A Good Word: What is Intimacy?

9 02 2010

I pulled a couple of excerpts on the theme of intimacy from Hands & Fehr’s Spiritual Wholeness for Clergy. I’d enjoy hearing your responses and thoughts. Make a comment, would you?

“Eric Berne calls [intimacy] a candid and honest emotional exchange (Berne, 1964). He maintains that there are only three possible human transactions: pastimes, games, or intimacy. Pastimes are routine, superficial remarks. “How are you?” Games are the many dishonest manipulations and hidden agendas among people. The only emotionally honest and candid interchanges are called intimacy.” (Donald R. Hands and Wayne L. Fehr. Spiritual Wholeness for Clergy. Herndon: The Alban Institute, 1993, p. 37.)

Think about recent conversations and interactions. How much time has been spent in “pastimes”? In games? In emotionally honest and candid interchanges?

“Etymologically. the word [intimacy] itself comes from the Latin word intus, meaning “inside”; its comparative is interior, meaning “more inside”; the superlative is intimus, meaning the “most inside.” The Latin word intimus, therefore, can also mean “best friend.” The whole series denotes depth and interiority, a sharing of one’s insides with another.” (p. 37.)


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Categories : Community, Spiritual Life, intimacy, wholeness

Church and Ministry Renewal

8 02 2010

We’re familiar with the practice of creating a mission statement for our businesses, ministries and churches. I’ve been part of shaping a number of them. The Leadership Institute recently worked through our own mission, vision, strategy and legacy statement. But in our work with ministries and churches, we’re seeing a practical difference between a stated mission statement and a functional mission statement.

For example, a church may declare that it is a church that prays. It may also have a board member who says, “We just don’t have time in this board meeting to spend praying.” The implication is that matters of organizational policy, financial accountability and conflict resolution and other business for which the board is responsible requires little by way of prayer and much more by way of business savvy. What we’ve stated is out of harmony with what we practice.

This is where Edgar Schein’s insights into organizational transformation are so helpful. Paul Jensen has done quite a bit of work with his writings and has developed a presentation for The Journey from these insights. Schein reminds us that the actual culture or “spirit” of an organizational is the unstated beliefs and assumptions that lie hidden from view below the surface of an organization’s social community. A leader’s primary function, in Schein’s view, is to transform the organization’s culture which first requires that the organization be preserved. An organization that is destroyed by leadership action cannot be transformed. And there is a tension between transforming functions and preserving functions.

One implication of Schein’s insight is that organizational culture is transformed more indirectly than directly. This happens through what he calls “embedding mechanisms.” He also talks about reinforcing mechanisms that do not produce change, but can serve to support (or fail to support) new beliefs and assumptions that are being embedded by leaders. How are these new beliefs and assumptions embedded in the cultural values of the organization?

  1. By what a leader actually models. To what degree does a leader (or leadership team) model trust in God versus trust in personal resources or strategies?
  2. What a leader gives attention to. Where is their focus? What do they talk about most? Where are the leader’s intentionalities focused?
  3. What criteria are used in selecting and advancing leaders? (Jesus spends the night in prayer before selecting his Twelve).
  4. What criteria are used in releasing others from certain tasks or roles? (Not just “firing,” but sabbatical or sick leave).
  5. How does a leader respond to crisis. How is crisis and the leader’s response expose actual values that may be in conflict with stated values?
  6. (Added by Paul Jensen) How is the leader telling the group’s story, reminding the community of their roots? Such stories are the lived experience of what its beliefs, assumptions and convictions actually are. God repeatedly invites His people to remember and proclaim the story of His actions on their behalf, as well as how they followed or didn’t follow. This is a way of refreshing the good things that were embedded in the past for the present.

Think about your own influence—family, work, church, ministry. How do you see these six mechanisms at work? Which is a strength for you? Which is a weakness?


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Categories : Leadership, Organizational Transformation, Renewal, mission statement, spiritual leadership, vision statement

Looking Back: What Do We Expect From Prayer

7 02 2010

I had chosen a passage and a presentation for last Friday’s Come Away retreat at the Center for Spiritual Development in Orange, CA and was ready to go. That morning, as I sat praying and gathering materials for the day, I had an impression that God was inviting me to switch passages from the gospel text I had planned to use to Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21. I had spent time in it with Chuck Miller and a leader visiting southern California from Berlin, Germany. The passage’s influence had lingered in my heart and mind.

