ImmanuelWithUs
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I'm currently reading the book "God Is Closer Than You Think" by John Ortberg and was shocked at this below - I've never heard of such a thing. Usually when I hear anything that ends in "pathway", I think of paganism and immediately throw it down, but this actually makes sense and one of them describes me to a "T" (contemplative).
Wondering if anyone else agree with this, knows more about this, or thinks this is a bunch of malarky? :coocoo:
"Exploring Spiritual Pathways"
Summarized from “God Is Closer Than You Think,” John Ortberg
God wants to be fully present with each of us. But because he made us to be different from one another, we are not identical in the activities and practices that will help us connect with him. Some writers speak of people as having different spiritual temperaments; Gary Thomas writes of “sacred pathways.” (Many authors have written about this over the years; I’m especially indebted to author Gary Thomas; to my former staff colleagues Bill Hybels and Ruth Barton; and to Corinne Ware and Robert Mulholland.)
A spiritual pathway has to do with the way we most naturally sense God’s presence and experience spiritual growth. We all have at least one pathway that comes most easily to us. We also have one or two that are the most unnatural and require a lot of stretching for us to pursue.
There is enormous freedom in identifying and embracing your spiritual pathway. It is a little like realizing that if you’re an introvert, you don’t have to work as a salesman; you could get a job in a library. You don’t have to beat yourself up or feel guilty because of what is not your pathway. You can focus on relating to God in that way for which you were made, while at the same time recognizing your need to stretch in certain areas that don’t come as naturally.
We will spend most of this chapter walking through seven spiritual pathways. We need to keep in mind that we all have at least some involvement in each one of them. All of us meet God in our minds, at work, in our relationships, and so on. But you will notice that certain pathways most resonate in you. They are the ones that may open up a whole new level of connection between you and God. Yet each pathway has certain dangers attached to it as well, and we will note those too.
Intellectual Pathway
People on the intellectual pathway draw closer to God as they learn more about him. You begin to vibrate when someone talks about the “life of the mind.” Ideas are as alive to you as people. You love to study Scripture. The word “theology” has the same impact on you that the phrase “hot doughnuts now” has on the average customer of a Krispy Kreme shop. No one wants to go to a bookstore with you, because once you walk in, they know they’re going to miss curfew.
When you go to church, you often find yourself marking time during the musical worship until the sermon starts. You get a little concerned about small groups containing a bunch of people swapping ignorance with each other. When you are faced with crises or spiritual challenges, you tend to go into an analytic, problem-solving mode.
Relational Pathway
People who follow the relational pathway find that they have a deep sense of God’s presence when they’re involved in significant relationships. Jesus’ statement that “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” makes perfect sense to a relational type. Small groups and other community experiences become indispensable.
If this is you, you rarely meet a stranger. When telemarketers call to invite you to refinance you home, you ask them, “How are you - really?” Being alone drives you crazy. You sometimes feel guilty when you hear other people speak of long periods of solitude with God. “Solitude wouldn’t be so bad,” you think to yourself, “if I could just bring a bunch of other people along.” You have often experienced key spiritual moments - being convicted of sin, or encouraged to persevere - as God speaks to you through other people.
I think the apostle Peter may have been on this pathway. He came to Jesus with others. He was part of an inner circle along with James and John. After the crucifixion, he was the one who gathered the other disciples to go fishing. The defining moments of his life - his decision to follow Jesus, his confession that Jesus is the Messiah, his denial of Jesus, his caving in to legalists (Paul writes about this in his letter to the Galatians) - all took place in a relational context.
People on this pathway need to lead a relationally rich life.
Relational types always have to guard against two dangers. One is superficiality. It is possible to get spread so thin relationally that no one gets past your external self to know you and love you and challenge you deeply. The second is to become dependent on others so that you live as a kind of spiritual chameleon. Practices like solitude and silence will be a stretch for you. They may never feel natural, but they will help free you from getting addicted to what others think.
