them loose to pastor each other, saying, “If you hit a real stickler, come to one of the pastoral staff. Otherwise, you’re the barefoot doctor.”

How do you train group leaders?

Kind of ad hoc. To start with, all our applicants for church membership go through a ten-hour course that includes being part of a small group with a facilitator. In other words, you don’t just sit down and listen to left-brain presentations of the gospel; you also receive guidance and a chance to share your life. If the assignment is to read a certain book, you come back and tell how you’ve applied this in your office, your neighborhood, your home. So you can’t join this church without spending two months with five or six other people on a weekly basis.

Then there are other occasions for modeling and training. For example, we’re going to the Opera House for our two Easter services this year. That way we can accommodate around six thousand people. But the main reason is to have room for ministry to people between services.

In preparation for that, we’ll have a Saturday class on conversational counseling. We’ll train our people to walk up to a stranger and say something besides “Are you saved?” We’ll show how to move from chatting about the service to getting down to deep needs.

But we don’t have a course that turns out certified small-group leaders. This is not like acquiring a computer skill.

In the past four years, have any of your groups gotten seriously off track?

Not that I know of. We have individuals who’ve done some strange things in groups, and people have come to us saying, “What do we do with so-and-so?” But nothing bizarre.

Do you control the study content of your groups?

I suppose so, in that most of our groups use things like The Edge of Adventure, Living the Adventure, or The Passionate People, materials developed by Keith Miller, my wife, and me. These courses make leaders out of anyone who knows how to turn on the tape recorder, since they include cassette instructions. But there is still much room for leadership skills to come forth, and that is what I want to see happen.

In the life of the church worldwide, what work is still to be done regarding community? What do you hope happens during your remaining years in the ministry?

I really believe the whole frontier of medicine has to do with belonging and intimacy. That’s why I wrote the book There’s a Lot More to Health Than Not Being Sick. General practitioners say if they could spend an hour a week with each of their patients just talking-“How’s your job? How are you treating your mother-in-law?” and so forth-most of them would get well.

That tells me the church ought to be at the forefront of healing, with the medical world as an adjunct.

Like any pastor, I get a parade of people coming through my office every year saying things like “I’ve just been dumped by my wife of fifteen years. She doesn’t want me anymore; she’s moved out.” That person doesn’t need a professional nearly as much as somebody who was dumped two years ago and has been a survivor. The same holds true for cancer victims, the bereaved, parents with kids in jail, the jobless-they’re all needing the touch of an ordinary person in whom the Spirit of God has been loosed.

If we would claim our birthright, we would be that kind of church. The medical world is looking for somewhere to refer people, but they think our business is religion. Our business is life.

I am not saying our primary task is healing. Our primary task is to proclaim and model a kingdom. As we do so, we deploy whole people to introduce others to the King, and healing results.

- More from Dean Merrill

Pastors

THE SEARCH FOR APPLAUSE

Henri Nouwen

I have always had a strange desire to be different than other people. I probably do not differ in this desire from other people. Thinking about this desire and how it has functioned in my life, I am more and more aware of the way my life-style became part of our contemporary desire for “stardom.” I wanted to say, write or do something “different” or “special” that would be noticed and talked about. For a person with a rich fantasy life, this is not too difficult and easily leads to the desired “success.” You can teach in such a way that it differs enough from the traditional way to be noticed; you can write sentences, pages, and even books that are considered original and new; you can even preach the Gospel in such a way that people are made to believe that nobody had thought of that before. In all these situations you end up with applause because you did something sensational, because you were “different.”

In recent years I have become increasingly aware of the dangerous possibility of making the Word of God sensational. Just as people can watch spellbound a circus artist tumbling through the air in a phosphorized costume, so they can listen to a preacher who uses the Word of God to draw attention to himself. But a sensational preacher stimulates the senses and leaves the spirit untouched. Instead of being the way to God, his “being different” gets in the way.

-Henri Nouwen

in The Genesee Diary

- More from Henri Nouwen

Pastors

Putting Pain to Work

Paul Brand and Philip Yancey

Healthy bodies know how to make use of pain. A healthy church does too.

Blake Reynolds / Lightstock

I admit, a professional career devoted to people with leprosy, whose main defect is an absence of pain, has biased me on the subject. And yet numbness, too, is a form of suffering. In the case of leprosy patients it can lead to a life of acute suffering.

When I reflect on pain I prefer not to think in a detached way of a hypothetical sum of the world's suffering; instead I focus on one individual with a face and body. At such moments my mind often flashes back to the refined, upper-caste features of my friend Sadagopan, whom we called Sadan. Readers of Fearfully and Wonderfully Made know him as the forbearing subject of my early experiments with proper footwear for leprosy patients.

