The Simplest Prayer: Thank You
7 | The Prayer of Solidarity
[iframe style="border:none" src="http://html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/4158193/height/100/width/480/thumbnail/no/render-playlist/no/theme/custom/custom-color/#87A93A" height="100" width="480" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen]Learn to pray on behalf of those who are suffering injustice! Host: Steven Hovater (Twitter: @stevenhovater Web: stevenhovater.com)Please think about leaving a review of the show on iTunes!You might also be interested in my podcast The Craft of Ministry, which is about developing key capacities for ministry.
Creative Repetition in Preaching
Repetition is the mother of learning, they say, and I don’t altogether disagree. It’s the kind of thing that requires balance in preaching over the long haul. On one hand, if you’re too repetitive, you’ll sound like you’re just riding a hobby horse to death, and you’ll lose people’s interest. Worse still, even the people still listening won’t be getting the sort of balanced diet that can help them grow and mature in the Lord—one dimensional preaching isn’t good for anybody. Your preaching needs a sense of breadth. On the other hand, preaching that has no element of repetition loses its sense of depth. The church needs some level of repetition to get the import of certain concepts, and to have a chance to really weave them into her life, so that they become part of the church’s identity and ethos.“Balance” may actually be a misleading word for what I think we’re trying to find here, because I don’t think the significant question is “How much repetition?”, but “How should we handle repetition?”. What I mean is, we want to employ repetition that doesn’t necessarily feel like repetition. We want to use creative repetition, so that even what we’re preaching about regularly can feel new and carry genuinely new dimensions each time. The repetitive element needs to be blended in, needs to become one of the layers just below the surface of sermons and series. If it’s always on the top level, sitting in the titles and showing up in the punch lines, it will lose its heft. But if it only shows up those places every once in a while, and the rest of the time is woven into the fabric of the sermons, it will add texture and continuity to your sermons.This isn’t sheer manipulation, by the way—it’s just good art. Good designers know how to use common elements across a series of pieces to tie them together, without that element of cohesion being the up front subject of each piece. Rather it becomes part of the framework that allows each work to speak to its own subject in a way that is part of a larger conversation. I think good preachers develop a sense of how to do this, how to weave certain motifs into their preaching over time, without hammering it in each particular sermon. Sometimes the motif comes to the fore and is the distinct subject of the sermon, but many other times it is just there in the background, a line or two in the introduction or a certain word choice in the narrative.It’s a useful technique to double back through certain themes and motifs in your preaching—just make sure you do it creatively. Otherwise, repetition will cease to nurture learning, and will only be the mother of monotony.
The Craft of Ministry Episode 8 | An Introduction to Design Thinking
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This episode introduces the idea of "Design Thinking", and begins to lay out how two of the key concepts, Function and Constraints, can be useful to ministers.
If you're interested in reading more on design thinking, I think Tim Brown's Change by Design is a great starting point, though The Design of Business by Roger Martin or Tom's Kelly's work might work well for you, too.
Host: Steven Hovater (Twitter: @stevenhovater, Web: stevenhovater.com)
I'd appreciate it if you would share the podcast with others, and please remember to subscribe for future episodes. You may also be interested in my other podcast, Spiritual Steps, which is about taking small steps in your spiritual journey.