Serving Pathway
On the serving pathway, people find that God’s presence seems most tangible when they are involved in helping others. Jesus’ comment that “whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me” is a truth they experience viscerally. If this is you, you may find that you are somewhat uncomfortable in a setting where you don’t have a role to play. But if you can do something - set up chairs, make coffee, help decorate - you feel a sense of God’s delight in you. You often find yourself making observations that help you grow, or speaking to God in ways that feel most natural while you are engaged in acts of service.
An example of this in Scripture might be a woman named Dorcas. She gets only a brief mention in the book of Acts, but we are told that she was always doing good and involved in helping the poor. Mother Teresa would be a kind of modern icon for this pathway. She said that the primary reason she was so involved in serving was not that it was something she was supposed to do, but that it brought her joy. She often felt her own inadequacy when she was alone; she never felt the presence of Jesus more strongly than in those she served. Jimmy Carter has probably inspired more people as an ex-president than he did while he was in office, because of his passion for servant-hood through channels like Habitat for Humanity.
People on this pathway find that if they are just attending church but have no place to serve, God begins to feel distant. They need to be plugged into a community where they have meaningful serving opportunities. They can enrich their sense of God’s presence in their lives by constantly looking for him in the people they serve.
A danger to these people is the temptation to think God is present only when they are serving. They can get so caught up in being God’s servant they forget they are his child first of all. They will have to stretch by learning to receive love as well as to offer it. Another danger is that if I am a big-time server, there is the temptation to resent others who are not serving as much as I am.
Worship Pathway
People on the worship pathway resonate with the psalmist who wrote, “I rejoiced with those who said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’” They have a natural gift for expression and celebration. Something deep inside them feels released when praise and adoration are given voice. Some of their most formative moments occur during times of worship.
A classic example of this occurs in Psalm 73. The psalmist is grousing about how often bad people get all the breaks, how the very people his mother warned him about are living the good life, and how he has been keeping his nose clean all his life and it has never paid off. “When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me, till I entered the sanctuary of God.”
For the psalmist, it was in worship that he experienced again the reality of God’s presence, and that presence changed his perspective on everything.
If this is you, when you worship at church, you hope it will go on for hours. While the intellectual types are looking at their watches, waiting for the message to start, you’re internally shouting, “Sing it again!” You may or may not be naturally expressive, but somehow in worship your heart opens up and you come alive. You sometimes find yourself in tears, sometimes in moments of deep joy, because God seems so close.
King David probably had this pathway. He wrote psalms and poetry to God. He played the lyre and expressed his delight in God through music. We are told that on one occasion he danced before the Lord with so much exuberance that he stripped down pretty much to his BVDs in the process - something that you probably don’t want to emulate if you are, say, Episcopalian.
If this is your pathway, you need to experience great worship on a regular basis. You may want to turn your car into a rolling sanctuary, get tapes of great music that help you worship, then sing your lungs out as you drive down the road. Don’t worry that we’re all staring at you from our cars. This is how you connect to God. Besides, you will bring joy to all of us who watch.
Here are a few cautions for people on this pathway: Don’t judge people who are not as outwardly expressive as you. Some people are from traditions where no one raises a finger, let alone a hand, in a worship service. Not everybody dances. Some of us are Scandinavian.
Also, guard against an experience-based spirituality that has you always looking for the next “worship high.” C.S. Lewis wrote about the fatal sin of saying “encore!” by demanding that God reproduce an experience or an emotion. He said that of all prayers, this may be the one God is least likely to grant, because it can lead us to worship an experience rather than the God to whom our experience points. Music, for instance, can be a great gift to worship. But because music affects our feelings so powerfully, I can grow dependent on music to produce a certain emotional response. I may need to spend some time worshiping God without music so that my worship is based on who God is and not a matter of getting swept up in certain sounds.
We can begin to judge the worship in our churches superficially by always demanding that they produce a certain emotional response. Engaging in study will be an important stretch for you, so that your heart is deeply rooted in the knowledge of God.
Activist Pathway
If you have an activist pathway, you have a high level of energy. You resonate with statements in Scripture such as the words said of Jesus: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” You do zeal. You are a zeal junkie.
