3 Ways To Improve Your Spiritual Solitude

I've posted a few times about how the typical church structure does a poor job of developing authentic community. You can attend for years, participate in official activities, and not have true friends at church. For real relationships, you have to do something beyond the scheduled experiences.

Today, I'm going to flip the coin and say that the typical structure is also weak for helping believers learn how to make the most of solitude. 

There are a host of verses in the Bible calling us to the private relationship with God. Jesus pulled away from the crowds--even from his disciples--to be alone with God more than once (John 6.22-24) and there are many verses calling us to be private and intimate and still before the Lord (Psalm 46.10, etc).

The sad truth is that solitude and private intimacy with the Lord don't automatically happen when you're not connecting with other people. Real intimacy in the private moments--real spiritual solitude--requires effort.

Western culture certainly isn't teaching us how to do this. Quite the opposite. We live is a world of constant distractions. On every stretch of road, someone is putting up their sign or their billboard. On every bench and bus, there are more bold colors and flashy distractions. And then we all have TVs and now phones that have constant noise and lights and entertaining distractions.

Don't get me wrong: I love my new smart phone and I do watch TV from time to time. Technology isn't bad.

But because it's constantly on, being alone no longer means having to pay attention to your heart and mind, let alone connecting with the heart and mind of God.

And our church services aren't much different than our culture. Typical churches fill every second with activity and sound and entertainment. Music is always playing, or someone is speaking. There are even advertising posters up in the lobby and spiritually inspirational images in the main sanctuary.

When is the last time you were in a church and there was true silence for more than a couple of seconds?

What would you do with that silence?

Most of us have no idea what do with it. Maybe pray? But let's be honest. In true silence, most of us would have a hard time staying focused on prayer for more than a minute or two.

We can't assume the people in our churches are doing this well on their own. And preaching a sermon on solitude and spiritual intimacy in the private moments won't cut it. People generally understand the need for it. What they need is help practicing.

Here are three elements of spiritual solitude you can practice with your church members (and on your own):

Meditation

This is NOT the same as eastern religious meditation. They advocate you empty your mind, etc. Biblical meditation is about filling your mind with the laws, ways, deeds, and precepts of God. It's about mulling over the things of God again and again. You could call it worry in reverse--a similar rethinking over and over, but on truth and goodness and God. There are tons of verses about meditation (i.e. Joshua 1.8, Psalm 119.15, etc).

This requires that you have information about God to load into your mind--and then that you engage God and mull over His ways together. Meditation is not the same as study. (More on doing this well in a later post.)

Self-Discovery

Many verses talk about how God reveals the heart, how God searches our souls and brings things to light (i.e. Psalm 139 and 1 Corinthians 4.4-5). Again, this should be done with God, guided by the Holy Spirit. Done separated from God it can lead to shame--or self-justification. Done with God, I usually go through a process of experiencing his love to discovering the 1-2 areas He wants me to work on back to being loved, without losing the sense of what I need to change. (I'll talk more on this process in another post.)

Waiting on God and Refreshing Your Soul

Many other verses talk about the need to wait on God and restore our soul (Psalm 23, VERSE etc). You don't empty your mind in this posture, but you don't have to push hard to a particular point, either. This is the one where you might put on some worship music or go into nature and soak in God's creation. Again, the goal is to engage God, not get your refreshing from nature or music alone.

Like a marriage, we need to be alone and intimate with God. We need to go on regular "dates" with God (get one on one time). And, like a marriage, being alone with God shouldn't be a passive ritual. Doing it well takes real effort and regular practice. If you want to keep your spark of love going strong for God, you need to regular "dates" together.

But how do you do this at church? Think about marriage retreats. Good ones have sessions where they teach, but also built in time for couples to get alone and practice what they're learning. You could do the same in church, if you really wanted to.

3 Weeks On 1 Question

If your idea is important to your church, then you shouldn't just drop it like a bomb (usually done via sermon) in one week and assume it was fully incorporated into their lives. Change requires time. So give your people the time to pray, process, and change.

Just recently, our church took three weeks and focused on one question: What is the one thing God is calling you to work on in your life over the next season?

