Many are sensing that the Church is on a new threshold. Author and pastor Brandan Roberston describes this threshold moment this way, “We are entering a truly liminal space where, for a multitude of reasons, many are leaving the ways they’ve historically worshiped and are entering into uncharted territory. This is an exciting time in religious history as we participate in radical and fundamental reforms of our institutions. A new reality is emerging, but we cannot see beyond the threshold.”

Do you wonder who and what can help the Church cross this threshold? A discernment model of spiritual leadership has always been at the heart of the Transforming Center. For more than 20 years, we have walked with pastors and leaders, providing guidance as they approach significant spiritual thresholds.

In order to expand our current ministry model and offerings, our goal is to raise $100,000 by December 31st. There is so much more to say than can be captured in a blog post or email. Watch the video so I can tell you a bit more.

Your year-end gift is crucial to help us approach this threshold in the new year. Click here to give a gift.

Friends like you empower the Transforming Center to provide retreats, resources, and relationships that strengthen the souls of leaders and their communities. There is so much more we can do to meet leaders at this moment in the life of the church.

On the threshold with you,

Ruth Haley Barton
Founder and Chief Essence Officer

Give now: Your year-end gift matters

Read more: You are Made for More

By way of introduction….

Cole Griffin

We have known Cole Griffin since he participated in Transforming Community 2 and then served as part of the Ministry Community for several communities. Cole comes to us from his role as Executive Pastor of Grace Church in Racine, WI, having served for 27 years in full-time ministry in various capacities. He has led a large staff team, provided key leadership and stability during transitions, and is a trained spiritual director and certified Christian Conciliator. In addition, he holds a Masters Degree in Counseling and Psychology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Cole worked as a professional mental health provider for several years as part of his Master’s level training. Early in ministry as a missionary, he experienced ministry and relational challenges that opened his eyes to the need for healing among ministry leaders. These experiences, coupled with the skills and gifts he brings in the area of financial oversight, staff and process management, and pastoral care, made him a great candidate for this role.

When Cole applied for the position, he shared:

“Responding to the request to pray for the Transforming Center’s need for an Executive Director, I never expected that God would prompt me to respond personally! Several alumni reached out and shared that God had prompted them to encourage me to apply. I have taken time to fast, pray, and be silent before submitting to this process and I am applying for this position in hopes that my gifts, experience, and heart can bless the Transforming Center and many other ministry leaders in the years to come.”

Charity McClure

Charity McClure has been working and thinking strategically in multiple roles on behalf of the Transforming Center for the past decade—planning events for donors and volunteers, consulting in the areas of donor development and fundraising, guiding our rebranding process, leading strategically in improving the Transforming Community experience and fostering diversity among us. Since completing Transforming Community 12 she has brought consistent passion and strategic thinking to the question of succession and how all facets of the Transforming Center can transition to a younger generation of leaders.

Charity shares…

“After all the years that I have spent loving and serving the Transforming Center, this transition came together in a very unexpected way! Hearing that the Transforming Center was at a crossroads and yet knowing the Executive Director wasn’t exactly the right fit for me, I found myself in a prayerful and open posture over several months — “What, if anything, is God inviting me to bring to the future of this organization?” God met me in several ways during that time, and eventually I felt called to present myself not as “the” person but as “one” person who could bring strategic leadership to the vision and mission of the Transforming Center while maintaining a deep commitment to the essence that has sustained it for almost 20 years.”

Before the Transforming Center, Charity served as Admissions Counselor for Hope College and Director of Development at Flannel, the nonprofit organization that produced the innovative NOOMA videos. Her immersion in the essence and ministry of the Transforming Center over the years— including her roles as Creative Director and Brand Manager and (most recently) Program Director—plus her natural gifting in the areas of strategic thinking and planning, make her a natural choice for helping create synergy among all aspects of the ministry in a way that will sustain us and help guide us into our future.

Cole will begin his tenure with us in mid-October after he takes a much-needed break between his current ministry assignment and his new role with us.
Charity will transition to these new responsibilities in mid-September.

Read more: Transforming Center welcomes Executive Director and creates new position, Director of Strategy and Programs

“The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a [person’s] life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul.”
—Thomas Merton

The safety of the spiritual direction relationship makes it the ideal place (and for some, the only place) where a leader can experience deeper levels of self-awareness, examine the hidden dynamics and relational patterns that are hindering them, and at times make confession. The idea of receiving someone’s confession may be uncomfortable for some directors because we do not think of ourselves as priests and we feel quite unprepared for such a thing. In some traditions the spiritual director and the confessor are seen as two distinct roles and two distinct people. However, most pastors and spiritual leaders (at least in the Protestant tradition) do not have anywhere else to make their confessions and there are times when this is what the soul needs most.

The Power of Confession

Confession is good for the soul—especially confession in the presence of someone who knows how to mediate God’s grace in the moment. Because of the safety, the privacy, and the longevity of the relationship with a spiritual director, this may be the only place a leader has to engage this powerful discipline. If the Spirit is moving them to make a confession, we need to be ready to receive it. There are many ways to receive someone’s confession; the important thing is to be available to the Spirit for what the moment requires.

The first time I made a confession to my spiritual director I had not planned to do it. Confession to any kind of confessor was not a part of my tradition but it had been on my mind as something that could be beneficial to my spiritual journey and on this particular day, it just kind of came out. Confession was so difficult for me, that I slid out of my chair and onto the floor in a wave of tears that took me by surprise. My director just quietly got down on the floor with me and put her arms around me in a gesture of love, comfort, and unconditional presence that was tremendously healing in its impact. There was no need for words.

The first time I received someone else’s confession, the person let me know ahead of time that this was something they wanted to do. Because the person was from a liturgical background, I brought my Book of Common Prayer so that I could read the prayer of absolution. She made her confession. The tears flowed. I put my arms around her and read the prayer of absolution along with a verse from Scripture that assured her of God’s forgiveness.

A good spiritual director will find ways of being with us in such moments that are true to who they are and responsive to what we most need. Making a confession and receiving someone’s confession is a sacred trust, and it is good for leaders to give some thought to confession as a significant spiritual practice that may be part of the direction relationship as we cultivate the rigorous honesty Merton refers to.

Fresh Disciplines for Worn Out Leaders

When I entered into spiritual direction I had been working very hard at practicing the spiritual disciplines I had been taught in my Protestant upbringing. I was sure I could make it all work if I just tried harder. But part of my desperation was the fact that the practices and habits that people had told me were supposed to work in bringing about my transformation were no longer working, no matter how faithful I was to their program. I was embarrassed and felt very defeated.

Surprisingly, my spiritual director encouraged me to stop doing what wasn’t working(!) and to pay attention to what I was longing for. It was the strangest and most wonderful feeling to be freed from the Bible study and prayer methods that I had practiced for so long in the hopes that there might be something new for me! While I continued to lead in the arenas where I had responsibility, I had a private place for letting go of what wasn’t working and trying some new things. This was all very hopeful.

Eventually my director helped me to understand that I was in a transitional place in the life of prayer and began to guide me into fresh disciplines that corresponded to my need, fostering fresh experiences with God that I was so thirsty for. Her concrete guidance along with the confidence she conveyed marked out a new path for me.

Blurred Boundaries

One of the natural pitfalls of pastoral leadership in particular is that the boundary between one’s personal spiritual life and the demands of one’s profession can become very blurry. Pastoral leaders may come with a great sense of guilt that “I just don’t feel like praying” or “I study Scripture so much for my sermons, that I am no longer able to engage Scripture without thinking about my next sermon.” Business leaders might have created a false dichotomy between their spiritual life and their leadership, having no idea how to engage spiritual disciplines that will help them forge a connection between their soul and their leadership.

