The 9 Arts of Spiritual Conversations

by Mary Schaller

  Because neighborhood witness is mandatory for all Jehovah’s Witnesses, I was able to focus my queries on their experiences and ask how easy or difficult sharing their faith was for them. Hearing their views and struggles related to that core requirement of their faith was a great learning experience, and I tried to put myself in their shoes. I asked God to show me how to communicate grace and welcome to my guests as we moved forward in the evening.

  While they have different beliefs than I, their religion takes sharing their faith more seriously than many of my fellow Christ followers. I admired their commitment and courage. I found myself empathizing with their personal witness challenges as we started to discuss more tender subjects about what they believed. By the time the husband and wife left that night, I had a genuine love for both of them and prayed in the upcoming months that they would know the full truth about Jesus.

  In speaking of welcoming as hospitality, Henri Nouwen, internationally renowned priest, professor, and beloved pastor, offers helpful insight and inspiration:

  In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found. . . . Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.[65]

  When you welcome people who believe differently rather than shunning them, your winsome friendship as a follower of Jesus creates a place where God can work to bring about eternal life change. Creating that kind of environment is a challenge—how easy it is for defenses to go up when worldviews clash! But Jesus modeled the value of welcoming people together in community, to experience his care and interact with his words together. As he rubbed shoulders with people from all walks of life and varied spiritual backgrounds, he was intent on keeping the environment around him open to people with baggage of all kinds.

  Think of a “Samaritan” in your life. How have you considered yourself superior to this person (morally, aesthetically, vocationally, socioeconomically, racially) in your heart or with your words? I encourage you to take a moment right now to confess and surrender your conclusions and judgments to God, asking him to forgive you for not loving and welcoming this person, and to replace your criticism with love and acceptance. Ask God to reveal this person’s good attributes to you and to reveal Jesus to him or her through your actions.

  God Is Responsible for the Results

  We all long for places that feel like home even if they’re not. In those places, we experience what it means to be valued, to be known, and to be loved. Whether you have welcomed someone by inviting her to eat a meal with you, by getting into an informal conversation in the break room at work, or by gladly entering his home, the spiritual result of your interaction must be left in God’s hands.

  Sometimes just being together and building a friendship has a greater net effect than anything you might say about the Bible or your relationship with Christ. We are not suggesting that sharing the truths of the Bible and being upfront about your personal faith are not important. However, without a welcoming environment people will not as easily be able to receive those words. Your job is to create a safe space to allow others to honestly explore matters of faith with you, as a true friend. Where it goes from there is ultimately between them and God.

  Discover

  How has Jesus extended his welcome to you in tangible ways? What impact has this had on your life?

  What simple, doable welcoming practice fits your personality? How can you incorporate that into your everyday life?

  Practice

  In the next few days, practice welcoming through one of the four aspects: your face, your space, your place, and your grace.

  Review the list of people you developed in chapter 1 and choose someone from it who is different from you. How have you considered yourself superior to this person in your heart or with your words? Take a moment to surrender your conclusions to God, asking him to forgive you and to show you how you can be more welcoming. Act on that insight and pray for that person in the upcoming weeks.

  THE FINAL THREE Arts of Spiritual Conversations are called Keeping It Going because they help us to maintain ongoing faith-based discussions with a small-group community. We’re building on the relationships we’ve established through consistently practicing the first six Arts and moving into regular conversations about spiritual topics.

  To review, the first three practices—Noticing, Praying, Listening—are Getting Ready Arts, with no expectation for you to say anything. The next three Arts, called Getting Started—Asking Questions, Loving, and Welcoming—are interactive Arts to help you initiate a meaningful conversation. These first six Arts can be exercised well with just one other person.

  The Arts for Keeping It Going transition from primarily one-on-one spiritual conversations to arts that can keep the conversation fresh on an ongoing basis in one-on-one interactions or in a small-group community. They include the Arts of Facilitating, Serving Together, and Sharing.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE ART OF FACILITATING

  And Jesus turned and saw them following, and said to them, “What do you seek?” They said to Him, “Rabbi . . . where are You staying?” He said to them, “Come, and you will see.”

  JOHN 1:38-39, NASB

  One who learns through the process of honest questioning, objective thinking, and respectful challenging is more apt to know in the end what is really true. And he will also know “why” he believes it.

  RANDALL ARTHUR

  MY (MARY’S) FRIEND BILL loved leading his small group, which was made up of several couples from his church. Leading gave him opportunities to teach others what he was studying in his Sunday school Bible class, and he learned a lot by preparing for his regular presentation to the group. Meetings didn’t include much dynamic discussion or diversity of opinion. It wasn’t necessary with Bill in the room; he had almost any answer that people needed. The other group members didn’t always agree with Bill or get to talk much, but he made it so clear that he was the expert that they were afraid to speak up with a differing opinion.

