Читать книгу The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place - Rob Bell - Страница 10
ОглавлениеI could feel my car keys in my pocket, and all I could think about was how far I could be by 11 A.M.
How much gas was in the tank?
How fast could I drive?
Sitting in a chair in a storage room behind the sound booth, I could hear the room filling up with people, and all I wanted to do was leave.
What do you do when you’re a pastor of a church, it’s Sunday morning, the parking lot is filling with cars, people are finding their seats, the service is about to start, and you are scheduled in a few moments to give the message and you realize you have nothing to say?
How did it come to this? It started out so great . . .
My wife and I and several others started this church called Mars Hill in February of 1999 with dreams of what a revolutionary new kind of community could be.
I was twenty-eight.
What do you know about anything when you’re twenty-eight?
But anyway, we did it. We started a church.
People who are starting churches, or want to someday, often ask me when I knew it was time to do it. And I actually have a coherent answer: I knew it was time when I no longer cared if it was “successful.”
I’m serious. I had this moment in October 1998 when I realized that if thirteen people joined up with us, and that was all it ever was, that would be okay.
This thing inside of me was so strong that I had to act on it. Can you relate to this feeling? That sense that there is something deep in the fiber of your being that you have to do, and if you don’t do it, you will be violating something . . . or somebody?
Better to try and fail, because at least you are being true to yourself.
And the worst thing would be to live wondering, What if?
Unleashing a Monster
The dream actually began years before when Kristen and I were living in Los Angeles. We heard about a church called Christian Assembly, so we visited it. What I saw changed everything for me. It was like nothing I had experienced before. This community was exploding with creativity and life—it was like people woke up on Sunday morning and asked themselves, “What would I like to do today more than anything else? How about going to a church service?”
I could not get my mind around this at first.
This concept was so new and fresh—people who gathered because they wanted to.
There wasn’t a trace of empty ritual or obligation anywhere in the place. I felt like I was going to see my favorite band. The anticipation. The fact that I would do whatever it took to get there. It didn’t matter how far away I had to park. The bond I had with the other people in the room.
Not “I have to” but “I get to.”
Not obligation but celebration.
Not duty but desire.
Kristen and I starting attending these services regularly, and then we’d go to the Taco Bell on Colorado Boulevard and talk about what a church could be.
Desire.
Longing.
Come as you are.
Connection.
A group of people who can imagine nothing better than this.
And so several years, two internships, and a cross-country move later, we did it. We started a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Now you have to understand that I started out playing in bands, back when alternative music was . . . alternative. Are there any Pixies fans out there? Talking Heads? Violent Femmes? Midnight Oil? I understood music to be this raw art form that comes from your guts.
Do it yourself.
Strip it down.
Bare bones.
Take away all the fluff and the hype.
This ethos heavily shaped my understandings of what a church should be like: strip everything away and get down to the most basic elements. A group of people desperate to experience God.
Please realize that to this day I have never read a book on church planting or church growth or been to a seminar on how to start a church. I remember being told that a sign had been rented with the church name on it to go in front of the building where we were meeting. I was mortified and had them get rid of it. You can’t put a sign out front, I argued; people have to want to find us. And so there were no advertisements, no flyers, no promotions, and no signs.
The thought of the word church and the word marketing in the same sentence makes me sick.
We had these ideas and these dreams, and we went with them.
People would come in, there would be some singing, I would talk about God and Jesus and the Bible and life for about an hour, and then it would be over.
And the strangest thing happened: People came on the first Sunday.
I remember like it was yesterday. A few people came to get me five minutes before the first service and said I had to look out the front windows. I was not prepared for what I saw. Cars and people everywhere. They proceeded to tell me there were traffic jams in every direction; they had run out of chairs; and people were giving up trying to get through the traffic and just pulling over on the side of the road, parking, and walking the rest of the way.
Chaos.
I loved it.
Now I am going to give you some numbers. And I hesitate to do this because few things are more difficult to take than spiritual leaders who are always talking about how big their thing is. But it happened and it’s true and it’s part of my story.
There were well over 1,000 people there the first Sunday.