See, God has a general pattern of focusing on one issue at a time. While there maybe 10,000 areas of my thought and behavior that need to adjust to be more holy, God isn't asking me work on all of them right now. This isn't a spiritual rule--He can certainly choose to do differently from time to time. But I've seen in my life and the lives of many, many others that God is usually only pressing on one of them at the moment. Once you deal with that one, of course, He'll draw our attention to the next one. But He gives us the grace of not dealing with all of them at once.

So we asked our members that question: What's the one thing God is do. I don't mean I preached a sermon on that question and sent them home to hope they thought about it. During an open ministry time, I literally asked the question. I did explain it a bit (like I'm doing here) and then we discussed the idea. Then we had time for people to sit silently and start asking God to speak to them about this. Then we prayed as a group about it.

We asked them a question and then gave them time--during the service--to answer the question. But all of that was only week one.

In week two, we did a bible study on cooperating with God as he works in our lives the next week--His part and our part--and talked and prayed more about what God was saying to each of us about our top focus.  And the third week we spent our open ministry time focusing on hearing from God and sharing to each other what God had been saying to us over the last few weeks.

The first week, even after some listening and prayer time, almost no one could name what area they thought God was pressing on in their life. But in that third week, almost every single person in our church shared an area that they believe God had spoken to them about. And the majority of them were able to layout specific steps they were going to take cooperate with God--to accelerate what He was doing in their lives.

Take time to let them grow. Slow down and teach at practice speed--you'll see much more real growth (see previous post for more on that idea) than rushing from idea to idea because you're "supposed to". Success isn't about how many great sermons you can produce. It's about how much change your members experience.

Of course, for us, the next challenge is to tailor our discipleship to the growth areas our members have identified. I'll post on that as we dig in.

Oh, and what is the one thing God wants to work in your life right now? What can you do to cooperate with Him? (Give yourself the time to stay with it and really figure it out. It might take three weeks or more, but it's worth finding out the answer.)

Why Men Aren't Coming To Your Church--Or Are Bored When They Do (And How Most Father's Day Services Make It Worse)

It's a sad fact that men are much less involved in church. Some examples...


• The typical U.S. Congregation draws an adult crowd that’s 61% female, 39% male. This gender gap shows up in all age categories. [1]
• On any given Sunday there are 13 million more adult women than men in America’s churches. [2]
• This Sunday almost 25 percent of married, churchgoing women will worship without their husbands. [3]
• Midweek activities often draw 70 to 80 percent female participants. [4]
• The majority of church employees are women (except for ordained clergy, who are overwhelmingly male). [5]
• Over 70 percent of the boys who are being raised in church will abandon it during their teens and twenties. Many of these boys will never return. [6]
• More than 90 percent of American men believe in God, and five out of six call themselves Christians. But only one out of six attend church on a given Sunday. The average man accepts the reality of Jesus Christ, but fails to see any value in going to church. [7]
• Churches overseas report gender gaps of up to 9 women for every adult man in attendance. [8]
• Christian universities are becoming convents. The typical Christian college in the U.S. enrolls almost 2 women for every 1 man. [9]
• Fewer than 10% of U.S. churches are able to establish or maintain a vibrant men’s ministry. [10]


Pasted from <http://churchformen.com/men-and-church/where-are-the-men/> Footnotes for these citations found there. Sources include US Census Data, Barna Reports, and that author's personal surveys at pastoral conferences.


This probably isn't news to you.


Why are men less involved? Is it that men are just inherently less spiritually mature? There's no biblical evidence for that.


Do we have an anti-Jesus male culture (as almost all of the articles on this topic claim)? Sure. But women have their own anti-Christian cultural influences, too.


My take on why men don't get involved: It's because typical church is designed to be a passive, emotional experience. We ask our men to come, sit quietly, sing love songs to Jesus--with lyrics about how safe he makes us feel, by the way--and let someone do all the work. This is the opposite of what God wired in the nature of men.


Men want to be active--to test themselves to see if they have what it takes. Think about how little boys play versus little girls. The girls sit in corners and make their dollies have conversations--for hours. Boys get up and move around, throwing things, poking things, building things, smashing what they just built. Does typical church sound more like how girls play or boys play?