One of the most significant contributions a spiritual director can make in our lives as leaders is to create space for reflecting honestly about their spiritual practices. In this space, we can quiet feelings of “ought” and “should” in order to acknowledge practices that are no longer fruitful or may have become layered with all sorts of professional expectations. This can open the way for letting go of what isn’t working and claiming fresh disciplines for ourselves. A significant role of the spiritual director is to provide guidance for entering into spiritual disciplines that will forge a stronger connection between our soul and our leadership. Practices of mindfulness, paying attention to one’s breathing, building time into each work day for silence and prayer, staying attuned to inner dynamics of consolation and desolation, and allowing such awareness to shape decision-making… all of these practices strengthen the soul of our leadership, but we may need guidance and support for entering in.[i]

Practicing Humility

It takes humility and courage for a spiritual leader to admit that though they are guiding others in spiritual matters they are coming up empty themselves. But as Thomas Merton so insightfully states, “The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a [person’s] life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul.”[ii]

The more experience and practice our spiritual director has with a wide variety of spiritual disciplines the more they are able to open up a treasure trove of spiritual possibilities for leaders who have done all they know to do and are desperate for fresh ways of connecting with God. This offers a world of hope to those who have lost hope in their ability to connect with God in the context of their leadership.

Reclaiming Identity and Calling

Our calling is rooted in our identity. Whenever we are out of touch with our identity or calling, we are vulnerable to a life lived at the mercy of other people’s expectations and our own inner compulsions. When a leader has lived this way for too long, it is hard to even tell the difference between being called and being driven.

A key role of the spiritual director is to help leaders stay in touch with their identity as given to them by God and their calling as spoken to them by God. The experience of calling is a place of great intimacy with God if we know how to cultivate it; it can also be a place where we might be experiencing a heartbreaking sense of being cut off from God and from our true self if we have let the demands of leadership consume us for too long.

I know one spiritual director who is always asking his directees, “Are you staying true to your calling?” It is a question that immediately brings clarity and, if not clarity, the need to find clarity.

Before calling has anything to do with doing, it has everything to do with being that essence of yourself that God called into being and that God alone truly knows. It is the call to be who we are and at the same time to become more than we can yet envision. Our calling is woven into the very fabric of our being as we have been created by God, and it encompasses everything that makes us who we are—even those things that have caused pain and confusion. This would include our genetics, our innate orientations and capacities, our personality, our heredity and life-shaping experiences, and the time and place into which we were born. As Parker Palmer points out, “Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”[iii]

Doing That Emerges from Being

The spiritual director has the extraordinary privilege of helping us listen to the voice “in here” so we don’t spend our whole lives being driven by other people’s expectations and our own inner compulsions. One of the ways spiritual directors help leaders return to a true sense of calling or recognize a new calling is to notice that a spiritual calling often takes us out to the edge of our capacities and sometimes to a place of great risk. With courage and restraint, a spiritual director can help leaders continue to listen to the voice deep within and to answer with a courageous yes when that voice speaks.

When I first began to sense God’s call to spiritual direction, I was in seminary preparing for a traditional pastorate while serving on staff at a local church. At the same time, several people were asking me to serve as a spiritual director for them and I began to discover that something about it fit better for me than a lot of what I had been doing. However, my own experience in spiritual direction had been so profoundly shaping that I could not imagine really playing that role in someone else’s life. The thought scared me to death. When I finally got up enough nerve to say something about it to my spiritual director, she quietly said, “I’ve seen that in you for years.” It was a moment that was electric with truth.

How glad I was that she hadn’t said anything sooner because I wouldn’t have been ready. I wept and trembled with fear and with hope—fear about what this change might require of me and whether or not I could really do it and hope that God knew me well enough to call me to something that fit so well.

What was most helpful to me at this point was that my director had waited until God said it to my heart and then affirmed it in a way that helped me to believe in what I was hearing. Our interactions about calling changed the course of my life vocationally and took me in all sorts of risky directions that have brought me to where I am today. Being with a director around questions of calling is, indeed, holy ground.

A Singular Focus

Jesus indicates that it is possible to gain the whole world but lose your own soul. If he were speaking to us as spiritual leaders today, he might point out that it is possible to gain the whole world of success in leadership and lose your own soul in the process. And when leaders lose their souls, so do the churches and organizations they lead.

Spiritual direction is essential for us as leaders because it allows us to stay in touch with our spiritual longings and to find support in crafting a way of life that opens us to what our souls most want. While those we lead often seem to be more concerned about what they can get out of us in terms of productivity and success, the spiritual director is in unique position to ask the question “How is it with your soul?” and to keep asking it whenever it seems like we are losing ourselves amid the demands of life in leadership.

Since the relationship with a director is “pure”—meaning that there is a singular focus on the well-being of the directee rather than competing agendas—spiritual directors are free to encourage and challenge us to be rigorously honest about how we are living our lives and whether our way of life is sustainable for the long haul. Many congregations and organizations actually encourage and applaud—albeit in very subtle ways—destructive patterns like compulsive overworking, performance-oriented driven-ness, or lack of boundaries in the leader. The spiritual director has no such hidden agenda. He or she is free to be completely focused on the well-being of the leader sitting before them.

There are few relationships in a leader’s life that are unencumbered with multiple agendas. This makes the spiritual direction relationship uniquely valuable to leaders for they can be vigilant about challenging us to find a way of life that honors the whole reality of who we are—body, mind, and spirit. The best thing any of us bring to leadership is our own transforming self. The spiritual director is uniquely prepared and positioned to provide intimate guidance in this process.

Spiritual direction has been a part of the Transforming Center’s ministry from the beginning. As a part of the Transforming Community experience, we strongly recommend that leaders seek out a spiritual director.

Be sure to browse our listing of spiritual directors—many of them offering in-person and remote spiritual direction (e.g. via Zoom). Learn more about spiritual direction on our website here. 

© Ruth Haley Barton, 2019. A version of this article first appeared in Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction, June 2010.

[i] See Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008)
[ii] Thomas Merton, Spiritual Direction and Meditation (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1960), p. 16.
[iii] Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000) p. 25.his process.

Read more: Spiritual Direction (Part 2): A Space for Rigorous Honesty

It was over 20 years ago now when, as a young leader, I crept into a spiritual director’s office desperate for help. A grown up pastors’ kid in my early 30s, on staff at a church I loved, busy with a growing family, and just beginning to embark on a public life of writing and speaking… I was aware of things in my life that needed fixing and longings that were painfully unmet. There was a level of selfishness that was being exposed in the crucible of marriage and family life that I did not know how to shift or change. There were emotions from past pains and current disappointments that I did not know how to resolve. There was a performance-oriented drivenness that I did not know how to quiet and a longing for more, but more of what?

I had tried everything that had been offered in my own Protestant tradition—more Bible study, praying harder, trying harder, better sermons, Christian self-help books—to fix what was broken and to fill what was lacking, but to no avail. In the midst of the outward busyness of my “professional” life there was an inner chaos that was far more disconcerting than anything that was going on externally. But this was not a good time to admit to any kind of spiritual emptiness or acknowledge any kind of serious questions about my faith. As an emerging leader, it was a time for being “good,” for being available when people called, for maintaining outward evidences of spiritual maturity commensurate with the responsibilities I carried and the opportunities that were coming my way. It was a time to do what was needed in order to keep climbing the ladder to professional success, and I knew it; yet my interior groanings were real and needed attention.

Help Is on the Way

For me, help came through a spiritual director, although I didn’t even know what one was at the time. Our paths crossed because she was a psychologist. I sought her out for therapy because I assumed that my problems were psychological in nature and could be fixed at that level. Psychological insight and process were indeed valuable—to a point. Eventually, however, she observed that what I needed was spiritual direction and suggested that we shift the focus of our times together to my relationship with God. She told me that the questions I was raising were actually an invitation to deeper intimacy with God and needed to be dealt with in the context of that relationship. It was a welcome invitation and so we made the shift.

