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Archives For November 30, 1999

Off-Road Disciplines

Charles Kiser —  September 29, 2008 — 8 Comments

I don’t know about you, but daily prayer and Scripture reading don’t really do it for me—by which I mean they don’t constantly nurture my relationship with God. That’s not to say that they aren’t a valuable or even indispensable part of the life of a follower of Jesus.

It’s just that my most meaningful times of connection with God don’t take place in the midst of such daily rhythms.

I’ve always felt kind of guilty about this. I’ve never been very good at “daily quiet time,” yet the concept is the most common answer I’ve received in my life about how to nurture my relationship with God.

Earl Creps eased my guilt a bit, however, by pointing out several dilemmas with the traditional duo of daily prayer and Bible study in his book Off-Road Disciplines (p. xv):

  • Scarcity: they aren’t practiced enough
  • Practicality: they often operate in isolation from real life, like the national anthem before a ball game
  • Performance: they aren’t easily correlated to ministry “success”— “unspiritual” people often accomplish a lot more than “more spiritual” people

  • Character: there are lots of bad people who pray and read their Bibles rigorously yet remain unchanged

  • Mission: there are lots of people committed to prayer and Scripture who have no concern for mission or even resist the changes it requires

Earl goes on to say that “on-road” practices of prayer and Scripture reading should be supplemented by other encounters with God that happen unexpectedly—“off-road” experiences. It’s these experiences that are often the formative ones for people.

Failure, for example, could be a legitimate “off-road discipline” to the extent it has the potential to be used by God to form our hearts to look more like the heart of Jesus.

For me, personal retreats are by far the most formative time for me spiritually—times when I break away for the purpose of doing nothing other than spending some time in reflection before God. I journal. I read Scripture. I pray. I prioritize a list of things to reflect on in God’s presence (that’s my type-A), and then reflect on as many of them as I have time.

I leave those times more in tune with God than I’ve ever left a morning quiet time. Certainly prayer and Scripture are involved, but in a different, “less rushed” way.

I’m not sure if retreating is an “off-road discipline” of the kind Earl describes. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not, looking at the table of contents. But it is, for me, a way of getting off the road of life for a while for the sake reorienting myself to God.

Today was one of those days. Thanks to a fellow church planter friend, Les McDaniel, I discovered a Carmelite Retreat Center about 6 miles from my house. It sits on about 30 acres and has private rooms for prayer and reflection. I spent the better part of the day there today and it was awesome. If you live in the Dallas area, you should definitely check it out: www.mountcarmelcenter.org.

Today I was reminded by Paul’s Pastoral Letters (1/2 Timothy, Titus), and then through the words of Earl Creps, that “my best practice must be me.” In other words, the foundation of my leadership and ability to bless other people is my own personal spiritual formation.

As a result, I’ve recommitted myself to retreat like this on a monthly basis. My own spiritual vitality requires it, at least for now.

Maybe it’s not retreating for you. Maybe it is daily quiet time—that’s great. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe, like me for a long time, you haven’t yet discovered what it is.

What ways do you nurture your relationship with God?

In Books, Prayer, Spiritual Formation
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Dallas Willard on Politics

Charles Kiser —  September 29, 2008 — 1 Comment

This quote was too good not to post. From Dallas Willard’s Revolution of Character, pages 14-15:

The revolution of Jesus is first and always a revolution of the human heart. His revolution does not proceed through the means of social institutions and laws—the outer forms of our existence—intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship with God and one another. It is a revolution that changes people’s ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates the deepest layers of their soul. External, social arrangements may be useful to this end, but they are not the end, nor are they a fundamental part of the means.

On the other hand, from those divinely renovated depths of the person, social structures will naturally be transformed so that “justice roll[s] down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24, NRSV). Such streams cannot flow though corrupted souls. At the same time, a changed “within” will not cooperate with public streams of unrighteousness. A transformed soul will block those streams—or die trying.