Also, men want to sing about power and conflict overcome, not safety and the beauty of Jesus' face. Yes, we do love Jesus, and yes, once in a blue moon I need to feel safe. But safety doesn't inspire me to do something with my life. What calls to men is facing danger for a grand cause. Think about the movies that inspire men the most--it's all up to the hero, who must step up and pay the price to challenge the villain. There's a lot of running, fighting, chasing--moving. Women often find all that moving around without talking boring. They watch movies about people who don't get along and in the end realize they love each other. Those characters sit around and have conversations--and end with a kiss.


Yes, I'm generalizing and there's a lot of exceptions to this. But these distinctions are true for huge portions of people in all cultures in the world. Again, what does typical church sound more like to you--a men's movie or a women's movie?


However, when you give men something to do--an active, critical role to play in the service--they step up. When every Sunday they get to share their thoughts and challenge someone else's thoughts--like we do in the member-driven church--when they get to be on the team and not just a dressed up spectator--men engage. When they get to decide how much of their money goes to whom; when they get to choose how to minister during the week, even starting their own project if they want; when they get to bring some form of ministry at least every other week--when men are honored as needed doers and leaders, they engage at a level I've never seen in a typical church.


We don't have a gap between men and women coming and in seven years of leading member-driven churches, I've never seen a gender gap.


Most Father's Day services in typical churches, in an attempt to get men more involved, inadvertently reinforce the tragic trend. They do things like put a handful of lazy-boy recliners in the front and relieve their men of the few duties they do have on Sunday. They make Father's Day about doing nothing and spectating.


No man wants to be a part of an organization where he doesn't play a crucial role--where he doesn't get to be active. Let them engage each other. Let them have some healthy dialogue and conflict. Don't be afraid of the conflict. Just teach them how to handle that well. Stop trying to get them to be more like women and let them love Jesus in an active way.


Oh, and add some fierce, spiritual warfare songs in there, too.

Bored At Church?

Can we be really honest for a moment? Are you bored at church? It might not be a fault on your part--not a lack of love for God at all. For years, my boredom--and the accompanying guilt--was a weekly burden.

In fact, there might be a very good reason you're bored. It could be because your church services are more stifling and passive than God intended. It could be because all you're doing on Sunday is talking or singing (which is talking set to music) about being a Christian. Except for prayer (5 min if you're lucky), there's almost no practice time on Sunday for typical church members.

It's like signing up to be a musician, joining God's orchestra, if you will. He gives you a world class instrument. You search around and join a group of other new musicians for weekly lessons....and each week you sit quietly, for years and years, and watch a small group of special leaders talk about what their life as musicians. They might play a little music as a demonstration, but you and me certainly don't get to make any noise during the lesson.

At first, that can be inspiring and exciting. But after a while you realize that your weekly training session will never offer you the chance to play any music--not unless you can somehow get onto the elite team that plays in front of the crowd. You're on your own if you want to practice your instrument.

But that's just how church works (you might be thinking).  Pastors "equip" the saints on Sunday and it's up to us to practice on our own during the week. That's biblical, right? And everyone who loves Jesus comes every week, sings the songs, and takes good sermon notes on how to be a Christian.

Actually, James talks pretty harshly about this approach.

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that —and shudder.

James 2:14-19

Typical churches (even the huge, "successful" churches) do a terrific job inspiring faith and a terrible job of helping people practice their faith. They spend Sunday after Sunday convincing people to believe in God, so to speak, and give no time to putting that faith into practice. Members are just supposed to sit there and silently think about what we believe. (And we wonder why so many churches are dead.)

Yes, most churches offer "side ministries" where people can walk out their faith during the week, but that still leaves the question on why Sunday--the premier gathering time for the whole church--is designed as such a passive experience. And in case you're wondering, this approach to church (presentations only on Sundays) is not required in the Bible. Our current church service pattern was established during the middle ages, actually.

There might be a good reason you're bored at church. Your church might be boring. You might be spending each Sunday becoming educated on music theory, but still not actually be a musician (able to play well).

