Becoming a Spiritual Community - Part 1

Here's the notes from a session with Larry Crabb (psychologist and author of The Safest Place On Earth and a bunch more books).

The premis is that what we need is not professional help but spiritual community as the Trinity models it. We may fall short at this type of Christian community but we can work toward it.

“We who offer spiritual leadership often find ourselves not living what we are preaching and teaching. It is not easy to avoid hypocrisy completely because we find ourselves saying things larger than ourselves. I often call people to a life I am not fully able to live.
I am learning that the best cure for hypocrisy is community. 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

The Trinity exemplifies perfect communion - perfect relationship. There are no relationships in hell. Sometimes the church becomes a picture of hell rather than a picture of Trinitarian community. Isolation and our own needs are what the Bible considers death. In our age, the therapeutic community allows us to sit in our individual emotional needs and not in relationship. It is important that we live in communion with each other.

The GOAL of SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY:

1) Ask - What we need to know about ourselves and God to aim toward it?

Here's a question: When a first time visitor comes to your church, how would they answer “What’s this church all about?”
In the book Jim & Casper Go To Church, Jim took his friend Casper, an atheist, to a variety of well known churches in the US. Casper's response after visiting all of the churches was, “If people who had never heard of Jesus visited these churches, they’d have to conclude that Jesus’ number one priority was that Christians invest the very best of their energy and their money into putting on a church event. Is this what Jesus told you guys to do?” – Matt Casper

The goal of the church is to change us. To make us Christ-like for the Father’s pleasure and for the mission in the world, not for producing a church event.
“I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” – Galatians 4:19
“We proclaim Christ...so that we may present everyone perfect (mature). To this end I labor, struggling with all His energy which so powerfully works in me.” – Colossians 1:28, 29

We need to make disciples through conversations that matter. We are called to relate in such a way that gifting and talent does not make possible; that is natural. Loving like the Trinity is supernatural. This is why a PhD in Psychology can leave you still not reaching people. This is often uncomfortable for us because we love our own pleasure and our own comforts. We must love Jesus more than our pleasure.
See the book by John Owen – Communion with God.

2) Ask - What is spiritual community?

In the therapeutic community, people focus on individualism. This defines the health of the individual over the spiritual community.
But in John 17:21, Jesus prays that we would be in communion with the Trinity.
Often the Trinity is more like a problem to solve than a reality to enter. We spend forever studying and learning about the Trinity but do not realize the full application of what all of this means.

Perichoresis – Moving together in perfect harmony with love, with the ruling desire to give another what is alive in ones self for the sake of the other’s well-being.
In spiritual community, we attend to what is most uniquely alive in us that comes from the Spirit and we freely give it to others with their well-being in view. This is difficult because we are naturally self-obsessed. From conception the energy ruling from our center is individualistic.
We live to protect whatever we value in ourselves rather than living to give what might prove valuable to another.

The NEW COVENANT, an arrangement conceived by the Trinity that makes spiritual community possible:
A new purity: absolute forgiveness
A new identity: defined by relationship
A new appetite: outside law becomes inside desire
A new power: the energy to love.