Logos Book of the YearMeetings can sap our energy, rupture community and thoroughly demoralize us. They can go on forever with no resolution. Or they can rush along without consensus just to "get through the agenda." What if there was another way?Church boards and other Christian leadership teams have long relied on models adapted from the business world. Ruth Haley Barton, president of the Transforming Center, helps teams transition to a much more suitable model—the spiritual community that discerns God's will together.In these pages you will discover personal and group practices that will lead you into a new way of experiencing community and listening to God together.
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Most people do not see things as they are; rather, they see things as they are.
Richard Rohr
Several years ago I had Lasik surgery—a pretty big deal for someone who has worn glasses or contacts since fifth grade. I had heard about Lasik surgery for years and had thought of having it done, but it was expensive and I couldn’t really believe that it was as good as it sounded. Well, at some point I got tired of how complicated seeing had become for me, and I decided to do it. And guess what? It was as good as it sounded! I walked into the surgery center not being able to see without glasses or contacts, and I walked out being able to see everything with my own eyes. No glasses, no contacts, nothing. Whether it came at the hands of a skilled doctor or Jesus himself touching my eyes, it felt like a miracle to me. What an amazing feeling it was to be able to see in a way I had never seen before! “Once I was blind, but now I see” took on a whole new meaning.
The Trouble with Seeing
One of the miracles Jesus most commonly performed while he was on this earth was the healing of blind people. The reason this particular miracle was so common might have to do with the fact that it is a metaphor for the spiritual journey itself—the movement from spiritual blindness to spiritual sight. In fact, the spiritual journey can be understood as the movement from seeing God nowhere, or seeing God only where we expect to see him, to seeing God everywhere, especially where we least expect him.
Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits and best known for developing a set of spiritual exercises intended to hone people’s capacity to see and respond to God in all of life, defined the aim of discernment as “finding God in all things in order that we might love and serve God in all” (emphasis added). Discernment is an ever-increasing capacity to “see” or discern the works of God in the midst of the human situation so that we can align ourselves with whatever it is that God is doing. Every Christian is called to this kind of discernment (Rom 12:2). It is a mark of Christian maturity (1 Jn 4:1), and it is also a spiritual gift with which some individuals in the body of Christ are particularly graced (1 Cor 12:10).
Discernment together as leaders takes us beyond the personal to an increasing capacity to “see” what God is up to in the place we are called to lead. It calls us to be courageous in seeking the will of God and then making decisions that are responsive to that will as it unfolds in front of us. There is a great deal of biblical precedent for discernment together as leaders. Acts 6:1-7 records a situation in which the apostles needed to discern God’s heart and mind regarding the complaints of a minority. Acts 15:19-20 describes a major decision involving doctrine and practice that needed to be discerned. Acts 21:10-14 records a situation in which an individual in the group (Paul) was contemplating a personal decision that would affect the leadership group he was a part of, and so he opened up that decision to a shared discernment process. All these passages recount situations in which believers in the New Testament church, through the presence of the Holy Spirit, discerned God’s will regarding important decisions; this, however, is not always as easy as it sounds.
John 9 records the account of a group of very religious people who were unable to recognize the work of God in their midst and thus missed the opportunity to be a part of what God was doing. In fact, the religious leaders were most guilty of thwarting and eventually dismissing the work of God taking place among them. In this particular story the bulk of the attention is given to the varying levels of spiritual blindness among those who witnessed the healing of a blind man. Everyone in this story saw the same man healed (or saw evidence of it), but all of them had difficulty recognizing and naming it as the work of God. What should have been a day of uproarious celebration for the healed man deteriorated into a day of controversy, debate, fear and expulsion. What prevented his family, friends and neighbors from recognizing and responding to the presence and activity of God in their midst is not all that different from what prevents us from seeing God’s work today.
Asking the Wrong Question
The story begins with really good news: Jesus saw the blind man, and being seen by Jesus opens up tremendous potential for healing. However, the story goes rapidly downhill from there because those who should have been seeing spiritual reality most clearly were the most blind and undiscerning. Sadly, those who were most “spiritual” were the ones who were most out of touch with God’s heart for this situation.
The disciples who were with Jesus saw the blind man too, but they used this man’s misfortune as an opportunity for theological and philosophical discussion. “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” There was no love, no compassion for this man’s situation, no concern for his well-being. Instead they turned him into an object lesson, reducing him to a specimen in order to satiate their own intellectual curiosity. They distanced themselves from the raw humanity of the situation and from their own calling as Christ followers to make a compassionate response. Instead of seeing this as an occasion to care for another human being and to wonder about the spiritual possibilities present in the situation, they added insult to injury by asking the blame question: Whose fault is it that this happened?