People in the aisles. People on the floor. Packed. No more room, not enough chairs.
I ended the message by inviting people to join us on this journey. I talked about the need to explore what a new kind of Christian faith looks like for the new world we find ourselves in. Whatever it was and wherever it led, we were going.
“Join us.”
The energy in the place was unreal.
The next morning I held a staff meeting. Which means I sat in my office and thought to myself, What have I gotten myself into? Followed closely by, Sunday’s coming again.
It was during this first week that the practical people stepped forward to be helpful and remind me that people were there out of curiosity the first week and to help me feel encouraged with my new little project. They made sure I understood that I wasn’t to get my hopes up, that all these people wouldn’t return, and that we’d be able to see in the next few weeks who was really going to be committed to this new church.
You can guess what happened.
More people came the next week.
And even more the following week.
I remember telling people we had no more chairs and if they wanted to bring their friends, they would need to buy chairs for them.
In the next month or two, over two thousand people were showing up on Sundays.
And by September of that first year, we had to hold three services, pushing things to over 4,000 people in the first six months.
A problem developed in the parking lot because people were losing their tempers when they had to wait so long to exit. I heard several stories of harsh words being exchanged and people giving each other the finger. So I stood up one Sunday and said, “If you are here and you aren’t a Christian, we are thrilled to have you in our midst. We want you to feel right at home. But if you are here and you’re a Christian and you can’t even be a Christian in the parking lot, please don’t go out into the world and tell people you’re a Christian. You’ll screw it up for the rest of us. And by the way, we could use your seat.”
People cheered.
The more honest, the more raw, the more stripped down we made it, the more people loved it.
We had no five-year plan.
We had no vision statement.
We had no goals.
We had no “demographic.”
All we cared about was trying to teach and live the way of Jesus.
It’s still all we care about.
So what did I do? I did what anybody else would do in these circumstances: I decided to teach through the book of Leviticus for the first year. Leviticus is one of the first books in the Bible, and it deals with all sorts of ancient ceremonial and sacrificial rites. There are detailed descriptions of what to do with the blood of an animal you have just slaughtered and how to clean yourself after sexual intercourse and how much of your crop needs to be given to the priests. Good stuff.
Around this time we were having problems with too many kids in the classrooms—there wasn’t enough oxygen.
And then, several months into it, the fire marshal showed up. Not good. Legal, but not good.
He said we were over code and illegal, and we would have to start turning people away at the doors. We literally had to post people at the doors, and when the room was full, they had to stand there and tell people they weren’t legally allowed to go into the service.
I have a friend who couldn’t get in the first three times he came.
So we bought a mall. Actually, somebody gave us a mall, and we bought the parking lots surrounding it.
Yes, a mall.
We blew out the walls of the anchor store to make a room big enough to meet in and then turned the other stores into classrooms for kids. A guy came to one of the first services in the mall-turned-church, sat down in a chair, and said, “Hey, I used to shoplift in this exact spot.”
So a couple of years into it, Mars Hill is still growing. There were stretches of time when a new staff member was hired every week. House churches were springing up all over the area, partnerships were beginning with other churches around the world, and people who had never been a part of a church were finding a home.
Once again I am going to give you some numbers, and I hesitate to do so, but it is part of the story and it helps to explain the rest. Two years into it, there were around 10,000 people coming to the three gatherings on Sundays.
In the middle of all this growth and chaos was me, superpastor. I was doing weddings and funerals and giving spiritual direction and going to meetings and teaching and dealing with crises and visiting people in prison and at the hospital—the pace and the workload were unreal.
I can’t begin to describe what it was like because it was happening so fast. One minute you have these ideas about how it could be and the next minute you are leading this exploding church/event/monster. All of a sudden there are all of these people who know who you are and want something from you and think you’re a big deal, and you are the same person you’ve always been. Everything has changed and yet it hasn’t. It’s hard to explain, but I found myself asking, “Where is the training manual?”
I think of people who never before cared if I existed who suddenly wanted to be my friends. And that’s why I tell you all of this. Because there’s a dark side.
It’s one thing to be an intern with dreams about how church should be. It’s another thing to be the thirty-year-old pastor of a massive church.
