What does spiritual strength look like? Over the past few months, I’ve come across many examples.
It looks like the preacher, diagnosed with an incurable cancer, who tells his congregation, “For the last twenty years, I’ve tried to show you how a Christian lives. For the next year, or however long God gives me, my ministry is to show you how a Christian dies.”
It looks like the ministry director who notices marital stresses affecting a leadership couple, and she bravely speaks to them directly about her observations and concern, and gently offers her help and her prayers.
It looks like the pastor who weighs an invitation to a “wider ministry” but decides to remain and give full attention to the church he has come to love.
Yet it also looks like the pastor who leaves his comfortable congregation in response to inner promptings from God to build a church in a largely unchurched area.
It looks like that pastor’s family, who agree to uproot and follow him across the country because they believe it truly is God’s calling.
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Where does spiritual strength come from? Theologically, we know that it comes from the Spirit, that it’s not mere human effort. We’re incapable of spiritual strength by exertion alone.
Traits such as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are called the fruit of the Spirit. These are not things we do but things we become by being rooted in Christ and living in the Spirit.
What’s the greatest obstacle to spiritual strength? According to our recent survey (see “How Pastors Practice the Presence”), church leaders cite environmental factors (busyness and interruptions) a bit higher than personal factors (sin, anger, lack of discipline).
Ask about a person’s spiritual growth, you’re likely to hear, “I’d do better if I could spend more time alone.” People, their demands, and the resulting busyness are seen as impediments to spiritual strength.
While solitude, prayer, and meditation are vital, I came across one individual who offers a refreshing reminder of the place of people and their ceaseless demands.
Pachomius was an Egyptian soldier won to Christ by the kindness of Christians in Thebes. After his release from the military around A.D. 315, he was baptized. Serious about his new faith and determined to grow, Pachomius became a disciple of Palamon, an ascetic who taught him the self-denial and solitary life of a religious hermit.
In early Christianity, the model of devotion was the recluse, dedicated to resisting the corruption of society. These hermits wandered the desert alone-fasting, praying, and having visions. Many went to extremes: eating nothing but grass, living in trees, or refusing to wash.
Such was the popular image of holiness: solitude, silence, and severity. And such was Pachomius’s early spiritual training. But he began to question the methods and lifestyle of his mentors.
How can you learn to love if no one else is around?
How can you learn humility living alone?
How can you learn kindness or gentleness or goodness in isolation?
How can you learn patience unless someone puts yours to the test?
In short, he concluded, developing spiritual fruit requires being around people-ordinary, ornery people. “To save souls,” he said, “you must bring them together.”
Spiritual muscle isn’t even learned among friends we have chosen. God’s kind of love is best learned where we can’t be selective about our associates. Perhaps this is why the two institutions established by God-the family and the church-are not joined by invitation only. We have no choice about who our parents or brothers or sisters will be; yet we are expected to love them. Neither can we choose who will or will not be in the family of God; any who confess Jesus as Lord must be welcomed. We learn agape love most effectively in our involuntary associations, away from the temptation of choosing to love only the attractive.
So Pachomius began an ascetic koinonia, where holiness was developed not in isolation but in community. Instead of each person seeking God in his own way, with the dangers of idleness and eccentricity, Pachomius established a common life based on worship, work, and discipline.
In community with flawed, demanding, sometimes disagreeable people, followers of Pachomius learned to take hurt rather than give it. They discovered that disagreements and opposition provide the opportunity to redeem life situations and experience God’s grace. Thus began genuine monastic life.
Pachomius, while largely forgotten in church history, points out to us that as attractive as solitary sanctification may seem, it is life amid people, busyness, and interruptions that develop many of the qualities God requires.
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Oops. In our Spring issue, we published an article by Robert Woods, “Baptism in a Coffin.” The following credit line was inadvertently omitted: Copyright 1992, The Christian Century Foundation. Reprinted by permission from the October 21, 1992 issue of The Christian Century.
-Marshall Shelley is editor of LEADERSHIP
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
