Becoming a True Spiritual Community

Becoming a TRUE SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY
by
Larry Crabb

 
 
The formation of community is the intricate, patient, painful work of the Holy Spirit. (p.viii)
 
I think that’s what the writer to the Hebrews had in mind. He told us to never stop getting together with other Christians. And, when we do get together, to say and do things that stir a flame into a fire, to arouse the life God’s Spirit has placed within us so we can go on through dark nights or pleasant mornings with our eyes fixed on unseen reality.  He told us to consider, to think hard, about what all that means. (p. xiv)
 
My plan is to write about spiritual community. I want to talk about what it might mean for us to turn our chairs toward each other and pour out the life in our hearts into our brothers and sisters, and to let them our into us. It is sometimes more difficult to receive than to give. In spiritual communities, people do both. (p. xv)
 
No one can rightly plead poor self-esteem or a damaging background or difficult circumstances as an excuse for ungodly living. (p. 7)
 
Brokenness is a  condition, one that is always there, inside, beneath the surface, carefully hidden for as long as we can keep a façade in place. (p. 11)
 
When we turn our chairs to face each other, the first thing we see is a terrible fact: We’re all struggling. (p. 11)
 
When you became a Christian, you packed your bags for Bermuda but your plane landed in Iceland. (p. 13)
 
We moderns tend to think of our spiritual journey as a God-directed adventure until something goes seriously wrong or until certain problems persist past the time we give God to take then away. Then we think about solving the problems more than about finding God in the midst of them. (p. 17)
 
Many voices in the church, perhaps most of them, speak to that desire: Here’s what to do, here’s the seminar to attend, here’s the counselor to see, here are the principles to follow, here are the rules to keep, here are the biblically exegeted promises to claim. Only a few voices direct us to worship, or call us to a new level of trust. Only a few invite us to experience spiritual conversations in a spiritual community. (p. 19)
 
We need to dive into the unmanageable, messy world of relationships, to admit our failure, to identify our tensions, to explore our shortcomings. We need to become the answer to our Lord’s prayer, that we become one the way He and the Father are one.
(p. 19)
 
With conviction, I speak of spiritual community as a gathering of people who experience a kind of togetherness that only the Holy Spirit makes possible, who move in good directions – and want to – because the Spirit is at work. (p.22)
 
Integrity is the first step: We must admit to our community, to a spiritual friend or a spiritual director, who we are at our worst. (p. 31)
 
A spiritual community, a church, is full of broken people who turn their chairs toward each other because they know they cannot make it alone. (p. 32)
 
We are not our problems. We are not our wounds. We are not our sins. We are persons of radical worth and unrevealed beauty. (p. 34)
 
The passion to protect ourselves, to keep our wounds out of sight where no one can make them worse, is the strongest passion in our hearts. (p. 35)
 
In unspiritual community, we make certain we are safe from people and never enjoy safety with people. (p. 35)
 
The difference between spiritual and unspiritual community is not whether conflict exists, but is rather in our attitude toward it and our approach to handling it. When conflict is seen as an opportunity to draw more fully on spiritual resources, we have the makings of a spiritual community. (p. 40)
 
We settle for an unspiritual community of congenial relationships, cooperative relationships, and consoling relationships, all counterfeits of spiritual friendship. (p. 41)
 
I  believe in that position because I believe that the root of all non-medical human struggle is really a spiritual problem, a disconnection from God that creates a disconnection from oneself and from others. That disconnection consists of a determination to take care of oneself in the face of a disappointing and sometimes assaulting world. We conclude that no one exists who has our best interests at heart. That’s unbelief.
The resolve to look after oneself (call that rebellion) breaks fellowship with God and others and involves a violation of our created nature to be givers (disconnection from self).  (p.47)
 
A growing number of psychologists, particularly those associated with the third stream of psychology (the human potential movement, as opposed to first stream psychoanalysis and second stream behaviorism) believe that the central motivating drive in human nature is self-actualization. (p. 51)
 
The pursuit of business keeps these elders safe while still doing “good” things. (p. 54)
 
Analyzing underlying causes and working with the psychological dynamics created by dysfunctional backgrounds are efforts to release self-serving tendencies in a more adaptive manner. (p. 55)
 
Biblical counseling is sometimes thought of as morality is violated, and exhorting the transgressor to conform his behavior to biblical standard. (p. 56)
 
Now there are two rooms inside us, the one we built where our natural self thrives, and the one the Spirit built where our natural self suffocates and our new self flourishes.
(p. 63)
 
Notice an important principle: When sin is lifted up form the bottom to something less than wretched, virtue is brought down form the top to something less than great. (p. 78)
 
Until we recover a distinctly Christian view of what lies beneath eating disorders and multiple personalities and  sexual addictions and relational conflict, the value of spiritual community will not be recognized. Churches will continue to heal superficially through moralism, inspirational presentations of relevant truth, and a flurry of wholesome activities. (p. 79)
 
Hypocrisy is not so much the result of not living what I preach but much more of not confessing my inability to fully live up to my own words. Henri Nouwen (p. 81)
 