When Sadan first came to Vellore, his feet had shrunk to half their normal length and his fingers were shortened and paralyzed. It took us nearly two years of unflagging effort to stop the pattern of destruction in his feet. Meanwhile we began reconstructing his hands, a finger at a time, attaching the most useful tendons to the most useful digits and retraining his mind to control the new set of connections. In all, Sadan spent four years with me in rehabilitation. He personified the soft-spoken, gentle Indian spirit. Together, we wept at our failures and rejoiced at the gradual successes. I came to love Sadan as a dear friend.

At last Sadan decided he should return home to his family in Madras for a trial weekend. He had come to us with badly ulcerated hands and feet. Now his hands were more flexible, and with a specially designed rocker type shoe he could walk without damage. "I want to go back to where I was rejected before," he said proudly, referring to the cafes that had turned him away and the buses that had denied him service. "Now that I am not so deformed I want to try my way in the great city of Madras."

Before Sadan left, we reviewed all the dangers he might encounter. Since he had no warning system of pain, any sharp or hot object could harm him. Having learned to care for himself in our hospital and workshop, he felt confident. He boarded a train to Madras.

On Saturday night, after an exuberant reunion dinner with his family, Sadan went to his old room where he had not slept for four years. He lay down on the woven pallet on the floor and drifted off to sleep in great peace and contentment. At last he was home, fully accepted once again.

The next morning when Sadan awoke and examined himself, as he had been trained to do at the hospital, he recoiled in horror. Part of the back of his left index finger was mangled. He knew the culprit because he had seen many such injuries on other patients. Evidence was clear: telltale drops of blood, marks in the dust, and, of course, the decimated clump of tendon and flesh that had been so carefully reconstructed some months before. A rat had visited him during the night and gnawed his finger.

Immediately he thought, What will Dr. Brand say? All that day he agonized. He considered coming back to Vellore early, but finally decided he must keep his promise to stay the weekend. He looked in vain for a rat trap to protect him that last night at home-shops were closed for a festival. He concluded he must stay awake to guard against further injury.

(To prevent such tragedies, we later tried to maintain a rule at the hospital: all released patients must take a cat home to protect them from rats during the night.)

All Sunday night Sadan sat cross-legged on his pallet, his back against the wall, studying an accounting book by the light of a kerosene lantern. About four o'clock in the morning the subject grew dull and his eyes felt heavy and he could no longer fight off sleep. The book fell forward onto his knees and his hand slid over to one side against the hot glass of the hurricane lamp.

When Sadan awoke the next morning he saw instantly that a large patch of skin had burned off the back of his right hand. He sat trembling in bed, despair growing like a tumor inside him, and stared at his two hands-one gnawed by a rat, the other melted down to the tendons. He had learned the dangers and difficulties of leprosy, in fact had taught them to others. Now he was devastated by the sight of his two damaged hands. Again he thought, How can I face Dr. Brand, who worked so hard on these hands?

Sadan returned to Vellore that day with both hands swathed in bandages. When he met me and I began to unroll the bandages, he wept. I must confess that I wept with him. As he poured out his misery to me, he said, "I feel as if I've lost all my freedom." And then, a question that has stayed with me, "How can I be free without pain?"

As I turn from the network of pain in biology to its analogy in the Body of Christ, comprising all believers, again I am struck by the importance of such a communicative system. Pain serves as vital a role in protecting and uniting that corporate membership as it does in guarding the cells of my own body.

Deep emotional connections link human beings as certainly as dendrites link cells in our bodies, evident even in such relative trivialities as sporting events. Watch the face of a wife sitting in the stands at Wimbledon as her husband plays in the championship tennis match. Strands of concern and affection unite them so intensely that every on-court success or failure can be read on the wife's face. She winces at every missed shot and smiles at each minor triumph. What affects him affects her. Or, visit a Jewish household in Miami, San Francisco, or Chicago around election time in Israel. Many Jews know more about the campaign ten thousand miles away than about their local elections. An invisible web, a plexus of human connections, links them with a tiny nation of strangers far away.

Or, recall the effect on a nation when a great leader dies. I experienced the unifying effect of pain most profoundly in 1963 when I came to the United States to address the student chapel at Stanford University. As it happened, the chapel service occurred just two days after the assassination of President John Kennedy. I spoke on pain that day, for I could read nothing but pain on the faces of hundreds of students jammed into that building. I described for them scenes from around the world, where I knew clusters of people would be gathering together in prayer and mourning to share the pain of a grieving nation. I have never felt such unity of spirit in a worship service.

Something like those sympathetic connections should link us to members of Christ's Body all over the globe. When South Africa jails courageous black Christians, when a government systematically destroys the church in Cambodia, when Central American death squads murder Christians, when Muslims drive a person from town for the crime of converting, when more of my neighbors lose their jobs, a part of my Body suffers and I should sense the loss. Pain also comes to our attention in whispered signals of loneliness, despair, discrimination, physical suffering, self-hatred.

"How can a man who is warm understand one who is cold?" asks Alexander Solzhenitsyn as he tries to fathom the apathy toward millions of Gulag inmates. In response, he has devoted his life to perform the work of a "nerve cell," alerting us to pain we may have overlooked. In a Body composed of millions of cells, the comfortable ones must consciously attend to the messages of pain. We must develop a lower threshold of pain by listening, truly listening, to those who suffer. The word compassion itself comes from Latin words cum and pati, together meaning "to suffer with."

