Cross-Shattered Christ: Reflection on "The Fifth Word"

"I thirst." -- John 19:28

I spoke to Dr. Stanley Hauerwas about these words on the cross and how it reveals his humanity, but Hauerwas was insistent that it also simultaneously reveals his divinity. Certain things can't be neatly separated out to say here's where Jesus is only human and here's where he is only God. He's very God and very man in everything he does. This also helps explain reflection four posted earlier.

SH: Right. You draw close and the closer you come, the more the assumption that you know who this is, is challenged. The temptation is to say, “Oh, when Jesus says 'today you will be with me in paradise,' that must be God, when Jesus says 'I thirst,' that must be man.” It’s like he’s fifty percent God here and fifty percent man there. When what you must come to understand is that he’s one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man in saying 'today you will be with me in paradise' and when he says 'I thirst.' And that’s a lot to get our lives around.

WS: So in other words, the one hundred percent God side might be the 'today you will be with me in paradise,' and 'I thirst' more the man side?

SH: No, they’re both. (laughs) He’s a hundred percent God and a hundred percent man when he says both of those things, which helps us to begin to realize, Oh, this is different.

WS: So God is not . . . comment on the "cuddly God syndrome" that seems to be out there. Say one thing to the average person who is looking for God in culture today . . .

SH: Well there are two kinds of fundamental attitudes, both of which I find horrible. One is, I say, the most determined conviction among American Evangelicals: that God is nice. You can’t make any sense of the cross if God is nice. This is high stakes stuff. The other equally disastrous view is people walking out of Mel Gibson’s The Passion saying, “Gee, I didn’t know he had to suffer that much for me.” What that does is indicate an inadequate view that this is some suffering that has to be undergone because the Father is mad.

WS: Because God needs to be satisfied?

SH: Right, no this is the second person of the Trinity. This is justice. So there’s no justice to be satisfied—that isn’t this justice.

WS: So how do you separate that in our minds? Because this is a very common misconception . . . when you try to explain the opposite, it’s mysterious in a way . . .

SH: Of course (laughs)

WS: It’s slippery to hold on to.

SH: It’s very hard.

WS: How do you go forth and explain the real mystery there?

SH: What you have to remember, where you need to start, is getting over narcissistic fascination with your sin. There’s bigger stakes going on here (laughs) than just God helping us to think that even though we’ve messed up in life, God’s forgiven us and we’re going to be okay. This is about the cosmic re-orientation of all that is. That reminds us that we no longer have to live as if we’re our own creator. Therefore, we’ve been brought within God’s eschatological kingdom in a way that we no longer have to live the desperate lives that think we have to make sense of all this on our own grounds.

Read more of NEW Wineskins interview with Stanley Hauerwas

Cross-Shattered Christ: Reflection on "The Fourth Word"

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"--Matthew 27:46

"We seek to 'explain' these words of dereliction," says Hauerwas, "to save and protect God from making a fool out of being God, but our attempts to protect God reveal how frightening we find a God who refuses to save us by violence" (that is, by power of armies and rebellions). The danger of misunderstanding these words, taken from Psalm 22, is that we misunderstand who Jesus is. How can God forsake God? So we may wrongly doubt in these words that Jesus is truly God.

In addition, further led down this road by The Passion Movie, we may see Christ more as an object of God's anger, rather than a willing participant who did not regard equality with God something to be grasped and who in love laid down his life because God would have it no other way.

"Here God in Christ refuses to let our sin determine our relation to him," Hauerwas says, then continues like this:

God's love for us means he can hate only that which alienates his creatures from the love manifest in our creation . . . any account of the cross that suggests God must somehow satisfy an abstract theory of justice by sacrificing his Son on our behalf is clearly wrong. Indeed, such accounts are dangerously wrong. The Father's sacrifice of the Son and the Son's willing sacrifice is God's justice. Just as there is no God who is not the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so there is no god who must be satisfied that we might be spared. We are the spared because God refuses to have us lost.

