A Pilgrimage of Unfolding Grace

Like many people, the Covid-19 pandemic became a sort of apocalyptic reckoning for me. When the world shut down I was forced to examine the way I held my work - although if I’m honest I already knew on a deep level I was teetering on burnout even before everything stopped. As all our norms and rhythms of “doing church” were put on hold, I realized I needed consistent guidance from a caring presence, which led me to Justin McRoberts. It has been a relationship that has greatly benefited me three years on.

One of the first pieces of wisdom I received from my time with Justin was understanding and blessing my limitations. Historically I had wandered into a common trap for spiritual leaders - I made myself available 24/7 in case there was a crisis any given day or hour, and I subconsciously put myself at the center of every possible solution to the problems we had in our community. I was afraid of disappointing my people, not doing a good job with the responsibility I had been given. Creating boundaries and saying “no” seemed anathema to the grandeur and challenge of the vocation, especially when sized up with scriptures that said we must “always be ready” or we must “be all things to all people”. From an authentic desire to be the best pastor I could be, I was stretching myself thin while also teaching my people a lesson I never intended - we must deny our boundaries in Jesus’ name. Justin helped me to see, not only was naming and embracing my limitations as a human being a blessing for me, it was also one of the greatest lessons I could pass along to my community.

It is no accident that you were born into this moment in history. There is something here, now, for you to offer a broken world. Not only has God gifted you with talents and passions, he has called you to a specific time and place that, if you allow them, will also speak to your life’s calling. The challenge before all of us is to choose to root ourselves in a particular place, over a significant period of time, so that we might see deep investment yield fruit.

My friend Scott Evans knows the value of developing a “theology of place” when it comes to ministry. He is currently a chaplain at University College Dublin and a minister in the Church of Ireland. In our discussion today we touch upon the blessings of rejecting many of the cultural messages that surround us which falsely promise bigger and better things elsewhere, to instead see the beautiful invitation laid before us in the very place we find ourselves now.

Sometimes there are stories we tell ourselves that are actually deceptive - they prevent us from embracing reality so that we might be open to God’s healing touch. We insist that life should follow whatever playbook we were handed along the way, but when tragedy comes we are left disillusioned and defeated. But what if this disillusionment is actually a gift, a chance to reassess what we thought life was about, in order that we might conspire with God in honesty to see what might be possible? This is the holy space in which we find real healing.

Brittney and Trevor Reinholt know this path well. As achievement-oriented personality types, they have both experienced radical encounters with God in times of disillusionment and an invitation to see their stories in the light of Christ. They have come to realize that our shortcomings do not discount us from the work of the Kingdom, but are invitations to do the holy work of growth as we in turn help others see the hand of God reaching out to save us. As we are healed, so we can offer healing.

The conversation around spiritual gifts can be a contentious one, both for people who have grown up in charismatic circles where they were sensationalized, or perhaps even weaponized; or for others who may not have grown up with any awareness of them at all. In many regards, it seems a facet of the Christian experience best left in a drawer, a relic from the first century church we can admire from afar, yet never really consider as part of our calling today.

From my vantage point however, I see incredible possibilities for the modern church, as we see the inner work of the Spirit through contemplative traditions meeting with the outer work of the Spirit through the Pentecostal ones. After all, formation and gifts are work of the same Spirit that has guided us for millennia.

Today’s conversation is with my dear friend, Brian Ban, who shepherds the Anchor Fellowship community in Nashville, Tennessee. I have watched Brian, first under his tutelage as part of that community and then as a peer, seek after the Kingdom with everything he has in a way that blesses the gifts to be an offering of God’s love to the world.

We live in an era of remarkable privilege. There are so many avenues available to us in terms of what we choose to do with our lives, which in one respect can be quite exciting; yet, at the same time, it can also feel rather daunting. Where previous generations may have struggled with a lack of options, many of us contend with a sort of “buyer’s remorse” when it comes to our careers - how do we know what we’re supposed to do, and what if we make the wrong choice? What if we get stuck in something that doesn’t bring us to life? re we meant to wander from thing to thing until something clicks? This is where the work of naming and blessing our values and the passions that arise from our unique personalities can help us.

Some of values are imparted to us by our families of origin, some are qualities we discover as we set out on our own, while others seem to be ingrained in our DNA from birth. The more we can articulate to ourselves what we value at the core of us, the better we can discern our purpose.

My friend Christina Ruiz is passionate about helping people slow down so they can name their values in a way that brings down the silos between our faith and work. Through her organization the Purpose Project, Christina creates space for us to consider our personalities, our values, and our best contributions to making a better world so that we aren’t arrested by infinite choice. We don’t have to wander aimlessly.

I am convinced that the greatest gift the Holy Spirit gives us is self-awareness. To see ourselves through the eyes of God is to understand the unique way we have been crafted to move through the world. In a way, maturity is learning to accept the full gamut of who we are, and to begin to do the work of growth to become healthier and more whole in partnership with the spirit of Jesus. God’s love is both affirmation of who we are and tranformation into who we are becoming.