Worship in the Dark: John of the Cross, Emotional Worship, and Me
In my own devotional time right now, I’m reading a few pages of the works of John of the Cross.I’d read a little bit in John’s works before, but I recently heard Randy Harris make a comment about how going back to it can feel like it’s a totally different book, and so I’ve gone back in, and I’m finding that to be largely true. I’m reading a few pages most days, maybe a chapter or two, and slowly digesting it, turning it over. I started with The Ascent of Mount Carmel.As John speaks in the early part of Ascent, it’s repeatedly felt like what he has to say about discursive meditation resonates with some feelings I have about worship, particularly that structured in so-called contemporary forms. Namely, these heavily sensory forms of corporate praise, designed to evoke emotion, simply don’t for me often. For a while, this was pretty frustrating, as I felt like I was losing a sort of capacity that the modern church equates heavily with spirituality—indeed, this often made me wonder if I was being hollowed out, and whether my heart was becoming disconnected from the Lord in a way that was leading me to become something like the trope of the hypocritical spiritual leader that doesn’t really believe what they’re selling that is often highlighted/parodied in our culture. Pretty scary stuff, particularly as I treasure and try to cultivate a sense of authenticity!However, I don’t think that’s actually the case, because I did feel connected to the Lord in other ways—in the communal silences of the eucharist, or in times of shared prayer with our shepherds (or others, but particularly with our shepherds) or in certain friendship spaces, or in just times by myself. Over time, I just came to moments of worship, particularly singing times, as something that didn’t really do it for me (whatever that means), but that I generally saw as helpful for others. (Some forms of singing, I still really enjoy—particularly songs that proclaim God’s lordship. I feel like now, what I really like are songs that make proclamations. I think they feel like protest songs, and I do find that fruitful.)Anyway, as I’ve read John, it’s often occurred to me that some of what he says about meditation feels similar to that. Like the sorts of worship that attempt to evoke a certain emotional intensity are sort of like the form of meditation that relies on the imagination, and I feel like it’s giving me further permission to let go of the desire to force that sort of emotion on myself, or work myself into that particular emotional place, and to allow myself some peace in that. I’m not quite sure how to describe the alternative path, but I do think that I’m coming to a place where I approach worship (aside from preaching!) as something that I passively receive or recognize God’s presence in, rather than working myself towards an emotional experience of that. Here’s a passage that seems to resonate with what I think the path forward may look like:
“When spiritual persons cannot meditate, they should learn to remain in God’s presence with a loving attention and a tranquil intellect, even though they seem to themselves to be idle. For little by little and very soon the divine calm and peace with a wondrous, sublime knowledge of God, enveloped in divine love, will be infused into their souls. They should not interfere with forms or discursive meditations and imaginations. Otherwise the soul will be disquieted and drawn out of its peaceful contentment to distaste and repugnance. And if, as we said, scruples about their inactivity arise, they should remember that pacification of the soul (making it calm and peaceful, native and desireless) is no small accomplishment. This, indeed, is what our Lord asks of us through David: Vacate and videte quondam ego sum Deus [Ps 46:10]. This would be like saying: Learn to be empty of all things—interiorly and exteriorly—and you will behold that I am God.” (Ascent 2.15.5)
That last line is pretty great. I’ll probably have more to post about this on another time, but if nothing else, I wanted to post it for those who may be feeling something similar, as though they’re not really sure how to make themselves feel the things in worship that it seems like they are supposed to. John writes about how sometimes seeking the Lord in faith feels like following in the dark—and sometimes everything around us that seems like light is really trying to lead us away from the dim light of faith. As I’ve reflected on that idea, I’ve come to believe that it’s important that we learn to worship in the dark—to give worship to God even when the faith that we are acting on doesn’t reward us emotionally like we expect. We give worship even when faith refuses to behave in such a way as to resolve all the ambiguities around us, or when it doesn’t trip the particular emotional triggers or imaginative experiences that we might expect. The road of faith does not always track with what we think or feel…sometimes it is just a matter of one step in front of another, seeking the Lord and being willing to keep seeking, following the sound of God’s call, even though we’re walking in the dark.I think that it is okay if all of the emotions don’t sweep you away in passion-ate worship, and if you’re in a place where you feel distant from all of that, don’t allow it to discourage you too thoroughly. In some situations, that might even be good, a sign that some things that were helpful for you before are now giving way to another stage of your faith’s development and maturity, although I would resist elevating that in relation to somebody else’s more emotive experience—that may be just what they need, and their different experience may be different than yours in ways that you cannot perceive. Comparison in this sort of thing just isn’t our friend.