Today our world has shrunk, and as a Body we live in awareness of all cells: persecuted Russian believers, starving Africans, oppressed South Africans and Indochinese and Central Americans . . . the litany fills our newspapers. Do we fully attend? Do we hear their cries as unmistakably as our brains hear the complaints of a strained back or broken arm? Or do we instead turn down the volume, filtering out annoying sounds of distress?

And closer, within the confines of our own local membership of Christ's Body-how do we respond? Tragically, the divorced, the alcoholics, the introverted, the rebellious, the unemployed often report that the church is the last body to show them compassion. Like a person who takes aspirin at the first sign of headache, we want to silence them, to "cure" them without addressing the underlying causes.

Someone once asked John Wesley's mother, "Which one of your eleven children do you love the most?" Her answer was as wise as the question foolish: "I love the one who's sick until he's well, and the one who's away until he comes home." That, I believe, is God's attitude toward our suffering planet. He feels the pain of the suffering; do we?

God gave this succinct summary of the life of King Josiah: "He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well." And then this profound postscript: "Is that not what it means to know me?" (Jer. 22:16).

I hear many cries for unity in the church today; a watching world sees divisiveness as our greatest failure. Calls go out exhorting one denomination to merge with another, or for many denominations to join hands in a national or worldwide campaign. Out of my experience with the nervous system in the human body I would propose another kind of unity: one based on pain.

I can read the health of a physical body by noting how well it "listens" to pain-most of the diagnostic tools we use, after all (fever, pulse, blood cell count), measure the body's healing response. Analogously, the corporate Body's health depends on how the stronger parts attend to the weaker.

Some cries of pain in the Body come to us loudly and persistently. We cannot help but acknowledge them. I am more concerned with the distant outposts of pain, the extremities of limb in His Body that we have somehow silenced. I have performed many amputations in my life, most of them because the hand or foot has gone silent and no longer reports pain. There are members of Christ's Body, too, whose pain we never sense, for we have denervated or cut whatever link would carry an awareness of them to us. They suffer, but silently, unnoticed by the rest of the Body.

I think of my Lebanese friends, for example. In Beirut, children have grown up knowing nothing but war. They carry submachine guns as nonchalantly as American children carry water pistols. They play, not in parks, but in crumbling skyscrapers gutted by bombs. Christians in Lebanon, especially the Armenians, feel utterly abandoned by the church in the West, which focuses so much attention on Israel and assumes all non-Israelis in the Middle East to be Arab and Muslim. Spokesmen for Christians in Lebanon eloquently plead for compassion or some token of understanding by their brothers and sisters in the West, but we act as though the neural connections have been cut, the synapses blocked. Few hear their pain and respond with Christian love.

Or I think of the homosexual population scattered throughout our churches and colleges. Some surveys show that as many as 20 percent of males in Christian colleges struggle with homosexual tendencies. The reality is so abhorrent to Christian leaders, though, that the church may simply pretend they do not exist. They are left to flounder, cut off from the balance and diversity of the larger Body and the compassion that might help them.

Or I think of the elderly, often put away out of sight behind institutional walls that hold in all sounds of loneliness and mourning. Or of battered children who grow up troubled, unwelcomed into foster homes. Or of races who feel cut off from participation in the Body. Or of prisoners sealed off behind huge fences. Or of foreign students who live tucked away in cheap lodging, isolated and afraid. Even those within the church judged for some minor doctrinal disagreement can feel cut off, severed.

In modern society we tend to isolate these problems by forming organizations and appointing social workers to deal with them. If we are not careful, a form of institutionalized charity will grow up that effectively isolates hurting members from close personal contact with healthy ones. In such an event, both groups atrophy: the charity recipients who are cut off from human touch and compassion and the charity donors who think of love as a kind of material transaction.

In the human body, when an area loses sensory contact with the rest of the body, even when its nourishment system remains intact, that part begins to wither and atrophy. In the vast majority of cases-95 of 100 insensitive hands I have examined-severe injury or deformation results. The body poorly protects what it does not feel. In the spiritual Body, also, loss of feeling inevitably leads to atrophy and inner deterioration. So much of the sorrow in the world is due to the selfishness of one living organism that simply does not care when another suffers. In Christ's Body we suffer because we do not suffer enough.

I must also mention one further service that members of Christ's Body perform by embracing others' suffering. I say this carefully: we can show love when God seems not to.

The great accounts of Christians who have suffered, beginning with the Book of Job and the Psalms and continuing through the writings of and about the saints, speak of a "dark night of the soul" when God seems strangely absent. When we need Him most, He is most inaccessible. At this moment of apparent abandonment, the Body can rise to perhaps its highest calling; we become in fact Christ's Body, the enfleshment of His reality in the world.