And that is why I was sitting there in the closet thinking about how far I could be by 11 A.M. The next service was starting, I had just finished the 9:00 service, and I was done. I escaped to the storage closet where I could be alone and collect myself and figure out what to do next.
I was moments away from leaving the whole thing.
I just couldn’t do it anymore.
People were asking me to write articles and books on how to grow a progressive young church, and I wasn’t even sure I was a Christian anymore.
I didn’t even know if I wanted to be a Christian anymore.
What do you do when you can hear the room filling up with thousands of people who are expecting you to give them words from God, and you don’t even know if it is true anymore?
I was exhausted.
I was burned out.
I was full of doubt.
I was done.
I had nothing more to say.
And so I sat there with my keys in my hand, turning them over and over, listening to them clink against each other, hearing the room getting louder and louder and more and more full.
And it was at that moment that I made some decisions.
Because without pain, we don’t change, do we?
I could talk about the dangers of megachurches and life in the spotlight. I could write pages about what is wrong with Church Incorporated and the flaws of institutional Christianity, but I realized that day that things were wrong with the whole way I was living my life.
And if I didn’t change, I was not going to make it.
It was in that abyss that I broke and got help . . . because it’s only when you hit bottom and are desperate enough that things start to get better. This breakdown, of course, left me with all sorts of difficult decisions to make about Mars Hill. The church was alive and people were being transformed and the stories never stopped coming. Who would leave all that? I decided to be honest about my journey, and if people wanted to come along, great. But I was still going to have to go. And a new journey began, one that has been very, very painful.
And very, very freeing.
It was during this period that I learned that I have a soul.
Shalom
The tzitzit (seet-see) first appear in Numbers 15 when God says to Moses, “Throughout the generations to come you are to make tassels on the corners of your garments, with a blue cord on each tassel. You will have these tassels to look at and so you will remember all the commands of the Lord, that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by chasing after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes. Then you will remember to obey all my commands.”1
God tells his people to attach tassels to the corners of their garments so they will be constantly visually reminded to live as he created them to live.
The word in Hebrew here for “corners” is kanaf.
The word for “tassel” (or “fringe”) is tzitzit.
To this day, many Jews wear a prayer shawl to obey this text. The prayer shawl is also in a lot of interesting places throughout the Bible.2 One of the most significant is in the prophet Malachi’s prediction about the coming Messiah: “The sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.”3
The word Malachi uses for wings is kanaf—the same word in Numbers that refers to the edge of a garment, to which the tassels were attached. So a legend grew that when the Messiah came, there would be special healing powers in his kanaf, in the tassels of his prayer shawl.
Fast-forward to the time of Jesus: A woman has had an illness for twelve years and no one can cure her.4 She pushes her way through a crowd to get to Jesus, and when she gets close to him, she grabs his cloak. Now remember, Jesus is a Torah-observant Jewish rabbi who keeps the scripture commandments word for word, including passages like Numbers 15, which means Jesus would have been wearing a prayer shawl. So when the woman grabs the edge of his cloak, she is demonstrating that she believes Jesus is the Messiah and that his tassels have healing powers. She believes that Jesus is who Malachi was talking about.
If you were in the crowd, what would you think about this woman? This woman believes that this man is the Messiah.
She touches his tassels and is healed, just like Malachi said.
But I don’t think the physical healing is Jesus’s point here. I think it is what Jesus says to her as they part ways.
He says to her, “Go in peace.”
The word Jesus would have used for peace is the Hebrew word shalom. Shalom is an important word in the Bible, and it is not completely accurate to translate it simply as “peace.”
For many of us, we understand peace to be the absence of conflict. We talk about peace in the home or in the world or giving peace a chance. But the Hebraic understanding of shalom is far more than just the absence of conflict or strife.
Shalom is the presence of the goodness of God. It’s the presence of wholeness, completeness.
So when Jesus tells the woman to go in peace, he is placing the blessing of God on all of her. Not just her physical body. He is blessing her with God’s presence on her entire being. And this is because for Jesus, salvation is holistic in nature. For Jesus, being saved or reconciled to God involves far more than just the saving of your physical body or your soul—it involves all of you.
