THREE INTERVIEWS: CHURCH LEADERS ON SPIRITUAL FORMATION A Paper Presented to Dr. Barry Jones Dallas Theological Seminary In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Course SF901 Spiritual Formation in the Local Church by Christopher Bogan April 2012 Box #176
THREE INTERVIEWS: CHURCH LEADERS ON SPIRITUAL FORMATION A great way to learn about spurring on spiritual formation in the church is by talking with church leaders who are already doing so. Three such leaders graciously participated in an interview on pursuing and encouraging spiritual formation in their congregations: Debbie Swindoll, executive director of the Evangelical Center for Spiritual Wisdom in Dallas, TX; Adele Calhoun, pastor of spiritual formation at Redeemer Community, Wellesley, MA; and Kurt Bruner, pastor of spiritual formation at Lake Pointe Church in Rockwall, TX. Debbie and Adele have several overlapping points, yet notable distinctions. Kurt s background differs strongly from that of the ladies, largely because of the different path by which he arrived in his position. This paper presents four subsections in each interview. First is a short biographical summary, offering bits of each person s life story that led them to minister in this way. The second section summarizes how they approach spiritual formation in their churches. Third, notable takeaways demonstrate the areas which stood out strongly in each interview. Finally, each interviewee offered a personal challenge for this author to heed as he prepares for church ministry regarding spiritual formation. First Interview Debbie Swindoll Bio Debbie Swindoll currently attends Grace Bible Church of Dallas, TX. She grew up in California, and she counts her excellent educational experience through the Institute for Spiritual Formation (ISF) at Talbot as a significant influence upon her life. She moved with her husband Curt to Dallas in 2008 and found herself for the next year grieving the loss of all she had enjoyed in California. This time of grieving led her to desire to bring the journey she had experience through ISF to others in Dallas. She founded the Evangelical Center for Spiritual Wisdom (ECSW) for three purposes: to set out a spiritual theology for the church, to provide resources for churches, and to train leaders for the curriculum she developed. 1
Spiritual Formation in the Church 2 To begin, spiritual formation means being willing to do the will of the Father as Jesus did. The apostle John emphasized this in his gospel, and Paul also stressed knowing the Father s will in his epistles. The goal of formation must be an engaged life in love with the will of God. To achieve this, the church needs robust goals: not goals that keep us as we are, but ones that change us to become like Christ. Many churches and pastors fail to make such goals for lack of understanding developmental schemas, how believers grow. Debbie, however, recognized that making such robust goals involves psychology, historical theology, and spirituality, and in order to develop a three-year curriculum for spiritual formation that churches could use she sought out experts in each of these fields. The three-year curriculum Debbie and the ECSW developed has four parts. First is teaching the information one needs to know about spiritual formation. Second is personal interaction engaging with what one learns, practicing it, and reflecting upon it. The curriculum also needs healthy community and a right leader, such as a trained spiritual director. Takeaways An interesting description of intentionality and spiritual disciplines that Debbie offered was exercises in attachments. Our only valid attachment is to God; our problem is that we so readily attach ourselves to other, lesser gods that distract us from Him. Spiritual disciplines draw up our lesser loves and attachments and help us refocus ourselves on Him. Most Christians who approach spiritual disciplines struggle with them because they add to their already busy lives. But Debbie notes that, biblically speaking, putting off the old man and its practices is just as important as putting on the new. Christians often forget to or neglect putting off the old, yet doing so frees believers from the overburdening pressure they often face when examining spiritual disciplines.