When God seems unreal, we can demonstrate His reality to others by modeling His love and character. Some may see this as God's failure to respond to our deepest needs: "My God, why have You forsaken me?" I see it as a calling for the rest of the Body to push through loneliness and isolation and to embody physically the love of God.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same suffering we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort (2 Cor. 1:3-7).

As I reflect on the need to develop greater sensitivity to pain, I think of one of my favorite patients at Carville, a man named Pedro. For fifteen years he had lived without pain sensation in his left hand, yet somehow the hand had suffered no damage. Of all the patients we monitored, only Pedro showed no signs of scarring or loss of fingertip. My associate went over Pedro's hand with great care and came up with a surprise. One tiny spot on the edge of his palm still had normal sensitivity so that he could feel the lightest touch of a pin, even a stiff hair. Elsewhere on the hand he could feel nothing. We also found on a thermograph that the sensitive spot was at least six degrees hotter than the rest of Pedro's hand (which supported our theory, still being formulated, that warm areas of the body resist nerve damage from leprosy).

Pedro's hand became for us an object of great curiosity, and he graciously obliged without protest as we conducted our tests and observed his activities. We noticed that he approached things with the edge of his hand, much as a dog approaches an object with a searching nose. He picked up a cup of coffee only after testing its temperature with his feeling spot.

Finally Pedro tired of our endless fascination with his hand. He said, "You know, I was born with a birthmark on my hand. The doctors said it was a hemangioma and froze it with dry ice. But they never fully got rid of it, because I can still feel it pulsing." Somewhat embarrassed that we had not considered that option, we verified that indeed the arteries in his hand were abnormal. A tangle of arteries brought an extra amount of blood and short-circuited some of it straight back to the veins without sending it through all the fine capillaries. As a result, the blood flowed very swiftly through that part of his hand, keeping its temperature close to that of the heart, too warm for the leprosy bacilli to flourish.

That single warm spot, the size of a nickel, which Pedro had previously viewed as a defect, had become a wonderful advantage to him when he contracted leprosy. That one remaining patch of sensitivity protected his entire hand.

In a church that has grown large and institutional, I pray for similar small patches of sensitivity. We must look to prophets, whether in speech, sermon, or art form, who will call attention to the needy by eloquently voicing their pain.

"Since my people are crushed, I am crushed," cried Jeremiah (8:21). And elsewhere, "Oh, my anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain. Oh, the agony of my heart! My heart pounds within me, I cannot keep silent" (4:19). Prophets like Jeremiah and Micah stand in great contrast to an insensitive one like Jonah, who cared more about his comfort than about an entire city's destruction.

The prophets of Israel tried to warn an entire nation of social and spiritual numbness. We need to encourage modern Jeremiahs and Micahs and to value our compassionate, pain-sensitive members as much as Pedro valued his tiny spot of sensitivity. By shutting off sensitivity to pain, we risk forfeiting the wonderful privileges of being part of a Body. A living organism is only as strong as its weakest part.

- More from Paul Brand and Philip Yancey

Pastors

How to Gauge the Closeness of a Group

Em Griffin

Analyzing conversation patterns can show how much a group trusts one another — or how far they need to go toward true fellowship.

I walked into the Santa Fe restaurant at 6:35 Wednesday morning looking forward to breakfast with friends. Gordon, Bob, Ron, and John were already seated around the table by the window. They were laughing about how I’d only order orange juice and then eat the bacon and hash browns off Gordon’s plate. I grinned and slipped comfortably into my chair thinking, This is a close-knit group.

What makes a group close? It’s a crucial question for Christians. Others can afford to see closeness as a luxury-a nice add-on, but secondary to the main task at hand. For the church, however, intimacy isn’t an option. Jesus commanded his followers to love one another. Call it what you will-closeness, fellowship, cohesiveness, koinonia-that’s what the family of God is about. But it’s easier to extol the virtues of fellowship than to clarify what it is.

Justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography, “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it.” That vague legal standard hasn’t proven particularly helpful in combating obscenity. Likewise, many Christians have only a shadowy understanding of what real fellowship is. It’s more than one fellow’s definition: “Closeness is a feeling you feel you’re feeling when you feel you’re feeling a feeling.”

I’d like to use our Wednesday morning men’s group to illustrate fellowship. What specifics demonstrate that mystical quality of closeness?

For starters, attendance. People vote with their presence. “If you care, you’ll be there” is one standard of commitment. None of the men would think of skipping a meeting unless he was out of town. I’ve even shifted travel schedules so I wouldn’t have to miss. It’s painful to be elsewhere on Wednesday morning when I know the group is together.

I mentioned the group meets at 6:35 A.M. Even the fact that everyone was there on time reflects our special chemistry.

We share lots of common ground. We’re all members of the same Presbyterian church. Each man is successful in his particular field. We include a corporate vice-president, the editor of a daily newspaper, and the owner/manager of a string of restaurants. All of us struggle to integrate fast-track vocations with the need and desire to spend lots of time with our families.