As I stayed faithful to my own spiritual journey under the tutelage of this wise guide, spiritual direction became one of the most important disciplines in my life as a leader. In all my years in ministry and leadership, my commitment to having a spiritual director myself has remained strong because I am convinced that spiritual direction is an essential practice for all those who are in positions of spiritual leadership.

Welcoming Desperation

I am not the only leader to have come to spiritual direction by way of desperation. Many pastors and leaders come for spiritual direction because they, too, are experiencing inner emptiness in the midst of outward busyness, feelings of being “stuck” in their spiritual life or a longing for more in the midst of seeming success. Their question is where does a leader go to articulate questions that seem so dangerous and doubts that seem so unsettling? Who pastors the pastor? Who provides spiritual leadership for the leader? Oftentimes it is a spiritual director. A vital question for spiritual directors is how can they increase their sensitivities and their capacities to be helpful to the particular needs of pastors and leaders?

Although it may sound strange, a good place to begin is to welcome, or at least normalize, the desperation or desire a leader brings. It can be very hard for a leader to seek out spiritual direction because it represents something of a role reversal. Leaders are accustomed to being, well, the leader, and to submit to someone else’s guidance or to admit the need for such guidance can be a humbling experience. Oftentimes, desire and desperation are the only dynamics powerful enough to cause them to seek guidance, and, in that sense, desperation is a good thing. Desperation opens us to possibilities that we might not otherwise be open to—like spiritual direction.

Finding Guidance and Sustenance

Oftentimes, a leader will come to the first direction session overwhelmed or embarrassed by the state they are in or the questions they are bringing. As they start to feel reassured that their experience of desperation is a wonderful starting place for new spiritual journeying, they visibly relax. They breathe a deep sigh of relief as they realize that this is a safe place to ask questions and explore issues that are lurking under the surface of their leadership persona. Leadership, by its very nature, places us in a position where our spirituality and ability to lead are constantly being scrutinized and evaluated. To have a safe place far outside one’s leadership setting in which to attend to our own souls’ needs is a great gift.

While the “normal” person has many options for seeking spiritual guidance and sustenance (community of faith; a relationship with a pastor, priest, or rabbi; a spirituality center; para-church ministry organizations that cater to specific needs), spiritual leaders are often very isolated in their leadership roles. Since everyone is looking to them for spiritual leadership, they cannot share the depth of their own doubts, questions, and growing edges without creating uncertainty among those they are leading. They labor under the burden of knowing that their job is in very real ways dependent on their perceived spirituality and doctrinal clarity—however that is evaluated in their particular circles. They know that even if they have questions, they need to continue to teach and preach with confidence; they must be wise about what they reveal in the presence of those who have the power to hire, fire, or significantly influence their career path.

The conundrum, of course, is that without a safe place to attend to his/her own journey, a leader’s growth will be stunted and their spiritual life will atrophy. As one directee (a parish priest) shared once, “My job is to help people attend to their own inner world and to cultivate hope and expectation that God is actively present in their lives, but I have lost that hope and expectation in my own life. I need someone to help me do what I am trying to help others do.”

Sacred Space

The word sacred simply means set apart or set apart for a special purpose. Leaders are deeply in need of finding a place that is set apart for the care of their own souls, a place of privacy that removes them from the public scrutiny of their work environment and the leadership persona that they must maintain.

Privacy is an ethical commitment that spiritual directors make to all their directees but privacy is of particular concern to those who are in public positions of leadership, and they may need more reassurance and concrete evidence that their privacy will be protected than most. When I first began spiritual direction, the questions and issues I brought felt so personal and had such potential to effect how others in my religiously conservative circles might view me that I was extremely skittish; however, I was also acutely aware of my need for a place where I could be completely open. I needed my spiritual director to assure me in the strongest terms that there was no possibility that she would ever betray my confidence. The fact that she was far outside my leadership settings and my social circles was very important.

Where we met was also important. When we began, we met in her office where she was a part of a busy practice of psychologists. The possibility of seeing people I knew in the waiting room in the midst of something that felt so personal was very unnerving to me. If I did see someone I knew, I felt like I had to explain something I didn’t want to explain and would have preferred to keep private. When she dropped out of the practice and we were able to meet in her home office, there was more privacy, and that was helpful.

The Need for Privacy

I am convinced that leaders need spiritual directors that are outside of their existing church systems and corporate structures so that it is truly safe for them. As a spiritual director, I have offered spiritual direction in my home and, more recently, in my office. In both settings I have taken great care to cultivate the physical environment in such a way that the space itself ushers leaders into a sense of being “apart” from the distractions, the responsibilities, and the frenetic activity that has become the norm for so many leaders. Without fail, leaders express deep gratitude for the quiet, the privacy, and the sacred quality of the space. Sometimes, when they first enter into the space and we share initial moments of quiet, they are moved to tears that they hardly know how to explain. To have a sacred space that is set aside for them and for the care of their souls rather than being in a religious environment that is associated with ministry or a coaching environment associated with getting more work out of them is a tremendous blessing.

The tears seem to be associated with the disillusionment and grief that many leaders experience as they realize that they have lost a sense of God’s presence for themselves personally in the context of their leadership. That grief is somehow comforted by finding a sacred (not necessarily religious) space that is carved out for them and for the care of their own souls. Even their ability to feel something in response to the space assures them that they are still alive in places where they thought they had become numb or had even died.

The Unique Burdens of Leadership

Those who have been in leadership for any length of time at all have experienced much scrutiny and evaluation of their spiritual life and their leadership. Many have experienced the heartache of being severely misunderstood, judged, and even betrayed to the point that they have given up on ever being safe. The loneliness that comes from being “the buck stops here” person and the natural process of projection that takes place between leaders and followers is par for the leadership course and yet it takes its toll.

By the time a leader comes to a spiritual director, they may have lost any sense of being loved beyond what they can produce; they might harbor deep feelings of disillusionment about themselves, the human condition, and institutions they serve– including (and perhaps most especially) the church. Their experiences might have left them questioning their effectiveness as a leader, whatever vision they had, and sometimes even their worth as a person.

Many leaders have repressed their grief and anger and soldiered on, leaving much that is unresolved beneath their professional exterior. Almost all leaders have something in their lives—some pain, some character issue, some spiritual question, some failure—that they have never talked to anyone about, and they desperately need a safe place to do so. They often walk into our presence carrying heavy burdens of unresolved pain; spiritual direction promises to be a place where they might be able to lay it down—at least for awhile.

When I first entered into spiritual direction, I was so beaten down by some of what I had experienced in pastoral ministry that I couldn’t believe that anyone could look into my soul and see something good. Particularly as a woman leading in church I had experienced roadblocks that were deeply disillusioning to the extent that they had caused me to question my faith. When my spiritual director affirmed the brightness of my spirit or the goodness she saw in my heart I was surprised to find that I had a hard time taking it in. I didn’t realize how far I had gotten from any kind of realistic sense of myself. Even though it took time for me to get used to it and believe it, I needed the healing of her unconditional “seeing” so desperately. Her consistent affirmation of my journey as a person with the call of God on my life and leadership was a significant element of what brought me back to a place of health and strength in my spiritual life. In spiritual direction I experienced what the poet Hafiz writes: How did the rose ever open its heart and give to the world all its Beauty? It felt the encouragement of light against its being. Otherwise we all remain too frightened. [i.]

Be sure to browse our listing of spiritual directors—many of them offering in-person and remote spiritual direction (e.g. via Zoom). Learn more about spiritual direction on our website here. 

Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved. For permission to use or reference this material, email permissions@transformingcenter.org.