But you don't have to be bored. Maybe it's time to find a church where you can actually play your instrument during the lesson--where you can practice your faith. That's not going to happen if you spend then next 10 years sitting quietly while the leaders talk. To paraphrase James: ideas without action produce no life.

(If you're excited about this idea, but dismissing it as impractical, don't give up too soon. Check out other posts on how our member-driven church is actually doing what I'm talking about. It's not hard and you could do it, too.)

No Sermons on Sunday? (Part 10: Values & Practices Unpacked)

Sermons aren't a necessary element of church. Studying the Bible is necessary; but sermons are not.
 
The modern sermon--a lecture from the pastor--isn't based off the Hebrew model of discipleship. Yes, Jesus did address crowds and the Sermon on the Mount is awesome. But with his disciples he spent much more time asking questions, working on ministry projects together, in dialogue (not just monologue).
 
Our current sermon template emerged in the middle ages of Europe when the entrance exam to become a priest included proving you could read. So each priest had all his illiterate members sit down and be quiet while he explained what the Bible said.
 
Bible Study is crucial for a healthy church. It's our second defining practice. But exclusive use of the sermon format actually weakens a church.
 
 

I not only work as a pastor, but also as a consultant and speaker to all sorts of organizations, from multi-billion dollar companies to start-up ministries. And if all I did was lecture, I'd get fired.
 
Ask any school teacher. Read any book on professional training. Listen to any news show on education reform. All education professionals agree that lecture-style teaching is among the least effective methods of teaching.
 
Only pastors don't seem to think so.
 
And pastors only think this way about teaching on Sunday morning. Churches who do small groups don't require sermons during those meetings. Once freed from the assumptions on how Sunday mornings have to be done, they get very creative on how to teach and train people, with videos followed by interactive discussions while using workbooks, for example.
 
Don't get me wrong. My spiritual gifts include teaching. I love to teach. And the church needs great teaching. The church even needs great sermons, from time to time. I'm not anti-sermons. I'm anti-sermons-all-the-time. We can do better than medieval teaching strategies.
 
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE PRACTICALLY
One of the leaders of our member-driven church (chosen in advance) stands up and presents an introduction, outlining the theme for the day's Bible study and explains any key background or context that people would need to know to read the scripture passages well. This takes maybe 5-7 minutes.
 
Then we release our members to their table groups. Our members sit tables surrounded by chairs, the same tables we ate lunch at (see the post on our practice of Eating Meals Together).  Each table is given a page with scripture passages listed and questions about those passages. We also have a Table Leader--trained in Bible Study principles--assigned to each table who facilitates the discussion for that table.  And our members open their Bibles, read verses out loud to each other, ask questions, and discuss the scripture's application to their lives.
 
After a while, the teacher who delivered the introduction stands back up and leads the room in some closing thoughts.
 
And then we practice whatever we taught (see the post on our value of Growth Through Practice). If it's a study on prayer, we pray for a while. If it's something harder to practice on the spot, then we give ourselves time to make plans on when, where, and how we'll practice when we leave (and probably pray with each other about our practice plans, too).
 
Are there topics that require teaching longer than 5-7 minutes? Absolutely. Some ideas are so new and complex that I've spent 30 min setting the stage. But even then I make at least a little time for the table groups to discuss what's been shared. Because lecture-only teaching isn't as fruitful as allowing the members to drive their own learning through discussion and discovery.
 
How do you think the members of your church would respond if they were given the chance to have group discussions this coming Sunday? How would the staff of your church respond?

What used to be the centerpiece of the early church service? (Part 9: Values & Practices Unpacked)

Did you know there's a half chapter in the Bible on how to handle the meal portion of your weekly church service? 1 Corinthians 11.17-34 covers principles like: choose pot-luck approach over everyone providing only for themselves and if you're too hungry to wait then have a snack because it's important for the whole church to share the meal. Paul also challenges us to take seriously the communion portion of the meal. That's usually the only section referenced in a typical church.