Debbie made it very clear that a relationship with a spiritual director differs greatly 3 from therapy. Spiritual direction is a discerning relationship where the director points out the activity of God in another believer s daily life. He or she encourages attentiveness and invitations to God; he or she supports the other s relationship with God and not with himself by asking, What is God doing here? How are you interacting with Him? Therapy, on the other hand, is about the client-therapist relationship. Relationship dynamics come with us, so that the therapist draws up these dynamics consciously in his relationship with the client. Therapy is very client-therapist focused; spiritual direction, however, focuses on the relationship between the believer and God. Adele Calhoun also concurs that spiritual direction is not the same as counseling, mentoring, or discipling through information; rather, it is accompanying someone as a spiritual companion with the Spirit as our mutual guide. Personal Challenge At the end of our conversation, Debbie challenged me that spiritual formation begins in the church with the church leaders, especially the pastor: someday, me. We cannot bring anyone else where we haven t been before! Therefore she urged me to focus on my own spiritual formation. She recommends that I do this by setting boundaries and by finding a spiritual director. Second Interview Adele Calhoun Bio Adele came into the area of spiritual direction out of necessity. She was trained in seminary, she had ministered with InterVarsity around the world, and she was serving Park Street Church in Boston before entering this realm. But she realized that when she offered advice to church members, they kept coming back because their underlying issues had only surfaced again with a new presenting problem. An informational fix would only aid the addiction of Boston s intelligentsia, who assumed that learning something new was what spiritual growth meant.
4 This realization led Adele to look for where transformation was happening in Boston, interviewing Catholics, Protestants, whoever would give her time to ask her questions! Her job changed at Park Street Church; she also assumed a position as pastor of spiritual direction at Christ Church of Oak Brook (CCOB), IL, and she now serves alongside her husband in the same role at Redeemer Community outside of Boston, MA. Spiritual Formation in the Church The method for developing spiritual formation in the church that Adele pursues is much more behind the scenes. When she was hired at CCOB, the senior pastor asked her about her vision and her plans for the next four to five years. Her answer? You re not going to hear or see much from me! Adele eschews big programs in favor of working with people who are hungry and seeking God, helping them become intentional in their spiritual life. The vision she expressed to her pastor was that in ten years, the culture of the church would change so that the pastor would feel as though he had a different kind of congregation. Part of working for culture change in a church means teaching leaders how to discern. Many church leaders don t know how to make decisions in a spiritual way rather than a corporate way. Bright business people do not necessarily have spiritual maturity, emotional maturity, or the gift of discernment. They often adopt best business practices to make their decisions, not realizing that there are other ways that are more suitable to making decisions in the church. Adele recommends that if a pastor knows the different kinds of people in his or her church, their different skills and giftings, then he or she ought to know who in the church has the gift of discernment. At CCOB, the pastor was wise enough to admit his inability to tell this, and he asked Adele to help him find these people. Takeaways To begin, Adele stressed the importance of cultivating a personal relationship with Jesus. Many Christians are addicted to knowledge, describing who God is only in abstract terms devoid of any sense of affection or relationship. There is a desperate need for good doctrine of
5 Christian experience! Churches must train Christians to describe their current experiences with God, to talk with others about their current testimony and not only their first one, and to revive the importance of the ordinary story of God s activity in our lives. Breaking addictions to judgment after years of Christian living would make great testimonies in the church! Like Debbie Swindoll, Adele also stressed the importance of discernment among the leadership of the church. People of discernment are not attached to their own opinions; while they are entitled to them, they are able to set them aside to listen, reflect, and adjust when necessary. They are not only biblically and theologically literate, but they are also emotionally and spiritually mature. Their ears are towards God, and their eyes are towards the congregation. They can see what the Spirit of God is doing with people and bring a sense of listening and waiting on God. While models of spiritual discernment did not exist when Adele first embarked on her journey of spiritual formation in the church, she now has worked with the elders at Redeemer to form a model of spiritual discernment in their