Spiritual Formation and Extroverts

Over the last few years I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions about spiritual formation and how it happens in an educational environment. It’s a fascinating conversation, and in the process I’ve had the opportunity to look at what a number of other churches and institutions do in that area.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that much of what is being practiced (solitude, silence, Scripture meditation, journaling, prayer practices, etc.)—all good things, mind you—seem to be best suited for people who are introverts (see this helpful article for more insights).

Now, I understand that reflective practices are, by nature, quiet and personal. They are ways that we center our consciousness toward God in order to be present to him. I’ve done those kinds of things and found them very helpful.

But they’re also not easy for me. I suppose that’s why they are called spiritual disciplines.

I am an extrovert, but I have come to recognize that I do have an introverted aspect to my personality. As I get older, I appreciate time to be alone more than I did when I was young. But I’m not energized there. I am energized with others, and I think most of my extroverted friends would find that to be true for them as well.

My friends who are introverts say that being with others for too long drains them of energy, and they find that they recharge by being alone. We extroverts are just the opposite. Being alone can be good for us, but being with others is where we come alive.

In education, learning theory takes seriously the differing learning styles of people, recognizing that one size does not fit all when it comes to education. Perhaps, in a similar way, we can look at how we are spiritually formed—formed by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit—in ways that take our mental wiring into consideration. I know that I struggled for years over my apparent inability to remain focused in prayer for extended periods of time (still do—you can take the boy out of his ADHD, but you can’t entirely remove the ADHD from the boy. Or something like that). But I’ve become more comfortable in appreciating what is natural for me and what must come through disciplined intention and action.

Some years ago, a friend and I spent a couple of days at a Catholic retreat center. We ended up being the only ones in attendance at a morning mass, and the priest was gracious enough to allow us to partake in all aspects, including the Eucharist (imagine!). After we shared the Scripture readings for the day, he said, “Let’s talk about what we’ve just read. I believe that the Holy Spirit speaks to us in community.”

That worked for me. I was energized by that.

I like it that, along with Jesus’ admonition to pray in secret (Matt. 6:6), there are lots of “we” and “us” statements in the New Testament. There seems to be a place for both introverts and extroverts in this journey of being formed in the likeness of Jesus. But one size does not fit all.

Engaging with the Reality of God's Work

I have been reading Mark Noll’s very helpful book, The New Shape of World Christianity. As he describes the character of the global Christian church as decreasingly European and North American, and increasingly African, Asian, and Latin American, he asks the question, “How much are the supernatural events that fill the pages of Scripture to be considered normative examples for what happens right now?” (p. 36) This is a question that is often answered differently in places like Africa than in Europe or the US.

Theology in the western world often remains abstract. For example, people still argue (to a lesser degree than in the 1980s) about the “inerrancy” of the Bible. People who stand for use of that word in relation to Scripture are seen by their detractors as narrow in their thinking, while those on the other side are often characterized as having a low view of Scripture.

But the debate isn’t typically about whether or not Scripture is authoritative; it’s about what language best describes that authority. The problem with our use of language is that it can only approximate reality and can allow us to remain abstract in our thinking.

When the view of inerrancy is examined, it is usually a claim that only the original manuscripts of the Bible are inerrant—without any errors regarding theology, distances between cities, number of soldiers on the battlefield, and so on. Most people recognize that the ancient manuscripts we have today show variances in them, so the focus is only on the original documents—the ones with the fingerprints of Moses, Isaiah, Matthew, John, Paul and all their friends on them.

Except that we don’t have those documents.

So “inerrancy” can remain only a theory. It is not possible to verify the claim. Yet, most of us still believe in the authority and inspiration of the biblical texts. Some of us just don’t think that “inerrancy” is the right word to describe the character of those texts.

But we can get really tangled up in the abstractness of the conversation, separating ourselves into camps based on theory, debating about the character of Scripture and missing something that our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world seem to grasp: That Scripture tells a story that is living, and we live today in the ongoing reality of that story. The language that describes that story doesn’t alter its character or its effect.

And many of our non-western friends claim that supernatural occurrences still happen—things like healings, exorcisms, the raising of the dead, and so on. For them, the Scriptures are not, for the most part, abstract at all. Noll comments,

“With only some hyperbole, we might say that although some of the world’s new Christian communities are Roman Catholic, some Anglican, some Baptist, some Presbyterian and many independent, almost all are Pentecostal in a broad sense of the term.” (p. 34)

Pentecostal and Charismatic folks in our culture have also made claims about the ongoing activities of the supernatural world, but in our theological work most of us can stay in the world of theories—whether about the nature of Scripture, proper images of the Atonement, creation and science, etc.—and never move into the work and activity of God in the world. Our brothers and sisters in the south and east haven’t separated theory from purposeful practice.