God’s desire is for us to live in harmony with him—body, soul, spirit, mind, emotions—every inch of our being.
Restoration
To say that salvation is holistic is to acknowledge that there are many dimensions to living in harmony with God. In one sense, salvation is a legal transaction. Humans are guilty because of our sin, and God is the judge who has to deal with our sin because he is holy and any act of sin goes against his core nature. He has to deal with it. Enter Jesus, who dies on the cross in our place. Jesus gets what we deserve; we get what Jesus deserved.
For Jesus, however, salvation is far more. It includes this understanding, but it is far more comprehensive—it is a way of life. To be saved or redeemed or set free is to enter into a totally new way of living in harmony with God. The rabbis called harmony with God olam haba, which translates “life in the world to come.” Salvation is living more and more in harmony with God, a process that will go on forever.
When we understand salvation from a legal-transaction perspective, then the point of the cross becomes what it has done for us. There is the once-and-for-all work of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins and saying, “It is finished.” Nothing more to be offered and nothing more to be sacrificed. Jesus’s death perfectly satisfies God. We claim this truth as Christians. All has been forgiven. But let’s also use a slightly different phrase: the work of the cross in us. There is Jesus’s death on our behalf once and for all, but there is the ongoing work of the cross in our hearts and minds and souls and lives. There is the ongoing need to return to the cross to be reminded of our brokenness and dependence on God. There is the healing we need from the cross every single day.5
Which leads to forgiveness. The point of the cross isn’t forgiveness. Forgiveness leads to something much bigger: restoration. God isn’t just interested in the covering over of our sins; God wants to make us into the people we were originally created to be. It is not just the removal of what’s being held against us; it is God pulling us into the people he originally had in mind when he made us. This restoration is why Jesus always orients his message around becoming the kind of people who are generous and loving and compassionate. The goal here isn’t simply to not sin. Our purpose is to increase the shalom in this world, which is why approaches to the Christian faith that deal solely with not sinning always fail. They aim at the wrong thing. It is not about what you don’t do. The point is becoming more and more the kind of people God had in mind when we were first created.
It is one thing to be forgiven; it is another thing to become more and more and more and more the person God made you to be.
Let me take this further: If we only have a legal-transaction understanding of salvation in which we are forgiven of our sins so we can go to heaven, then salvation essentially becomes a ticket to somewhere else. In this understanding, eternity is something that kicks in when we die. But Jesus did not teach this.
Jesus said that when we believe, we have crossed over from death to life.6 God always has been and always will be. And when I enter into a relationship with God through Christ, I am connected with God now and I will be connected with God forever. For Jesus, salvation is now.
I need a God for now.
I need healing now.
I need help now.
Yes, even greater things will happen someday.
But salvation is now.
This now leads to another danger of embracing only one dimension of salvation. When faith is defined solely in legal terms, the dominant idea often becomes “inviting Jesus into your heart,” a phrase that is not found anywhere in the Bible. That doesn’t mean it is not legitimate; it just means we have to be careful that we don’t adopt ideas that come with it that aren’t what God has in mind. The problems come when salvation becomes all about me. Me being saved. Me having my sins forgiven. Me being reconciled to God.
The Bible paints a much larger picture of salvation. It describes all of creation being restored. The author of Ephesians writes that all things will be brought together under Jesus.7
Salvation is the entire universe being brought back into harmony with its maker.
This has huge implications for how people present the message of Jesus. Yes, Jesus can come into our hearts. But we can join a movement that is as wide and deep and big as the universe itself. Rocks and trees and birds and swamps and ecosystems. God’s desire is to restore all of it.
The point is not me; it’s God.
It is one thing to be saved. To believe in Jesus. It is another thing to be healed. It is possible to be saved and miserable. It is possible to be saved and not be a healthy, whole, life-giving person. It is possible for the cross to have done something for a person but not in them.
My Soul
What happened to me is that I realized I believed in Jesus and thought of myself as “saved” and “redeemed” and “reborn,” yet massive areas of my life were unaffected. I learned that salvation is for all of me. I learned that Jesus wants to heal my soul—now.