[i] Daniel Ladinsky, trans. The Gift: Poems by Hafiz (New York: Penguin Compass, 1999), p.121.

Read more: Spiritual Direction (Part 1): A Vital Practice for Discerning Leaders

Lectio involves a slower, more reflective reading of Scripture that helps us to be open to God’s initiative rather than being subject to human agendas—our own or someone else’s. Through a delicate balance of silence and word, we enter into the rhythm of speaking and listening, which is at the heart of intimate communication. A time of silence before the reading helps us to quiet our inner chaos so that we are prepared to listen. Moments of silence throughout the process help us be attentive to God when he does speak and creates space for noticing our own inner dynamics and exploring them in God’s presence.

The Process of Lectio Divina

Lectio divina is experienced in four movements. We might think of them as moves rather than steps because it is reminiscent of dancing. When we are learning a new dance, we are very awkward and very concerned about getting it right. We watch our feet, trying to get them to do what they are supposed to do. We wonder what to do with our hands. If we are dancing with a partner, we might be clumsy at first as we try to figure out how to move together gracefully. But in the end, the point is to be able to enter into the dance, flow with it, improvise, and enjoy the person we are dancing with.

It is the same with lectio divina. When we are just starting out, we concentrate on following the steps and getting everything in the right order. But eventually, as we become more comfortable, they become moves in a dance that flows with beauty and pleasure, heart and soul. The moves become very fluid and flow into one another quite naturally. But first we do have to familiarize ourselves with the basic moves.

Choose a short passage (6–8 verses at most) that is either a part of your normal reading plan, a passage you have chosen for today, or a passage from the lectionary reading for this week, and enter prayerfully into the lectio process. Following are very detailed instructions to help you learn the moves. (This approach to Scripture is so old that it was originally presented in Latin. Although I have chosen English words to describe the process, I have included the Latin words in parentheses so that the beauty and the nuance of the original language are not lost.)

Preparation (Silencio). Take a moment to come fully into the present moment. With your eyes closed, let your body relax and allow yourself to become consciously aware of God’s presence with you. Express your willingness (or your willingness to be made willing) to hear from God in these moments by using a brief prayer, such as “Come Lord Jesus,” “Here I am,” or “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

Then read the chosen passage four consecutive times, each time asking a slightly different question that invites you into the dynamic of that move. Each reading is then followed by a brief period of silence:

Read (Lectio): Listen for the word or the phrase that is addressed to you. Turn to the passage and begin to read slowly, pausing between phrases and sentences. You may read silently or you might find it helpful to read the passage aloud allowing the words to echo and resonate, sink in, and settle into the heart. As you read, listen for the word or phrase that strikes you or catches your attention. Allow for a moment of silence, repeating that word or phrase softly to yourself, pondering it and savoring it as though pondering the words of loved one. This is the word that is meant for you. Be content to listen simply and openly without judging or analyzing.

Reflect (Meditatio): How is my life touched by this word? Once you have heard the “word” that is meant for you, read the passage again and listen for the way in which this passage connects with your life. Ask, “What is it in my life right now that needs to hear this word?” Allow several moments of silence following this reading and explore thoughts, perceptions, and sensory impressions. If the passage is a story, perhaps ask yourself, “Where am I in this scene? What do I hear as I imagine myself in the story or hear these words addressed specifically to me? How do the dynamics of this story connect with my own life experience?”

Respond (Oratio): What is my response to God based on what I have read and encountered? Read the passage one more time listening for your own deepest and truest response. In the moments of silence that follow this reading, allow your prayer to flow spontaneously from your heart as fully and as truly as you can. At this point you are entering into a personal dialogue with God “sharing with God the feelings the text has aroused in us, feelings such as love, joy, sorrow, anger, repentance, desire, need, conviction, consecration. We pour out our hearts in complete honesty, especially as the text has probed aspects of our being and doing in the midst of various issues and relationships” (Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey, p. 114). Pay attention to any sense that God is inviting you to act or respond in some way to the word you have heard. You might find it helpful to write your prayers or to journal at this point.

Rest (Contemplatio): Rest in the Word of God. In the final reading you are invited to release and return to a place of rest in God. You have given your response its full expression, so now you can move into a time of waiting and resting in God’s presence like the weaned child who leans against its mother (Psalms 131). This is a posture of total yieldedness and abandon to the Great Shepherd of our souls.

Resolve (Incarnatio): Incarnate (live out) the Word of God. As you emerge from this place of personal encounter with God to life in the company of others, resolve to carry this word with us and to live it out in the context of daily life and activity. As you continue to listen to the word throughout the day, you will be led deeper and deeper into its meaning until it begins to live in you and you “enflesh” this Word in the world in which you live. As a way of supporting your intent to live out the word you have been given, you may want to choose an image, picture, or symbol that you can carry to remind you of it.

In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from his book Life Together, “The Word of Scripture should never stop sounding in your ears and working in you all day long, just like the words of someone you love. And just as you do not analyze the words of someone you love, but accept them as they are said to you, accept the Word of Scripture and ponder it in your heart, as Mary did. That is all… Do not ask ‘How shall I pass this on?’ but ‘What does it say to me?’ Then ponder this word long in your heart until it has gone right into you and taken possession of you.”

©Adapted from Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation (InterVarsity Press, 2006).

For more information on the practice of lectio divina, read Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina by Michael Casey.

Read more: Lectio Divina: Engaging the Scriptures for Spiritual Transformation

As an organization, we were experiencing incredible growth on a global scale. We were bringing rescue to victims of violent injustice in the most desperate places of suffering in our world, and we did so by working directly with local law enforcement and government officials to prove that justice for the poor is possible. We were witnessing miracles from the hand of God and it was clear that the adventure had only just begun.

Time to talk to God

In the midst of this season of tremendous growth and change, I took a sabbatical with the intention of setting apart time to talk with God about what he was doing in our midst and where we were headed as we pursued his work of justice. As I emerged from my sabbatical, I shared with our team the conviction that had grown within me and presented my colleagues with the mysteriously named “8:30 Stillness” journal and Ruth’s book.

I sensed that God desired for IJM to experience more of his presence and his power. But… we were not yet ready to receive it.

As an organization, we had a regular rhythm of praying together every day at 11 am. And yet, all too often our work would veer into prayer-less striving rather than expectant abiding. We longed for transformation – in ourselves and in the lives of those we sought to serve. We longed to know more deeply the love of our good Father who leads us in transformation. And yet, we needed a more disciplined attentiveness that would ready us to receive more of God’s presence and power. We needed to learn to be still, to wait on the Lord, to simply be with him.

Beyond prayer-less striving

The gift of the journal and Ruth’s book was a signpost of sorts, pointing us toward a new season. Perhaps more aptly it was a toolbox, equipping us for the journey into deeper readiness to experience God’s miracles of transformation – both in the world and our souls. With the blessing of our Board of Directors, beginning on that day when staff received their gift of the journal and book, 8:30 am was declared to be the formal beginning of every IJM workday as well as a time of complete stillness for all – a time we simply call “8:30 Stillness.”

Now imagine with me for a moment: a staff of high-performing lawyers, criminal investigators, social workers, and professionals in Washington, DC, and offices across the developing world, rushing to the office to begin their day, faced with the task of fighting slavery, human trafficking, police abuse, and other forms of violent oppression. As these staff arrive at their desks, their first order of business is to stop. All phones are off. Laptops closed. No email. No meetings.

Just silence. Solitude. Stillness.

For 30 minutes.

Letting the sediment settle

On any given day, stillness can be hard. Even awkward, frustrating. We come to each day like a jar of river water that has been shaken. The water is murky, impossible to see through. But as the jar sits still, unmoved, the silt and sediment begin to settle. Clearer waters emerge. So too, in the stillness that enables solitude and silence, the mud and mire of our souls begins to settle and clarity emerges.

