The 9 Arts of Spiritual Conversations

by Mary Schaller

  I am blown away that these guys who saw Jesus perform countless miracles, speak with more authority than anyone, and conquer death still had doubts that made them hesitant to worship Jesus. What’s more, although Jesus knew their doubts, he proceeded to commission them, with “all authority in heaven and on earth” backing him, to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (28:18-19). The good news about this passage is it reminds us that doubting doesn’t faze Jesus. It’s normal. Believers have doubts at times, and people who are on a journey of seeking God will have plenty of them too. Our job is to guide them toward unchanging truth as they seek to resolve those doubts in the context of caring community, where healing, love, and spiritual growth can flourish.

  Power of Community and These Nine Arts

  When Don Ross, the senior pastor at Creekside Church in the Seattle area, was introduced to The 9 Arts of Spiritual Conversations, they immediately resonated with him. He decided to try to incorporate the nine practices into his own life. In the middle of writing a book called The Turnaround Pastor, he decided to write at a local McDonald’s; it had free wi-fi and decent coffee at a reasonable price. And although he hadn’t been aware of this before or seen it as a need, McDonald’s was a place where he could meet people.

  After sitting in the same spot almost every day for a few weeks, Don noticed a man who sat at the next table nearly every day he was there. At first all they did was nod a brief hello. Eventually Don learned the man’s name was Carl, and he started to regularly pray for Carl without knowing much about him. Before long the men had a brief conversation every time they saw each other, with Don asking Carl some questions and listening to what he shared. Carl had been married three times and had eleven women in his past. He’d been to jail and had battled alcoholism. Don had a common challenge with recovery from an addiction. Carl must have sensed that Don was relating well with him because at one point, Carl said, “I don’t know why I feel like I can tell you all this stuff!”

  One day, Carl came into McDonald’s very upset as Don was on his way out. Carl said that his four-year-old grandson, Truin, was having open-heart surgery that day to repair two holes in his heart. He asked Don if he would mind praying for Truin, since Carl didn’t think he “had the right kind of pipeline to God.” So right there, near the trash cans outside of McDonald’s, Don said a short prayer for Carl’s little grandson. The next time Carl saw Don at their usual spot, he could hardly contain himself! He said that his grandson was fine now. Somehow the bottom hole in his heart had healed itself, and the top hole had been an easy fix for the surgeon. Carl said, “This prayer stuff really works!”

  Pretty soon there was a community of guys—some of whom were homeless—gathering around Don at McDonald’s. Don gave them a booklet to read called “What on Earth Am I Here For?” by Rick Warren. He told them to underline everything they were curious about, and then they’d talk about it. During one of their conversations about the book, Don asked Carl if he was ready to start walking with Jesus. Carl said yes, and the two prayed together once again. After that, the two prayed together regularly.

  A few of Carl’s friends who also had lived hard lives began to get sick and were dying. Carl wanted Don to visit them, but Don encouraged Carl to go instead and to share what he was learning about Jesus. One of these friends ended up praying to have a relationship with Jesus just before he died. Carl said he “could feel the Spirit of God moving through him” as he made these visits. Don describes Carl’s impact on his friends as a spiritual chain reaction.

  When Don asked Carl how his life is different since they met, Carl said, “I used to feel so alone. But now I feel like I have a regular friend in Jesus who’s always with me. And I feel like I have a purpose in life with those around me.”

  Don is now the Pacific Northwest regional director of the largest denomination in the Pacific Northwest, the Assemblies of God. Because of his experiences with Carl and his other McDonald’s friends, he has encouraged his network of nearly three hundred churches to practice The 9 Arts of Spiritual Conversations and start Q Places.

  What challenges you about putting all of the 9 Arts of Spiritual Conversations into practice? Can you begin praying about whom God would have you partner with to start a Q Place? We see that on average, about half of the people who join a Q Place end up placing their faith in Jesus as a result of their exploration of God and the Bible. If eight spiritually curious people joined a Q Place to discuss faith matters, that means that about four people could make a decision to follow Jesus through your initiative, enabling you to faithfully live out the Great Commission and make new disciples. What an impact for God’s Kingdom!

  Discover

  Have you ever had the privilege of walking alongside someone on their faith journey? What impact did it have on your own faith?

  Review your list of people God is calling you to engage with in spiritual conversations. Who would benefit from a small group where they could figure out what they believe about God? Pray about developing a group and inviting those people.

  Practice

  Talk to someone you know who is not a Christian but may be spiritually curious, and ask them what they think of this small-group concept. Would they ever consider becoming a participant? Why or why not?

  Host a movie night or a book discussion that would prompt some good spiritual discussion with a few good open-ended questions. What went well? What did you find challenging? How might this experience prepare you for starting a Q Place?

  CHAPTER 13

  FROM CUPS OF COLD WATER TO RIVERS OF LIVING WATER

  Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

  JOHN 7:37-38

  I believe this moment is unlike any other time in history. Its uniqueness demands an original response. If we fail to offer a different way forward, we risk losing entire generations to apathy and cynicism.