And for Jesus to heal my soul, I had to stare my junk right in the face.
There is so much I could say about this healing of the soul, and it has only just begun for me, but a few things have become quite clear.
First, no amount of success can heal a person’s soul. In fact, success makes it worse. I speak with great authority on this subject. People were referring to me as the poster boy for the next generation of Christianity. I started a church and a lot of people were coming to hear me speak, and I had things I had never dealt with and they were still there, even after I “made it.”
If you have issues surrounding your identity, those issues will not go away if you “make it.” They will be there until they are hunted down and identified and dealt with. We often live under the illusion that when we reach that goal and complete our mission, those issues that churn on the inside will go away.
But it’s not true.
There is a great saying in the recovery movement: “Wherever you go, there you are.”
That’s why when we talk with people who are just itching to leave town because they “just need to get out of here,” we know they will be back. Often they find out that whatever it is, it went with them. The problem is not the town. The problem is somewhere inside of them.
Success doesn’t fix anything. We have the same problems and compulsions and addictions, only now we have more stress and more problems and more pressure.
I used to think—and I’m giving you a window into my insanity here—that when the church got bigger, then it would be easier.
Easier?
I don’t know if this connects with you, but have you bought into any of these lies? The lies that tell you success and achievement will fix it? They won’t. You will be the same person, only you’ll have more of everything, and that includes pain.
In addition, there is always a mystery behind the mystery.8 There is a reason we do what we do, and often it is the result of something that is the result of something that is—you guessed it—the result of something. What happens is we try to fix things, but we stop at the first or second layer. We’re stressed and so we make adjustments in time management. But a better question is, why do I take on so much? But an even better question is, why is it so hard for me to say no? Or even, why is that person’s approval so important to me?
But that’s not even the real issue.
What I have learned is that the deeper you go, the more painful it gets.
We have to be willing to drag up everything.
I started going to counseling and discovered that there are things that happened to me when I was thirteen that have shaped me.
Thirteen?
In one moment of enlightenment, my therapist and my wife were helping me drag up specific events from when I was in my early teens. I was remembering them like they were yesterday. I remember the encounter, what was said, what I did, how I reacted, and what it did to me.
Now I come from a family where I was loved and supported, and yet I have junk from way back then. What we discovered is that some of these experiences produced a drive in me to succeed and prove myself and show others . . . sound familiar?
Part of my crash came from my failure to identify these forces until recently. I had been pushing myself and going and going and going and achieving and not even really knowing why.
It is easier to keep going than to stop and begin diving into the root causes.
I think this is why so many pastors have affairs. They don’t know how to stop. They are driven and are achieving and are exhausted and don’t know how to say they’re tired. They are scared to look weak. So they start looking for a way out. They know that a “moral failure” will give them the break they’re looking for.
As pastor, I spend a lot of timing dealing with other people’s pain. And when I am dealing with theirs, then I don’t have to think about my own. I think that’s why so many of us push ourselves so hard. As long as I’m going and going and going, I don’t have to stop and face my own pain. Stopping is just so difficult.
I learned that most of my life I avoided the abyss because it is the end of the game. There’s no more pretending.
It is scary. It is scary to hit the wall because you don’t know what it’s going to feel like. And you might get hurt.
But what happened to me in that storage room between the 9 and 11 A.M. services, in those agonizing moments of despair, was the best thing that could have happened.
I couldn’t go on.
Usually, we can go on. And that’s the problem.
We put on the mask, suck it up, and keep going.
We find some extra reserve of strength and pretend like everything’s fine, like that incident was just a minor blip that isn’t a big deal.
But it is a big deal.
It’s a sign that we are barely hanging on. And we ignore these little blips at the risk of our souls. It is only when something deep within us snaps that we are ready to start over and get help.
We have to let the game stop.
I realize this is not groundbreaking news, but when we get desperate and realize we cannot keep living this way, then we have to change. We have no other option, which is why we only change when we hit the abyss. Anything else is like window shopping; we may look for a moment or even try it on, but we aren’t taking anything home with us.