In solitude and silence, we become aware of the inner needs and desires we bring to the day. Then we can talk to God, our good and loving Father, about what it is we actually need for that day, asking for his wisdom, his guidance, his grace to prevail.

I am utterly convinced that God works miracles of transformation in the world through miraculously transformed people. God is eager for us to be with him, to know his love and his goodness, even as he calls us to lead with great courage in the world around us. What we have learned is that the transformation we so long for comes when, whether we feel like it or not, we actually show up and choose to be still in the presence of our good God.

A crucible for world-altering transformation

It doesn’t matter who you are or what kind of work faces you on any given day; facing the demands that confront you and choosing to be still and wait upon the Lord before rushing into action is a feat that only the Spirit of God can make possible. And yet the choice to pursue daily stillness has the potential to be, perhaps more than anything else, the very crucible for the world-altering transformation every Christ-following leader is longing for.

Since those early days, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership alongside Ruth’s wise counsel and friendship, has ministered to the entire IJM family and to me in extraordinary ways, teaching us how to seek the restoration of our souls that can lead to the transformation of the world.

How deeply we need this restoration and transformation, and all the more as we move further into the work of the Kingdom and the promise of Jesus that he is, with us, making all things new.

Gary Haugen will be our guest presenter at the 2019 Transforming Community Alumni Retreat. Click here to learn more and to register.

©Gary Haugen, 2018. Adapted from the forward to Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry, InterVarsity Press, 2018. (Headers added by Ruth Haley Barton). Not to be reproduced without permission.

Read more: Justice and the Inner Life

As a former long-term pastor of a congregation, I had the honor of witnessing occasional spiritual transformation in the lives of congregants.  Generally, the changes were more gradual than sudden, more subtle than dramatic, more confined to individuals and small groups than congregation-wide.  I can still recall painful seasons of ministry when signs of spiritual formation seemed few and far between.  Even so, it was the occasional fruit of transformation that fueled my desire to keep on keeping on.

Now perhaps you can understand the euphoria I feel as I witness multiple examples of breathtaking spiritual transformation emerging from the nine quarterly retreats of a typical Transforming Community^®.  Isaiah 43:19 has new meaning for me as I observe God doing new deeds of transformation in dramatic fashion right before my eyes!

Recently, I saw fresh evidence of God’s new deeds as I participated in the final Transforming Center retreat of the latest Transforming Community.  For a variety of reasons, I participated in only two retreats of this Baltimore community—the first and the last.  The change I observed in individuals—and the entire community—between the first and last retreats was staggering!

Perhaps the best way to communicate this change is to share comments made by retreatants as they reflected together about the significance of their two years in community.  When Ruth Haley Barton, the community teacher, invited them to speak, the floodgates opened!

Here’s a brief sampling of comments from various church and organizational leaders:

“My life is no longer based on performance, but on God’s presence.”

 “You can be vulnerable here…this is true community.”

“Two years ago my soul was drowning.  This community has resuscitated my soul.”

 “I’ve noticed how many of us have changed in posture and appearance…including me!”

 “Before coming to this community I concluded that my life in ministry was not sustainable…now I’m hopeful about ministry again.”

 “Watching God work among us has been a beautiful thing.”

“In many ways, I feel that this whole experience was just a beginning for me as I continue to walk out the things we learned and practiced together. I’ve told many that I don’t know how you all pull off all you do in the less than 48-hour-period that we are together. We experienced unbelievable teaching, wonderful meal times, deep times of prayer and communion with God and together, rich small groups, times of silence and solitude, and plenty of time for rest! Obviously, you are being led by the Holy Spirit, and he multiplies and orders the steps of our time through you during those two days of retreat.”

 Talk about music to my soul!!  So much transformation on so many levels over a comparatively brief period of time…before my very eyes!

If you are a church leader who has given up on spiritual transformation—including your own—I urge you to consider joining us for Transforming Community.

Doing so could literally change your life…and transform your soul.

Read more: Transformation Before My Eyes

In the beginning, one might presume a rather triumphalistic image of becoming Christlike, being “hid with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). We are all too ready to be the Jesus who feeds 5,000, but not the Jesus who fasts for 40 days; to be the Jesus who casts out demons, but not the Jesus who is tempted by the Devil; to be the Jesus who is transfigured, but not the Jesus who is despised and rejected; to be the Jesus who alleviates suffering and heals infirmities, but not the Jesus who is a “man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity” (Is. 53:3); to be the resurrected Jesus, but not the crucified Jesus.

Then what is the nature of this God into whom we are invited to journey;  what is the nature of the journey? If we don’t know the nature of the goal, how can we journey with integrity?

The Nature of God

God’s most profound self-revelation is seen in the Cross. We usually think the Cross is something God did to “solve” the sin problem that alienates us from God. In his visionary experience, however, John realized that in the Cross we see the manifestation of the essence of God’s nature. The Cross reveals who God is, not what God did as an action separate from God’s nature.

In Revelation 12:1-5, John sees God, imaged as a woman,^[1] birthing God’s very being into the mouth of the dragon. Since the dragon’s rebellion or Satan’s fall follows this  (12:7-9), John is seeing God’s response to the seed of Satan’s rebellion — Satan wanting to usurp God’s role–even before the rebellion. Here is a way to help grasp this profound mystery: We are created for a relationship of loving union with God. But a love relationship requires the beloved be free to reject the relationship. Integral to the intention to create beings for such a love relationship was God’s intention to maintain the relationship of loving union from God’s side even in the face of rejection.  As one Eucharist liturgy puts it, “When we turned away and our love failed, your love remained steadfast.”^[2] Any loving human parent who has suffered rejection by a child has an inkling of the cost of God maintaining loving union with those who reject that relationship; the cost is cruciform love!^[3]

God’s Love for Us

The saints of the Christian tradition have reminded us from the beginning that God dwells in every person. What else could John mean when he writes, “The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn. 1:5), but that God dwells at the heart of the darkness of our rejection. Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you” (Jn. 15:4); he already abides in us. Paul tells us, “God was pleased to reveal his son in me” (Gal. 2:16), not “to me,” as in many mistranslations. Then there is St. Augustine’s famous witness: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you.”^[4]

One way to envision this mystical reality is to picture yourself as a sphere with another sphere at its center. The central sphere is the presence of God within, the Light shining in our darkness; the sphere around it is our being “outside” of God, our being in a state of rejection of God.^[5] The boundary layer between the two spheres is cruciform. It is the place where God maintains loving union with us at an unfathomable cost.

Our Response to Cruciform Love

That boundary layer is also cruciform from our side! Jesus was describing this when he said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mt. 16:24). He then said, “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (16:25). To be restored in loving union with God requires the abandonment of the self we have constructed around the rejection of God as God. This is far more than polishing up a few rough edges of our life; it is the relinquishment of that fundamental posture of rejection of God as God which underlies and informs the entire structure of our being — our perceptions, our values, our behaviors. This is a dying to that entire mode of being. This is a cruciform action. It is why Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:19), “our old self was crucified with him” (Rom. 6:6), “those who belong to Messiah Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24). Paul uses “old self,” and “the flesh” to describe a state of being in rejection of God as God.

