I have recently made a shift in my daily devotional life. I have decided to spend some time – days, weeks, months, maybe years – going page by page through noted books on spiritual disciplines, recording statements that grab my attention in a journal, looking up any Scripture references that are given, and noting my thoughts along the way. I’ve only been at this for a week or so, and I really didn’t think of it in terms of ministry multiplication or my gcmatrix blog, but I think I might have underestimated the relationship between spiritual disciplines and missional multiplication.
The first book I’m using is Celebration of Discipline: the Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard Foster. The first statement I recorded, from page 1, is as follows:
Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant gratification is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.
I claim that my process for gaining vitality in churches is a combination of spiritual renewal and strategic initiative. I wonder if my approach to spiritual renewal is a “deep” approach, or “deep enough” approach, and I wonder if the current trend in church health and growth toward being missional isn’t guilty of superficiality, striving for instant gratification.
Most of us are too busy with far too much to do in far too little time, but depth requires time. There is no substitute. What’s the proper balance between pushing to make things happen and pausing to let things sink in, deeply? If Foster is correct, we need “deep” more than we need smart and we need “deep” more than we need gifted. I can’t think of any formal assessment of pastors and leaders that measures depth though all seem to measure smart and gifted. How could depth even be measured?
Where to begin? I think I’ll start with shifting the personal discipling that I’m doing to the development of spiritual disciplines over the accumulation of knowledge and the employment of gifts. Obviously, these are not mutually exclusive and I don’t want to over-swing the pendulum, but I’m seeing the need for a seismic shift toward the disciplines – in my life and in the lives I’m influencing. Time will tell!