  Then one day Bill was sick with the flu, and his wife, Sally, volunteered to lead the group in his place. Sally didn’t consider herself a Bible expert, but she knew how to draw people out. She brought a discussion guide that asked good questions about the Bible passage. She made sure everyone got a chance to talk and share their perspective, even if it didn’t agree with hers or others’ in the group. By the end of the meeting, the group had experienced more laughter and lively discussion than on most evenings. Everyone asked whether Sally would mind leading more often. They couldn’t quite put their finger on how her leadership was different from Bill’s, but they knew they liked it and wanted more.

  Flipped

  A relatively recent phenomenon in education is called the flipped classroom. A traditional classroom approach involves listening to lectures and taking tests in the classroom, while problem solving and interacting with the concepts you are learning both occur at home. A flipped classroom is a reversed instructional model where students learn content at home, watching online video lectures about the subject, and then do “homework” in class, with teachers and students discussing questions and solving problems in their prime time together. Relational interaction between students and teachers significantly increases, and teacher interaction with students is more personalized. The role of the teacher is to guide or facilitate learning, rather than only to deliver content in a lecture.

  Greg Green, the principal of Clintondale High School in Clinton Township, Michigan, a financially challenged school near Detroit, had seen his school’s failure rates—the percentage of students failing each class—compete for the highest in the country year after year. His staff thought the situation was hopeless, given no clear solution from the experts and inadequate funding avail
able to address problems. Yet after only eighteen months of “flipping” classrooms at Clintondale, discipline problems decreased dramatically, the English failure rate decreased from 52 percent to 19 percent, the math failure rate decreased from 44 percent to 13 percent, and the science failure rate decreased from 41 percent to 19 percent.[66] A complete paradigm shift had been needed, and it worked at almost no new expense to the school! Thanks to Internet and video technology, students watched lectures outside of class and then worked closely with their teachers and fellow classmates at school to discuss and problem-solve.

  With those impressive results in such a short period of time, educators all over the world began watching what was happening at Clintondale and wondering what it could mean for them. Those involved in the flipped-classroom movement say that it changes the teacher’s role from a “sage on the stage” to a “guide on the side.”

  I can’t help but wonder what relevance this might have to the church. Do any aspects of how the church functions need to be flipped? A fascinating article titled “Flipping the 40-Minute Sermon” appeared in the May 2013 issue of Christianity Today. Contributing writer Karen E. Yates points out that we are all so busy with jobs, parenting, and extracurricular activities that we hardly have time for each other, resulting in crowded loneliness. Christians come to church to connect with God and one another, and yet most Sunday church services rarely give them a chance to relate much.

  Yates cites an expert and pioneer on interactive learning, Harvard Professor Eric Mazur, who believes that the greatest learning occurs when people engage in dialogue about a topic with their peers. Yates points out that evolving academic structures could have big implications for the church at large. Even though instructional teaching holds an important place in the church, she doesn’t think the forty-minute sermon given by the pastor is what makes the church the church. Rather, it’s the interaction of the congregation and the formation of community around the Word of God that are most important. She writes, “When we hear a lecture we receive information into our short-term memory, but to learn, we also need to assimilate the information we’ve received; meaning, we need to engage and apply the information.”[67] Should we incorporate more opportunities to interact with one another during the Sunday service to address our need for community and to help us better engage with what we’re learning?

  Scottish theologian William Barclay pointed out that “it is only when truth is self-discovered that it is appropriated. When a man is simply told the truth it remains external to him and he can quite easily forget it. When he is led to discover the truth for himself, it becomes an integral part of him and he never forgets it.”[68]

  The Unit of Transformation

  If it is true that people learn best through facilitated discussion rather than a lecture format, then we must consider how we can implement more strategies where people can seek God in small-group communities led by facilitators rather than experts. As the church becomes more intentional about forming communities to interact with one another not only at church but also where people live, work, and play, the Art of Facilitating becomes an important practice to cultivate. We will need hundreds of thousands of initiators who can form safe places where ongoing spiritual conversations can flourish.

  Peter Block, author of Community: The Structure of Belonging, calls a small group the ideal “unit of transformation.” While his book is written for a secular audience, its discoveries can be applied to any small-group community. He explains why it is worth investing in authentic transformative communities:

  The small group is the structure that allows every voice to be heard. It is in groups of 3 to 12 that intimacy is created. This intimate conversation makes the process personal. It provides the structure where people overcome isolation and where the experience of belonging is created. . . .

  In the small group discussion we discover that our own concerns are more universal than we imagined. This discovery that we are not alone, that others can at least understand what is on our mind, if not agree with us, is what creates the feeling of belonging. . . .