The disciples, for all of their closeness to Jesus, were caught in a kind of blindness that was more limiting and debilitating than physical blindness. It was a structural blindness embedded in the belief system they adhered to. The question they asked was shaped by their outdated religious beliefs and cultural superstitions—the commonly held assumption that human misfortune had to be someone’s fault. And it framed the situation so narrowly that it only allowed for two outcomes, neither of which was positive. Either the blind man sinned or his parents sinned. The only way they could have seen beyond these assumptions and their implications would have been to somehow stand outside the system and the limits of their shared way of thinking.
Jesus responded by saying (in effect), “You are asking the wrong question. Neither this man nor his parents sinned. That is an old way of seeing and interpreting reality, and has nothing to do with spiritual reality as it is unfolding right now. This man was born blind so the works of God could be revealed in and through his life.” This possibility hadn’t occurred to them because their systemic way of thinking had produced the wrong question in the first place. The right question, according to Jesus, was, What is God doing in this situation, and how can I get on board with it? Now that is a much better question. In fact, it is the best possible question in the face of the brokenness and impossibility of the human situation.
Jesus was not trying to sugarcoat the situation or to avoid dealing with the harsh realities of life. Yes, there is evil in the world. Yes, there is sin with all of its tragic consequences. Yes, there is a complex web of cause-and-effect relationships at work in the human experience. But what good does the blame question do? The real question is, What is God going to do with it? Jesus engaged the heartbreak and the complexity of the human situation by pointing out that such situations create the most amazing possibilities for God to be at work. He said, “Let’s learn how to notice that and then get involved.” Which is exactly what he did.
One of the first lessons we learn about discernment—from Jesus, anyway—is that it will always tend toward concrete expressions of love with real people rather than theoretical conversations about theology and philosophy. Such conversations are valuable only if they eventually lead us to more concrete expressions of love for the real people who are in need around us. If such conversations don’t move us toward concrete action in the world, we become the proverbial noisy gong and clashing symbol. The disciples’ blindness to the work of God in their midst is sobering because it demonstrates that even those who are closest to Jesus and on a serious spiritual journey can still miss things—especially if we are living and breathing the same cultural influences together.
Stuck in Old Paradigms
The blind man’s neighbors were the next group of people given the opportunity to recognize the work of God in their midst. They had seen the blind man every day and were intimate with the situation. Perhaps some of them were even friends of the family who had been there the day he was born and shared his parents’ grief when they discovered he was blind. They had pretty strong ideas about what the situation was and were stuck in their paradigms. A blind man who could now see—particularly this blind man, whom they knew so well—just did not fit what they were accustomed to seeing, so they couldn’t “see” it.
The neighbors were afflicted, as we all are, with cognitive filters that helped them categorize and make sense of reality. The problem of course is that these unconscious filters, developed over years of interacting with the situation in the same way, prevented them from seeing anything new or allowing any new data into their consciousness. They found ways to talk themselves out of this new possibility by questioning whether the healed man was their neighbor, even though the man himself was right there saying, “Hey, it’s me!” If the situation wasn’t so sad, it would be comical.
The neighbors’ predicament points out another difficulty we have with seeing: we only see what we are ready to see, expect to see and even desire to see. And we’re even more stuck when we are with others who share the same paradigms. How desperately we need practices, experiences and questions that help us get outside our paradigms so that we can see old realities in new ways!
Preserving the System at All Costs
By now the situation had gotten so confusing the neighbors didn’t even trust themselves; they brought the man to the Pharisees to seek help in making sense of it all. The Pharisees were the most committed followers of God in their day. Their job, which they took very seriously, was to uphold and restore a deeper piety and holiness to the Jewish people in the only way they knew how—through a meticulous observance of the law. The Pharisees were by-the-book people. They were determined to be right. But, as I once heard Dallas Willard say, “It is hard to be right and not hurt anyone with it!”
On the day of the blind man’s healing the Pharisees had only one concern: the preservation of the religious system (as represented by the issue of sabbath keeping) and their place of power within it. As long as the system remained clearly defined and everyone was functioning according to its rules and expectations, they remained safe and in control.
The religious system also afforded them an easy, straightforward way of evaluating themselves and others—by the externals of laws and rituals, religious beliefs and loyalty to the powers that be. Their strict adherence to this way of evaluating people made them judgmental and uncaring in the way they wielded the power of their position. The Pharisees did not hesitate to use their power to intimidate, exploit and exclude those who didn’t toe the line wherever they chose to draw it. So on this most amazing day not one of them jumped up and gave the blind man a high five. Not one of them said, “How exciting for you!” No one was the least bit curious about what it was like to be able to see for the first time ever. No one asked to hear the details. Instead, they fought, and they fought hard, to preserve the system and to dismiss anything that threatened the system the way they understood it.
Getting caught up in preserving the system gave them a convenient way to avoid dealing with who Jesus was, the miracle he had performed and the fresh wind of the Spirit of God that was blowing among them. The Pharisees used the issue of sabbath k...