The conclusive reality is that our journey into God is a cruciform journey into a cruciform God. The place where the boundary layer of God’s cruciform love impinges upon facets of our rejection of God as God is where we are called to respond, crucifying our rejection in whatever form it may take. Just as God “loses” God’s self to maintain loving union with us, we lose our self to enter into loving union with God. How then do we take up this cruciform journey? Jesus’ question to Peter is a good place to start, “Do you love me more than these?” (Jn. 21:15)

In the context of this question “these” is ambiguous. Is Jesus asking Peter, “Do you love me more than these other disciples do?” Or is he asking, “Do you love me more than you love them?” Or, perhaps, “Do you love me more than your boat, your nets, your sails, etc.?” In any case, the ambiguity of “these” is an alert for us. Anything in our life that we love more than we love Jesus is closing him out at that point. Often the “these” are things, relationships, perspectives, values, behaviors which, in themselves, are innocuous. But when they usurp Jesus’ place in our life they hinder our journey toward wholeness in the image of Christ. Usually we love “these” more than we love Jesus because something of our identity, our worldview, our values, our behaviors are deeply rooted in them. To love Jesus more than “these” is to lose something crucial to who we understand our self to be; in Jesus’ words to “lose our self for his sake.” To love Jesus more than “these” is to deny “these” as having major influence on who we are. Such loss, such denial, is a crucifying experience, a dying to something in our life that has had a vital role in our self-understanding.

Engaging the Cruciform Journey

In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis offers a powerful illustration of cruciformity when he describes a person from Hell who is making a visit to the outskirts of Heaven.^[1] He has a lizard of lust riding on his shoulder and is met by a heavenly being who offers to take care of the lizard. The person is all for it, because he is tormented by that lust. But when the heavenly being reaches out to kill the lizard, the person recoils because so much of his identity has been misshapen by that lizard. In the end, he allows the heavenly being to kill the lizard but, in the process, the person he was “dies.” He enters into the cruciform nature of transformation. Out of his “death,” however, he is transformed into a whole being. The lizard is also transformed into a magnificent stallion upon which the transformed person rides off into deep heaven.

It is only in that loving union where we find our true self, the self created in the image of God, the self “hid with Christ in God,” the self which is a “partaker of the divine nature.” It is this Christ-self for which, in the words of Thomas Merton, “One’s great need is now no longer to be loved, understood, accepted, pardoned, but to understand, to love, to pardon and to accept others just as they are, in order to help them transcend themselves in love.”^[6]

Question:  If you heard Dr. Mulholland’s teaching on cruciform love in your Transforming Community experience, how has it impacted you?

[1] For the development of John’s imagery cf. M. Robert Mulholland, Jr. Revelation, The Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2011), 504-505, 507-512.
[2] The Upper Room Worship Book (Accompaniment and Worship Leader Edition), (Nashville: The Upper Room, 2007), 44.
[3] Recent New Testament scholarship has begun to realize the Cross reveals the essence of God’s nature. Cf. N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 56-98; Michael  Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); Richard Bauckham, God Crucified, Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism or Christian Theology, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
[4] Confessions, X, 27, 38
[5] Perhaps better stated as our rejection of God as God on God’s terms.
[6] Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 114.

©Dr. M. Robert Mulholland, Jr. 2014. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Read more: A Cruciform Journey into the Cruciform God

It was almost twenty years ago now when, as a young leader, I crept into a spiritual director’s office desperate for help.  A grown up pastors’ kid in my in my early thirties, on staff at a church I loved, busy with a growing family, and just beginning to embark on a public life of writing and speaking…I was aware of things in my life that needed fixing and longings that were painfully unmet.  There was a level of selfishness that was being exposed in the crucible of marriage and family life that I did not know how to shift or change.  There were emotions from past pains and current disappointments that I did not know how to resolve.  There was a performance-oriented driven-ness that I did not know how to quiet and a longing for more, but more of what?

I had tried everything that had been offered in my own Protestant tradition—more Bible study, praying harder, trying harder, better sermons, Christian self-help books—to fix what was broken and to fill what was lacking, but to no avail. In the midst of the outward busyness of my “professional” life there was an inner chaos that was far more disconcerting than anything that was going on externally.  But this was not a good time to admit to any kind of spiritual emptiness or acknowledge any kind of serious questions about my faith.  As an emerging leader, it was a time for being “good,” for being available when people called, for maintaining outward evidences of spiritual maturity commensurate with the responsibilities I carried and the opportunities that were coming my way. It was a time to do what was needed in order to keep climbing the ladder to professional success and I knew it;  yet my interior groanings were real and needed attention.

Help is on the Way
For me, help came through a spiritual director, although I didn’t even know what one was at the time.  Our paths crossed because she was a psychologist.  I sought her out for therapy because I assumed that my problems were psychological in nature and could be fixed at that level.  Psychological insight and process were indeed valuable—to a point.  Eventually, however, she observed that what I needed was spiritual direction and suggested that we shift the focus of our times together to my relationship with God.  She told me that the questions I was raising were actually an invitation to deeper intimacy with God and needed to be dealt with in the context of that relationship. It was a welcome invitation and so we made the shift.

As I stayed faithful to my own spiritual journey under the tutelage of this wise guide, spiritual direction became one of the most disciplines in my life as a leader. Eventually responded to the calling to become a spiritual director, completed my training in spiritual direction at the Shalem Institute, and took a position in a large church as director of spiritual formation. Over time began writing and speaking as a spiritual director on themes related to spirituality, leadership, and the church and later on founded an organization focused on caring for the spiritual needs of pastors and Christian leaders. Our mission has been to provide a safe place for pastors and leaders to receive direction in attending to their own spiritual formation in the midst of the realities of life in leadership. In all of this, my commitment to having a spiritual director myself has remained strong because I am convinced that spiritual direction is an essential practice for all those who are in positions of spiritual leadership.

Welcoming Desperation
I am not the only leader to have come to spiritual direction by way of desperation. Many pastors and leaders come for spiritual direction because they, too, are experiencing inner emptiness in the midst of outward busyness, feelings of being “stuck” in their spiritual life or a longing for more in the midst of seeming success.  Their question is where does a leader go to articulate questions that seem so dangerous and doubts that seem so unsettling?  Who pastors the pastor?  Who provides spiritual leadership for the leader? Oftentimes it is a spiritual director.   The question for us is how can we increase our sensitivities and our capacities to be helpful to the particular needs of pastors and leaders?

Although it may sound strange, a good place to begin is to welcome, or at least normalize the desperation or desire a leader brings. It can be very hard for a leader to seek out spiritual direction because it represents something of a role reversal.  Leaders are accustomed to being, well, the leader and to submit to someone else’s guidance or to admit the need for such guidance can be a humbling experience.  Oftentimes, desire and desperation are the only dynamics powerful enough to cause them to seek guidance and in that sense, desperation is a good thing.  Desperation opens us to possibilities that we might not otherwise be open to—like spiritual direction!

Oftentimes, a leader will come to the first direction session overwhelmed or embarrassed by the state they are in or the questions they are bringing. As they start to feel reassured that their need or desire or feeling of desperation is a wonderful starting place for new spiritual journeying, they visibly relax.  They breathe a deep sigh of relief as they realize that this is a safe place to ask questions and explore issues that are lurking under the surface of their leadership personae.  Leadership, by its very nature, places us in a position where our spirituality and ability to lead are constantly being scrutinized and evaluated.  To have a safe place far outside one’s leadership setting in which to attend to my own soul’s need is a great gift.

While the “normal” person has many options for seeking spiritual guidance and sustenance (churches, synagogues, a relationship with a pastor, priest or rabbi, spirituality centers, para-church ministry organizations that cater to specific groups), spiritual leaders are often very isolated in their leadership roles.  Since everyone is looking to them for spiritual leadership, they cannot share the depth of their own doubts, questions and growing edges without creating uncertainty among those they are leading.  They labor under the burden of knowing that their job is, in very real ways dependant on their perceived spirituality and doctrinal clarity—however that is evaluated in their particular circles.  They know that even if they have questions, they need to continue to teach and preach with confidence; they must be wise about what they reveal in the presence of those who have the power to hire, fire or significantly influence their career path.