A Review of Treasures in Clay Jars by Lois Barrett and Friends
Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness by Lois Barrett et al. (2004)This book is a follow-up to Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Guder et al., 1998). It expressly seeks to develop the concepts of that volume, providing concrete examples of the ecclesiological vision expressed therein. It responds to the question, “What does a missional church look like?” by providing a series of nine case studies of churches in North America that represent the missional ecclesiology developed in Missional Church. Within those churches, the authors identify eight patterns of missional faithfulness: “Missional Vocation”, “Biblical Formation and Discipleship”, “Taking Risks as a Contrast Community”, “Practices that Demonstrate God’s Intent for the World”, “Worship as Public Witness”, “Dependence on the Holy Spirit”, “Pointing Toward the Reign of God”, and “Missional Authority”. These patterns take a variety of forms in the churches, and the authors go to great pains to assure that they are not meant to be “tests” of the presence of missional life, but are offered more as patterns that can be recognized in different forms in different churches.The sketches offered here both limit and open the concept of missional. They limit the concept by providing a sort of defining matrix for the missional church, a set of patterns that, taken together, form a composite of what the missional flavor of churches might look like. However, the limiting effect is somewhat suppressed because the authors frame the patterns in mostly positive terms—these are the sorts of things missional churches do. However, these descriptions are sometimes too broad, and the edges of the practice are so soft that they become less useful as a defining taxonomy. For instance, the emphasis on prayer and the Holy Spirit could, on some level, be recognized as described here in the vast majority of churches, and depending on how generous the onlooker, the same could be said of the picture of missional leadership described here. Occasionally, the book does provide a negative contrast, noting for example that it is possible to be Biblically centered without moving into a missional mode (60), or that worship should not be driven by what the individuals “get out of” the service (110), and these moments are extremely useful in moving towards a more bounded conception of missionality. There are also contrast patterns implied by the changes that these churches are undergoing—in other words, the narratives included from the lives of these churches could be taken as movement towards increased missionality, and thus the previous iterations of the church could be taken as examples of lesser missionality. However, in the main line of the book there aren’t enough of these sorts of contrast pictures, not enough opposition, to fulfill the burden of providing clarity. Thus, the authors’ resistance to being firm in the boundaries between what being missional is and what it is not mitigates the books effectiveness at answering the question “What does a missional church look like?”. In this way, the book’s actual function is to open the definition of missional somewhat, and the real value of the book is that it provides a set of markers by which readers can recognize and name missional patterns of behavior in a wide range of churches. However, it may open up that definition so much that it becomes too ambiguous. In my view, the book’s success in providing clarity to the concept of the missional church could be greatly aided by seeking to also answer the negative version of its core question: “What does a missional church not look like?”Despite this core shortcoming, I still found the book useful on a couple of levels. First, it helped me sharpen my skills in recognizing this set missional patterns, and what they might look like in different contexts. It was easy (perhaps too much so!) to read our congregation’s patterns into the sketches offered here. Second, I think it’s a helpful book in demonstrating the idea that missional churches can have diverse “looks”, that there can be a common missional core even if the particular practices and institutional shapes of these churches take different forms. The book is an important complement to its antecedent, Missional Church, and maybe even a necessary one.
A Review of Missional Church by Darrell Guder and Friends
Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. Edited by Darrell Guder (1998).It may be a little late to the party to review a text almost twenty years old, but this text is still central for the development of the missional church movement. It collects the thinking of six theologians: Darrell Guder, Lois Barrett, Alan Roxburgh, Craig Van Gelder, Inagrace Diettrich, and George Hunsberger. As a whole, the book makes the case that the church in North America faces a crossroads due to the end of Christendom, and that this change challenges the church to rediscover its missionary nature. It is critical that the church now come to understand itself principally as the people of God who are together drawn into the very mission of God in the world, and take on practices that will help it give witness to the reign of God in the world. The book both serves as a critique of the most common forms of the church in North America in its (then) current state, and as a vision for how the church could begin to live under a new paradigm. That paradigm is radically new, the book argues, and involves extensive shifts in the way churches think about their identity, their reason for existence, their structures and leadership, and their core practices. The vision captured here is extensive in its scope and depth, prescribing shifts in all kinds of churches and changes that reach deep into the fabric of the church.This book resonated deeply with me. I felt like I was recognizing the source of a stream that I have been drinking from, unknowingly, from a long time—it’s clear that many of the books that have been key in the formation of my own sense of mission are derivative of this landmark work. The greatest weakness of the book is that it can be, at times, ambiguous as to how its new directions play out. The book is providing a broad framework that touches on many areas, and so at times it lacks concreteness. For instance, it doesn’t provide examples of what the ecclesiological model offered might really look like in actual congregations. That weakness has been somewhat mitigated by the publication of Treasures in Clay Jars (Barrett et al., 2004), which can easily serve as a companion volume to provide the needed sketches. Elements such as the leadership model suggested here and the shape of Biblical formation mentioned remain ambiguous, but these have been developed in other works as well. In many ways, this text’s greatest value is that it has served to initiate conversations in the development of missional ecclesiology in many areas, by many other authors. It has effectively framed the conversation. However, that “frame” has also proven to be flexible and porous over time, and it remains to be seen what missional theology will become, and if it can provoke and sustain the kinds of meaningful shifts that will help the church navigate the present with faithfulness.Missional Church’s contribution really is that of a foundational text. It provides a great summary of the current situation of the church at the end of Christendom, and the turn towards thinking of the church as a participant in God’s own ongoing work continues to provoke the kinds of conversation that I hear around our congregation, and in the larger church. The text serves as an anchor in thinking about the missionary nature of God, and the corollary missionary nature of the Church God has created. I should also note that I was surprised at how practical some parts of the book are; the reflections on the kinds of practices that are central to the core of the church were particularly concrete and helpful. This is a fundamental text on the missional vein of theological thought, and it deserves its place of influence. Highly Recommended. For a clearer piece on my own take on missional theology, see my post here: "What is Missional Theology?"
