Experiencing God on a Whole New Level

At the first of the year I began teaching a Sunday morning Bible class I am calling "Experiencing God on a Whole New Level."  This class stemmed from a study of spiritual formation I did in college and desire to cultivate more intimate and meaningful connections with God.  I was first introduced to the idea of spiritual temperaments/modes by one of my professors and that study forever changed the way I view formation and worship (in fact I ended up taking the class twice because I was so drawn to the material being presented).  The idea behind spiritual modes is that we are all uniquely created, and just as we all have different "love languages" or "learning styles" we all have different spiritual temperaments, or ways that we interact and experience God.

How about a quote from a book I've never read...

"Every human being has a temperament, which means that certain practices will come more naturally for you than others." - John Ortberg The Me I Want to Be

This gist of this statement is that people, because we are uniquely created, will interact and experience God differently.  For instance, while incorporating times of prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours prayer book might nourish me spiritually, you may receive the most nourishment from serving sandwiches to those who live on the streets.  Now the reality is, that no matter our dominant spiritual temperament, the goal should be to live holistically.  To echo the words of Scripture we should love God with "ALL of our heart, ALL of our soul, ALL of our strength, and ALL of our mind."  However, for the most part, we in church leadership have not given you the proper tools to mine the depths of those holistic experiences and interactions.  For instance, as a worship leader, I often hear things like "I just didn't get that much out of worship today..." or maybe "I just feel dry and burned out spiritually..."

I came to a couple of conclusions once I dove head-first into this study.  First of all, as spiritual directors and ministers, we have done a poor job of tooling believers to connect with God on various levels that God has created within us.  When we hear statements like the ones listed above.  We tell you "Go to church...read your Bible...go to small group..." which are all incredibly important practices, but are by no means the comprehensive list of spiritual practices.  In doing so, it's like we are giving you a hammer, and only a hammer, and tell you to build a house.  Well, we all know that building a house with only a hammer is going to be really hard to do.  So I think there is a need for us, as ministers, to share new (and really old) and vibrant ways to experience God.

Secondly, I realized that, as a worship leader, my job should focus more on helping people connect and interact to God on a personal level.  In doing so, I firmly believe that our collective worship experiences will be more fulfilling and meaningful.  That is to say, before expecting "Joe" to get a lot of a contemplative reading of Scripture in our collective worship hour, I need to provide him the tools and experience of how to do so during his personal worship.

Third, I came to the conclusion that many of us are unaware of our dominant spiritual path and are being left "dry and empty" because we only assume there are a specific number of ways to interact with God.

So over the course of the next several weeks, I am going to try my best to put some of my thoughts here as a supplement to the things I am researching and discussing in our Sunday morning class.

You should know I have two goals for the class:

1) To be able to assess and affirm your spiritual language, dominances and weaknesses. 

2) To be able to gain valuable knowledge about your spiritual language/temperaments and to give you the proper tools that will help you grow closer to God on a spiritual level. 

3) To better understand how and why we do certain things in our collective worship services on Sundays.  

So just as we all have different learning styles and love languages, let's explore together what it means to have different spiritual temperaments and how we can use them to experience and interact with God on a whole new level.  Over the next several weeks I will be using Sacred Pathways by Gary Thomas as my guide in this class.  We will look at the nine temperaments he lays out in that book and assess how each reveals to us a deeper experience with God.  If you would like to join us in finding your personal spiritual path, you can take the online assessment here.  

Hope you'll join us in this journey! 

Resources for spiritual formation: 

Sacred Pathways - Gary Thomas

Rennovation of the Heart - Dallas Willard

Invitation to a Journey:  A Road Map for Spiritual Formation - Robert Mulholland