These words are easily misunderstood and one reason we must reflect on these words of Jesus at the cross is that, properly understood, they shape us as the Psalms shape us. Jesus, says Hauerwas, is the only life that is "the perfect prayer the Psalms are meant to form."

Jesus' cry of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" is not God becoming something other than God, not an act of self-abandonment, nor is it a lesser god being forsaken by a greater one. Instead, Hauerwas explains, "this is the very character of God's kenosis--complete self-emptying made possible by perfect love."

Living God's Love - Conversation Six

RENOVARÉ, which is holding an International Conference addressing the theme of Spiritual Formation and Scripture June 19-22, 2005, "The With-God Life: The Dynamics of Scripture for Christian Spiritual Trans^Formation" will address the role of Scripture in the formation of Christlikeness in the heart, soul, mind, and strength.

That is also the subject of Gary Holloway's and Earl Lavender's book that I am writing about chapter by chapter in this blog. More specifically, chapter four discusses how to listen for God's voice through meditative reading called lectio divina, "holy reading." In a later article, we will be describing lectio divina in more detail, but here is what RENOVARÉ recently said in an email about their upcoming conference, and it fits here:

For many the spiritual formation view of Scripture comes quite natural. And yet, as we reflect on the Church, it is likely our primary view of Scripture has been formed in one of three ways:

Apocalyptic - The Bible primarily as a resource for End Times concerns.

John 3:16 - The Bible primarily as a resource for personal salvation.

Historical Critical - The Bible primarily as a text to be subjected to scientific method.

While each of these views of Scripture can be beneficial, a Spiritual Formation view of Scripture is quite different. Seeing the Bible from this view encourages us in our daily formation in the likeness of Christ, informing in and forming us for holiness.

This week I am meditating on John 15, The Vine. Each day I will share with you what I am doing. First, I want to quiet my mind and heart, to be still and ready myself to hear and read. Second, I read the passage slowly, letting the words soak in. Next steps I'll tell you about tomorrow along with some reflections on the passage. One overall goal is to no longer stand above Scripture as mentioned above, trying to look for ways I can preach it or shape it to my point or particular bent such as historical critical concerns but to seek to be shaped by it.

Scripture and God's authority stands over me, and I am shaped by Scripture, by his voice, by his "Spirit of truth" (John 14:17). More and more I'm finding that Spirit of truth is not about exact beliefs but pure faith in the person of Jesus Christ, God the father, and the Spirit longing to dwell in me and shape me into the image of Christ.

Cross-Shattered Christ: Reflection Three on "The Third Word"

"Woman, behold thy son!" . . . "Behold they mother!" - John 19:26-27 (KJV)

This is a difficult reading of Hauerwas for non-Catholics who have not revered Mary the way Catholics have. Perhaps, however, it's one that Protestants and Free Church Christians need to hear . . .

He quotes Augustine who says of Mary:

Holy is Mary, blessed is Mary, but the Church is more important than the Virgin Mary. Why is this so? Because Mary is part of the Church, a holy and excellent member, above all others but, nevertheless, a member of the whole body. And if she is a member of the whole body, doubtlessly the body is more important than a member of the body.

I don't claim to understand the importance of saints, but regardless of what we in the "believing church" or Restoration circles say, we do put saints such as Abraham, Moses, and Paul on pedestals, effectively giving them at least special if not at the extreme an unspoken sainthood. Is there something wrong with this? We hear echoes of Paul convincing the Corinthians (1 Cor. 1) not to favor one brother or leader over another. Our heritage is strongly opposed to following particular "founders" or calling ourselves by them. I'm proud of this heritage, but to not hold some who were people of faith as more exemplary than others or to see the special status God himself placed on Mary as the mother of the incarnated Son of God, would be to deny the model of Hebrews 11. This is not "no saint left behind." Some excel and are honored above others. God in Christ is still the only true saint and the saint-likeness of others is always imperfect but still worthy of honor.