Our waitress says we laugh a lot. It may be that each of us views the world on a twenty degree off-center tilt, but lots of things strike us funny-including us. We think God wants us to take him seriously, but not ourselves.

Our overriding similarity is that we are trying to be open to the truth of Scripture and have become convinced that God has a special concern for the poor. The group first came together a year and a half ago, after I gave a sermon on “The Struggles of a Bruised Camel” based on Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler. Each man self-selected himself for the group because he wanted to investigate the responsible use of wealth.

You can see how this focus guarantees a certain oneness of spirit. In our church it is probably easier to talk about sex than to reveal income, net worth, and expenditures. A voluntary decision to openly discuss these private details gives us a powerful internal glue.

But do similar backgrounds, personalities, and values guarantee closeness? No. My work as a communications professor and my experience with Christian small groups convinces me that the crucial determiner of koinonia is not the original make-up of the group but what is said between its members. Jesus said it’s not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out of his mouth (Matt. 15:11). In like manner, it’s not who the people are that makes or breaks closeness, but what comes out of their mouths as they interact.

I’ve discovered a tool for analyzing conversation that is a good barometer for the quality of closeness. It’s called the Hill Interaction Matrix-HIM for short. The system was developed by a secular psychologist for use with therapy groups (William F. Hill, Hill Interaction Matrix Monograph). It’s not only diagnostic-describing the level of interpersonal closeness-but I’ve found that a modified version is also a prescription to help people draw closer.

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The HIM is a grid that allows you to categorize any statement according to how well it promotes closeness. Since the equation says that communication equals content plus relationship, the grid slices an utterance two ways-into what is said and how it’s said. There are twenty options. Some reflect individuals maintaining their splendid isolation. Others reveal a unified body that is “one-in-the-spirit.”

Most groups will cover the whole range over a period of time. But group closeness increases as the flow of communication moves toward the bottom right corner of the diagram.

Here’s how the matrix interpreted our “Bruised Camel” group’s conversation.

Topic Statements

The first of four content labels is topic: when members talk about people or things that are not part of the group. Our Camel group does lots of this. We talk about the church, the poor, the weather, the family, the Bible, the buck. As long as the focus is on something or someone outside, and not on our reactions, it would fall in the topic column. Of course, the speaker can set up lots of different moods with his listeners when making a topic statement. That’s what the vertical dimension of the matrix is all about. Here are some real examples from our group as we discussed God’s attitude toward the poor.

Topic-Nonresponsive. John had assigned 2 Corinthians 8, and he asked if anyone was surprised at what Paul said there. After thirty seconds of uncomfortable silence, I said, “Uh-uh.” In terms of fostering closeness, my contribution was zilch. It’s the bare minimum.

Topic-Conventional. Another time Ron quoted Jeremiah’s statement about King Josiah-” ‘He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me?’ declares the Lord.” This plain vanilla recitation is still a topic statement, but the manner in which it was given is a cut above the noncommittal and nonresponsive grunt that had to be dragged out of me. Ron’s statement is topic-conventional, but also note that it doesn’t carry a great deal of personal commitment, which is what moves a statement to the assertive category.

Topic-Assertive. “God has a special concern for the poor!” Gordon stated it as a definite, unassailable fact. His proclamation screamed with certainty. Assertive is the “thus saith the Lord” line in the matrix. Unlike nonresponsive and conventional contributions, assertive words leave no doubt where the speaker stands. Because of this transparency, the HIM says assertive pronouncements foster slightly more cohesiveness. The group at least has some real meat to chew on.

But there’s still a problem. None of these first three gives any indication that the speaker is open to change. In that sense they are all nonrisky. Change of any kind is threatening. When it means reordering cherished beliefs or altering our self-image, it can be downright painful.

Nothing is so emotionally risky as being vulnerable in the presence of others. Yet it’s precisely that willingness to risk that leapfrogs us into the possibility of intimacy. That’s why the HIM makes a big jump from the nonresponsive, conventional, and assertive mindsets to the speculative and tentative ways of saying things. In the ascending order of intimacy, the staircase looks like this:

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Topic-Speculative. “What do you think Jesus meant when he said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven?” Bob asked in a way that showed he really wanted to know. He was ready to hear what others thought and was willing to adjust his worldview based on what he heard. Topic-speculative reflects an attitude that promotes true fellowship. It avoids the “I shall not be moved” intransigence of the assertive style. On the other hand, it loses the positive commitment that assertiveness puts forth.

Topic-Tentative. The tentative way of saying things picks up the best of the assertive and speculative without their drawbacks. “As I read Scripture, I get the impression God has a special identification with those on the margin of society-the hungry, the poor, the prisoners, the oppressed, the widows, the orphans, those who are emotionally strung out.” Hearing John, we were not left in the dark about what he thought, but neither was he dogmatic. The same openness to change that surfaces in the speculative statement is apparent here. John let us know his conclusions, but the slight hesitancy in word and tone of voice also revealed his willingness to adjust that view if confronted with additional wisdom.

