If you remember one prophetic word, this is it: Soul slips away easily from a church or an institution. You may go to any of these places and find that the Spirit has departed; the Shekinah is gone. When a local church loses its soul it begins to slip into mediocrity and is unable to give life. The average person doesn't even know when a church begins to lose its soul. It takes unusual deeper wisdom to see it, and then when we see it, it is costly beyond words to retrieve it.
N. Gordon Cosby
A church is a group of people collapsing into God and collapsing into one another.
If you feel you can't tolerate the mess, the only advice I can give to you is this: choose what for you is a better mess, if you can find it. But wherever you go, you go to the next mess. You may take a couple of years to find out how messy it is, but you will find it to be a mess. God has tolerated many messes for many eons.
Confession has to do with facing and naming before God the darkness within us--crying out the grief that has marked us and too often been covered over. Confession also has to do with naming before God the light within us--being willing to confess our gifts even when that means becoming responsible for them.
The God who speaks in the depths of our beings always bids us reach into the world of the unconscious, so that we may bring into the world of consciousness more of our real selves. Without a preparatory time of confession each day, no real silence is possible, nor is any new vision given.
The one journey that ultimately matters is the journey into the place of stillness deep within one's self. To reach that place is to be at home; to fail to reach it is to be forever restless. At the place of 'central silence,' one's own life and spirit are united with the life and Spirit of God. There the fire of God's presence is experienced. The soul is immersed in love. The divine birth happens. We hear at last the living Word.
Breaking from the old, launching out into the new, always means inner turbulence and outer turbulence. Anybody who tells you that if you get into the boat with Jesus everything's going to work out well forever after, just doesn't understand the faith. There is always turbulence. Inner questions. Wondering. And then, eventually, the storm ceases. There is calm. The elements are quieted, and there is an inner, living hush. And we know Jesus in a new way, in the intimacy of the boat, and we are never as fearful again.
Potential servant leaders best receive their training set in the midst of the suffering, feeling the hurt and pain of which they are to be the healers. Unless we ourselves are there, we'll not be able to introduce others to the poorest of the poor.
We pray for our neighborhood and also for those servant leaders who, in their own cities and countries, begin to bring in the shalom prophesied by Isaiah and embodied in Jesus. We'll keep on until we are interconnected and intertwined with the whole world. There is a new world coming. It must come because it is in God's mind and God has willed it.
What we do with intensity and focus in our own neighborhood, the one in which God has set our community--your community--will enable us to reach out in affection to the whole globe. To the whole human family. To the whole created order.
The time has come when all limited patriotic boundaries must be transcended. Everything is interconnected. We are related in affection to everything.
When each person is exercising her gift, she becomes an initiating center of life. When we confirm a person's call to this segment of the Church, we say by that confirmation that we will be instruments in calling the person forth in her totality. The one who joins assumes that same responsibility for all the other members of the community. This covenant is implicit in the celebration of commitment of each new member.
The Church of the Holy Spirit is full of variety. Sameness and conformity are the demands of alien spirits.
No gift is unimportant. There are no lesser gifts. Each is crucial to the proper functioning of the Body; each contributes to the rich diversity needed by the Church for its work within the total organism of humanity.
If there are ten people in one of the small groups of the church and each is an evoked person exercising his gift of the Spirit on behalf of the whole, then you have a group with power to attract. People gather around it. They respond to it, they love it, they hate it.
Such a group has the power to heal, to liberate, to tackle the demonic systems and structures of society.
All of us live by some vision. It may be a depressing vision. It may be a very limited vision. It may be a vision that it's all going to pieces. But there is a vision, conscious or unconscious, that each of us lives by. If it's a dark vision, one that's moving toward disintegration and chaos, then we will be fearful. If it's a larger vision, if it's a universal vision, if it's a vision of God's Realm and we really believe that it's going to come into being, we'll be filled with hope. Hope is the confidence that the vision which is the biblical vision will really occur. And no one is going to be excluded.
One of the most crucial dimensions of letting go is the recognition that there is no need to change an event or person. This is extremely rare and demands a respect and reverence beyond most of us.
But, we argue, shouldn't we want to change an undesirable happening, or to change a person who obviously needs changing? The answer is, no. We can be there, and God's presence can be there in us and through us, and that's all we can do. Whatever changes are appropriate will occur. But that is quite different from our struggling to change people and trying to change events.
There will be very little celebration and transcendence and lifting of another's burdens when we're hoping to change them and "clean them up." I have discovered through the years that it is very heavy work to get another cleaned up. And it's even heavier to get a community cleaned up.
The task, I think, is to enjoy the other more. To experience the wonder of the person, to be more open, more attentive, to learn from the person or the community, and to revel in the surprises that are given. If the person or community changes, good. If not, you've celebrated who they are. You've lived in the Now.