But to return to the question of the importance of the mother of Jesus . . . what does Jesus mean when he speaks to John of Mary? Does he mean, "take care of my earthly mother"? Or does he mean, "this is the mother of your Lord"? She is worthy of honor as the first believer in the Messiah, who she was told about in a vision when she said, "Here I am." That was Moses' phrase at the burning bush, but her faith mirrors Abraham's.

As Hauerwas observes from Raniero Cantalamessa's Mary: Mirror of the Church, Jesus is known as a new Adam, new Moses, new David but not a new Abraham. Cantalamessa suggests that the reason Jesus is not associated with Abraham is because Mary is. "Just as Abraham did not resist God's call to leave his father's country to go to a new land, so Mary did not resist God's declaration that she would bear a child through the power of the Holy Spirit," Hauerwas says.

Hauerwas does not suggest we add this saying of Jesus on the cross to our "pro-family" arsenal. "In spite of the current presumption," says Hauerwas, "that Christianity is important for not other reason than that Christians are pro-family people, it must be admitted that none of the Gospels portray Jesus as family-friendly" (Mark 3:34-35; Luke 14:26). He could be seen as loving children, but the Gospels explain this in kingdom terms, not in familial ones.

Hauerwas says he doesn't call attention to Jesus' anti-family remarks to denigrate his words to Mary on the cross.

Indeed I think we can only appreciate Jesus's (sic) commending Mary to the beloved disciple, as well as his charge to the discople to regard Mary as his mother, when we recognize that Mary is not just another mother. Rather, Mary is the firstborn of the new creation. Without Mary's response "Here am I" to Gabriel, our salvation would not be.

Finally, Augustine said that God created us without us but refuses to save us without us. Mary is the first great representative of that "us," Hauerwas says.

Living God's Love - Conversation Five

In chapter three of Living God's Love Holloway and Lavender suggest that we may do well to speak of our life in God more as a covenant of love between a loving Father and we as his sons and daughters than as ascent to a particular set of beliefs, though that's not unimportant.

They look at what salvation really means. Does it simply mean not burning in hell? Or does salvation ultimately mean more than "being saved." They point out that our language of "conversion" or "getting saved" might lend itself to an under-realized view of the life God gives us now and cause us to see our salvation only in terms of a post-life-on-earth benefit. That's more of a transactional conversion than a relationship transformation that includes the idea of God saving us for relationship with him now and forevermore.

Next they talk about repentance not merely as feeling sorry for sin but a complete turning away that prepares us for relationship. Pharisees rejected the preparation of John the Baptist by repentance and therefore were not in position to be transformed by Christ when he came into their lives. Philip Yancey, in What's so amazing about grace? speaks to this in his discussion of Romans 6:1-2 with this illustration that really fits Lavender's and Holloway's focus on our life with God as a relationship. Yancey says when we get married, we do not immediately ask our spouse how many times we can cheat. What?! I know my wife would call that asinine, with the emphasis on the first syllable. No, continuing to sin or dancing around it will not promote the relationship that God wants us to enjoy with him any more than cheating on a spouse.

Finally, the authors show how repentance leads to a relationship commitment of baptism, which is not as much "doing" on our part as it is "receiving" and "appealing" to God's grace (I Peter 3:21-23). As Alexander Campbell pointed out, baptism is not a pardon-procuring process but a pardon-certifying or receiving ceremony. By it we formally witness to the story of God's love for us and join in this powerful, life-changing, redeeming, saving life story. We join with Christ in his death, dying not only with Christ but to our sin and living a new washed and cleansed life free from the shame and guilt that characterizes a life "out" of Christ rather than "in Christ," one of Apostle Paul's favorite phrases.