context that includes waiting, listening, prayer, and quiet. Along with the importance of discernment is the importance of emotional maturity. Too many churches will recognize spiritual maturity in emotionally immature people. For such persons, emotional baggage sabotages their other processes so that they are too sensitive or overreactive, often finding offense where none was intended. People can know God s Word, quote it, wear out six Bibles, yet without spiritual formation they are still emotional adolescents. Adele recommends the books Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and The Emotionally Healthy Church by Pete Scazzero as fantastic resources to strengthen this aspect of spiritual formation in the church. Part of Adele s ministry at CCOB turned into the Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, a collection of 2-3 page summaries of spiritual practices that everyday people can try as they grow in their relationships with God. Her intention as she wrote these up for meetings of church leaders at her church was to expose them to ways to make space in their lives for God beyond Bible study and prayer alone. She covers topics such as contemplative prayer, fasting,
meditation, worship, subcategories of these and other methods as well in her practical guide. 6 These bite-sized disciplines share a common principle with Kurt Bruner s approach to take-home applications: make them easy, and make them likely. Personal Challenge Adele s personal challenge came in three parts. The first was to get a spiritual director: someone to walk with me and help me listen to God s movement in my life. Second was a tandem-question: What part of my personality is unusable in the Lord s service in its present form? What needs to be transformed in me? Thirdly she asked me, How is your prayer life, and how is it changing? Addressing these questions honestly, tackling them intentionally, and walking alongside a spiritual director will be a great help in my continued personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Third Interview Kurt Bruner Bio After earning his Th.M. degree, Kurt started working at Focus on the Family in a temporary position that turned into a twenty-year career! He always felt called to pastoral ministry, yet he was never on staff at a church, serving instead in lay leadership as an elder or teaching Sunday School. It wasn t until six or seven years ago that he felt an inexplicably strong sense of call that overrode his previous lack of personal freedom to leave Focus on the Family. A burden came upon him as he recognized that the family was the primary context for spiritual formation, yet this concept didn t even register on most church s radar. He took a three-day retreat to wrestle with this unsettlement, and he came away with a sense of call to focus fully on partnering with a local church to create a model of spiritual formation that was based in the home and supported by the church.
7 Kurt came into contact with Lake Pointe Church in Rockwall through a fortuitous and providential set of circumstances. His wife suggested that they move somewhere closer to family, and so Kurt sent a letter of interest to the church next to the big hotel they once stayed at in Rockwall Lake Pointe. On the other end, Steve Stroope and his leadership team at Lake Pointe had just finished their triennial self-assessment and found that the family came in dead last out of their thirteen core values. By divine appointment, Kurt s letter arrived soon after this assessment, and Steve met with Kurt to talk with him about a new position at his church. After twenty years of service as Vice President of Media at Focus on the Family, Kurt accepted the call to be the Pastor of Spiritual Formation at Lake Pointe Church. He is also an adjunct faculty member at DTS in the D.Min. program, married to Olivia, and father of four children: Kyle, Shaun, Troy, and Nicole. Spiritual Formation in the Church The striking image Kurt uses in his book, It Starts at Home, is related to gardening: to grow, plants need soil and water. For Christians to grow, we need good soil at home and lifegiving water from the church. The role of the church is to empower families to carry out spiritual formation in the primary context of their lives: the home. Kurt s generally unstated model is threefold for believers to grow in Christ. First, people must make a profession of faith in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. But the next step that for most people offers them daily opportunities to be conformed into Christ s image is to get married. Marriage reflects the relationship between Christ and the church, and as two lives are lived together, its members practice submission to one another and self-sacrificial love (cf. Eph. 5:22-33). After marriage is parenting, which brings along opportunities for parents to grow and display the love of God our Father to their own children. What shapes us most into the image of Christ if we let it is carrying out God s ordained roles for us in the family. Intentionality in the unavoidable incarnational ministry of the family reveals to us multiple times every day how to be more like Christ. Even those who have spiritual conversations with unbelievers six times a year (cf.