As I let all this come spewing forth the first time in my therapist’s office, he interrupted me. I was making lists of all the people I was working to keep happy. He said it was clear that there were significant numbers of people I was spending a significant amount of time working to please and that my issue was a simple one.
I was anticipating something quite profound and enlightening as I got out my pen.
He said this: “Sin.”
And then he said, in what has become a pivotal moment in my journey, “Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God has made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.”
The relentless pursuit of who God made me to be.
I started identifying how much of my life was about making sure the right people were pleased with me. And as this became more and more clear, I realized how less and less pleased I was with myself. What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split.
I was split.
I had this person I knew I was made to be, yet it was mixed in with all of these other . . . people. As the lights were turned on, I saw I had all of this guilt and shame because I wasn’t measuring up to the image of the perfect person I had in my head. I had this idea of a superpastor—all of these messages I had been sent over the years that I had received and internalized.
Superpastor is always available to everyone and accomplishes great things but always has time to stop and talk and never misses anyone’s birthday and if you are sick he’s at the hospital and you can call him at home whenever you need advice and he loves meetings and spends hours studying and praying and yet you can interrupt him if you need something—did I mention he always puts his family first?
Now you are starting to see some of my issues.
I am not superpastor.
I don’t do well in an office nine to five.
I jump out of my skin if I am in meetings too long.
I am institutionally challenged.
But I am not defined by what I am not. And understanding this truth is a huge part of becoming whole. I had to stop living in reaction and start letting a vision for what lies ahead pull me forward.
I began to sort out with those around me what God did make me to do. What kept coming up was that my life work is fundamentally creative in nature. And creating has its own rhythms, its own pace. Inspiration comes at strange times when you create. And inspiration comes because of discipline. And discipline comes when you organize your life in specific, intentional ways. It means saying yes to certain things and no to other things. And then sticking to it.
I had this false sense of guilt and subsequent shame because I believed deep down that I wasn’t working hard enough. And I believed the not-working-hard-enough lie because I didn’t function like superpastor, who isn’t real anyway.
So I had one choice—I had to kill superpastor.
I had to take him out back and end his pathetic existence.
I went to the leaders of our church and shared with them my journey as it was unfolding. I told them that if they needed to release me and find superpastor, I understood. If we don’t know who we are or where we’re trying to go, we put the people around us in an uncomfortable position. They are doing the best they can with what they have, but sometimes we haven’t given them much, have we?
And when we begin to pursue becoming the people God made us to be, we give them more and more to go on.
I meet so many people who have superwhatever rattling around in their head. They have this person they are convinced they are supposed to be, and their superwhatever is killing them. They have this image they picked up over the years of how they are supposed to look and act and work and play and talk, and it’s like a voice that never stops shouting in their ear.
And the only way to not be killed by it is to shoot first.
Yes, that is what I meant to write.
You have to kill your superwhatever.
And you have to do it right now.
Because your superwhatever will rob you of today and tomorrow and the next day until you take it out back and end its life.
Go do it.
The book will be here when you get back.
Healing
There are so many layers to the healing of the soul. One practice that has brought incredible healing is the taking of a Sabbath. Now when we read the word Sabbath, most of us think of a day in the week, which is what it is. But I have learned that the real issue behind the Sabbath isn’t which day of the week it is but how we live all the time.
I decided to start taking one day a week to cease from work. And what I discovered is that I couldn’t even do it at first.
I would go into a depression.
By the afternoon I would be so . . . low.
I realized that my life was all about keeping the adrenaline buzz going and that I was only really happy when I was going all the time. When I stopped to spend a day to remember that I am loved just because I exist, I found out how much of my efforts were about earning something I already have.
Sabbath is taking a day a week to remind myself that I did not make the world and that it will continue to exist without my efforts.
Sabbath is a day when my work is done, even if it isn’t.
Sabbath is a day when my job is to enjoy. Period.
Sabbath is a day when I am fully available to myself and those I love most.
Sabbath is a day when I remember that when God made the world, he saw that it was good.
Sabbath is a day when I produce nothing.
Sabbath is a day when I remind myself that I am not a machine.