The authors leave us with one final picture of the church, which will be discussed more in-depth in later chapters. The picture is in John's Revelation (19:7), the bride of Christ, dressed in lily white, fresh as Spring on untouched land. The church is the bride of Christ the lamb of God. The future we have is to be fully known and to fully know God in Christ who we walk with now by the Spirit.

For reflection and deeper thought sample questions from the end of chapter three:

What do you remember about your initial response to God's loving call?

Have you truly repented of a self-focused life? What can help you do so?

What do you need to do to stay focused throughout the day on God's love for you? Develop a plan to remind yourself--notes, reminders from friends, hourly thoughts, etc.

Living God's Love - Conversation Four

Where are we in our lives in relation to Jesus shaping us? Review 2 Cor 3:17-18 and Gal 4:20 about being shaped into Christ's image. What does that really mean? We often make faith an abstract and intangible set of nebulous beliefs and a system of values that is not connected to the person and life of Jesus, to the powerful drama of God's story. Finding ourselves in God's story is where we need to park the rest of our lives.

In the ethics issue (Jan/Feb 05), Lynn Anderson laid out stages of faith that I think are very helpful in this discussion to interface with at this point. Here is the link: Heart of Integrity: stages of faith

Here are more resources from Living God's Love:
Gunilla Norris, Being Home: Discovering the Spiritual in the everyday (Mahwah, New Jersey: HiddenSpring, 2001).

William A. Barry, Finding God in all things (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1991).

Dallas Willard, The Divine conspiracy: discovering our hidden life in God (San Francisco: Harper, 1998).

Madame Guyon, Experiencing the depths of Jesus Christ (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000).

Living God's Love - Conversation Three

In chapter two of Lavender's and Holloway's book, the authors lay out the most important story of history: God's story of his creation, chosing, and continuing pursuit of his creation for relationship.

This story may not be new to you, but the way the story touches us, the way we internalize it and are transformed by it, the way we make the story our own, is radically different from anything we might have ever discovered.

Indeed, we are part of a larger drama that God is directing. As one person recently told me, "What God has in store five years from now is none of my business." Our business is seeing how God has been working through history and how we are being shaped by that story. The way our story intersects with God's story as a drama has been described variously by different authors but Lavender and Holloway reference J. Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh, Truth is stranger than it used to be (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1995), 182.

Here are the six acts of God's drama that Holloway and Lavender lay out in chapter 2 of Living God's Love:

• Act 1: Creation


• Act 2: Fall


• Act 3: Israel


• Act 4: Jesus


• Act 5: Church


• Act 6: Return of Jesus

Seems simple but it's more messy when we begin to become uneasy with our theatre chair and find ourselves on stage in the drama. Neither are we the director but we are fellow participants in the drama of God's story. When we read Romans 5-7 we realize we have more in common with Adam than Jesus but by the grace of God we are joined in union with Christ. By sin the one man brought death and we're of that one man, Adam. Yet by the one man, Jesus Christ, we have been made alive and join with him.

When we read various stories in the Bible, who do we identify with? The righteous ones? Do we berate and belittle the Jews when they throw earrings in the fire and out comes a golden calf? Do we find Aaron guilty or do we see ourselves with a fist full of rings, waiting in anticipation for what idol comes out of the fire? Do we absolve ourselves of the sin and deception we see in Jacob's life? Do we think Lot's wife was so different from us when we long for comforts of home, take our hand from the plow and away from the narrow path and look back? The difference here is perspective and through whose eyes we see the story. We've been trained to read Scripture from on high, working it to our advantage, proving our points, making ourselves the good guys. We are the woman at the well . . . or perhaps we are one of the five men who discarded this poor Samaritan woman that Jesus had pity on, on whom he pronounced the blessing of living water and sent her on her way as the first to proclaim the gospel message "come and see." [Some of these last lines of reflection here come from hearing John York's sermon this Sunday at Woodmont]

We have been experiencing a journey ourselves, but do we consider ourselves part of God's story? Or do we co-opt God's story for our own purposes, shaping the story into our own story, making God into our image. The reverse should happen: the story shapes us, we are formed into God's image when God's story becomes our story, when our story melts into union with the story much bigger than us, much more profound than our personal journeys. This is the story that God is authoring.