  GABE LYONS

  IN MAY 1943, Army Air Forces bombardier Louis Zamperini’s plane crashed, shot down in an air battle over the Pacific Ocean. He and two other airmen found themselves floating aimlessly in tandem rafts in the middle of the Pacific, desperately hoping to be rescued by their fellow countrymen. To their utter disappointment, the three men discovered that their rafts were stocked with only a few bars of chocolate, several half-pint tins of water, and a few other supplies. In the remarkable true story about Zamperini’s life, titled Unbroken, author Laura Hillenbrand writes, “Most worrisome was the water situation. A few half-pints wouldn’t last them long. The men were surrounded by water, but they couldn’t drink it.”[97]

  After their supplies were gone, Zamperini and his friends went three days without water before a storm produced a most welcome drink, which the three men consumed voraciously by throwing back their heads and opening their mouths to catch the raindrops. Hillenbrand describes it as a “sensory explosion” to these three desperate men. Over the course of the storm, they figured out how to capture the rain with canvas and funnel it to refill the tins with fresh drinking water to keep them alive.

  Very few of us reading this in the Western world with almost unlimited access to good drinking water can grasp how difficult it is to survive each day without water. But people living in the first century and those in developing countries today know all too well the value of a tin of fresh drinking water.

  Arid Palestine in AD 30 had too few wells and fresh bodies of water for the basic needs of its people and animals. Obtaining water would have been close to the front of everyone’s minds. When Jesus used the example of giving a cool cup of water as a way to show mercy and love (see Matthew 10:42), his hearers would have understood it on a visceral level. Giving people something as simple as a cup of cold water was probably a sensory explosion then, too!

  What’s the spiritual equivalent of a cup of cold water today in the West
ern world? We think it is genuine mercy and love, shown through the nine simple practices we have described in this book. When people get a taste of it, they have a sensory explosion, like Louis Zamperini and his friends on the raft, who desperately needed fresh water to survive. People are so thirsty for someone to pay attention to them and show that they have value in this world. When they experience the attention of people who notice, pray for, listen to, ask questions of, love, welcome, and serve with them, they are drawn to that attention. It is good news to them, and they want more.

  West Point graduate and former Army Ranger Greg Plitt was an imposing physical specimen. He was a fitness model and actor who seemed to have everything: health, fame, and fortune. Yet he was searching for truth, wondering whether it could give him the contentment and peace that had eluded him. For eighteen months he met regularly with Dave, his former high school wrestling coach, and talked about God and what he believed. The two of them would sit in an LA restaurant for a couple of hours once a quarter and talk about Jesus. Greg trusted Dave, as he didn’t feel judged or coerced to believe as Dave did. The conversations were lively and full of questions from both men.

  On January 17, 2015, Dave received a distraught call from Greg’s brother-in-law. There had been a tragic accident; Greg had been killed by a commuter train in Burbank as he was filming a video on the train tracks that promoted his new protein drink. This tragic accident cut short Greg’s search for God. Dave was asked to conduct two memorial services for Greg and to somehow make sense of it all. Here’s what Dave said:

  Greg wanted to know Jesus. But his lifestyle and never-ending pursuit of excellence kept him from creating space for God. He once said to me, “I’m thirty-five years old but I feel like I’m eighty.” Our times together were the few times he could take a break and talk about his emptiness and how God may be the answer to his lifelong pursuit of fulfillment, meaning, and worth.

  Then there’s Laura (not her real name), a thirty-year-old divorced hairdresser in the western suburbs of Chicago who thought she had found the man of her dreams. She had dated Doug, an electrician, for about six months when they decided to get married. Within a year they had a baby. Looking back, Laura would say the marriage showed signs of trouble even before their son, Charlie, was born. Doug liked spending time with his buddies watching sports at the local pub more than being with his wife. When his son was born, it seemed as if he spent even more time away from his young family. Laura confronted Doug about this several times, but he became increasingly distant. Eventually the couple divorced, and Laura is now raising eight-year-old Charlie on her own, fighting Doug for every dollar of child support and trying to make ends meet with her income at the beauty salon.

  Laura was not raised with any faith background. She is more open to spiritual matters now than ever because life is difficult. After going to three different churches in the area to check out “whether they might have something to offer” her, she said she gave up because “they didn’t seem like a fit” for her. In the meantime, she goes on every day the best she can, raising her son and making ends meet, wondering why life is so hard. For a while I (Mary) was getting my hair cut by Laura. We’ve had several conversations about God. I’ve prayed for her and have asked her several questions about what she believes, listening attentively to her answers and, when asked, sharing with her what I believe. I sense that she is thirsty for this meaningful dialogue. She has expressed interest in going to a group where she could interact with others who are similarly searching for God.

  Laura is high on my list to invite to a Q Place, but she doesn’t live close by. I wonder whether there are Christians in her apartment building or at the playground she visits with her son. What if they began to notice, pray for, and listen to her? And what about Doug, her ex-husband? Has he begun to recognize the dismal consequences of his choices? Could he be open to talking about God? Is there a fellow electrician at work who is a Christ follower, who could ask questions and listen?