The rest of us have a lot to learn from them.

Certainty is Overrated

We who follow Jesus believe we have come to know some things about God. We have ancient creeds, like the Apostles’ Creed (my personal favorite), that we recite over and over, reminding us what we have come to believe and affirm about God. The declarations in that creed are derived from scripture, and we trust the witness of those texts to be true and right.

Some of our perceived certainties, however, can be detrimental to us. It’s too easy for us to grasp our beliefs in things (religious, political, economic, and so on) and lock ourselves into ideologies that we crash ourselves and others against. Sure, we come to believe particular things and then orient our lives around those beliefs (I believe in the authority and veracity of scripture, so I take it seriously; I believe in the pursuit of physical health, so I avoid junk food, except for potato chips; I believe in the power of gravity, so I avoid high places with no guard rail).

But when it comes to God, we have to think through our certainties.

I believe that God created the heavens and the earth, but I didn’t see him do it.

I believe in the real, historic person of Jesus, but I’ve never seen him with my own eyes.

I believe that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, that he suffered, died, and rose from death, and that he ascended to the Father. But I didn’t witness any of that taking place.

I can’t claim certainty about any of these declarations in the way that I can be certain about things I saw happen yesterday. In some ways, when it comes to historic Christian faith, certainty—in terms of quantifiable, measurable, verifiable evidence—eludes us.

But we have confidence.

The claim to certainty can be a dangerous thing when it comes to God. Once I have my certainties nailed down and the walls of defense securely erected, I can come to the conclusion that I now have all that I need as a person of faith. Once I’ve got my certainties about the way that scripture is authoritative, how the Atonement is explained, how the Reformation is as infallible as the Pope, and so on, then I might believe that I have become religiously self-sufficient. Once my certainties are locked down, I might not even need God.

Certainties can be abstract and propositional. Certainties make dangerous idols.

Confidence, on the other hand, is related to trust. Once we trust God, we find ourselves mysteriously connected to him. We find that something changes within us, as though our eyes are opened for the first time to what is real. We come to see Jesus as the very image of God, and we trust the witness of scripture, the faithfulness of the church (with all its wrinkles), and the experience within ourselves that God is present to us.

Certainty runs the risk of creating a concretized religion.

Confidence is grounded in trust, and trust in God is relational.

Confidence trumps certainty.

Of this I am certain.

Same-Sex Marriage: A Parallel

In the conversation about same-sex marriage, please allow me to offer a theological parallel that might help us.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the evangelical church, in general, didn’t know what do with divorced people. In the little church where I grew up, while we didn’t see many divorces back in the 1960s, if someone did suffer a marital break up, they just disappeared from our faith community. There was simply no place for them. There was this unspoken assumption that something was wrong with that person that wasn’t wrong with the rest of us—a leper among the healthy.

A greater problem emerged when these divorced people remarried. After all, we had a text of scripture, words from Jesus, which prohibited this:

“I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” (Matthew 5:32)

But when the national divorce rate skyrocketed, churches started reaching out by creating divorce recovery groups and embracing these people, even those who had remarried.

There was a practical side to this accommodation. If a high percentage of people are now divorced, and some are remarried, ignoring or shunning them would be to turn away from some very deep human needs. Such neglect would also affect whether or not people would find a place in the community of faith. Churches could shrink pretty quickly.

I’m not sure, however, that there was a lot of theological exploration on the issue. There were (and still are) churches that draw a hard line about biblical grounds for divorce and remarriage, and how people who violate those grounds will be subject to church discipline and, if necessary, dismissed from the church. Others, however, seem to have decided that God’s grace and love trumps the text.

There were some who took the theology of the problem seriously. They looked at the texts of scripture (such as the one above) and realized that Jesus’ words were in reaction to the male-controlled process of easy dismissal of an unfavored wife, one who would be desperate to remarry in order to keep from becoming homeless. Jesus also extended the culpability in the sin of adultery by claiming that even a lustful thought about a women (again, he spoke directly to the men in the audience) produced the guilt of infidelity (Matthew 5:28). In other words, there was a pervasive solidarity in the sin of adultery. It was real for everyone, and wrong for everyone. Everyone with a mind and body had the stain of adultery on them. All were in need of forgiveness.

But another question had to follow: Was divorce and remarriage the unpardonable sin? If one lacked the so-called biblical grounds for divorce, was that person eternally consigned to a solitary life? Or could there be forgiveness available for the one who helped destroy a marriage, and grace to start anew? Some of these thinkers said yes. In these situations, everything was not okay. Something sacred had been broken and destroyed. The marks and scars would always remain. But there could be forgiveness and grace.