You have a passion to act. When you are in a group that hears a story about injustice, other people in the group shake their heads in sadness. You are vibrating for action: “Somebody’s gotta do something! I’m in. Who’s with me?”
Challenges don’t discourage you; they energize you. You thrive on opposition. When someone says, “This can’t be done,” you smile and say, “Watch me!”
You love a fast-paced, problem-filled, complex, strenuous way of life. At the end of the day, you want to be able to say, “I ran really hard. I used every ounce of effort and zeal at my disposal, God, and it’s all for you.” Activists want to run with everything they have between now and the day they die, which will probably be in their early fifties of a heart attack. And when they get to the other side, they are desperately hoping heaven does not consist just of a cloud, a harp, a nice house, and an eternal songbook. That sounds a lot more like eternal punishment to them.
Our biblical example of an activist is Nehemiah. When he hears that his beloved Jerusalem has fallen into disrepair, he is upset and wants to act. He invokes a classic example of the Activist Prayer: “I prayed to my God and said to the king….” For activists, prayer and action naturally go together. They are triggered to look for and depend on God’s presence and guidance in the heart of battle.
If you are an activist, you need a cause. It doesn’t have to be glamorous or visible, but it has to demand the best you have to offer. Without this, your spiritual life will stagnate.
A caution for you is that you may get so excited about the cause that you begin to run over other people or exploit them because you get so focused on what you want to accomplish. Even God may become a means to an end for you rather than the one you serve. Activists sometimes have a hard time discerning God’s true call from their own strong impulses to action. You may need to create balance by spending time in solitude and reflection, so that you allow God to speak to you about what is truly motivating your action.
Contemplative Pathway
If you have a contemplative pathway, you love large blocks of uninterrupted time alone. It is very likely that when you were a child, your parents used to tell you to get outside and play with other kids more. Reflection comes naturally to you. You often feel like an observer in life.
God is most present to you when distractions and noises are removed. Images and metaphors and pictures help you as you pray. If you get too busy, or spend too much time with too many people hanging around, you begin to feel drained and stretched thin.
This is a challenge in American society. What happens when a quiet contemplative type meets a chatty relational type? They get married and drive each other crazy. The contemplative says, “Don’t you have any depth at all? All you ever want to do is schmooze!” The relational type says, “Don’t you even care about people? You just want to navel-gaze all the time!”
If you are a contemplative, you may need permission to follow your pathway. American society tends to value net-workers and activists; contemplatives don’t end up on many magazine covers. You have what Gordon McDonald calls “a large interior world,” or intrapersonal communication. You do not require much external stimulation. Making time to listen to God in silence and solitude is vital to the health of your soul, and necessary for you to experience a deepening sense of his presence. You will need regular, protected, intense, undistracted times alone.
Reading other contemplatives, such as St. John of the Cross or Henry Nouwen, often helps you. You will probably find it helpful to keep a journal. (Relational types almost never journal. They might dictate to a stenographer. Activists don’t journal much, though they may sell other peoples’ journals.)
You may need to stretch in the area of relationships. It will be tempting for you to retreat to your inner world when friends or work or society disappoints you. Involvement in significant relationships and regular acts of service will help keep you tethered to the external world.
Creation Pathway
Creation types find that they have a passionate ability to connect with God when they are experiencing the world he made.
For people on the creation pathway, there is something deeply life-giving and God-breathed about nature.
People on the creation pathway may need to guard against using it as an escape. People are part of creation too - but you may find that when they disappoint you, you are tempted to run away to the woods. Folks in our day are sometimes prone to think, “I don’t need church; I can worship God on my own in nature.” But, of course, we have to learn to see beauty where God does, and people are the most valued part of all that he created.
Using the Pathways to Experience God
Embracing how God made you also means you need to resist the temptation to envy somebody else’s pathway.