Sabbath is a day when at the end I say, “I didn’t do anything today,” and I don’t add, “And I feel so guilty.”
Sabbath is a day when my phone is turned off, I don’t check my email, and you can’t get ahold of me.
Jesus wants to heal our souls, wants to give us the shalom of God. And so we have to stop. We have to slow down. We have to sit still and stare out the window and let the engine come to an idle. We have to listen to what our inner voice is saying.9
I was with a friend last week who was abused as a young child. She has never dealt with it. She has never faced it and dragged it up and let Jesus heal her. And so we’re driving along and she’s angry with every other driver and her rage is boiling just below the surface. She has a mystery behind the mystery. Her entire life is affected by what happened to her when she was eight, and she isn’t even aware of it. And when it’s brought up, she brushes it aside.
Why do we do the things we do? Many people react to and are driven by these deep, unspoken forces. They are strong and they dictate huge areas of our lives. And it is possible to be a good Christian and go to church services and sing the right songs and jump through the right hoops and never let Jesus heal your soul.
Perhaps you have been around Christian communities enough to want nothing to do with them, and one of the reasons is the talk all seems so shallow. Like no one is talking about what really matters. I think this is a direct effect of the state of the souls of many pastors and leaders. So many leaders in Christian communities are going so fast and producing so much and accomplishing so much that they become a shell of a person. There is no space to deal honestly with what’s going on deep inside them.
I have seen many leaders who wear their issues on their sleeve. They are raising money to build a bigger building, but the truth is they are still trying to earn their father’s approval. They never unplug their answering machine and take a Sabbath because they still believe their parents’ divorce was their fault. They live in reaction to everybody around them because no one ever taught them to have a spine. They are racked with guilt because they are not doing enough. They are trying to teach people about a way of life that isn’t true of their own life. On a regular basis when I’m with pastors, I’ll ask them if the message they are preaching is the dominant reality of their own life. You can’t believe how many will say that it isn’t.
So my question for leaders—and for Christians everywhere—is, are you smoking what you’re selling?
I cannot lead people somewhere I am not trying to go myself. I don’t have to have arrived, I don’t have to be perfect, but I do need to be on the path. And that’s why for so many the church experience has been so shallow—so many leaders have never descended into the depths of their own souls. They haven’t done the hard, difficult, gut-wrenching work of shining the bright lights on all of the years of baggage and destructive messages.
It is so hard to look deep inside yourself. My experience has been that very few people do the long, hard work of the soul. Maybe that’s why Jesus said the way is narrow.
I’m hoping that wherever you are on your journey, you are tracking with me. I beg you to get help wherever you need it. Go to a counselor. Make an appointment. Go on a retreat. Spend a couple of days in silence. Do whatever it takes.
If you’re barely holding on, come clean. Tell somebody. Tell everybody if you have to. Check yourself in somewhere. What is it ever going to mean for you to gain the whole world if you lose your soul in the process? (I feel like I’ve heard that before somewhere.10)
I say the system has to be changed. It has to be destroyed and replaced not with another system but with an entirely new way of life. I see it happening, and it gives me great hope. I see leaders getting help and refusing to stuff it anymore. I see communities embracing their brokenness and the brokenness of their leaders, and healing is taking place. I see honesty. I see people who want to be fully alive. I see people who want the life Jesus promises and who are willing to let go of ego and prestige and titles to get it.
I can’t begin to tell you how much better my life is today than it was several years ago. I continue to dig things up and process new insights and learn about my insides. The journey continues.
I’m learning that a lot of people give up. They settle. And they miss out. Anybody can quit. That’s easy.
I’m learning that very few people actually live from their heart. Very few live connected with their soul. And those few who do the difficult work, who stare their junk in the face, who get counsel, who let Jesus into all of the rooms in their soul that no one ever goes in, they make a difference. They are so different; they’re coming from such a different place that their voices inevitably get heard above the others. They are pursuing wholeness and shalom, and it’s contagious. They inspire me to keep going.
I was sitting in the storage room last week at Mars Hill. The room was filling up for the service at 11 A.M. And I couldn’t wait for it to start.
Because Jesus is healing my soul.