On retreat Friday, that passage became not only the focus of our scripture reflection, but also of my comments in preparation for solitude, silence and prayer. It wasn’t a prepared talk as much as a guided conversation. At the end of the day when we debriefed together, at least four participants shared that the passage felt like a bulls-eye for them in their life and ministry situation. I was amazed and grateful.

A year ago, I wrote up a post here having reflected on this same passage. It was a personal journal I wrote during another retreat day I was leading. I tried to imagine what a Christian community would look like if this prayer was deeply answered in it. It was good to go back and read it again. I hope you enjoy it:

Click for “What Do We Expect From Prayer?”


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Categories : Come Away, Looking Back, Prayer, scripture reflection

A Good Word: Personal Psalms

6 02 2010

Yesterday, I enjoyed leading another of our Come Away retreats. I reviewed some spiritual reading from a while back and came across this word of wisdom from Thomas Merton’s Praying the Psalms.

“No matter whether we understand a Psalm at first or not, we should take it up with this end in view: to make use of it as a prayer that will enable us to surrender ourselves to God. If we keep this one thing in mind, the various Psalms will gradually yield their mysteries to us, and we will begin to find out that certain ones fit our own condition and our own experience better than others. This recognition of a special appropriateness for our own lives, in particular Psalms, is an actual grace of God. It is an invitation of the Holy Spirit, urging us to pay  more attention to these Psalms, to use them more frequently in our prayers and meditations, to adopt them for our own use. They become “our” Psalms. We do not have to tell other people about our preference, preach about it or write books about it. We simply need to take possession of these Psalms, “move in” to them, so to speak. Or rather we move them into the house of our own soul so that we think of our ordinary experiences in their light and with their words.” (Thomas Merton. Praying the Psalms. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1956, pp. 17-18.)

I shared a few thoughts from Psalm 84 recently in “Deeply at Home in God.” I am deeply drawn to the longing and thirst I hear in this psalm for the Living God. I don’t like feeling thirsty. I’m often tempted to quench my thirst in ways that leave me thirstier.

Is there a psalm God has been using in your own life to invite you to place of deeper surrender to Him (and therefore freedom in Him)?

Buy a copy of Praying the Psalms (By Thomas Merton) on Amazon.com


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Categories : Prayer, Surrender, Thomas Merton, praying scripture, psalms

Spirituality-Based Leadership Gatherings

5 02 2010

The Leadership Institute’s focus for twenty years now has been “integrating spiritual formation and leadership development.” Sometimes the inner life is separated from the outer life, emphasizing one at the cost of the other. But a healthy tree has both deep roots and broad branches.

One simple way we have communicated the need for deep formation in the context of our leadership structures is a little guideline we call “The One-Third Rule.” By this, we mean that whenever we plan a seminary course, a retreat, a training event, a board or staff meeting, or any scheduled event, we are intentional to see that one-third of those hours are actually engaged in spiritual practices of intimacy with God or ministry practices of community and mission. Chuck Miller has said, “We must be the people of God before we do the work of God.” We do not count talking about or teaching about disciplines in that one-third.

As one example, we would argue that a perfunctory ten-minute devotional at the beginning of a three-hour board meeting is insufficient. It represents only about five percent of the time. Everyone intuitively knows that it makes little difference in the tone or focus of the gathering. When a board member says, “Why are we wasting time praying?” (I don’t know if you’ve heard that one before, but I have), we are communicating that expressing our practical dependence on God is of little importance. Instead, our business experience and decision-making prowess matters more. In our board and staff gatherings, we set aside about one hour in a three-hour gathering to share in the scriptures together, to share with one another how we are needing prayer and then actually praying for each other.

Such a practice knits our hearts together in Christ. Disagreements aren’t taken as personally because we know our commitment to one another runs deeper than ideas and opinions. I wonder how many conflicts in a leadership gathering are not at all about the agenda, but an expression of inner struggle, pain, emptiness, pride, anxiety or frustration that has gone unaddressed. Or, how many times do we take disagreement personally and react, rather than feeling secure enough in Christ to engage creatively and boldly in our shared work in Christ?