For Personal Reflection (from Living God's Love)
How do you view the biblical story? Do you see yourself in the story as part of God's redemptive plan? If so, how does that shape your life today?

Why do you think Israel misunderstood God's purpose for them? How can we avoid the same mistake?

What gets you out of bed in the morning? Do you see your work as something that allows you to get by, or as an opportunity to embody God's kingdom?

Terry Schiavo and "orthodox" view

A reader named Eric has sent this opinion which is relevant right now to the dilemma or removing or keeping the feeding tube for Terry Schiavo in Florida. Please see our ethics issue (Jan/Feb 05) for more in-depth focus on medical ethics that can help us think through these important issues.

Here are Eric's comment:

Recently, I read a devotional book by Roberta Bondi, she teaches at Candler. She deals indirectly with dying with dignity issue. Her Aunt was about to be forced to go through an orthopedic surgery through which she had little chance of survivial. Bondi halted the surgery and a morphine drip was begun instead. Having dealt with geriatrics for thirteen years and watching families and patients, I don't know that I can keep my integrity and hold an "orthodox" opinion on this matter. I simply can't understand why it is seen as an evil to withdrawal unnatural means of sustaining life. God made the human body to live under certain conditions.

Why would some legislate that I choose "all available means" to be a faithful Christian, when God didn't design the body to resist extreme conditions. I am not saying that a Christian should not choose all available means, but where can I stop. I think we need to allow others in the community of faith the freedom to decided how best to guard the image of God. In theory, each new medical advance would place new ethical obligation on the family and patient. Perhaps God's image in us is much more than the physical body, but perhaps resides in the spirit that returns to God.

Join us in reviewing articles in our ethics issue and in discussing here on Wineskins Blog.

What does mountain climbing have to do with Spiritual Formation?

A few years ago fourteen buddies and I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. We climbed in four stages. The first day we walked through tropical rainforest and could not even see the summit. Incidently, the guys who came with gortex and North Face outfits got just as wet as those of us with cotton socks and tennis shoes, because it rained and we were walking up a path that turned into a river!

Day two we walked through mountain savanna and scrub brush around boulders with fantastic vistas of the summit up ahead, almost laterally ahead of us. It looked light years away, and I wondered how we were going to make it to the top.

Day three, now at nearly 12,000 feet, we walked through alpine desert, a dusty flat slope up to the last place we would sleep before attempting to summit the next morning. We would sleep until midnight at Kibo Hut at about 16,000 feet, wake up, walk in the dark two steps forward and one step back on scree (like fine gravel), trudging up switchbacks for six hours. At dawn we looked back and the sun was coming up, illuminating the path ahead and the expanse below from which we'd come.

Dawn of day four was the most fantastic sunrise I've ever seen. We'd groped up the mountain six hours in the dark and the sun over the Mwenzi Peaks immediately warmed me and I forgot how much my head was hammering and how I was ready to quit. We reached the first peak, about 19,000 feet. A walk along the snow filled crater in the center of the mountain led to the highest point, Uhuru Peak, at 19,300. Eleven of our group went on up, four of us decided to enjoy the success of reaching the first peak. All fifteen of us sang "We shall assemble on the mountain" and shared a moment of communion together to remember our Lord as the brother who held this brotherhood together.

Were we climbing Kilimanjaro the first day, even when we couldn't see the summit? Yes. We were. Were we climbing Kilimanjaro when the summit seemed so far away the second day? Yes. Was alpine desert part of the climb? Absolutely. What about that last day when we were in the dark, slugging our way up ankle deep in fine gravel? Yes. All the stages were climbing and all were important to reaching the summit.