The conundrum, of course, is that without a safe place to attend to his/her own journey, a leader’s growth will be stunted and their spiritual life will atrophy.  As one directee (a parish priest) shared recently, “My job is to help people attend to their own inner world and to cultivate hope and expectation that God is actively present in their lives but I have lost that hope and expectation in my own life. I need someone to help me do what I am trying to help others do.”

Create Sacred Space
The word sacred simply means set apart or, set apart for a special purpose. Leaders are deeply in need of finding a place that is set apart for the care of their own souls, a place of privacy that removes them from the public scrutiny of their work environment and the leadership persona that they must maintain.

Privacy is an ethical commitment that spiritual directors make to all their directees but privacy is of particular concern to those who are in public positions of leadership and they may need more reassurance and concrete evidence that their privacy will be protected than most.   When I first began spiritual direction, the questions and issues I brought felt so personal and had such potential to effect how others in my religiously conservative circles might view me that I was extremely skittish at first; however, I was also acutely aware of my need for a place where I could be completely open. I needed my spiritual director to assure me in the strongest terms that there was no possibility that she would ever betray my confidence.  The fact that she was far outside my leadership settings and my social circles was very important.

Where we met was also important.  When we began, we met in her office where she was a part of a busy practice of psychologists. The possibility of seeing people I knew in the waiting room in the midst of something that felt so personal was very unnerving to me.  If I did see someone I knew, I felt like I had to explain something I didn’t want to explain and would have preferred to keep private. When she dropped out of the practice and we were able to meet in her home office, there was more privacy and that was helpful.

I am convinced that some of us need to function as spiritual directors outside of existing church systems and corporate structures so that there is a safe place for leaders to go. I have offered spiritual direction in my home and more recently, in my office at a nearby retreat center. In both settings I have taken great care to cultivate the physical environment in such a way that the space itself ushers leaders into a sense of being “apart” from the distractions, the responsibilities and the frenetic activity that has become the norm for so many leaders.  Without fail, leaders express deep gratitude for the quiet, the privacy, and the sacred quality of the space.  Sometimes, when they first enter into the space and we share initial moments of quiet, they are moved to tears that they hardly know how to explain. To have a sacred space that is set aside for them and for the care of their souls rather than being in a religious environment that is associated with ministry or a coaching environment associated with getting more work out of them is a tremendous blessing.

The tears seem to be associated with the disillusionment and grief that many leaders experience as they realize that they have lost a sense of God’s presence for themselves personally in the context of their leadership.  That grief is somehow comforted by finding a sacred space (not necessarily religious) that is carved out for them and for the care of their own souls.  Even their ability to feel something in response to the space assures them that they are still alive in places where they thought they had become numb or had even died.

The Unique Burdens of Leadership
Those who have been in leadership for any length of time at all have experienced much scrutiny and evaluation of their spiritual life and their leadership.  Many have experienced the heartache of being severely misunderstood, judged and even betrayed to the point that they have given up on ever being safe. The loneliness that comes from being “the buck stops here” person and the natural process of projection that takes place between leaders and followers is par for the leadership course and yet it takes its toll.

By the time a leader comes to a spiritual director, they may have lost any sense of being loved beyond what they can produce; they might harbor deep feelings of disillusionment about themselves, the human condition, and institutions they serve– including (and perhaps most especially) the church. Their experiences might have left them questioning their effectiveness as a leader, whatever vision they had and sometimes even their worth as a person.

Many leaders have repressed their grief and anger and soldiered on, leaving much that is unresolved beneath their professional exterior.  Almost all leaders have something in their lives—some pain, some character issue, some spiritual question, some failure—that they have never talked to anyone about and they desperately need a safe place to do so. They often walk into our presence carrying heavy burdens of unresolved pain; spiritual direction promises to be a place where they might be able to lay it down—at least for awhile.

When I first entered into spiritual direction, I was so beaten down by some of what I had experienced in pastoral ministry that I couldn’t believe that anyone could look into my soul and see something good.  Particularly as a woman leading in church I had experienced roadblocks that were deeply disillusioning to the extent that they had caused me to question my faith. When my spiritual director affirmed the brightness of my spirit or the goodness she saw in my heart I was surprised to find that I had a hard time taking it in. I didn’t realize how far I had gotten from any kind of realistic sense of myself. Even though it took time for me to get used to it and believe it, I needed the healing of her unconditional “seeing” so desperately.  Her consistent affirmation of my journey as a person with the call of God on my life and leadership was a significant element of what brought me back to a place of health and strength in my spiritual life. As the poet Hafiz writes: How did the rose ever open its heart and give to the world all its Beauty?  It felt the encouragement of light against its being.  Otherwise we all remain too frightened.[i]

The Power of Confession
The safety of the spiritual direction relationship makes it the ideal place (and for some, the only place) where a leader can experience deeper levels of self-awareness, examine the hidden dynamics and relational patterns that are hindering them, and at times make confession. The idea of receiving someone’s confession may be uncomfortable for some directors because we do not think of ourselves as priests and we feel quite unprepared for such a thing.  In some traditions the spiritual director and the confessor are seen as two distinct roles and two distinct people.  However, most pastors and spiritual leaders (at least in the Protestant tradition) do not have anywhere else to make their confessions and there are times when this is what the soul needs most.

Confession is good for the soul—especially confession in the presence of someone who knows how to mediate God’s grace in the moment. Because of the safety, the privacy and the longevity of the relationship with a spiritual director, this may be the only place a leader has to engage this powerful discipline.  If the Spirit is moving them make a confession, we need to be ready to receive it. There are many ways to receive someone’s confession; the important thing is to be available to the Spirit for what the moment requires.

The first time I made a confession to my spiritual director I had not planned to do it.  Confession to any kind of confessor was not a part of my tradition but it had been on my mind as something that could be beneficial to my spiritual journey and on this particular day, it just kind of came out.  Confession was so difficult for me, that I slid out of my chair and onto the floor in a wave of tears that took me by surprise.  My director just quietly got down on the floor with me and put her arms around me in a gesture of love, comfort, and unconditional presence that was tremendously healing in its impact. There was no need for words.

The first time I received someone’s confession, the person let me know ahead of time that this was something they wanted to do.  Because the person was from a liturgical background, I brought my Book of Common Prayer so that I could read the prayer of absolution.  She made her confession. The tears flowed. I put my arms around her and read the prayer of absolution along with a verse from Scripture that assured her of God’s forgiveness.

Each of us will have to discover the ways of being with our directees in such moments that are true to who we are and responsive to what the directee most needs.  The point is that receiving someone’s confession is a sacred trust and it is good for us to have given some thought to how we might respond.  If we are in spiritual direction with leaders, there is a good possibility that we are the only place where they can make confession and they will, at some point, be moved to do so. We need to accept this as a part of the gift that we bring and be prepared to respond in ways that fit the situation.  It is one of the ways we can serve them.

Fresh Disciplines for Worn Out Leaders
When I entered into spiritual direction I had been working very hard at practicing the spiritual disciplines that I had been taught in my Protestant upbringing.  I was sure I could make it all work if I just tried harder. But part of my desperation was the fact that the practices and habits that people had told me were supposed to work in bringing about my transformation were not longer working, no matter how faithful I was to the program.  I was embarrassed and felt very defeated. Surprisingly, my spiritual director encouraged me to stop doing what wasn’t working (!) and to pay attention to what I was longing for.  It was the strangest and most wonderful feeling to be freed from the Bible study and prayer methods that I had practiced for so long in the hopes that there might be something new for me! While I continued to lead in the arenas where I had responsibility, I had a private place for letting go of what wasn’t working and trying some new things. This was all very hopeful.

Eventually my director helped me to understand that I was in a transitional place in the life of prayer and began to guide me into fresh disciplines that corresponded to my need and fostered fresh experiences with God that I was so thirsty for. Her concrete guidance along with the confidence she conveyed, marked out a new path for me.