We also need to pay attention to those pathways that may not come naturally to us. It is important that we have some involvement in each of the pathways. No one can ignore their intellectual life or opt out of worship. And each of us has a few temptations that will mean there are pathways we particularly need to be stretched in. (From John Ortberg’s GOD IS CLOSER THAN YOU THINK)
Wondering if anyone else agree with this, knows more about this, or thinks this is a bunch of malarky? :coocoo:
"Exploring Spiritual Pathways"
Summarized from “God Is Closer Than You Think,” John Ortberg
God wants to be fully present with each of us. But because he made us to be different from one another, we are not identical in the activities and practices that will help us connect with him. Some writers speak of people as having different spiritual temperaments; Gary Thomas writes of “sacred pathways.” (Many authors have written about this over the years; I’m especially indebted to author Gary Thomas; to my former staff colleagues Bill Hybels and Ruth Barton; and to Corinne Ware and Robert Mulholland.)
A spiritual pathway has to do with the way we most naturally sense God’s presence and experience spiritual growth. We all have at least one pathway that comes most easily to us. We also have one or two that are the most unnatural and require a lot of stretching for us to pursue.
There is enormous freedom in identifying and embracing your spiritual pathway. It is a little like realizing that if you’re an introvert, you don’t have to work as a salesman; you could get a job in a library. You don’t have to beat yourself up or feel guilty because of what is not your pathway. You can focus on relating to God in that way for which you were made, while at the same time recognizing your need to stretch in certain areas that don’t come as naturally.
We will spend most of this chapter walking through seven spiritual pathways. We need to keep in mind that we all have at least some involvement in each one of them. All of us meet God in our minds, at work, in our relationships, and so on. But you will notice that certain pathways most resonate in you. They are the ones that may open up a whole new level of connection between you and God. Yet each pathway has certain dangers attached to it as well, and we will note those too.
Intellectual Pathway
People on the intellectual pathway draw closer to God as they learn more about him. You begin to vibrate when someone talks about the “life of the mind.” Ideas are as alive to you as people. You love to study Scripture. The word “theology” has the same impact on you that the phrase “hot doughnuts now” has on the average customer of a Krispy Kreme shop. No one wants to go to a bookstore with you, because once you walk in, they know they’re going to miss curfew.
When you go to church, you often find yourself marking time during the musical worship until the sermon starts. You get a little concerned about small groups containing a bunch of people swapping ignorance with each other. When you are faced with crises or spiritual challenges, you tend to go into an analytic, problem-solving mode.
Relational Pathway
People who follow the relational pathway find that they have a deep sense of God’s presence when they’re involved in significant relationships. Jesus’ statement that “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” makes perfect sense to a relational type. Small groups and other community experiences become indispensable.
If this is you, you rarely meet a stranger. When telemarketers call to invite you to refinance you home, you ask them, “How are you - really?” Being alone drives you crazy. You sometimes feel guilty when you hear other people speak of long periods of solitude with God. “Solitude wouldn’t be so bad,” you think to yourself, “if I could just bring a bunch of other people along.” You have often experienced key spiritual moments - being convicted of sin, or encouraged to persevere - as God speaks to you through other people.
I think the apostle Peter may have been on this pathway. He came to Jesus with others. He was part of an inner circle along with James and John. After the crucifixion, he was the one who gathered the other disciples to go fishing. The defining moments of his life - his decision to follow Jesus, his confession that Jesus is the Messiah, his denial of Jesus, his caving in to legalists (Paul writes about this in his letter to the Galatians) - all took place in a relational context.
People on this pathway need to lead a relationally rich life.
Relational types always have to guard against two dangers. One is superficiality. It is possible to get spread so thin relationally that no one gets past your external self to know you and love you and challenge you deeply. The second is to become dependent on others so that you live as a kind of spiritual chameleon. Practices like solitude and silence will be a stretch for you. They may never feel natural, but they will help free you from getting addicted to what others think.
Serving Pathway
On the serving pathway, people find that God’s presence seems most tangible when they are involved in helping others. Jesus’ comment that “whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me” is a truth they experience viscerally. If this is you, you may find that you are somewhat uncomfortable in a setting where you don’t have a role to play. But if you can do something - set up chairs, make coffee, help decorate - you feel a sense of God’s delight in you. You often find yourself making observations that help you grow, or speaking to God in ways that feel most natural while you are engaged in acts of service.
