Writing Your Way Home in Preaching, Teaching, and Soul Tending
by Kent Ira Groff
Do you ever think, “I’ve got to write this”? But other times, “I get to write this!” Sometimes duty takes over: Sunday’s sermon, newsletter deadline, persistent e-mails. How can we move through “got to” into “get to”?
During a writing funk, two things occurred to me.
First, if I find bits of grace in the grit of duty, then obligation morphs into invitation.
Second, even if my words get rejected, what matters at the end of a day is if I’ve written myself an inch closer home to my true self and God.
Writing can help us appreciate ministry. Preaching, teaching, and soul tending extend an invitation to pen our way home and out into the world’s need—the tides of contemplation and communication.
PREACHING
How dare I preach the Word unless I first let the Word preach to me? If I lose my passion, my words are hollow. How can we keep coming home while writing—and preaching?
I constantly remind myself: “Pause… to fall in love again with the Word beneath your words and with the people who ache for you to let them in on your sacred ideas, fears, and dreams.”
Sometimes I trick myself home by writing what I would say if I could. Once all I could think was nothing.
I write about
Nothing.
No thing.
Ah! No thing really matters,
only relationships.
Other times I keep writing page after page even if it feels like junk—then: Pause… I tell myself, there must be inklings of grace in all this grit. So I go back and highlight the inklings (prune my junk) and I’m home again.
I tell myself to “story the sermon,” oxygenating theological ideas. A pastor conversed about preaching new insights regarding Advent. We paused… She began telling of a lone child who wandered into worship. Into the synergy of silence dropped this poem prayer.
*To cradle a new insight or give*
**birth to anything everlasting**
***wrap your truth in stories.***
We can practice “contemplative exegesis” by looking at a biblical story from new angles. French artist Claude Monet painted the same cathedrals and bridges in different hours of day, seasons, or weather. What happens when I reposition the easel? Does the subject change? Or do I?
A minister retold the overworked “Prodigal Son” story from the neighbor’s viewpoint. “Let me tell you about this dysfunctional family next door. Young brat was spoiled rotten. Insulted his dad. But guess what that father did? Yep. Let his son run off with big family money. And that mother—she was invisible—just grieved inside the house. Older brother worked 24/7—felt no thanks from Pop. What happened when that wasted brother came home? Did he get a beating? No. Pop threw him a party. Did that cool older brother blow up!”
By shifting the easel to the neighbor’s voice, the pastor reconstructs original tensions in the story. The father and mother (aspects of God?) seem weird like their kids.
Sometimes I need to pick up my easel and go to some far country to come to myself—arise to return home for the first time again. The sermon prepares the preacher; the preacher prepares the sermon.
TEACHING
How dare I teach unless I learn some new thing? “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear,” goes a Zen saying. If the pupil of my eye and heart is wide awake, I can be digging or diapering or delving into books and my teachers appear out of nowhere.
Someone turned the saying on its head: “When the teacher is ready, the pupil will appear.” How can I explain the thread of providence that brought students and seekers across my path when my life was ready?
Sometimes a troubling person is my teacher. A bright pastor contributed insights in a seminar I was leading. The last night he got angry. I awakened early and conversed with him in my journal. Through my fingertips I heard: “It’s so frustrating—when I go back to my Kentucky mountain church I can’t talk about Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky the way I’ve done here.” Trying on his moccasins changed me. We conversed at breakfast and I enlisted his help in the final class to explore students’ re-entering back home.
SOUL TENDING
How dare I tend others’ vulnerable souls if I don’t tend my needy soul first? Prayer helps me show up to God with my hurts and hopes to be safely present to another.
An impulsive letter or e-mail from a tide of anger can “kill” a relationship. Yet as Abraham Lincoln knew, that same letter, written but never sent, can prevent or restore a broken relationship.
One time I scheduled lunch with a friend I thought had failed to support a common project. I felt so fussed I wrote three-pages till I got to God’s desire beneath my anger—then shredded them. When we broke bread I was free: we found ways to support one another.
Without tending our souls, we endanger our selves and our ministry. Words can guard one’s soul: a pastor stays free of porn by imagining Jesus repeating: “Come here… don’t go there.”
A journal helps me get surprised. I play with words and ideas—pray my pain and anger. After my father died, unresolved grief reared its head. By writing in dialogue about his verbal non-responsiveness, I began understanding him and that non-responsive part of me. I realized he was a master at communicating through intuition and gestures! I celebrate those gifts in myself.
Writing creates a way to tend another’s soul. Jon flew 3,000 miles to his home state to be with his comatose father. The next morning he read his father a note penned by his own twenty-something son, Sean. Minutes after “hearing” his grandson’s words, Jon says his father’s breathing began to ebb into a peaceful death.
For the next e-mail or card to contratulate or sympathize, try composing your own simple “prayer poem.”