Some might think we get a great deal less done by investing so much time to something other than the agenda. Actually, we have found that practicing such a priority causes us to be much more likeminded and less likely to have deep disagreements. Where there are differences, they can be discussed in a spirit of shared deference to Christ and openness to whatever He might want (even if it ends up different than my current conviction).

A one-third rule. What is one meeting or event you’ll have some planning responsibility for in the next week or two. How might you creatively expand the actual time given to practices of spiritual formation, community and mission (rather than just talking about them)?


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Categories : Prayer, Spiritual Formation, The Leadership Institute, leadership development, spiritual leadership

Deeply At Home in God

4 02 2010

I’m looking forward to leading our Come Away spiritual leadership retreat tomorrow at the Center for Spiritual Development in Orange, CA, as well as preaching from Psalm 84 this Sunday at Orange Coast Free Methodist Church. I’ll preach there every Sunday in February. In my preparations, I’ve been grateful for some encouraging insights and questions that have come.

Psalm 84:5a (“Blessed are those whose strength is in you…”) raises a question for me: “Where else might I believe my strength is rooted? Our physical energy level? Our positional authority? Our recognition by others? Our organizational impact? Is my strength in Him, or in me: my talents or gifts, my plans or strategies, my resources, my expectations or my drive?

Psalm 84:4a (“Blessed are those who dwell in your house…”) raises another question:  “What would be the impact of our lives and our leadership if we were more truly and fully at home in God? What if the world around us saw us dwelling peacefully, joyfully, lovingly in Him? Would my life tantalize others to come to Him and follow Him? Do we feel pressure to prove that God is good, or do we so trust that He is good that others can see the reality of His goodness in and through us? How much evangelistic impact might my life filled with Jesus’ life have in my world?

Another this question took shape in my thinking: “What if dwelling deeply in God resulted in my really speaking the kinds of words Jesus would speak if He were in this conversation?” Or, “What would happen if I responded in this circumstance as Jesus would if He were here in my place?” This is what Jesus had to learn having come to take our flesh upon Himself. He learned to fully depend on the Spirit of God for his words and his works. What would it look for us to follow Him in this way of life?


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Categories : Abiding, Attentiveness to God, Christ in me, Come Away, belovedness, center for spiritual development

Building A Blog Readership

3 02 2010

I’ve been posting something to my blog daily since late May 2009 as a writing discipline, as well as a ministry discipline. As I seek to grow readership of the blog, here are some practical that are helping:

  • Post regularly – There are many blogs that start with a burst, but fade into “cobweb” pages. Daily posts are, for me, a challenging commitment, but the dailiness has been key in having readers return. If someone visits a blog and finds the same post once or twice, they are unlikely to come back anymore.
  • Address topics of interest – My “Ministry Burnout Stats” post from June 2009 continues to drawn daily visitors from Google searches including the word “burnout.” I didn’t set out directly to address burnout, but it is clear that there is a great need. Addressing it seems to be drawing more readers. I also add links on that page to other posts I write on the theme down the road.
  • Better post titles – I have a tendency to title my posts with “content accuracy” rather than with curiosity provoking or interest attracting ones. Some of the posts I feel strongest about have had few visits, in part, because the title didn’t draw visitors in. Other posts that weren’t my favorites have had huge numbers of readers because of a felt need the title appealed to or a title that provoked interest. I’ve seen at least one post that had a boring title to start with begin to increase hits when I spent some time creating a better one.
  • Posting a group of links to past posts – Every once in a while, I’ll write a kind of review post that includes links to past posts that have proven more popular than others. Not everyone visits my blog everyday, so this gives readers a chance to visit a post they may have missed.
  • Honest writing from the heart – posts in which I do more than just offer a quotation from something I’m reading, but actually share something honest about my spiritual journey or my ministry tend to get more views and comments. Brenda Ueland, in her If You Want to Write, basically says that the most interesting writing is the most personally true writing.
  • Regular Facebook/Twitter updates – A lot of my initial blog visits come from my Facebook and Twitter friends who I update at least once a day regarding the latest post. I find that taking a moment to write something stimulating and provocative helps draw more visits. I have sometimes overused Twitter so that some shared that they were overwhelmed by the number of updates. I’ve cut way back to two or three updates (that always include an abbreviated link) to my blog.