An example of this in Scripture might be a woman named Dorcas. She gets only a brief mention in the book of Acts, but we are told that she was always doing good and involved in helping the poor. Mother Teresa would be a kind of modern icon for this pathway. She said that the primary reason she was so involved in serving was not that it was something she was supposed to do, but that it brought her joy. She often felt her own inadequacy when she was alone; she never felt the presence of Jesus more strongly than in those she served. Jimmy Carter has probably inspired more people as an ex-president than he did while he was in office, because of his passion for servant-hood through channels like Habitat for Humanity.
People on this pathway find that if they are just attending church but have no place to serve, God begins to feel distant. They need to be plugged into a community where they have meaningful serving opportunities. They can enrich their sense of God’s presence in their lives by constantly looking for him in the people they serve.
A danger to these people is the temptation to think God is present only when they are serving. They can get so caught up in being God’s servant they forget they are his child first of all. They will have to stretch by learning to receive love as well as to offer it. Another danger is that if I am a big-time server, there is the temptation to resent others who are not serving as much as I am.
Worship Pathway
People on the worship pathway resonate with the psalmist who wrote, “I rejoiced with those who said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’” They have a natural gift for expression and celebration. Something deep inside them feels released when praise and adoration are given voice. Some of their most formative moments occur during times of worship.
A classic example of this occurs in Psalm 73. The psalmist is grousing about how often bad people get all the breaks, how the very people his mother warned him about are living the good life, and how he has been keeping his nose clean all his life and it has never paid off. “When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me, till I entered the sanctuary of God.”
For the psalmist, it was in worship that he experienced again the reality of God’s presence, and that presence changed his perspective on everything.
If this is you, when you worship at church, you hope it will go on for hours. While the intellectual types are looking at their watches, waiting for the message to start, you’re internally shouting, “Sing it again!” You may or may not be naturally expressive, but somehow in worship your heart opens up and you come alive. You sometimes find yourself in tears, sometimes in moments of deep joy, because God seems so close.
King David probably had this pathway. He wrote psalms and poetry to God. He played the lyre and expressed his delight in God through music. We are told that on one occasion he danced before the Lord with so much exuberance that he stripped down pretty much to his BVDs in the process - something that you probably don’t want to emulate if you are, say, Episcopalian.
If this is your pathway, you need to experience great worship on a regular basis. You may want to turn your car into a rolling sanctuary, get tapes of great music that help you worship, then sing your lungs out as you drive down the road. Don’t worry that we’re all staring at you from our cars. This is how you connect to God. Besides, you will bring joy to all of us who watch.
Here are a few cautions for people on this pathway: Don’t judge people who are not as outwardly expressive as you. Some people are from traditions where no one raises a finger, let alone a hand, in a worship service. Not everybody dances. Some of us are Scandinavian.
Also, guard against an experience-based spirituality that has you always looking for the next “worship high.” C.S. Lewis wrote about the fatal sin of saying “encore!” by demanding that God reproduce an experience or an emotion. He said that of all prayers, this may be the one God is least likely to grant, because it can lead us to worship an experience rather than the God to whom our experience points. Music, for instance, can be a great gift to worship. But because music affects our feelings so powerfully, I can grow dependent on music to produce a certain emotional response. I may need to spend some time worshiping God without music so that my worship is based on who God is and not a matter of getting swept up in certain sounds.
We can begin to judge the worship in our churches superficially by always demanding that they produce a certain emotional response. Engaging in study will be an important stretch for you, so that your heart is deeply rooted in the knowledge of God.
Activist Pathway
If you have an activist pathway, you have a high level of energy. You resonate with statements in Scripture such as the words said of Jesus: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” You do zeal. You are a zeal junkie.
You have a passion to act. When you are in a group that hears a story about injustice, other people in the group shake their heads in sadness. You are vibrating for action: “Somebody’s gotta do something! I’m in. Who’s with me?”