The impotence of political and social systems to bring about real change is one of the reasons Jesus didn’t send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today. These organizations inevitably convey some elements of a human system. Instead, his disciples were to establish beachheads of his Person, word, and power in the midst of a failing and futile humanity. They were to bring the presence of the kingdom and its King into every corner of human life by fully living in the kingdom with him….Churches—thinking now of local assemblies of Christ’s followers—would naturally result from this new kind of life.

In Books, Justice, Politics, Spiritual Formation
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Acceptance and Transformation

Charles Kiser —  March 31, 2008 — 13 Comments

Yesterday we visited an American Baptist/United Church of Christ/Alliance of Baptists/Emergent church that’s meeting in a Presbyterian church building in North Oak Cliff. It’s obviously quite a diverse community of faith.

I really enjoyed the service. It’s hard to describe it—kind of a contemporary-high church hybrid. In the pastor’s words, the church has one foot in Mainline Protestant churches (high church) and one foot in Emergent churches (contemporary). We listened to a jazz solo, sang an a cappella African song and followed a liturgy. The sermon was an actual conversation between the pastor and church members. Claudia Porche guessed that it might have been the most significant church experience we’ve had yet in our eight weeks of participant-observation.

At the heart of this experience’s significance for me was dealing with the tension of acceptance and transformation. This little eclectic church majored in the gospel value of acceptance. Everyone is welcomed and embraced, regardless of background, race, or even sexual orientation. We experienced this welcome and acceptance ourselves from church members after the service.

The church’s stance on sexual orientation got us talking at brunch afterwards. Though we hold different theological convictions on the subject of sexual orientation, we found ourselves drawn to the culture of acceptance there. We found ourselves asking: How do foster a culture of acceptance and at the same time value life transformation that results when the gospel is appropriated? How can we avoid judging people without loosening our grip on our theological convictions?

It’s a delicate balance. I recently read a book by John Burke addressing these questions called No Perfect People Allowed: Creating a Come as You Are Culture in the Church. Burke said a couple things that stuck out to me. First, unbelievers can’t be expected to fall in line with the transformative values of the gospel until they make a commitment to Jesus. Second, unbelievers don’t make a commitment to Jesus and experience life change without the power of the Holy Spirit at work in their lives. Ministers can’t engineer conviction and transformation.

On a practical level I think Burke’s observations mean that we love people unconditionally and leave conversion and life change to the work of the Holy Spirit. He is the only one, after all, who can convict the human heart and bring about transformation. Unbelievers see the values of the gospel as they are lived out in the Christian community and the Holy Spirit uses that modeling as fodder for change.

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten. I’m curious for your feedback on this matter.

How do you / your church community live in the tension between acceptance and transformation?

In Books, Gay & Lesbian, Spiritual Formation, Values
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Creating Margin

Charles Kiser —  March 24, 2008 — 6 Comments

One of the rhythms we’ve been developing in our early weeks in Uptown concerns space for reflection and evaluation. Andy Stanley and company, in 7 Effective Practices of Ministry, call this rhythm creating margin—space carved out of the calendar for the purpose of evaluation, planning and celebration.

My suspicion is that, if you’re like me, there’s not usually a whole lot of margin in your life. The activities take up all the space on the page. We keep pretty busy; things are hectic; we don’t have time for much more than crashing in front of the TV for a little while at the end of a long day.

Porche and I are trying to make deliberate calendar decisions in our church starting work that will provide moments of margin along the way. We’re convinced it will make us more fruitful and less crazy in the long haul.

Margin moments occur when we evaluate what’s happened in the past: how did the Prayer Walk go? What were the strengths and limitations of that worship gathering? What went well in that hospitality event? What progress are we making toward achieving our goals?

Margin can also be used for future planning and generating new ideas. Maybe it’s reading a book on a subject of interest and sharing its best concepts. Maybe it’s a retreat experience for the sake of planning sermons for a year.