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Thoughts on Reading More

2 02 2010

As I develop the discipline of writing, I’m learning a lot about the discipline of reading. Simply put, writers read. Good writers read a lot. I was wondering how many hours a day good writers read, and found a great blog post by a Jesuit professor of government at Georgetown University (Fr. James Schall, S.J.) who quotes Samuel Johnson as recommending five hours a day of reading. Nowadays, I can only imagine something like this working for someone whose primary work is scholarship, writing or speaking. Nonetheless, I found some the blog Yikes! I enjoyed this paragraph from the post:

At London’s Mitre Tavern on July 14, 1763, James Boswell records what Samuel Johnson (the 300th anniversary of whose birth is this year [2009]) said about reading. “Idleness is a disease which must be combated; but I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good. A young man should read five hours a day, and so may acquire a great deal of knowledge.”

I’m especially impressed by Johnson advises against any kind of reading plan. I’ve been trying to work a quarterly reading list for about seven years now. It has been a way to read things I might not have read, but I’m not sure that it has ended up getting me reading any more. I still probably average more like 60 to 90 minutes of reading per day. For me, this isn’t enough. As someone whose primary ministry is speaking, preaching, counseling, training and, more recently, writing towards publication, I lose too many hours to aimless wandering and administrative piddling. If I gave even an hour or two of this time to reading, it would be time much better invested.

Instead of a reading plan, Johnson recommends instead that one read “just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as task will do him little good.” What do I want to read is a good question to ask myself. There is a difference between that question and “What do I feel like reading.” Sometimes I feel like reading junk. But if I pay attention to my own heart and mind, a place where the Spirit of God is at work renewing me, I discern deeper desires for good reading that I could pursue.

Johnson encourages me to read according to interest, curiosity and desire. He isn’t saying to read whatever I feel like reading. I don’t think he’s recommending that I read low quality novels. He’s just getting at the emptiness of “I really should read this or that. It would probably be good for me.” I will not be able to sustain this kind of reading five hours a day, let alone one or two.

If you were to ask yourself, “What reading do you deeply desire to do these days?”, what might be your answer. Is there somewhere in scripture you haven’t read (or read in a while) that you find yourself drawn to read? That might be a good place to start. Or, did you buy a book that grabbed your eye at some point, but then sat on your shelves unread? Perhaps revisit it.


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Categories : Reading, Spiritual Reading, lectio, writing

Burnout Isn’t Necessary 2

1 02 2010


Sometime back, I wrote “Burnout Isn’t Necessary.” I reflected on Jesus’s invitation to come to Him to find rest. Last week, as Journey Generation 18 began, there was one theme in the sharing and conversations that rose above the others—burnout! And this was a very capable group of leaders. High level leaders sometimes think that burnout is only for those who aren’t strong.

But I don’t think burnout isn’t a factor of strength or weakness. I’ve seen leaders with twelve cylinder engines burnout. The main factor in burnout is not whether you have a Ferrari-sized engine or a VW-sized one. Any engine can burnout. It is more about consistent maintenance and care. Burnout is the product of failing to make enough space for rest, for creative expression, for relationship with God and with good friends. These are the water and oil that help our engines continue to function well over time.

If you are feeling weariness than you should, what kind of attention might your engine need?


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Categories : Burn-out, Prayer, Refreshment, Spiritual Growth

Classic Spiritual Counsel for Anxiety

31 01 2010

I love reading classic letters of spiritual direction. The quotation below is a piece of classic counsel for “nerves” (which, I think, would probably correspond to what we would call “anxiety” today).

“Personally I believe that the cure for nerves is an attempt at contemplation. I hope this does not sound absurd. But it seems to me that the one thing that does cure that maddening soreness of spirit that we call nerves is to sit still, in body, mind, and soul, and exclude every thought but that of God as He is in Himself. But it is foolish to say all this…. Perhaps too you have not much time to sit still bodily. I do think, however, that the remedy lies in that immense effort of cessation of effort. I wonder whether you ever take attributes of God, and set them before you, excluding everything else: saying the word-e.g. PEACE; over and over again-and then imaging it in a quiet sea, a space in air, a summer garden, and so on….” (R. Hugh Benson. Spiritual Letters of Monsignor R. Hugh Benson to One of His Converts. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919, pp. 95-96.)

Being still like this isn’t easy, but when I am feeling fearful, anxious or just nervous, being still and remembering God in the simple way Benson suggests actually helps. You might try it.


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Categories : Peace, Spiritual Direction, anxiety

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