Challenges don’t discourage you; they energize you. You thrive on opposition. When someone says, “This can’t be done,” you smile and say, “Watch me!”
You love a fast-paced, problem-filled, complex, strenuous way of life. At the end of the day, you want to be able to say, “I ran really hard. I used every ounce of effort and zeal at my disposal, God, and it’s all for you.” Activists want to run with everything they have between now and the day they die, which will probably be in their early fifties of a heart attack. And when they get to the other side, they are desperately hoping heaven does not consist just of a cloud, a harp, a nice house, and an eternal songbook. That sounds a lot more like eternal punishment to them.
Our biblical example of an activist is Nehemiah. When he hears that his beloved Jerusalem has fallen into disrepair, he is upset and wants to act. He invokes a classic example of the Activist Prayer: “I prayed to my God and said to the king….” For activists, prayer and action naturally go together. They are triggered to look for and depend on God’s presence and guidance in the heart of battle.
If you are an activist, you need a cause. It doesn’t have to be glamorous or visible, but it has to demand the best you have to offer. Without this, your spiritual life will stagnate.
A caution for you is that you may get so excited about the cause that you begin to run over other people or exploit them because you get so focused on what you want to accomplish. Even God may become a means to an end for you rather than the one you serve. Activists sometimes have a hard time discerning God’s true call from their own strong impulses to action. You may need to create balance by spending time in solitude and reflection, so that you allow God to speak to you about what is truly motivating your action.
Contemplative Pathway
If you have a contemplative pathway, you love large blocks of uninterrupted time alone. It is very likely that when you were a child, your parents used to tell you to get outside and play with other kids more. Reflection comes naturally to you. You often feel like an observer in life.
God is most present to you when distractions and noises are removed. Images and metaphors and pictures help you as you pray. If you get too busy, or spend too much time with too many people hanging around, you begin to feel drained and stretched thin.
This is a challenge in American society. What happens when a quiet contemplative type meets a chatty relational type? They get married and drive each other crazy. The contemplative says, “Don’t you have any depth at all? All you ever want to do is schmooze!” The relational type says, “Don’t you even care about people? You just want to navel-gaze all the time!”
If you are a contemplative, you may need permission to follow your pathway. American society tends to value net-workers and activists; contemplatives don’t end up on many magazine covers. You have what Gordon McDonald calls “a large interior world,” or intrapersonal communication. You do not require much external stimulation. Making time to listen to God in silence and solitude is vital to the health of your soul, and necessary for you to experience a deepening sense of his presence. You will need regular, protected, intense, undistracted times alone.
Reading other contemplatives, such as St. John of the Cross or Henry Nouwen, often helps you. You will probably find it helpful to keep a journal. (Relational types almost never journal. They might dictate to a stenographer. Activists don’t journal much, though they may sell other peoples’ journals.)
You may need to stretch in the area of relationships. It will be tempting for you to retreat to your inner world when friends or work or society disappoints you. Involvement in significant relationships and regular acts of service will help keep you tethered to the external world.
Creation Pathway
Creation types find that they have a passionate ability to connect with God when they are experiencing the world he made.
For people on the creation pathway, there is something deeply life-giving and God-breathed about nature.
People on the creation pathway may need to guard against using it as an escape. People are part of creation too - but you may find that when they disappoint you, you are tempted to run away to the woods. Folks in our day are sometimes prone to think, “I don’t need church; I can worship God on my own in nature.” But, of course, we have to learn to see beauty where God does, and people are the most valued part of all that he created.
Using the Pathways to Experience God
Embracing how God made you also means you need to resist the temptation to envy somebody else’s pathway.
We also need to pay attention to those pathways that may not come naturally to us. It is important that we have some involvement in each of the pathways. No one can ignore their intellectual life or opt out of worship. And each of us has a few temptations that will mean there are pathways we particularly need to be stretched in. (From John Ortberg’s GOD IS CLOSER THAN YOU THINK)
