On Saturday May 21, the Arbor Leadership Team met at Holy Wisdom Monastery and Retreat Center for a spiritual and working retreat. Pastor Peter and the current team attended. We missed ad hoc members; Colin Steinke and Tom Collins. The retreat was the outgrowth of a sincere longing to discern how God is leading us, as individuals and as a church. Ken Lund organized and guided us through a helpful and holy day.
The outline for the day was built around the six Covenant Affirmations.
Part I—The Word of the Lord
1) “We affirm the centrality of the word of God.”
2) “We affirm the necessity of new birth.”
We opened the day reading, writing and sharing about Hebrews 11:8-12. This is the retelling of the story of Abraham and Sarah who are called into the unknown, to obey by faith. By faith they “looked forward to the city whose builder and maker is God.” By faith, we are seeking a church whose builder and maker is God.
Part II—The Work of the Spirit
3) “We affirm a conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit.”
4) “We affirm the reality of freedom in Christ.”
During this session we used the book “Christianity for the Rest of Us” by Diana Butler Bass. Bass looked at 50 “spiritually vital” mainline Protestant churches and compiled a list of ‘signposts’ that these churches often had in common.
Bass writes; “Although no map can fix the way, there are signposts to point Christians in the right direction, toward the wisdom of God, toward love, toward home….Christians call these signposts ‘practices,’ the activities drawn from our tradition that we do together in community. Practices form Christians in faith as they deepen their trust in God’s love and strengthen their love for the world. When Jesus said ‘Follow me,’ he did not say ‘Follow the map’. Rather, he invited people to follow him, to walk with him on a pilgrimage toward God.”
Below is a review of the 10 signposts we discussed. Part of these synopsis’s are from personal notes and part are edited quotes from the above book and others.
HOSPITALITY. “Christian people, ourselves sojourners, welcome strangers as we ourselves have been welcomed into the heart of God’s transformative love. Hospitality is not a tame practice to offer only those who are likeable, it can be frightening and risky. Hospitality changes both the guest and the host.”
HEALING. Imbalance is one of the central problems of our time. Western life is rooted in stimulation and activity. Christian faith calls us to live a life rooted in God, who offers us salvation and transformation. We open ourselves to God’s healing grace through prayer and contemplation.
CONTEMPLATION. Prayer, silence, solitude, meditation. In our society, noise actually serves to further disconnect us from others and drive us deeper into isolation (different from solitude). Some church experts maintain that a successful church entertains people during worship. Jung says, ”to run from the self is to run from God. From Richard Rohr, “When the church is no longer teaching the people how to pray, we could almost say it will have lost its reason for existence.”
TESTIMONY. “We become ourselves as we tell our own stories. Testimony gives voice to our diversity, the Holy Spirit knits us together. The practice of testimony is a process of releasing control. In many ways, testimony is the most democratic and empowering of all Christian practices. Testimonies are individual stories of being surprised by God’s love, a spirituality of not having all the answers but of living the questions. We did not invent it, it was part of the early church.”
DIVERSITY. Difference not division. Jesus embodies the love of God for all peoples. Love opens the way for people who are different to be reconciled. Desmond Tutu: “The truth is we need each other. We cannot survive and thrive without one another.” Diversity is a foretaste of heaven, God’s dream here and now.
JUSTICE. “Acts of justice can be hard. Maybe they should be. After all, the world is mostly a place of injustice.” “Doing justice goes beyond fixing unfair and oppressive structures. Doing justice means engaging the POWERS, transforming the ‘inner spirit’ of the systems of injustice, violence, and exclusion.” (Please read these 2 sentences a second time, maybe a third.)
WORSHIP. Worship is an experience that transforms the heart. “Worship needs to be ‘an experience of God’, rather than ‘a reflection about God.’” The object of worship is not to ‘create’ anything, the goal is simply to invite people into a sense of openness and attentiveness. “If you can take an hour on Sunday morning and open people to experiencing just a quarter-second of awe, wonder and surrender, it is accomplished.” “Christian worship, though graced with appropriate reverence, need not be solemn.” It embodies the full range of emotions we all experience in celebration, from sorrow to mirth.
REFLECTION. At its core, theological reflection is a way of seeing the world, of linking the intellectual content of faith to its everyday practice.” “These mainline pilgrims linked intellectual curiosity with humility, however. …thinking theologically did not mean arriving at certain conclusions. Teaching and Bible study were not concerned with dogma and doctrinal facts; rather, they immersed themselves in the biblical stories attempting to connect their lives to the text’s ancient wisdom….” “As soon as certainty replaces humility,… it leaves little room for awe. It does not much matter if that certainty is of the ‘left’ or the ‘right’.” “Vital mainline congregations are giving up liberalism, but finding their way back to liberality—that genuine openness which reminds us that in the economy of the universe, we are only human and, despite our marvelous intellectual capabilities, there will always be things we cannot know. In that gap God breathes, and there, we experience awe.”
BEAUTY. Music, art, nature, words, touch, smells, taste, the list can go on and on. Our senses connect us to beauty. But we are even more than our physical senses. For 2 centuries, American Protestantism has struggled between the poles of rationalism and mysticism-with rationalism most often winning. In the vital congregations, rationalism was giving way to new expressions of beauty and finding God beyond words.” and finally; “Perhaps unexpectedly in this highly technological age, young adults may well have found their way back to an untapped stream of American theological mysticism… Christianity is changing–from being the Truth of rational speculation, to being an exploration of the exquisite truthfulness of beauty.”
Part III—God’s Mission in the Church
5) We affirm a commitment to the whole mission of the church.
6) We affirm the Church as a fellowship of believers.
DISCERNMENT. This was the work for the day. Where do we start? “Seeking and embracing the will of God is the hallmark of Christian maturity.” “Discernment does not simply confirm our hunches or intuitions. Instead, it is a perilous practice that involves self-criticism, questions, and risk-and it often redirects our lives.
Transformation is the promise at the heart of the Christian life, that by God’s mercy, we can be different, our congregations can be different, and our world can be different.” So, seeking God’s will in our lives and church, we ask the questions that have helped spark change in the vital churches looked at. “Who are we?” and “What is God calling us to?” “Discernment is fundamentally a practice of asking ‘God questions’ instead of ‘I/we questions’. ‘I questions’ can be driven by the need for self-actualization and a sense of entitlement, ie. ‘What am I going to do to defeat evil? What am I going to do to reach out for God?’ In both questions, difficult ethical problems are solved by what ‘I believe’ or what ‘I think’ is best’. Although ‘I questions’ are a necessary part of life, they do not constitute a Christian practice of discernment. ‘God questions’ shift our focus from what we do to what God IS doing, ‘God questions’ help us understand where we fit in the larger economy of God’s hope for the world.” We can be prayer focused, not program and belief focused. God will give us our passion, purpose and mission. We do not need to try to be something we are not. We can be who God has called us to be in this time and place. We were reminded by Mark Hanson of the work of Global Development Network and their foundational belief that “God’s love will flow”. We are not the planners or controllers of how or when or where,– God’s love WILL flow.
Specifically, the leadership team left with a call to prayer and to develop a Spiritual Formation Ministry Team to help lead us all in asking the God questions for Arbor.
Personally, as I looked at our church family in the sanctuary on Sunday morning, I felt new gratitude to God and richly blessed seeing the faithfully occupied seats, and began to let go of the worry and sadness I have felt at what I thought were too many empty chairs.
We are on this journey together with our loving God and our friend and Savior Jesus.
Elrene Lund for the Arbor Covenant Leadership Team