You may smile at the seeming paradox of “flexible convictions.” But whatever label we use, the HIM suggests that “riding light in the saddle” is the best way to draw people together rather than drive them apart. This is true not only when talking about topics beyond the group but also speaking about the group itself, personal matters, or relations between members.

Group Statements

Many groups never depart from topic statements. That’s too bad. Holding the conversation to external matters is an excellent way to avoid intimacy. Talking about the group itself is an improvement. The focus comes much closer to home.

Our Camel group has discovered that periodic corporate introspection can strengthen the bonds that hold us together. This is true even when we’re discussing topics.

We originally thought of forming a nonprofit foundation through which to channel funds to alleviate poverty. After much discussion, we decided to keep it an informal fellowship wherein we all anonymously commit funds to a common pot and then jointly decide where to allocate those dollars. We drew closer in the process. The following group type statements may explain why.

Group-Nonresponsive. We were discussing what name we should call our group. “I don’t care,” said John. His brusk reply was understandable. He’d been up most of the night counseling a suicidal teenager. Still, it didn’t do a lot for group unity.

Group-Conventional. “Go ahead and write the article, Em. One of our purposes for existence is to be a possible model for others.” Bob wasn’t just giving me permission to submit this piece to LEADERSHIP. He was making a straightforward statement-about the group, which clarified our reason for being. Helpful.

Group-Assertive. “None of us wants to expose himself to the loss of privacy that 501(c)3 nonprofit status would require!” Ron was adamant. He was also wrong. A few of the men weren’t worried about anonymity. But the strong feelings he attributed to the group carried a lot of weight as we struggled to find the right vehicle to channel the funds.

Group-Speculative. “Do you think we’ll be able to agree on some projects without being at each other’s throat?” This was my question, which probably reflects a desire to avoid conflict. But I was up for hearing their response, and the group quickly laid to rest my fears of a bloodbath. My willingness to accept their assurances is a sign of a true speculative question.

Some folks use questions to nail home a point. Suppose I had said, “None of us is crazy enough to think we’re going to have harmony in selecting projects, are we?” That would be an assertive pronouncement only thinly veiled as a question. No one would be fooled into thinking I’d honestly consider a differing point of view. To be speculative, a group member has to communicate his openness to change.

Group-Tentative. “It seems to me one of the reasons we’re a close-knit group is that we have a common commitment to changing how we spend our bucks.” Gordon’s observation came after a great deal of group soul-searching. We all credited the sincerity of his interpretation, but his “It seems to me” qualification and tone of voice left some “wiggle room” for those who might like to offer an alternative explanation. In this case nobody did. But the fact that we had the option made for a warmer group climate.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, you may be scratching your head in amazement at the idea of me sitting in the Camel group saying, “Gee, I just heard a group-tentative statement.” Do I really do that? No. At least not usually. But there are times when I feel vaguely uneasy with the group atmosphere and try to figure out what’s going wrong. Then I realize we’re talking about topics- important topics, but issues still external to the group. Or else I detect nonresponsive, conventional, or assertive tones coming through.

This knowledge gives me options. I can choose to let the discussion continue in this natural vein, or I can choose to intervene with a statement designed to bridge interpersonal distance. We’ve already seen that group references do this better than topic ones. But just as there was a giant step from the assertive manner to the speculative style, so the personal category accomplishes a great deal more closeness than group-oriented words.

Personal Statements

Personal comments are those a member makes about himself. He could be talking about past history, present feelings, or future dreams. But when self-disclosure begins, we’re no longer referring to absentees or abstractions; we’re dealing with warm bodies having an immediate impact on each other. Fellowship flourishes.

But there are still five ways of presenting personal content.

Personal-Nonresponsive. All of the Camel group are married. Four of us have teenage children. We’ve usually been as transparent concerning our family relations as we have been about money. Once someone in the group asked me how my daughter was.

“Fine,” I answered. That was about as helpful as “No comment” at a press conference. The nonresponsive is the bare minimum of communication without being a social Neanderthal.

Personal-Conventional. “You should have seen me squirm last night when my wife asked me what we were going to talk about this morning,” Ron said. We laughed, because the main item on the agenda was our marital relations vis- … -vis money. The fact that he put a humorous cast on the feeling is typical of a conventional style.

Personal-Assertive. “No way can I go on our weekend retreat. I don’t spend enough time with my family as it is.” Gordon announced his feelings in such a firm way that no one tried to get him to reconsider. Unless other members are feeling combative, personal-assertive words are conversation stoppers. But we did know how he felt.

Personal-Speculative. “I wonder if I’m expecting too much from my kids?” Bob’s question opened a floodgate of doubts that we all have about our effectiveness as fathers. By probing his own adequacy, he created an atmosphere in which we could examine ours. The circle became closer.