One of the natural pitfalls of pastoral leadership in particular is that the boundary between one’s personal spiritual life and the demands of one’s profession can become very blurry. Pastoral leaders may come with a great sense of guilt that “I just don’t feel like praying” or “I study Scripture so much for my sermons, that I am no longer able to engage Scripture without thinking about my next sermon!” Corporate leader might have created a false dichotomy between their spiritual life and their leadership, having no idea how to engage spiritual disciplines that will help them forge of connection between their soul and their leadership.

One of the most significant contributions a spiritual director can make in the life of a leader is to create space for reflecting on their spiritual practices.  In this space, we help them quiet feelings of “ought” and “should” so that they can pay attention to those practices that are no longer fruitful for them or may have become layered with all sorts of professional expectations.  This can open the way for a letting go of what isn’t working and claiming fresh disciplines for themselves.  Our role as directors is to provide guidance for entering into spiritual disciplines that will forge a stronger connection between their soul and their leadership. The practice of mindfulness, paying attention to one’s breathing, building time into each work day for silence and prayer, staying attuned to inner dynamics of consolation and desolation and allowing such awareness to shape decision-making are all practices that strengthen the soul of one’s leadership.[ii]

It takes humility and courage for a spiritual leader to admit that they are guiding others in spiritual matters, they are coming up empty themselves. But as Thomas Merton so insightfully states, “The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a [person’s] life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul.”[iii]

The more experience and practice we as spiritual directors have with a wide variety of spiritual disciplines the more we are able to open up a treasure trove of spiritual possibilities for leaders who have done all they know to do and are desperate for fresh ways of connecting with God. This offers a world of hope to leaders who have lost hope in their ability to connect with God in the context of their leadership.

Reclaiming Identity and Calling
A leader’s calling is rooted in their identity. Whenever a leader is out of touch with his/her identity or our calling, they are vulnerable to a life lived at the mercy of other people’s expectations and their own inner compulsions. When a leader has lived this way for too long, it is hard to even tell the difference between being called and being driven.  A key role of the spiritual director is to help leaders stay in touch with their identity as given to them by God and their calling as spoken to them by God.  The experience of calling is a place of great intimacy with God if we know how to cultivate it; it can also be a place where a leader experiences a heartbreaking sense of being cut off from God and from their true self if they have let the demands of leadership consume them for too long.

I know one spiritual director who is always asking his directees if they are staying true to their calling and it is a question that immediately brings clarity or if not clarity, the need to find clarity.

Before calling has anything to do with doing, it has everything to do with being that essence of yourself that God called into being and that God alone truly knows.  It is the call to be who we are and at the same time to become more than we can yet envision.  Our calling is woven into the very fabric of our being as we have been created by God, and it encompasses everything that makes us who we are—even those things that have caused pain and confusion. This would include our genetics, our innate orientations and capacities, our personality, heredity and life-shaping experiences, the time and place into which we were born.  As Parker Palmer points out, “Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to be something I am not.  It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”[iv]

The spiritual director has the extraordinary privilege of helping people—in this case leaders—listen to the voice “in here” so they don’t spend their whole lives being driven by other people’s expectations and their own inner compulsions.  One of the ways we can help leaders return to a true sense of calling or recognize a new calling is to notice that a spiritual calling often takes us out to the edge of our capacities and sometimes to a place of great risk. With courage and restraint, a spiritual director can help leaders to continue to listen to the voice deep within and to answer with a courageous yes when that voice speaks.

When I first began to sense God’s call to spiritual direction, I was in seminary preparing for a traditional pastorate while serving on staff at a local church. I thought that was my calling. But at the same time, several people were asking me to serve as a spiritual director for them and I began to discover that something about it fit better for me than a lot of what I had been doing.  However, my own experience in spiritual direction had been so profoundly shaping that I could not imagine really playing that role in someone else’s life.  The thought scared me to death.  When I finally got up enough nerve to say something about it to my spiritual director, she quietly said, “I’ve seen that in you for years.”  It was a moment that was electric with truth and I’m glad she hadn’t said anything about it any sooner because I wouldn’t have been ready.  I wept and trembled with fear and with hope—fear about what this change might require of me and whether or not I could really do it.  Hope that God knew me well enough to call me something that fit so well.

What was most helpful to me at this point was that my director had waited until God said it to my heart and then affirmed it in a way that helped me to believe in what I was hearing.  Our interactions changed the course of my life vocationally and took me in all sorts of risky directions that have brought me to where I am today. This is, indeed, holy ground and that is where we as spiritual directors often find ourselves standing with the leaders we are companioning.

The Soul of Leadership
Jesus indicates that it is possible to gain the whole world but lose your own soul.  If he were speaking to us as spiritual leaders today he might point out that it is possible to gain the whole world of success in leadership and lose your own soul.  And when leaders lose their souls, so do the churches and organizations they lead.

Spiritual directors are in a unique position to help leaders stay in touch with their spiritual longings and support them in crafting a way of life that opens them to what their souls most want. While the people around them are often more concerned about what they can get out of them in terms of productivity and success, the spiritual director is in unique position to ask the question “How is it with your soul?” and to keep asking it whenever it seems like a directee is losing themselves amid the demands of life in leadership.

Since their relationship with a directee is “pure”—meaning that there is a singular focus on the well-being of the directee rather than competing agendas—spiritual directors are free to encourage and challenge leaders to be rigorously honest about how they are living their lives and whether their way of life is sustainable over the long haul.  Many congregations and organizations actually encourage and applaud—albeit in very subtle ways—destructive patterns like compulsive overworking, performance oriented driven-ness or lack of boundaries in the leader. The spiritual director has no such hidden agenda. He or she is free to be completely focused on the well-being of the directee.

There are few relationships in a leader’s life that are unencumbered with multiple agendas. This makes the spiritual direction relationship uniquely valuable to leaders as we are vigilant with them about finding a way of life that honors the whole reality of who they are—body, mind and spirit.  The best thing any of us bring to leadership is our own transforming self and the spiritual director is uniquely prepared and positioned to provide guidance in this process.

©Ruth Haley Barton, 2010.  This article first appeared in Presence:  An International Journal of Spiritual Direction, June 2010. Ruth is founder of the Transforming Center.  A nationally recognized speaker, spiritual director, and retreat leader, she is the author of numerous books and resources on the spiritual life including Pursuing God’s Will Together, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, Sacred Rhythms and Invitation to Solitude and Silence.

Read more: Spiritual Direction with Pastoral and Corporate Leaders

I have spent years listening to people reflect on their spiritual journeys and have discovered that this experience is not unusual. A Barna Research Group study published in January found that almost half (46%) of self-identified Christians said they are not experiencing transformation as a result of being involved in their church.

For over ten years, we have focused intentionally on guiding clergy and Christian leaders in understanding that the best thing they bring to leadership is their own transforming selves. We are now ready to take the next step: equipping those leaders to effectively guide their churches and/or ministries to become centers of spiritual transformation.

The Transforming Church initiative includes two key elements:

1. the Transforming Church network—an affiliation of pastors and ministry leaders committed to leading their churches and organizations in becoming communities of spiritual transformation; and
2. the new Leading a Transforming Church two-year program—all new content and process designed to equip leaders to guide their communities in becoming centers of spiritual transformation

To support the Transforming Church initiative we are launching a three-year campaign. Your gift now will help us with the content development, staffing and piloting process needed to call forth communities of spiritual transformation in this new way.

We believe every church should be a center of spiritual transformation. Click here to learn more and partner with us as we seek to equip leaders to cultivate communities of spiritual transformation in their settings.

Sincerely,

Read more: Is the Average Church a Center for Spiritual Transformation?