Kristen Blommel is a longtime member of our community, and someone I have come to trust immensely in her capacity to hear the voice of God. In this conversation we talk about her work with the Myers-Briggs personality system, and mine with the Enneagram, and how these systems are intended to give us language for accepting our individuality. If we hold them well they can fast-track the work of spiritual growth in discerning how God has equipped each of us to administer God’s love into the world.

The problem with the ways in which we often try to name the truest things about ourselves is that they are so transparent and transient. They are transparent in that they don’t seem to provide a solid enough foundation upon which to see ourselves, and transient in that they seem to constantly shift, or even slip through our fingers. None of these lies seem to provide us with the length or breadth necessary to identify ourselves, and we find ourselves scrambling to compensate.

I would like to propose that we in the Christian household have an opportunity to reclaim an understanding of our true identity, and allow that reclamation to inform and shape how we see our personality. The most profound way we can approach “identity” is seeing it is a gift to be received, not a status to be earned or attained. There are a few ways we phrase it, being “made in the image of God”, or being God’s children, but my favorite way to name it is being “the Beloved”. It is a hard thing to learn how to receive love rather than earn it, perform for it. Perhaps this can be seen as one of the primary pursuits of a spiritual life. But to learn to receive our belovedness as the core of who we are is to find something eternal and unchanging, in the highest highs and the lowest lows of life itself. It is a gift that is not dependent upon what we like or don’t like, what we have or don’t have, what we do or don’t do, what others think about us.

I had the honor to sit down with my longtime friend and colleague Mark Nicks to discuss the difference between identity and personality. Mark is a pastor and counselor who uses story to help us discern how God is redeeming our personalities as we await the new heavens and new earth.

It is apparent to most that the church in the West is at a tipping point. The faults and failures of what has come before have been laid bare in apocalyptic terms. Yet we know that from the ashes of frail human institutions God is able to birth something new, something vital. Part of what keeps me going is finding voices within the Christian household who can bring a vision of what comes next rather than simply joining in the rage and vitriol. What I hear time and again is the necessity of a dialogue between the liturgical/contemplative traditions that teach us an inner life of the Spirit, and the pentecostal or charismatic movements that champion an outward life of the Spirit. If we are to truly become faithful in our time we must learn to enter a total life of the Spirit, as people who are creating sanctuary in our innermost being to find grounding in God so we can then speak of a radically new way of enacting justice in the world as God’s kingdom.

Brian Zahnd is a pastor in St. Joseph Missouri whom I trust to articulate the way to becoming a contemplative revolutionary. In our conversation, we discuss his journey from Zeppelin-loving Jesus freak to church-growth guru to contemplative pilgrim. We talk about the necessity of a prayer life that, patiently over time, shapes us to have a healthy detachment from the chaos and pain of the world, in order to offer a better more Christlike way.

If our first calling is based on the solidarity of “me too”, then the invitation in our second calling is to those with whom we don’t naturally empathize. There is opportunity for growth outside our tribal allegiances and prejudices when we cross the border into Samaria. The challenge Jesus puts before us is to lay claim to another type of compassion that is no less powerful - the ability to come alongside someone and to say, “I have no idea what that’s like”. It is a chance to learn solidarity that is not based on mere understanding, but presence. I think it is problematic when we limit our compassion to being able to see ourselves in the eyes of others beyond the foundation human experience. If we do so, we risk loving people with an agenda to make them more palatable to us, to get them to be more like us, rather than seeing them encounter unconditional love that might open them to meeting Jesus. Samaritans offend us, but in doing so, they invite us to shed some of our biases in order to love better. In this way, enemies might become friends and our capacity to love is enlarged.

Today's episode is a conversation with Jenna Wimmer, a dear friend and elder in our community. Jenna has devoted her life to care for people with HIV/AIDS, among other things. What I appreciate about her story is how the Lord has given her a burden for people that, at first glance, she has no inherent connection to. She is living out the call to journey into Samaria, in which we learn to love people who are not like us.

The writer Ann Lamott says the most powerful sermon we can ever preach is “me too”. She is speaking to this special form of authority we carry when we see others living a story we intimately know, because it is our story as well. Our hearts are more open because of empathy. The people who are “just like us” may be of a similar background, either ethnically or nationally, but it may be that they share that same spirit that dominated our lives before we met God. They also feel isolation, or rejection, or unseen. Your Kingdom authority is not because you have read all the right books, or done the proper courses, or are an eloquent speaker, but because you are drawn in by sacred familiarity. This is almost always your first and primary calling in your life’s work.

I had the honor of sitting down with my friend Johnny to talk about his years-long struggle with addiction, how God has moved time and again to bring healing to his story, and how it has opened him to his calling to his own personal Judea.