Personal-Tentative. “Have you noticed that I’m usually the last one to share what’s happening at home?” Although John’s words had the form of a question, they zeroed in on a truth. He thought he had noticed a trend in his participation and laid it before the group for confirmation or denial. In this John was like a researcher who states a tentative hypothesis and then lets the empirical findings support or refute his hunch. In either case, the statement is benign.

Relationship Statements

Groups don’t have fellowship, people have fellowship. That’s why the HIM regards an exchange between two individuals about their relationship as having the highest potential for generating koinonia.

It means a lot more to me if someone says, “I like your smile, Em,” than if he says, “I’m sure glad everybody’s optimistic.” A relationship statement can draw two people together much more than a generic group reference. But for those listening in, there’s also a vicarious payoff. Everybody benefits. Since group cohesiveness is the sum of the attraction between individuals, feedback is essential to increase the magnetism.

Our Camel group has a structured way of stimulating relational feedback in the area of money. Once a year we take turns presenting our overall financial picture-what we make, what we spend, what we give. Hopefully this is done in a personal-tentative manner. The discloser then opens up for feedback. This is a relational test that can make or break a group. In our case, it’s had the effect of superglue.

Relationship-Nonresponsive. This is almost a contradiction in terms. But it can happen in the closest of groups. After opening my financial books to the group, I asked for specific feedback concerning the purchase of an ultralight airplane. Did they think the expenditure of a few thousand dollars for the sheer fun of flying was selfish on my part? John’s answer, when pressed, was “Maybe.”

John has a sophisticated theological mind and is deep into the question of social justice. He also loves flying. I assume he had all sorts of reactions-pro and con-to my intended purchase. Perhaps he held back because he didn’t want to shoot down my dream. But for some reason I never got the benefit of his reaction. Score it as relationship-nonresponsive. Note that the content designation is relationship because the issue at hand is whether or not John thinks I’m selfish.

Relationship-Conventional. In the same session, I presented a list of charities and the dollar amounts I’ve contributed over the past year. I pointed out that my intent was to support a blend of emergency relief, development, evangelism, and educational efforts. Bob comments, “I like your mix of giving. It’s like a balanced portfolio.” Bob’s affirmation was delivered in a warm, straightforward fashion. I felt good.

It would still be a relationship-conventional response even if he expressed disapproval rather than praise in the same manner. The key is the objective, declarative tone.

Relationship-Assertive. “Your sacrificial giving is pleasing to God!” Note the exclamation point. In written communication punctuation tells us how we are to interpret the words. In face-to-face communication nonverbal signals accomplish the same task. Gordon’s tone of voice, definitive sweep of the arm, and intense gaze seemed to say God himself wouldn’t dare to disagree. Gordon hath spake.

Relationship-Speculative. At the same meeting Ron raised the question of beggars. The previous day he’d been approached by a panhandler. “Do you think I’m foolish for giving him a dollar?” At root, this wasn’t a question of abstract morality or charitable strategy. Ron wanted to know what we thought of him. His openness fostered a time of sharing about our own embarrassment and self-doubts when faced with the same situation. It’s rare to hear someone ask a relationship-speculative question in a sincere quest for feedback. It’s risky. But when someone takes the plunge, the mood becomes deeper, softer, warmer.

In the movie David and Lisa, there comes a point where the schizophrenic girl, Lisa, turns to her equally disturbed friend and pleads, “David, look at me and what do you see?” Wondering out loud is vintage relationship-speculative. It’s also the beginning of togetherness within and without.

Relationship-Tentative. The attempt to state honest perceptions while recognizing that all the polls aren’t in yet is a delicate balancing act in all four content categories, but it’s toughest in the relationship area. Our feelings are so close to the surface.

I attempted to steer this course when one of our members revealed that 75 percent of his generous contributions went to the United Way. See if you think I pulled it off. My response was, “I don’t work in a corporate situation where there’s pressure to contribute a percentage of my salary, so I may not really understand the situation. But my initial reaction is that you might get more bang for the buck if you targeted more of your giving to a few openly Christian organizations that care about the whole person.”

How did I do? When I first heard of the proportion, I was bothered by the thought of all that money going mostly to secular organizations. I tried to temper my reaction while honestly voicing my reservation. I used qualifiers like “might,” “maybe,” and “initially,” which I hoped would keep things open for further input. It worked. He valued my opinion, but I also learned some of the redeeming features in community-chest type giving. I know we drew closer as a result of the interaction.

Drawing a Group Together

So how close is your group? The thrust of the HIM system is simple. You can tell how close a group is by the amount of personal and relationship statements that are voiced in a speculative and tentative way. It’s unrealistic to expect all conversation to be in those four lower right cells. The going would be too heavy. But lots of Christian fellowship gives lie to the name by never getting past topic statements delivered in a nonresponsive, conventional, or assertive style. Many Bible studies get stuck in a sterile topic-assertive mode. That’s sad.

What do you do if your group is trapped in these upper left cells? Understanding where you are and where you want to go is half the battle. The next step is to put the Golden Rule into practice. Model the verbal behavior you’d like to see others use toward you. Personal self-disclosure and relational feedback tend to be returned in kind. Honest speculation and sincere tentativeness are usually reciprocated.