The architect of the Lower Room likes nothing better. If  we can’t smell the cesspool within us, we’ll be less bothered by it. We’ll be more likely to bathe in it, thinking the water is reasonably clean. (p. 84)
 
Deep brokenness is required, the kind that come from feeling the snakes crawl over our naked feet as we stand in the cellar, from smelling the stench of our interior cesspool.
(p. 85)
 
In spiritual community, people participate in dialogue: They share without manipulation, they listen without prejudice, they decide without self-interest. (p. 95)
 
Courage, Nouwen notes, comes form coeur, which means “heart.” “To have courage is to listen to our heart, to speak from our heart, and to give from our heart.” (p. 97)
 
There is an Upper Room, but I’m beginning to think that if we try to experience its passions without first smelling the reek of our Lower Room, we will discover only natural virtue, what is really only socialized sin that still comes from the Lower Room. We will be deceived by the effect of air freshener liberally sprayed over garbage. (p. 99)
 
In chapter 9, I suggested that God has looked at the mess we have made of our lives. He has seen our self-focused desires, our stubborn independence, our foolish definition of “life as pleasure now” and of  “death as pain now.” He has said, “The way you are living life is wrong. Here’s the right way to live. Now do it!”(p. 106)
 
The Old Covenant was never intended to solve our problem but to reveal it, to reveal our need for a different plan. (p. 107)
 
I do not want to be heard as suggesting that these four elements of spiritual community – celebrating, envisioning, discerning, touching – are ways to merely give us good feelings about ourselves. (p. 135)
 
There may be reason for rebuke, discipline, even hard words, but in spiritual community the spirit of celebration is never lost. (p. 136)
 
And through the New Covenant, the Spirit creates in us a new appetite, a new set of inclinations, a new disposition. (p. 138)
 
That is precisely what happens when a community of people, ruled by their own Upper Room passions, offers an individual a relationship that forcefully communicates four messages:

1. We accept you – we celebrate your purity in Christ, as we worship God.
2. We believe in you – we envision your identity in Christ and what you can become

as we trust God.

1. We see you and are glad to stay involved – we discern your good passions and

delight in them; we discern your bad passions and know they do not define you, as we ourselves continue to grow in Christ.

1. We give to you – we apply no pressure to change you. The power to change is

already in you. We give you what is most alive in us with the prayer that it will set you free to indulge your deepest desires, as we eagerly obey God. (p. 141)
 
A mystic, by that definition, is a spiritual person, someone who knows in the Hebrew sense, the person of God. (p. 144)
 
Perhaps an attempt at definition will help: Mysticism is the felt arousal of spiritual passions within the regenerate heart, passions that can have no existence apart from a Spirit-revealed knowledge of truth and the promptings of the same Spirit to enjoy that truth. (p. 146)
 
Orthodoxy that is cold is only academically orthodox. It stimulates the Lower Room passion to manage:
 

• “The Bible says this. What shall I do?”
• “ I want to love my husband well. What does that mean?”
• “My children are a heritage from the LORD. I will train them properly.”

 
That passion produces scholars with no higher ambition than to precisely articulate truth. It produces moralists who want only to bring their lives and the lives of others into behavioral conformity with biblical standards. It produces counselors who train to understand what’s wrong with people and to technically intervene. (p. 148)
 
Here is perhaps the pivotal key to mysticism: When spiritual people interact, something pours out of one soul and into another soul as surely and literally as life-giving fluid flows out of a man’s body and into a woman’s body during sexual intercourse. (p. 150)
 
Pascal put it this way: “If we submit everything to reason, our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural.” (p. 150)
 
????? None of us will sin in heaven, but not because it will be impossible. (p. 151)
 
We look at others differently, both the people we like and those we don’t. No longer are they objects to use with our needs in view, nor threats to guard against. We now see people as reasons for celebration, as possibilities in the making, as fellow strugglers who sometimes fail miserably and do the darnedest things, as opportunities to give and receive our common life in Christ. (p. 163)
 
The broken people I know seem more aware of their inadequacies than their strengths, but not with a “poor me, take-care-of-me” attitude. They feel their neediness. We feel their strength. (p. 171)
 
We feel safe with folks who are: (1) broken yet strong, (2) vulnerable with hope, and (3) respectfully curious. They worship God and, because of what they know about Him, they celebrate us.  We feel more  solid in their presence. (p. 171)
 
Perhaps at that moment, when our spiritual community disrupts us with an exposure of where we’re blindly wrong, we most sense their trust in God to grow us. They are humble, broken people who know growth is God’s mysterious work and that  their commitment to personal holiness is more powerful than strong rebuke. They may at times be firm. Discipline has its place. But they never push. (p.  173)
 
The choice is not between psychotherapy and spiritual direction. It is rather between independence and community. (p. 180)
 
Spiritual directors are men and women who know the Spirit, who trust the Spirit, who by virtue of calling and gifting and self-awareness can see into the workings of the human soul and can direct it toward its end. (p. 182)