8 REVEAL study) seem to pale in comparison with this daily repeated opportunity for formation in the family context. As Debbie said earlier about the importance of putting off the old man before putting on the new, Kurt also realizes that spiritual formation in the home must not be one more thing to do. Creating a new ministry silo will counteract his intentions. Rather, his motto is two fold: make it easy, and make it likely. Spiritual formation in the home is easier through bite-sized intentionality, offering free information in small doses, encouraging small steps at a time in this process. His church gives easy instruction to families through life-segment communication, offering helpful pamphlets concerning roughly 25 family stages such as single parenting, raising teenagers, children with special needs all offering guidance on living in an intentionally godly way through one s family. Lake Pointe makes this method both easy and likely by setting up this information on Main Street, in a high traffic area where church members can t miss it. They reinforce this family emphasis on spiritual formation by preaching on it two or three times a year, and streamlining their themes with other ministries. Every trimester (120 days) the church members are all asked to reevaluate their intentionality with spiritual formation in the home with an appraisal and a plan. Lastly, the church promotes birthday-driven intentionality, reaching out to families as children s birthdays come up and offering developmentally appropriate ways to encourage their growth as they grow older. Takeaways Kurt s approach to spiritual formation is much different from any others I have yet encountered. For starters, it embraces spirituality in the active life more than the contemplative life. Most people aren t called to contemplative living. Most pursue God amidst a full work week, loaded calendars with social events for themselves and their children, and they don t have time to engage God in solitude or more ascetic disciplines. However, his approach makes sense both historically and sociologically. Historically his approach is like Luther, who wrote his Shorter Catechism after finding such inadequate preparation for spiritual upbringing within the
9 homes of his congregants. Also in history one remembers the Brethren of the Common Life or the Moravians, who, aware of the need of increased community to sustain a vibrant Christian walk, brought their families together to live out the way of Jesus. Sociologically Kurt knows the power of community in spiritual formation. His strategy is to focus his ministry on the 80% of his congregation which is married with children. He aims for the community in which most people live most of their lives. At the same time, he is not unaware of the number of unmarried singles in his congregation yet he challenges them to determine whether they are called to singleness (very few) or stalled in singleness (very many). What has formed a great deal of his ideology and theology is what he calls a theology of the body and of marriage. Kurt stresses the incarnational ministry of the family, rooted in a theology of marriage that reaches back to Genesis 1 and 2. He also values approaches to a theology of the body as Christopher West and other Catholic authors have offered, even appealing to the Vatican II Catechism for wisdom on the body and the family. Kurt recommends West s book Theology of the Body for Beginners to learn more. One truth that is easily recognized but not commonly named is the dangerous inoculation of kids and youth against the gospel that pervades much American culture. By preaching gospel truth to kids weekly but not supporting gospel-life in their homes, we keep them from internalizing the faith. This, Kurt feels, is the primary contributing factor to the unchristian culture America faces today, where most people aren t unchurched, but dechurched. Many non-christians grew up in the church, were inoculated against it by learning it superficially but not living it in their primary contexts, strengthened their skepticism through this disconnect, and walked away from the faith instead of being launched with a firm foundation. Personal Challenge Kurt offered me three pieces of advice to take spiritual formation into my own home. First, I should apologize to my wife! understanding that this is part of the greater call to serve her and lay my life down for her. Second, I need to intentionally view every difficult moment
10 that Brooke and I will experience with our daughter Caroline through the lens that tells us, This is conforming me into the image of Christ. Such a lens will sharpen us, make us more intentional and aware, and keep our attention on Him instead of raising constant other distractions to the flesh. Finally, I must remember that my church and other ministries are only second-tier compared to my family. Kurt spent a period of five years curtailing his ministries to the church so that he could spend more time helping his mother-in-law through Parkinson s disease. Without a doubt he felt this to be the right ministry and gladly set others aside to pursue this. His parting words: your family will define how you look like Christ. Conclusion Listening to three live perspectives on spiritual formation in the church brought me encouragement and excitement. Debbie s approach is practical from a contemplative perspective, with an organized curriculum and clear, robust goals. Adele s approach is like a pot roast, cooking behind the scenes, so that your original ingredients mature out of sight in a fullydeveloped state. Kurt s approach recognizes the importance of community and revives the emphasis on spiritual formation in a new way, centering the equipping focus of the church not within its own walls and short-lived times of community, but in the constant, ordinary settings where God ordained for us to live our lives. Themes of discernment, spiritual direction, small steps, and intentionality all weave throughout their approaches. Whatever one gains from each of these interviews, he can be assured that there is a company of saints in whom God yet moves to bring the hearts of the church into greater likeness to Jesus Christ.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bruner, Kurt. It Starts at Home. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010. Bruner, Kurt. Phone Interview. 11 April 2012. Calhoun, Adele. Phone Interview. 10 April 2012. Swindoll, Debbie. Personal Interview. 6 March 2012. 11