There are multiple mentions of eating meals as a regular practice of the early church. Acts 2:42; 2:46; 20:7;  etc. In fact, scholars believe the early church centered their gatherings around a shared meal. They called it the Agape (godly love) Feast. Meals as a spiritual practice is all over the Bible, from the Passover to the Lord's Supper to Heaven described as a wedding feast.

So our first defining practice is Eating Meals Together. For example, one of our members brought the dish below not long ago. And it's not cupcakes. That's actually meatless meatloaf with mashed potatoes and cherry tomatoes. It was delicious! (I'm still trying to figure out the "meatless meatloaf"--is that just called loaf?)

Don't get me wrong. Eating meals during Sunday gatherings is not a biblical requirement. But we do think it's a great way to live out the mandate to pursue Authentic Community. It also reflects our value of Growth Through Practice. (See other posts for more on our core values.)

If being a real community, the family of God, is so important to having a healthy church (and I don't know a church leader who doesn't say so), then what are you doing to stimulate that during your services?

The "shake-your-neighbor's-hand" time in the service? Seriously? Does anyone actually believe that's going to build authentic relationships? If anything, it encourages us to be more fake! It's harder to reveal that I'm hurting knowing I'm about to sit right back down. So I've just smiled and said, "I'm fine" in response to the standard "How are you?" greeting.

What it looks like practically:

Our meals typically last an hour. As a result of having a weekly meal, we don't meet on Sunday morning, but start at lunch time and go into the afternoon. It's harder to get up earlier to cook and breakfast food doesn't have as much variety and lunch/dinner food. The food is placed on long folding tables. A handful of members sanitize their hands and stand on the back side of the tables, dishing out food. And each week I email a food theme for variety without boredom. Some of our favorites have been: casseroles, kid's favorites, red & green (where each dish should have red and/or green in it)…it's fun. And delicious!

The question isn't really why we choose to eat together, but why don't all church still eat meals? It's so effective for building community. It's not hard or expensive to do. So what happened? Seriously, what do you think happened?

Part 5: Values & Practices Unpacked

A metaphor from Awake From Atrophy explaining Growth Through Practice:

[After demonstrating three chord formations on his guitar...]

Jacob strummed through a few chord transitions and stopped.

“Have I been clear with all of this? Would you say you understand these principles about playing the guitar?”

“Um, I guess so,” Randall obliged.

“Now you can say you know how to play the guitar,” Jacob said proudly. He put the guitar down.

“Well…I don’t know about that,” Randall muttered.

“You wouldn’t say that?” Jacob asked Randall. “Why not? Didn’t you understand the principles? Should I show you them again?”

“No, I saw what you did,” Randall replied. “But that doesn’t mean I know how to do it.”

“But I just showed you how,” Jacob said. He was using a very gentle tone to offset otherwise combative words—sounding curious, not frustrated. “You said you saw and understood. What’s wrong?”

“There’s more to playing the guitar than just knowing about it,” Randall asserted.

“Yeah,” Randall's wife, Laura, jumped in. “Playing the guitar isn’t just about knowing concepts. You have to train your fingers to do it. I understand the concepts. They’re not that different from piano chords. But, well, when you play the piano you have to train your fingers to move how your mind imagines. Playing the piano is fairly easy to explain,” Laura continued. “Each key matches a note on the written page. You push each key for the length of time the page says. An uncultured person I know, whom I won’t name at this time,” she shot a look at her husband, “has called piano playing musical typing.”

Everyone chucked.

“But knowing what the page of music says still leaves you a long way from being able to actually play that music. Understanding the ideas written on a page of music still leaves you a long way from being able to call yourself a musician,” Laura finished the longest speech Drew had heard her deliver all morning.

“Exactly!” Jacob exclaimed. “And I believe it’s the same for being a Christian. That’s why one of our core values is Growth Through Practice. We believe becoming a mature Christian requires more than intellectual understanding. ”

--Awake From Atrophy

The typical church design produces educated people who can barely play their instrument, so to speak. We need a design that's more like a live jam session with expert players explaining what they're doing, where we all try out new principles and get feedback.

Instead, most churches today provide a professor to lecture on music theory and history while members take notes, their instruments safely locked up in their cases. No musical mistakes allowed.