Don’t be afraid to set up artificial means for stimulating this kind of communication. What is normal or “natural” is not necessarily healthy. If it takes playing The Ungame to get people to talk about their feelings, so be it. If it takes prefacing your comments with the phrase “It seems to me . . .” to combat a tendency toward certainty where Scripture is silent, do it.

Above all, see if you can get your group to share the same perceptions you now have. If others see the desirability of relating personal and relationship concerns in a speculative and tentative way, you’re home free.

Enjoy! As you can tell, the Camel group does.

- More from Em Griffin

Pastors

LEADERSHIP BIBLIOGRAPHY

Paul Borthwick

The following resources deal with the church as a caring community. Some deal with care for individuals or specific needs, while others concern the ideals of true fellowship.

Augsburger, David. Caring Enough to Confront. Ventura, Calif.: Regal, 1973. A fine resource for encouraging accountability.

Augsburger, David. When Caring Is Not Enough. Ventura: Regal, 1983. Others in this series are also excellent in fellowship building: Caring Enough to Forgive/Not Forgive and Caring Enough To Hear and Be Heard.

Baker, Don. Pain’s Hidden Purpose. Portland, Oreg.: Multnomah, 1984. Good for building compassion as well as for counseling the suffering.

Bergmann, Mark and Elmer Otte. Engaging the Aging in Ministry. St. Louis: Concordia, 1981. Understanding the older members and incorporating them into fellowship and service.

Bolt, Martin and David G. Myers. The Human Connection. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1984. How people change people.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. A look at a committed community. Useful in helping set high standards for the fellowship.

Claerbaut, David. Liberation from Loneliness. Wheaton, III.: Tyndale, 1984. Examines causes and cures. Helpful both for counselors and the lonely.

Colston, Lowell G. Pastoral Care with Handicapped Persons. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978. Guidelines from a pastor who is also a handicapped person.

Drakeford, Jack. The Awesome Power of the Listening Ear. Waco, Tex.: Word, 1967. The skills required for effective listening. A good training tool. Author has also written The Awesome Power of the Listening Heart (Zondervan, 1982).

Getz, Gene A. The Measure of a Church. Ventura: Regal, 1975. Measures Christian fellowship using biblical standards of love, hope, and faith.

Gish, Arthur G. Living in Christian Community. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald, 1979. Evaluates the church’s fellowship and mission by such standards as discipleship, discernment, sharing, and worship.

LeFever, Marlene. Creative Hospitality. Wheaton: Tyndale, 1980. Ways to use the home as an environment for caring and service to others.

Mace, David and Vera. Marriage Enrichment in the Church. Nashville: Broadman, 1976. Help on structuring the church to build marriages in strength and intimacy.

Mains, Karen Burton. Open Heart, Open Home. Elgin, Ill.: David C. Cook, 1976. Using the home and natural contacts to communicate care and concern.

Menking, Stanley J. Helping Laity Help Others. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984. Teaching church members, by practical instruction and personal example, to care for one another.

Rupprecht, David and Ruth. Radical Hospitality. Philipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1983. Ways to care for others, particularly the needy, troubled, and homeless.

Schaller, Lyle E. Assimilating New Members. Nashville: Abingdon, 1978. Good ways for incorporating newcomers into the body.

Sell, Charles M. Family Ministry. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1981. How to enrich family life through the church.

Stone, Howard W. The Caring Church. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983. A guide to getting laity involved in active pastoral care.

Tournier, Paul. Escape from Loneliness. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962. A good resource for the lonely.

Ver Straten, Charles A. How to Start Lay-Shepherding Ministries. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983. Ways to equip lay people to do pastoral care.

Wilke, Harold H. Creating the Caring Congregation. Nashville: Abingdon, 1980. Guidelines for ministering to the handicapped.

Wilson, Earl D. Loving Enough to Care. Portland: Multnomah, 1984. A useful resource in training others in deepening the love of a fellowship.

Worthington, Everett L. When Someone Asks for Help. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1982. Practical teaching on reaching out to peers in need.

Wright, Norman. An Answer to Loneliness. Irvine, Calif.: Harvest House, 1977. A brief tool best used as follow-up to personal counseling with the lonely person.

- More from Paul Borthwick

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The Red Flower

In Trabert’s Woods

Why the Plum Trees Had Plums

Dorothy

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The personality trap

The thirst for power

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Nathaniel Stephens

The Ancient Priest at Mancetter

Priest Living about Tamworth

Dr. Cradock of Coventry

Macham

Avoiding Such Malpractice

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How Shall We Then Preach?

Choose Appropriate Texts for the Setting

Emphasize Truths Appropriate to the Group

Plan for the Appropriate Response

Train Specialists for Each Kind of Group

Don’t Cross-Mix the Techniques Unless You Mean To

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Topic Statements

Group Statements

Personal Statements

Relationship Statements

Drawing a Group Together

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