Hovater's 2016 Reading Plan
Over the last several weeks on social media, I've been posting different book lists that I've come across as I've compiled my own reading plan for 2016. But now it's time to show my own cards, so here's the list I've come to so far. If you have something else you think I should add, let me know!The Writings of John of the Cross is what I've been working through a few pages at a time for devotional reading. I already feel like John is helping me deepen my prayer life.Essentialism by Greg McKeown is a book about guarding the things you put time and energy into, and making sure that you carefully discern the things you commit to.Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr. I've already dipped my toes into this one, and love it. Rohr writes about what it means to press onto maturity in faith.$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America is a look at life for our neighbors who are struggling in poverty.Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright is a much needed book that offers a corrected to our popular understandings of eschatology. (That is the least compelling description, I know.)The Heaven Promise is Scot McKnight's version of Surprised by Hope, which promises to be a bit more readable.Farewell to Mars by Brian Zahnd looks like an interesting book about what it means for Christians to resist our culture's thirst for blood. I've heard Zahnd talk about Christian Nationalism before, and I'm very intrigued.Paul and the Faithfulness of God by N.T. Wright is the heaviest book on my list this year, literally. Taking my medicine with this one, but the first three in the series have been outstanding...life changing, really.Prodigal Christianity by Fitch and Holsclaw, whose podcast Theology and Mission has become one of my favorites. We'll see if the book matches up.Jesus, Feminist by Sarah Bessey is a book on Gender Justice in the church that I haven't had a chance to work through yet, so 2016 is the year.The Powers Trilogy by Walter Wink is something I've been needing to read to clarify some of my theological thinking about the dark powers of the world, and the way evil is manifests through systems.Home and Lila by Marilynn Robinson are on my list after reading the first of the trilogy, Gilead. I found it to be a fantastic novel, the kind that makes you want to read everything the author's ever written. I'm also including her book of essays, The Givenness of Things.The Martian is also making the list in the fiction category. I hear good things—You people better not be leading me astray. I'm looking for another good novel.Leaders Who Last by Dave Kraft has a great reputation as a leadership book.Lessons in Belonging from a Church-going Commitment Phobe is a fantastic title. Fantastic book? Remains to be seen.Good to Great and Outliers are two books on excellence I'm looking forward to. I like reading about the sorts of practices that people who stand out exemplify. Not all of these sorts of things translate well, but I think these two will be useful.Fellowship of Differents is a book by McKNight on Ecclesiology that looks to be very useful. I'm preaching on Ecclesiology this coming summer, and this will be part of my prep work for that series.
The Fruit of Hope: Mission
The first post in this series looked at nurturing hope. Here, I want to think about its fruit.It's not an accident that people into the missional church movement are also often rooted in the sort of eschatology emphasized by theologians such as N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight, and Jurgen Moltmann. These theologians focus on God's intent to bring about the redemption of creation—the reconciliation of all things to God. The sort of hope that this kind of theology cultivates points towards mission as its natural fruit. Here are four ways that a robust sense of hope moves us towards mission.1. Hope helps us deal with the brokenness that we experience in ourselves. Hope allows us to see our own conversion as something that has begun but which is not yet completed. Our own discipleship has a trajectory, even if the specific turns and twists along the way remain mysterious to us. In hope, we see ourselves as in the process of being formed, and that takes place for and by God's missionary work in the world. Thus, mission is no longer something that we only see as being given to the elite super-spiritual, but is something for all of us. It is not for those who have already arrived, but is a part of the journey towards God's future, the source of our hope.2. It allows us to engage in broken systems. As hope grows within us, we we have new energy to struggle against the dark powers of the world, knowing that God will indeed defeat them in the end...their ability to crush and grind people is destined to fall, and when they are defeated, the systems they use to break people will crumble to. That knowledge allows us to actively subvert those systems through story and action, even while facing the frustration that comes from facing their current powers. I know this particular point sounds super nerdy and theoretical, but there's one last one that we meet every day:3. Hope sustains our ability to love people. People are tough to love sometimes, and there are moments when our frustrations with their behavior can overwhelm our loving desires for their well-being. That's just speaking about the people we already have affection for—we still have to deal with the surely strangers who rub us wrong from the beginning! Hope can help us deal with those frustrations. It provides us the resources to be able to see people for what they can be, rather than only as they already are. Realizing that everyone we meet is on a journey frees us to think about how our relationship with them, even the smallest interactions, might move them along the way towards wholeness. I think this is part of Jesus's own way of dealing with people, an imitating it is a step on the path of discipleship.4. Hope broadens our vision. It's perhaps most obvious how this happens temporally, as we expand our view from the present moment towards a long view. However, hope properly conceived also contains within it a vision of how God reconciles all of creation, and so we find it broadening our field of vision spatially and relationally as well. We begin to see how God's mission, and perhaps to some extent our place in it, relates to all humanity and the wholeness of God's world. Hopeful people see beyond themselves.