  The power of the small group cannot be overemphasized. Something almost mystical, certainly mysterious, occurs when citizens sit in a small group, for they often become more authentic and personal with each other there than in other settings.[69]

  Block identifies questions as the essential tools of engagement because questions create the space for something new to emerge. They promote freedom of expression. On the other hand, ready-made answers by an expert in the group can shut down the discussion and the future possibilities of what could be said. While good questions are important for dynamic discussion in one-on-one conversations, they are critical in small groups.

  Guide on the Side

  As we discussed in chapter 1, there are two general approaches to learning: the telling approach and the asking approach. In the telling approach, sometimes referred to as didactic or deductive learning, one individual acts as the expert, telling listeners what he or she has learned about a selected topic. In this approach, the listeners are passive receivers of information, and the teacher is the active giver of information.

  In the asking or inductive approach, facilitators create an environment in which the participants can all be active discoverers. The facilitator is a guide, not a teacher or information dispenser. The definition of facilitate is “to make easier or less difficult” or “to help forward.” A facilitator’s role is to help someone learn. The focus is on the learner, not on the one with more knowledge.

  Several years ago, I ran across a book by educator Maryellen Weimer called Learner-Centered Teaching, which provides a foundation for why facilitating is generally more effective than lecturing in the learning process. While reading the book, I came to the conclusion that Jesus was a learner-centered teacher. He seemed to meet people where they were in their understanding of God and their own personal spiritual journey, rather than expecting them to grasp advanced principles that he knew would be over their heads or that they were not ready to receive. For example, after Jesus’ resurrection, he came to some of the disciples as they were fishing on the Sea of Galilee. (See John 21:1-19.) He talked to Peter, who had just betrayed him, and through a simple repeated sentiment—“Feed my sheep”—showed Peter that he was forgiven and could still be counted as Jesus’ disciple. Jesus worked within Peter’s frame of reference rather than beginning with complicated teaching.

  When we talk to people about God, do we, like Jesus, meet them where they are—in their brokenness and current understanding of faith? Or do we expect them to know what we know about God and the Bible?

  Weimer’s premise is that traditional classrooms are teacher centered rather than learner centered. She points out that teachers do most of the work when learning is teacher-centric; therefore, they are learning more than the students. Could this also be true of those delivering sermons and Sunday school lessons and leading small groups? Those doing the teaching might be the biggest benefactors of this learning approach.

  Acting as a facilitator to others’ learning challenges everyone to be more engaged in the process. In learner-centered teaching, students develop skills for how to think, rather than just absorbing the content. This approach encourages learners to reflect on what they are learning and how they are grasping it. Learners are challenged to accept responsibility for their own understanding by reflecting on, analyzing, and critiquing new content rather than passively accepting it.

  Learner-centered teaching motivates learners by giving them some control. Weimer believes that teachers have been making too many decisions about what students should learn, how they learn it, the pace at which they learn, and the conditions under which they learn. Then they also determine whether students have learned. In contrast, Weimer sees people in a classroom (much like a church gathering or a small group) as communities of learners. People learn from and with each other.[70] Perhaps giving faith learners a chance to determine what they want to learn, how they’ll learn
it, whom they’ll learn it with, and the pace at which they learn it could increase the likelihood of behavioral change and more gradual and consistent choices to follow Jesus.

  Given all of this, why don’t we become learner centered in how we approach making new disciples? One reason is that facilitation, or guiding someone’s learning, is more difficult than teaching through content delivery because you do not control the process. And let’s face it: We all prefer to be in control. Facilitation is messy; it takes more time, and it requires patience. But in another way facilitation is easier for the ordinary Christian who does not have a seminary degree, teaching gift, or pastor credential because you don’t have to have all the answers! You are walking alongside someone as a fellow learner, learning together as an initiator of the process but certainly not as an expert. It gives you permission to say, “I don’t know the answer. What do the rest of you think? Let’s discover the answer together.”

  A facilitator guides learners who are active in the process rather than supplying information to passive recipients. Encouraging active learning is important in matters of faith if we want to see disciples whose hearts are truly transformed rather than those who merely give nominal assent to Christian principles. Because our traditional approach to discipleship has been more teacher centered than learner centered, sadly, it has often been more about us than them. We focus on what we want to tell people rather than on what they want to know.

  Jesus’ actions in first-century Israel reveal the timeless value of facilitation. Even Jesus’ public ministry required people to wrestle with the meaning of what he said; it’s easy to imagine people dialoguing about one of Jesus’ parables as they walked home after hearing his teaching. But Jesus’ primary focus was to facilitate learning and growth in a small group of twelve. Again and again, Jesus took his small band of followers aside and helped them think through what he had just said or done. He often asked them many more questions than he gave answers.