Whether you write for love, labor, or learning—or blessedly all three—every form of writing can call forth the Word that unlockss the treasure of your life’s purpose.
KENT IRA GROFF is a spiritual companion, retreat leader, and writer living in Denver, Colo. He is founding mentor of Oasis Ministries, Camp Hill, Pa. This article is adapted from his book, Writing Tides (Abingdon). For Active Spirituality (Alban) and other resources for ministry see www.kentiragroff.com
Holy ground in cyberspace
One of the perennial concerns raised about online learning is that some sorts of education simply must occur face to face — that group process, for instance, or the forming of strong interpersonal bonds, or the intimacy of peer to peer mentoring, requires the physical proximiity of teacher to student, and students to one another, in a shared culture of presence.
This has always seemed to me a somewhat questionable assumption for those of us in the Christian tradition, whose main source of authority is itself the product of the discovery of the technology of writing, and is shared with the remoteness of 2,000-3,000 years of history, and across unshared cultural boundaries and barriers of language.
St. Paul, who wrote the earliest parts of New Testament, used this technology of inscription, delivered by the technologies of sailing, in the form of letters to remote communities around the Mediterranean. In doing so he intended to serve as their mentor and spiritual guide, encouraging them into deepening bonds of affection and commitment and faithfulness that have been shared across the millenia thanks in particular to the technology of the printing press.
The following is a post from the Daily Episcopalian blog about one counter-intuitive discovery about online learning written by Ann Fontaine, an Episcopal priest and General Convention deputy from the Diocese of Wyoming. It may make all of us think differently about the potential of cyberspace for religious education.
By Ann Fontaine
Seven years ago the Diocese of Wyoming’s Canon for Ministry Development, Lynn Wilson, wondered if we could offer Education for Ministry (EfM) via the internet to our isolated and rural churches and their leaders. I have been a mentor and trainer with EfM since the early days of the program. This was a challenge I could not resist. How could we replicate this small group experience with its transformative theological reflection and study? Dr. Norm Peterson, a mentor and Dean of Education at the University of Wyoming and I recruited our first class of students for a pilot project with Blackboard, the popular distance education program that most colleges use.
I thought it would be possible to carry out the program but did not believe it would be as good as face-to-face EfM. I could not have been more wrong. Now the online groups are spreading around the country with students from as far away as South Africa, Bahrain and Korea. Originally we thought it would be great for rural isolated students. We have discovered that it is great for those who travel for work, those who live in cities and don’t want one more night out, those who have children at home and snowbirds. The intimacy and depth of sharing is beyond my dreams. When we do find time to see each other in person – we are like old friends.
Other EfM Online mentors have had similar experiences. Jenifer Gamber, Diocese of Bethlehem, finished her 4th year in an online group then became a mentor. She writes:
Leading with life-changing stories
by Twila Glenn
Consulting Manager, The Alban Institute
Narrative Leadership: now what in the world does that mean? There are a lot of answers to that question, but basically, it is a way of leading organizations in which the story of who we have been, seen through the lens of who we are, forms the foundation for the story of who we are to become. Stories wind their way through individual lives, through family lives, through community lives, through congregational lives, and through the faith journey of each of us.
In about a month, folks will gather at Lake Junaluska Conference Center in North Carolina to hear stories, tell stories, and learn new ways to weave together God’s story, their congregation’s story, and their community’s story in powerful new faith journeys. You can be part of that gathering—part of that story.
If you come to Lake Junaluska in July, Dr. Judy Fentress-Williams, noted Old Testament scholar and vivid storyteller, will take you by the hand and walk you into the heart of that rich and teeming story of the Israelites—perched on the edge of promise—learning to remember their own story. You will emerge from the experience with new insight into how what a community remembers shapes its identity.
With Dr. Larry Peers, Senior Consultant for the Alban Institute, you will “wade in the waters of deep change. You will learn the healing power of reauthoring problem-saturated stories of your congregation and your leadership into powerful new stories of possibility.”
And then, Alban Senior Consultant Alice Mann will ask you to journey with her into the “soul of the place” and explore with her what it would mean to befriend the soul of the place in which you and your congregation live. Learn with her how to take this sense of place that is “in our bones”—this place where we live and work and worship—and nurture it, turn it into a powerful story of well-being and justice for our community and our world.
All of this—and beautiful Lake Junaluska (with a powerful story of its own)—can be yours at the Alban Institute at Lake Junaluska in July. Come share your story! (Click here for more information and registration.)
The Problem Trap
Alban Weekly, 2008-06-16
Number 203 printer-friendly version
by Larry Peers
To effect deep change, leaders must be able to stand outside the dominant story of whatever it is we are trying to change—rather than being so immersed in it that we cannot truly observe how to lead a particular group in a particular situation. Ron Heifetz, author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, often talks about this as being able to take a balcony perspective. I have found the tools and perspectives of narrative therapy especially useful in helping clergy begin to get up on the balcony and become different observers of their situations, allowing for different actions and different results to become possible.