Cultivating a Bias towards Hope
No reason to be coy here, to keep up any pretense of objectivity. Let's just put this on the table from the very beginning: I have a bias towards hope.Generally and theologically speaking, I trace that seed to the work of God in the world especially the movement of God in Jesus. I haven’t scientifically studied the origin of this bias in me particularly, though I suspect my family and the church collaborated in planting it within me, and it probably also began to take root because of my sunny genetic disposition. The origins are tough to nail down. Easier to see are the fruit of that hope, and I’ll write a bit more on that tomorrow. Today I’m thinking about the middle part of hope’s lifespan…the growing of hope.Hope doesn’t skip from seed to fruit, and the movement doesn’t happen automatically. Hope must be cultivated. Hope must be nurtured. The seed requires care and attention, or it will shrivel up and die, and there’s hardly anything more tragic than dead hope.[bctt tweet="Hope must be cultivated. Hope must be nurtured."]The importance of nurturing hope becomes even clearer when you think about the opposition it faces. The relentless chatter of cynics stunts its growth, our abundant experiences of scarcity and loss chips at its branches, and our perpetual busyness poisons its roots. The news cycle provokes a climate of stifling fear, and the more sentimental corners of facebook and youTube try to replace real hope with something immediate and shallow.In the face of all this and more, the seeds of hope wither and die without protection, and cultivation. Hope must be nurtured—and it can be! Here are six ways to actively cultivate hope.1. Connect with a foundation of hope. For me, this is the resurrection of Jesus, which I take to be a signal to the world of God’s intent to defeat the enemies of hope. This isn’t the only possible foundation for hope, but it’s been a reliable spring of hope for me. So I try and connect with it consistently enough that I can view other stories and events through that master story of hope.2. Embed yourself in a community of hope. Hope struggles in isolation. It seems to me like there is a tipping point, a place when a community struggles to muster up the courage to believe in the future anymore. On the other hand, a community that holds and practices a sacred hope can sustain your hope and develop its character.3. Remember you’re playing a long game. Hope requires patience. What you’re cultivating is not going to pay off immediately, maybe even within your lifetime. You can’t allow yourself to be dominated by the demands of the present, even though you seek to be fully alive in each moment you are given.4. Expect trouble. Don't shelter your hope by refusing to acknowledge the possibility of dark days. Hope doesn't benefit from naïveté. In fact, that causes hope to suffer, as unexpected trouble inevitably come to challenge hope's promise. But you're not cultivating a naïve hope, but a resilient one. And that means that your understanding of hope has to be big enough to hold trouble. This isn't anything new, by the way. Isaiah and Revelation, which are arguably the great books of biblical hope, both arrive at their visions of hope by routes that promise times of suffering. This doesn't nullify the hope they contain. It fortifies it.5. See both the forest and the trees of hope. Practice perceiving both the world and individuals through the lenses of hope. Let your sense of God's future be grand enough for the whole world and gritty enough to hold the complications of flesh and blood people. Let both of these senses inform each other, and your hope will become more and more robust over time.6. Pray for God's future. Hope is formed more deeply within us as we prayerfully look forward to the redemption and reconciliation of creation. The New Testament ends with Jesus's promise to come and bring about the reconciliation of heaven and earth. "Surely I am coming soon," he says. And revelation closes with John's reply: "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!" We do well to join this prayer, even as we join in his mission of reconciliation in the present.You might also want to read the next post in this series, The Fruit of Hope: Mission.