I am watching to see if the churches that are talking about the implications of same-sex marriage will engage in deep theological and biblical reflection on this topic—not to dismiss Scripture, but to question our own hermeneutic (interpretation) as was done with divorce and remarriage. And not to be theologically reckless, tossed about by every new cultural preference that blows across the landscape, but to be theologically alert, willing to think broadly and to pray humbly.

And I hope we will remember that we follow Jesus, the one called by the religious elite “the friend of sinners.”

A Lenten Reflection for March 18, 2013

They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.” But others said, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And they were divided. (John 9:13-16)


It would be amazing to have your sight restored. Imagine being blind from birth, never seeing a thing, then suddenly your eyes are opened. Everything would be new to you—color, movement, faces, landscape. It would take quite a while to get accustomed to a sighted life. It would be like landing on a distant planet where all things are alien to you.

The man born blind in this story would have been in the midst of joy and celebration when the Pharisees showed up to interrogate him. I wonder if he stared at them for a while before answering, marveling at their phylacteries and robes. They were putting a damper on the moment, not seeming to care that the man could see for the first time in his life. They were more concerned with how Jesus had done it.

Had Jesus just waved his hand like a Jedi knight, it might have been considered an acceptable act of healing. But Jesus made mud to do the job, and on the Sabbath such an act was interpreted as work. You can’t work on the Sabbath, even to heal a blind man, so said the religious leaders. They stood on God’s word.

Jesus, of course, saw the Sabbath differently. He claimed that the Sabbath was for people, not the other way around. For him, the works of God could not be separated from the word of God. He also claimed to do only what he saw his heavenly Father do. That was blasphemy enough for the Pharisees.

When the abolitionists rose up in the 19th century to fight against slavery in the UK and US, they were accused of going against the word of God. Scripture, so the defense went, did not condemn slavery, but rather commanded that it be done with kindness. Therefore, the abolitionists were (among other things), fighting against God’s will.

But the anti-slave people persisted, seeing something deeper in Scripture that did not allow for the oppression and enslavement of anyone. No one today would likely disagree with their convictions.

Are there other issues facing us today where we have gripped our texts of Scripture—our interpretations of those texts, actually—in such a way that our convictions of correctness end up bringing harm to others? Is being right our highest calling? We have a number of biblical and historical precedents showing how the desire to be right can violate what God is doing in the world (think of Jesus and the Pharisees; of Paul and the Judaizers; of abolitionists and slaveholders; of women and men in the church).

God help us to recognize his works before we make a false claim on his word.

Political Correctness for All

In a recent CNN article, the focus is on the actor Kirk Cameron, who has recently produced and starred in the documentary movie, Monumental. The movie seeks to investigate the Christian faith of America’s founding fathers and attempts to draw attention to a historically revised culture whose soul, he claims, is sick.

In response to challenges to the veracity of his claims and the accuracy of the historical work done by his colleagues, Cameron insists that his detractors are the ones who “bow to the god of political correctness.” I suspect that the historians who have critiqued the movie—some from Christian academic institutions—might see their motivations differently.

I think, however, that there really is such a thing as the attitude popularly known as “political correctness.” I’ve been in settings where the mere mention of a different way of looking at an issue raises cries of horror and claims about personal offense. I find that such hyper-sensitivity does not allow for creative, thoughtful dialogue, regardless of the issue.

I wonder if there aren’t really two sources of this attitude: Fear, and the desire for power. The desire for power is easy to understand. Propaganda has been used for a long time to re-create the thinking of a culture and to vilify those who see things differently. Creating a new “political correctness” that caricatures one’s enemies and produces popular support is a mechanism of power.

But political correctness can also be generated by fear—mostly by the fear of loss. Certain topics are off-limits or instant fields of battle because of the fear of losing position, orthodoxy, or allegiances.

And we religious folks are not immune to this. I’ve been in settings where questions are raised about the nature of the atonement or the language that properly describes the authority of Scripture, and things get pretty nasty after awhile. Once someone has decided that there is a lot to lose in the conversation, certain things cannot be discussed.

Jesus, clearly, took on a politically incorrect posture, and it resulted in his murder. But Jesus wasn’t the only politically incorrect player in the story; the Sadducees also ran against certain dominant views. The Sadducees were known for their disbelief in the resurrection of the dead, and stood in theological opposition to the Pharisees. I find it interesting that Jesus was willing to engage both parties in dialogue—setting them straight, to be sure, but without allowing their differences to exclude anyone from the conversation.

Let’s face it—we all do the political correctness thing at one time or another. Dumping that descriptor doesn’t mean we have to roll over and play dead for every view that comes our way, but it could mean that we don’t have to be driven by fear or the need for power. When we fall into those traps, any evidence—real or fabricated—that supports our preferred views is often considered acceptable.

I think that the Bible would put that in the category of Bearing False Witness.