Recognizing the Problem-Saturated Story
One of the primary kinds of stories that takes hold in congregations and makes change difficult is what is known in narrative therapy as the “problem-saturated story,” or one in which the focus is on who or what is or has been wrong.
You can recognize the problem-saturated story when you’re in a group where someone offers an example of how difficult or awful something is in the congregation and before you know it the rest of us can’t help but chime in with more evidence for how truly bad and impossible the situation is. We can almost hear ourselves saying, even if the words aren’t verbalized, “You think that’s bad, let me tell you how it is even worse than that!”
Why We Are Losing Ground with Young Adults
By Marty J. Cauley
I have the amazing privilege of working with spiritually sensitive and passionate young adults from across the southeast. I am also charged with understanding why the church is losing ground with young adults. After hundreds of conversations with young adults, I have identified some common strands running through their decisions to leave the church, or at least our version of the church.
One reason is the perception that worship is passionless. This is not because young adults do not care for traditional worship or liturgy. There is actually resurgence in older forms of liturgy among young adults, but the churches they flock to for this type of experience do it very well and are clear about why they do it. Young adults just will not tolerate watered down, unexplained ritual or poor quality, half-hearted worship. This generation desires to experience God in wholly different ways than did their parents – with their hearts as well as their heads.
Young adults desire clarity in a world filled with uncertainty. The lack of a clear, unified vision for our churches is a stumbling block. We must find a way to clarify our vision and renew our commitment to making disciples and changing our world. The abandonment of our heritage’s commitment to balancing social justice with evangelism leaves us without the needed bifocal emphasis that would be most appealing to young adults.
Since their birth, this generation has been told they can change the world, and they intend to do it. But many are disgusted by what they see as the incongruity of spoken values and lived values in the church and the culture. To see a Greenpeace bumper sticker on a Suburban really bothers this generation of revolutionaries. They are also perturbed by constant political in-fighting within the denomination. The church’s tendency to make mountains out of molehills seems ridiculous to this highly practical and pragmatic generation.
Another thing that drives young adults from our doors is criticism of things of little consequence. Churches that balk at having a young person with blue hair or a pierced nose as part of their congregation are essentially assuring their absence. This generation is striving desperately to identify who they are and where they fit into community. If that accepting, loving community is not found in the local church, they will find it elsewhere. Does it really matter how many piercings or tattoos they have?
Finally, the church’s token attempts to reach young adults are actually alienating rather than attracting them. They see it as hypocritical when the church states how important their presence is but develops program for them but not with them such as “90’s style” praise services. This is a generation of “doers” and not “watchers.” They do not want to send money to missions as much as they want to be part of a missionary endeavor. They desire to put their hands where their hearts are. They also perceive the incongruity in rhetoric about wanting young adults in our churches at the same time that funding is cut for ministries with college students.
There is, however, hope. Young adult Christians can flourish in places where the focus on spiritual formation is sharp; where they can worship with complete abandon in services filled with symbolism and depth; where this generation of Myspace® users can tell their own stories of how God intersects their lives and be listened to; where they are welcomed into positions of influence and responsibility and empowered to live and lead boldly into the future; where the vision is clear; and where local mission and a global vision seek to change the world.
There are several important steps the church can take to reestablish connection with the next generation of leaders:
- Validate youth and young adult ministry as a primary calling. Those on the front lines of young adult ministry – youth workers, campus ministers, camping directors – have been made to feel that their ministry is not as important as that of other ministries. They often feel little connection and support from those who stand to benefit or suffer greatly from the fruitfulness of their endeavors in the years to come.
- Bridge the gap between church youth groups and college ministry. Pastors need to make contact with campus ministers at colleges where they are sending their youth. And these interactions must be substantive – not just completing a form. Then, the campus minister needs to take pastoral responsibility for these new members of their “flock.” The lines of communication between local churches and their college students must reinforce the importance of spiritual connectivity.
- Reinvest in ministries with college students. This may mean capital improvements to outdated facilities that have deferred maintenance due to fund shortfalls. Salaries for campus ministry must be comparable enough to be attractive to the best and brightest.
- Plant emerging churches to reach young adults. New churches are more successful than established churches in reaching young adults. These churches may require greater investment than some church plants, but the returns can be tremendous in lives changed.
The Rev. Marty Cauley (mcauley@sejumc.org) is director of Ministries with Young People for the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church.
Becoming a Praying Congregation
Becoming a Praying Congregation
Alban author and seminar leader Jane Vennard talks about her upcoming Alban seminar “Becoming a Praying Congregation: The Art of Teaching Spiritual Practice.” July 15–17, 2008 at the Inn on Broadway, Rochester, New York. (length: 8 minutes)