Lynn Anderson details Westerhoff's stages of faith in the Jan/Feb 05 ethics issue of Wineskins. Like climbing Kili, we move through the stages of faith and find value in each one. First, we experience faith then affiliate with the faithful, the church. Third, we search, ask questions, move beyond only affiliating with a church but seek to find faith in Christ himself, asking questions like his disciples, sometimes off-based, sometimes angrily, sometimes blindly, other times faithfully. Fourth, we own our faith. We make God's story our story, recognizing that faith is not only experiencing but it does include experience, that faith is more than affiliating with a church but that this affiliation is with Christ himself as we are being shaped by him, not only doing what he does but being as he would be if he were us.

Nehemiah 9 is one of the great summaries of God's story, told after Nehemiah returned to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and Israel was returning to worship God. The story is about God's covenant faithfulness, Israel's stiff-necked (like a horse that doesn't want to turn) rebellion, God's discipline, Israel's return to the Lord. It's a cycle: God chooses, Israel accepts but grows stubborn and rejects God and in his compassion he disciplines or punishes them and they return.

The story is messy, and it doesn't progress like Westerhoff's movement from experience to affiliation to searching to owning. Someone might correct me here. I haven't read his book firsthand so he may acknowledge the messiness and cyclical nature of faith and Israel and our own faith, how it will dodge and turn even as it moves not by perfection but in the God direction.

Now, there are a couple of basic ways that people over time have viewed children and faith. The predominant Catholic view for centuries has been we are born lost. We are baptized as infants and move toward faith. In Churches of Christ, we have started from a safe position then at age of accountability we drop off the cliff into the lost position. In John Mark Hicks's and my book on baptism, we discuss a third option, one which affirms that children are maturing participants in faith if they are growing up being taught the gospel. So their faith and baptism becomes more like signposts than a U-turn. I believe we need more of these markers in our children's lives. How can we help put more of these markers in our children's lives?

For instance, handing keys to a sixteen year old is not a very good entrance into adulthood, but our society doesn't do much better than this for rites of passage into adult life. Similarly, when we hand keys of the kingdom to newly baptized, it ought to have been through a series of signposts along the way that give them a clear understanding about who they are believing, less about how much they felt they knew but in whom did they have faith when they were baptized?

By giving more signposts along the way, we are blessing our children with a movement toward baptism in faith, not baptism as the first step. My children, six, eight, and eleven all express faith in Christ, love for God, devotion to the Lord. But none are baptized yet. When Anna wanted to be baptized on her seventh birthday, we talked more than ever about her faith, how she could express it in many ways before being baptized and we still needed to experience some of these together.

How does a child express faith? I would like to hear more about how you encourage your children to express their faith in signpost ways. What is authentic faith? What does climbing a mountain have to do with Spiritual Formation? What metaphors make sense to you?

Show and Tell

One short thought: Our grade-school experience that was designed to ease our fears in presenting before a group may well have wisdom in its name.

If Christians make it a practice to be all about supporting each other and those in need in extravagant ways just as the early church did right after Pentecost, people will naturally ask "Why are you doing this?"

That's our opportunity to answer, "Because Jesus would."

If we show His love first, we are almost guaranteed an easy transition to tell of it.

Ashley Smith

Ashley Smith's story is amazing. A struggling widow and mother of a five-year-old endured a harrowing ordeal with a man who was the focus of perhaps the largest manhunt in Georgia history, Brian Nichols, who is accused of murdering of a judge and three others in his escape from custody and court appearance for the rape of his former girlfriend.

Smith knew this man was wanted for cold-blooded murder of a judge yet somehow her faith and life-experience and the Holy Spirit calmed her, allowed her to do two amazing things: treat her kidnapper like a human being who needs grace while still realizing he should be caught and held accountable for his alleged crimes. She stayed with him seven hours, was allowed to leave to see her five-year-old daughter, then she called 911.