Probably one of the most neglected uses of margin is celebration: rejoicing in our successes, saying thank you, encouraging each other to keep up the good work. How weird would it be if a baseball team forgot to celebrate after winning the World Series? It would never happen. Yet sometimes we get so caught up in the busyness of life and ministry that we forget to celebrate our victories with each other.

This margin idea is not really new at all. The Israelites’ word for margin was Sabbath. God started the Sabbath rhythm after creating the cosmos. What did God do for Sabbath? God evaluated/celebrated (“God saw all that he had made and it was very good”) and he rested.

One concrete way Porche and I have put the margin principle to work is through the development of our own annual personal growth plans. In short, we’ve created a document that puts together all the ways we’ll seek to create margin in the following year—from vacation dates and conferences, to monthly mentoring and coaching appointments, to monthly personal mini-retreats, to daily times of solitude and spiritual habit. I’m invigorated just thinking about how I’ll be invigorated in these times of margin.

Where do you find margin in your life?

In Books, Leadership, Spiritual Formation
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Marvelous Light

Charles Kiser —  December 11, 2007 — 1 Comment

I thought I’d share a testimony from a Christ Journey friend whose life was impacted by the Marvelous Light retreat on November 16-17. It just reminds me why I do what I do (by the power of Almighty God, of course).

Once upon a time I was me. It seemed like a long time ago, but praise to God, I am new today. I went to a retreat a few weeks ago hoping for a change. I say hoping because that is what I was doing, hoping. Not praying. I knew that others had come through it and they had been changed and I wanted change too. Anyway, I wanted to be made whole again so that I could see Gods miracles and blessings in my life. I knew that I was being held back because of things that I continued to hang onto in my magical backpack that no one but me and God knew was there. I would say they were gone, but they weren’t. They were just pushed deeper so I could keep on pretending. God knew though. He knew that He had blessings waiting for me and He stood there, arms crossed, toe tapping, eyes rolling saying, “C’mon, quit talking and start doing. I have a bagful of blessings piling up here…” Can you see Him? He is probably doing it to you too.

During our retreat, we heard about the things in the dark that we do and hold onto that keep us out of the light, (hence the name Marvelous Light). We heard about bondage and things of the occult, (which is more than you would have thought). We heard about legalism and idolatry. Most of all we heard about forgiveness. One of my dear friends and I have talked a lot about that in the past. She is very wise. She had given me some of her story but at the retreat, she gave all of it. When she talked about her story in full, it filled in the rest of the blanks for me and I got it. I understood all that she had said to me and more. She helped a lot of people that weekend.

At that moment I realized that the biggest thing holding me back from receiving the full blessings of God was the spirit of unforgiveness. I realized that I said I forgave but I just called it something else. I pointed fingers at other things. “Well, they made the bad decisions, they are not humble, they sure do have issues!” In reality, all those things are true, but because of my unforgiveness, I harbored anger and resentment. Those two things alone are enough to drive you insane when your mind starts thinking about it. Your stomach starts to boil, your blood starts to rush, your head feels heavy and before you know it you are taking it out on everyone around you who loves you. Then the ball starts rolling, they take it out on the people around them and around them and around them…. No wonder there are so many angry people.

But for me, NO MORE. I refuse to let Satan take my joy away anymore. I refuse to let Satan take my blessings away anymore. I know that I was changed at the retreat because I had an opportunity this weekend to let the anger retake control. I did not do it. I was faced with the one thing that would get me seething mad and I did not bite. Instead, I chose to remain calm. My stomach did not start to boil, my blood did not start to rush, my head did not feel heavy. I was completely and irrefutably unaffected. Even when I realized nothing was happening, I still was unaffected. Even when the discussion heated, I still remained calm. At that moment, I knew that my prayers at that retreat with the 2 other women in my triad were heard and delivered upon. I knew that that burden in my magical backpack was gone. I knew that God had answered my call to take them away from me. Wow, what a freedom I have received! I have been blessed beyond measure since then.

In Marvelous Light, Spiritual Formation
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