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Tonight I enjoyed several hours of conversation with a cohort of missionally focused church planters in Kansas City. After opening our time with a reading from the Book of Common Prayer, our leader invited a follow-up discussion to the prior session’s topic: A Rule of Life. While this topic may be familiar to many readers of Conversations Journal (or if it’s not, you can read more about it in Chris Webb’s excellent article, “Shaping a Rule of Life”), it was not as familiar to many evangelical church-planters in their twenties. Until about a decade ago, it wasn’t familiar to me, either. You may think, Oh, that’s how spiritual formation can be, the idea du jour, a new fad in church-planting circles. 

Let me reassure you, this was a very real, substantive conversation that was about more than just a Rule of Life. It started with some of these honest questions and observations: 

• I tried silent prayer, but haven’t gone back to it because it felt so weird. 

• Why do spiritual formation practices, and people, just make me feel guilty? 

• I feel overwhelmed at the thought of mapping all my times with God for the next year into my calendar; I’m not sure I can have a Rule of Life. 

• How do couples experience and encourage spiritual formation together? Or should they? 

• Being a pastor is like being a freshman in high school and having to run the three-hundred-yard high hurdles. Just when you begin to hit your stride, you face with a huge obstacle, and you’re just too short. Once you manage to get over it, you barely begin to hit your stride again and there’s another . . . and then another . . . and the race never ends. (He is seated next to his wife; they have four sons, and appear under the age of thirty.) 

 

This is real. This is the pain, the longing, the confusion. And from my perspective, this is the opportunity to serve pastors and leaders. The needs are urgent; the time is now.  Personally, I feel called to stand as a bridge between these jet-fuel drinkers and the candle lighters. 

 

Candle-lighters are the 

quiet, 

slow-paced, 

somewhat solitary, 

somewhat mystical, 

focused-on-the-now, 

Spirit-aware, 

presence of God-sensing 

spiritual Formation types. 

 

Jet-fuel-drinkers are the 

loud, 

fast-paced, 

somewhat solitary, 

somewhat fanatical, 

focused-on-the-future, 

Spirit-aware, 

presence of God-sensing 

leadership types. 

 

See how much they have in common? See how different they are? 

I love these two groups deeply; they have each formed me in their own way, and I deeply believe the cause of Christ, the Kingdom of God, the blessed community, depends upon them both. Though they often speak very different languages, they actually need each other. 

And that’s why I was I invited to join this cohort tonight—an invitation I received with great gladness and care. This was a room full of jet fuel drinkers, trying to learn to slow down, find a new rhythm and recover their connection with God as the source of strength. These emerging leaders want to find a way of life—and a way of ministry—that brings these two extremes together. Not to be cool, but in order to thrive. Not to follow a fad, but out of desperation of the best sort: desperation for God. 

The vision, the relationships, the practices of spiritual formation are sorely needed in all streams, to be sure. But speaking from my context, the Evangelical Stream, we especially need help recovering a way of life with God that will ground, guide, and govern our impulse towards action. 

I’ve been honored to serve many church leaders through the ministry of Soul Care, and continue to do so.i But in the past few years I’ve also been invited to join the leadership for the Willow Creek Association, serving the minds, hearts, and souls of leaders around the world. 

In doing so, I’m reluctantly leaving my team of section editors (in the name of simplicity and facing my limits), but am thrilled to learn you will be blessed through the writing and efforts of Alan Fadling, who will be taking on the Honesty About The Journey section in these pages. 

I hope to join you again from time to time—but for now I have a final request. It’s simple, but sincere. Remember your leaders. Remember that they need you, even if they don’t say as much. If they run around your church with their hair on fire, please love them. It’s just the jet fuel. They’re wired by God that way, remember. But they will need your love, your help. They won’t need your judgment; in all likelihood, they are already very hard on themselves. That could be why they’re running so hard. 

Please move toward, not away. 

These leaders tonight shared fresh stories from this past weekend’s service: a few key families left their church for a better one nearby. Three years into the church plant, and they’re getting used to that familiar tightening in the chest when someone says they “want to get together.” Maybe you’ve been there? I know I have. 

We all might agree that the “Western evangelical church model” sets pastors and leaders up for un-winnable scenarios. Even if that’s the case, you can help. You really can. You can love. You can listen like a spiritual director; pray like a spiritual director, whether or not a leader has “hired” you as their spiritual director. 

This is just the beginning of what candle-lighters have to offer our weary leaders.  The bridges need to be built—and not just for the weary ones, but for our souls as well. As I continue to work where God has called me, I encourage you to join me in your own contexts. We will only be a fully nourished, fully alive body of Christ when we are drinking from all the streams of living water (even if those waters taste a little like jet fuel from time to time.)