During those seven hours she read to Nichols. She picked up where she'd left off in her own reading: Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life, chapter 33: "How Real Servants Act." This after Nichols had held her at gunpoint, entered her apartment in the north part of Atlanta, tied her up then later released her. Before she left to see her daughter she made him pancakes. Nichols was surprised she would act the way she did.

What did motivate her to act this way? Self-preservation? The desire to see her daughter again? Or was it because she was living a kingdom life of a servant in the most extreme situation imaginable? When people are put under pressure, their true colors come out. Ashley Smith showed her faith last Friday.

Her testimony is one we should hear more about. For more, read an article by Charles Colson in today's Wall Street Journal, "The lesson of Brian Nichols's last hostage."

Living God's Love - Conversation 2

Lavender and Holloway suggest in their book, in the "Going Deeper" section (p 24), that we draw a picture of God, using crayons or colored markers. "What do you learn about your view of God from this picture? If you think this is a childish exercise, ask yourself, "Has my view of God changed significantly from my childhood?" If so, how?

I decided to take their advice. I hoped no one came in while I had my children's crayons strewn across my desk and I was intent with mouth twisted and eyebrows furrowed in effort to draw a picture of God. So I guess I do need to ask myself how my view has changed since I was a child. Because we believe God doesn't change, doesn't mean we should let our view of God to remain static throughout our lives. We'll never fully get our minds around God, but part of Spiritual formation for us is to form our minds around who God is, what he has done, how we conceive of him, how we are shaped, in return, by him.

Here's my picture:


I envisioned the day Jesus returned to his disciples, who had been fishing, and he cooked fish for them. The ways God is revealed as creator and father, as Son and Savior and Lord, and as Holy fire of Spirit are represented. There are so many ways we can think and conceive of our God. I want to see yours . . .

Draw a picture of God today and share it with me by email or mail. gtaylor@zoegroup.org. The ZOE Group/Wineskins PO Box 41028 Nashville TN 37204.

Living God's Love - Conversation One

I sat with Earl Lavender in the faculty lounge of Lipscomb University. A heady place with enough brainpower in the room to light nine city blocks. Yet in this brain soup environment, for this co-author of Living God's Love, from which we've taken an excerpt as our first offering in the Mar/Apr 05 issue on "Spiritual Formation," the conversation came down to a ragged old piece of paper he pulled from his wallet.

John Ortberg had given Lavender the small card (and I'm not dropping names because Lavender also made fun of himself for once patting himself on the back in his life and dropping names when he got to meet Ortberg), tattered and worn on the edges so the scripture was cut off and said "UKE 6:40" instead of LUKE 6:40.

Here's what the card said:

My ultimate goal is to live as Jesus would live if he were in my place. UKE 6:40

Then the word "ultimate" was scratched out and "only" was handwritten above it. When did he make that edit to his life goal? When he realized it was idolatry to play a dozen roles in his life such as minister, equipper, teachers, spouse, dad, brother, son, rather than making the overarching goal of everything to be a good follower in the way of Jesus.

He then quoted what "UKE 6:40" says: "A student is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher" (NIV).

Lavender is convinced that Spiritual Formation must permeate every part of the church, and that we should not strive for "church systems or structures" but to be kingdom people so that the compartmentalizing of sacred and secular that we often so easily stumble over does not sidetrack our discipleship. He spoke of several books that I'll need to check out of the library and list for you later. One by a couple of Aussies on the missional church that you may have read. If so, let's hear it.

Gary Holloway and Earl Lavender are in the middle of a revolution on one college campus, but it's happening in pockets worldwide. College-aged and thereabouts want what is real and, according to Lavender, they want to know what gives God pleasure. Their book helps us envision the love of God and his sons and daughters. Not only that, it gives structure and direction to that.

