Part IV of VI: Relevance

[note- this post originally appeared on my Xanga blog. Clicking the link will take you to the original article, which will allow you to read the original comments]

Currently Reading In the Name of Jesus : Reflections on Christian Leadership By Henri J. Nouwen see related

What is it about submitting to a structured pursuit of personal spiritual disciplines as an integral part of a corporate experience (i.e. CTI) that turns so many of us off?

Is it the fact that we’re told by other people that this is what we should be doing? That we’re often led down the path of spiritual discipline by our peers – people that we don’t see as any more qualified to guide us spiritually than we are to guide ourselves?

“Don’t tell me what to do to maintain my own spiritual health.If you like to read the Word, then that’s great for you, but God hasn’t given me that same passion, and therefore it doesn’t have as much bearing on my spiritual development as it does on yours. I have other ways of staying intimate with God… like playing Mario Kart.”

Maybe it turns us off because personal quiet time, corporate prayer, team devos and the like… don’t feel like they’re much more than just “going through the motions” and are therefore not authentic or relevant enough for us.

Henri Nouwen was like 52 when his book In the Name of Jesus was published in 1989 (long before any of us knew what it meant to be postmodern,) yet in it, he makes a statement about the seeking of relevance in ministry that ought to be startlingly convicting to the emergent generation that we’re a part of:

Aren’t we priests and ministers called to help people, to feed the hungry, and to save those who are starving? Are we not called to do something that makes people realize that what we do makes a difference in their lives? Aren’t we called to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and alleviate the suffering of the poor? Jesus was faced with these same questions, but when he was asked to prove his power as the Son of God by the relevant behavior of changing stones into bread, he clung to his mission to proclaim the Word and said, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4)

Sometimes I am able to see my personal hangup on authenticity and relevance for the stumbling block that it is. If some motion or degree of action doesn’t 100% represent how I feel, what I believe, or what I’m about… I won’t go forward with it. I thereby effectively declare that no motion at all is better than motion that contains any degree of misrepresentation.

And so, though I won’t be wrongly associated with something I don’t fully buy into, I don’t produce anything good either. Not in the outside world… not in my inner world.

Nouwen goes on to make this assertion:

The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there.