  And there are Darla and Steve (names changed), whose son Richard was a consultant at a large aerospace company in the Pacific Northwest. They got a call in the middle of the night from the police saying that their son had jumped out of a fifth-floor hotel window. Darla and Steve don’t have any connection with a church. Do they have Christian neighbors and friends? Do these friends know how to engage in meaningful conversations about God with people who are suffering deep grief and loss? Did Richard have Christian friends at work who could have given him an opportunity to explore the offer that Jesus gives and see it for himself?

  I am sure you could list many people in your life who are untouched by a local church yet have a story of brokenness and a need for God’s redemptive power.

  The Church in Crisis

  As I (Mary) was writing this final chapter, I happened to talk with two Christians who shared what was going on in their own churches. Barbara, along with her husband, has belonged to an Episcopalian church in a small resort town for most of her life. She said that their church is dwindling and that she and her husband, in their sixties, are the youngest people there. “In the summer, we’ll have tourists and snowbirds there and it seems a little more vibrant. But on Sundays the rest of the year,” she says, “I have a pew to myself.”

  Another friend belongs to a Bible-based nondenominational church not too far from Barbara’s. He said that his church had a congregation of about 120 people less than five years ago. “We now have thirty people who would call it their church home. People moved or left because they didn’t agree with some things we were doing. I still love it, and those who have stayed are growing mature in their relationship with Christ,” he said.

  While some of the “big box” churches are seeing vibrant activity primarily from transfer growth of Christians leaving their smaller churches, the overall picture of shrinking churches is becoming increasingly clear. I am sure everyone reading this could give more examples that point to a less-than-hopeful path for the institutional church in the US. And yet there are people like Greg, Laura, Doug, Steve, Darla, and Richard all around us in our daily lives!

  These anecdotal stories are pretty discouraging, and so is the data. David T. Olson, author of The American Church in Crisis, claims that by 2020 only 14.7 percent of the American population will be attending a Christian church on any given weekend. He doesn’t think the conditions that could produce growth are present, and he believes that the downward trajectory will continue.[98] That tells us we can’t rely on pastors to be the only ones doing the work of making disciples through a one-hour teaching on Sunday, especially if fewer people are coming to hear it.

  According to John Dickerson, author of The Great Evangelical Recession, “Christianity as we know it is receding.” Speaking primarily about the Western world, he writes about the 10-percent drop in evangelicals over the last several decades. He defines “evangelical” as “churches and individuals who believe a salvation-by-faith-alone ‘gospel.’ We’re talking about American Christians who believe the Bible is God’s Word, that it is without error, and that Jesus is the only way to salvation and to God.”

  Dickerson believes that evangelical Christians in 2014 made up between 7 and 9 percent of the US population, or 22 million people. He expects this figure to decline to about 4 percent in the next thirty years.[99] However, he believes that “the evangelical recession offers us a window of opportunity, during which we can re-center Christ’s church on His mission.”[100]

  Pollster and author George Barna writes:

  The church landscape will continue to evolve into something that would have been unrecognizable a quarter century ago. . . . The mainline churches and even some of the evangelical and fundamentalist groups that were solid at the end of the last millennium and the beginning of this one will lose altitude unless they substantially reinvent themselves.[101]

  If making disciples is the mandate of the Great Commission, and if church growth and attendance are lead indicators that we are accomplishing this important mis
sion, we have got to understand that something is seriously wrong and needs to be addressed.

  Perhaps we’ve somehow made fulfilling the Great Commission too hard? Too complicated? Too institutional? Perhaps we don’t see our individual responsibility as followers of Jesus to make disciples? Perhaps we are not noticing all of the people like Greg and Laura around us who are searching for God but have not found him in the church building on Sunday? Perhaps we’ve relied too much on a telling approach that appears transactional and prescriptive to many around us?

  Jesus reminds us in John 17:18, “As you [the Father] sent me into the world, I have sent them [believers] into the world” (emphasis added). We have been sent. Are we willing to go? I love The Message’s paraphrase of this same verse: “In the same way that you gave me a mission in the world, I give them a mission in the world.” It’s not just the paid professionals. We all have a mission to make new disciples. It’s like in Isaiah 6:8, where Isaiah describes hearing God ask the question: “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” Isaiah said in response, “Here am I. Send me.” Are you willing to be sent?

  Bystanders?

  A phenomenon called the “bystander effect” may help explain why an individual Christian is unlikely to view making disciples as his or her own personal responsibility. The bystander effect refers to people’s tendency not to help someone in need when other people are present. In fact, the more bystanders who are present, the less likely they are to do anything.

  There are many heart-wrenching examples of the bystander affect. Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax was stabbed to death in 2010 after trying to help a woman who was being attacked by a robber in Queens, New York. Over the course of an hour, almost twenty-five people walked by while he lay dying on the sidewalk. No one helped him. One person even took a picture.[102] Medical professionals have learned that when there is an emergency, it is critical to point to one person, ask his or her name, and then tell that person to call an ambulance or take some necessary action. Being asked directly and personally increases the likelihood that someone will see it as his or her job to help.