The mantra of "living like Jesus" and being shaped into his image (2 Cor. 3:17-18) seems simple enough, but it does not just happen. It does not happen merely by pooling ignorance in discussion groups but through interaction with the person and life of Jesus Christ. It happens most authentically when we make our only life goal to know Jesus and experience him in our lives through the power of the Spirit and a relationship with the Father to which Christ introduces us.

For those of you who read this blog, here is an early look at the excerpt. The rest will see an email Thursday. During this issue on Spiritual Formation, we will be reading and discussing Living God's Love together. If you have the book, read along with us or buy the book and join us.

A prayer of preparation for Spirit Formation

One of my roles as managing editor of Wineskins is to prepare myself for each issue, to research the themes, to ready myself to be a holding tank out of which writers and thought can flow on to readers. That's literal in some sense. Sometimes I hold an article for up to two years till the time is right. I have stacks but you are always welcome to add a few centimeters to the stack. This is a humbling task, for I tell myself with each new issue that I don't know much about "Ethics" or "Spiritual Formation" or whatever the theme is.

In my inquiry into each theme, I focus the telescope on one part of the sky, then I notice another galaxy, then another. This makes laughable the thought that I have occasionally feared we'd run out of original themes to publish.

For this issue I have attended a Spiritual Formation retreat, picked up various prayer books, and I'm reading various works on SF. Two that Leonard Allen gave out to everyone at the prayer retreat are J.H. Garrison's Alone with God and Gary Holloway's and Earl Lavender's Living God's Love.

By the way, Gary Holloway hosted the Spiritual Formation retreat, co-authored one book I've recommended, and edited J.H. Garrison's book. You'd think he was paying me Spiritual kickbacks. Joking aside, Gary is a person who I appreciate and love because he humbly seeks after God and is a genuine presence of God in my life and in lives of students at Lipscomb University in Nashville and beyond.

These are two books I highly recommend to you. We will be offering an excerpt from Living God's Love, a book that brings theology into focus without jargon for college-aged but also for those of us who want to discover God anew and truly "live in that love of God" daily.

Here is a prayer by J.H. Garrison, as we contemplate Spiritual Formation and receive God's invitation into His life:

You gracious Giver of all our gifts, how infinitely great and tender must be your love that has found expresion in the unnumbered mercies that have crowned our lives. Accept the gratitude of my heart, O loving Father, for giving me a place, humble though it may be, in your great family.

Hear me, while I plead for the Holy Spirit in larger measure, to enlighten, quicken, comfort and strengthen me in your service. Since we are assured by your well-beloved Son that you are willing to give your Holy Spirit to them that ask you, I would with the more boldness ask this great gift at your hand.

How much I need His presence within me,that I may be strong to resist evil, that the love of God may be shed abroad in my heart, that my life may be like a fruitful garden and that my character may be conformed to your divine will! O may the fruit of the Spirit abound in me, that I may be used of you in bringing others into fellowship with you. Forbid, O God, that I should grieve your Holy Spirit, by impure thoughts, unkind words, unrighteous acts, or by a life of careless indifference to the claims of religion.

Help me to remember that my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and to keep it pure from all defilement. Through your Spirit transform me, O God, into the image of your Son, and finally fashion this mortal body into the likeness of Christ's glorious body, that where he is there I may be also. And this I ask in his precious name. Amen!

We welcome you to add your prayers here, to make requests for certain coverage on this theme of Spiritual Formation, or to give us resources to share with all of our readers.

Leaking the theme of the next issue

OK, bloggers, you get the first leak of the theme of the next issue . . .

For March/April, starting in a few days, the next Wineskins theme is "Spiritual Formation."

Now, if you are reading, writing, blogging, living, ministering, struggling, loving on Spiritual Formation, write me or comment here.

My email is gtaylor@zoegroup.org

Here is a sampling of what we have coming down the pike:

• Interview with Stanley Hauerwas
• Review of Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible (Harper San Francisco, 2005)
• Excerpt of Rodney Clapp’s Tortured Wonders: Christian Spirituality for people, not angels