As I mentioned in Friday’s Week in Review, my InterVarsity colleague Tom Trevethan pointed me to a recent post by Fuller president Richard J. Mouw on Duke’s Call & Response blog.
Mouw asks:
What difference does it make to open class with prayer?
InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network
As I mentioned in Friday’s Week in Review, my InterVarsity colleague Tom Trevethan pointed me to a recent post by Fuller president Richard J. Mouw on Duke’s Call & Response blog.
Mouw asks:
What difference does it make to open class with prayer?
Last week, I began reading the new book from IVP publisher Bob Fryling, The Leadership Ellipse: Shaping How We Lead By Who We Are. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the question “Who am I?” (and reading other IVP books on the subject of being yourself). Bob seeks to connect two popular genres that don’t often interact with one another: spiritual formation books that focus on the contemplative, internal life, and leadership books that focus on the active, external life. In truth, our internal and external lives cannot be separated — in the foreword, Eugene Peterson calls them the “right foot and left foot of our Christian life” — but they are rarely brought together in an explicit way.
Photo credit: pictoscribe via Flickr
Chapter two — “A Growing Strength: The Practice of Pruning” — contained some advice that I found challenging, which I bet many of you will also find challenging. Bob writes that, for spiritual and personal growth, we often need pruning, especially three kinds:
Much could be said of all three, but I found the middle pruning — of the passion to maximize life — the most challenging. Bob recognizes that we must be responsible stewards of the talents that God has given us, and that we must work for “night is coming” (John 9:4), yet there is danger in pursuing efficiency, just as there is danger in too much food or drink.
As leaders we can also become addicted to efficiencies that at first help our bottom line or our workload, but can become an obsession that leaves out important relationships…
Choosing not to be consumed with efficiency is a great freedom that allows greater flexibility and spontaneity. As Jesus taught, it is not efficient to go after the one lost sheep at the expense of the other ninety-nine, but it is the right choice.
Personally, I struggle with a desire for “efficient mornings,” which usually means that I try to read the newspaper while getting my children ready for the day, and then skip directly to my email, calendar, and task list instead of taking time for Bible study and prayer. Of course, the results are that my children try to model my efficiency by wanting to watch TV while they eat their breakfast, and that I quickly fall out of the discipline of spending time with God.
How do you respond to Bob’s statement about efficiency? Do you struggle with making efficiency an idol at the expense of relationships or other important areas of life? How do you guard against the idolatry of efficiency?
If you want to order The Leadership Ellipse, don’t forget about your ESN member discount! Also, see a Google Preview of the book after the break. [Read more…] about Strength through Pruning
Do you think of worship, hospitality, or celebration as spiritual disciplines? If you’re like me, you associate the idea of “discipline” with things that are hard, like fasting, daily prayer, intense Bible study, and so on. But if a discipline is something that trains us to live and think rightly, then what better response to the resurrection can there be than over-the-top celebration?
In fact, celebration holds a place of honor in both of my top two books on spiritual disciplines. Richard Foster, in Celebration of Discipline, places celebration at the conclusion of his classic work, while Adele Ahlberg Calhoun puts Celebration at the very front of her Spiritual Disciplines Handbook.
Here’s what Calhoun writes about Celebration:
The world is filled with reasons to be downcast. But deeper than sorrow thrums the unbroken pulse of God’s joy, a joy that will yet have its eternal day. To set our hearts on this joy reminds us that we can choose how we respond to any particular moment. We can search for God in all circumstances, or not. We can seek the pulse of hope and celebration because it is God’s reality. Heaven is celebrating. Right now the cherubim, seraphim, angels, archangels, prophets, apostles, martyrs and all the company of saints overflow with joy in the presence of their Creator. Every small experience of Jesus with us is a taste of the joy that is to come. We are not alone — and that in itself is reason to celebrate. (Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, 27)
Here are a few ways that my family and I celebrated the resurrection of Jesus:
All in all, a great day of celebration. And I didn’t even mention the eggs.
How did you celebrate Easter?