RECENT TRENDS AMONG EVANGELICALS (Part Eight)

(Adapted from chapter one of ‘Recent Trends Among Evangelicals’ by Rowland C.Croucher, John Mark Ministries 1986/1995.

Spirituality and spiritual direction

We now look at the other side of the action/reflection nexus. Since Thomas Merton, the church around the world has become ‘conscientised’ not only about its need for solidarity with the poor, but also with its lack of an adequate spirituality for these modern times. Can you name one book about the classical practice of spiritual direction either written by an evangelical or by any non-Catholic before 1977?

Seminary courses on these subjects are receiving increasing enrolments in the US and elsewhere. Thousands still attend the retreats at Taize. We are learning more about the devotional habits of people like Maria Teresa and Helder Camara – and we evangelicals are being shamed in the process.

We only know one item on John the Baptist’s curriculum for his disciples: how to pray. We only know of one specific submission by Jesus’ disciples for his curriculum for them: how to pray. Surveys around Australia show that about 98% of evangelical leaders were never taught to pray by anyone! About the same percentage never confess their sins to anyone, as per the injunction in James 5:16. I know of only five or six evangelical leaders and pastors who regularly submit to spiritual direction, i.e. they have the same relationship with a ‘father in God’ (as Luther put it) as Paul was to Timothy.

We have become vitally interested in these spiritual disciplines through desperation. Pastors may be leaving the parish ministry in greater numbers than are being lost to any other profession. Whereas research twenty-five years ago showed clergy dealing with stress better than most professionals, since 1980 studies in the US (and there would be no reason to assume the situation is different in other Western countries) have described an alarming spread of stress and burnout in this profession. Pastors, according to the latest research, are the persons least likely in our communities to have a close friend. They are very lonely people indeed – and so are their spouses.

So when I talk about convening a retreat with a couple of experienced (Catholic) spiritual directors to learn about this ancient discipline, I am overwhelmed with responses! In the 1980’s the splendid little book by evangelical Quaker Richard Foster, ‘The Celebration of Discipline’, became a best-seller. Not since W.E. Sangster has a so-called evangelical written about Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox spirituality – and Sangster was about forty years ahead of his time.

Part of this renaissance of interest in Christian spiritualities is a function of our moving away from a predominantly rational/cognitive approach to our faith. The charismatic renewal has prompted recent interest in the legitimacy of spiritual experience. Ecumenical contacts, particularly with Catholics, have generated enormous interest in the ‘devotional classics’. Which evangelical had ever heard of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ a few years back? And yet it’s one of the greatest spiritual classics in the English language!

In Australia evangelicals are forming themselves into societies like Eremos (‘desert’) to study the relationship between prayer and social action. The evangelical journal ‘On Being’ has the same balance. Courses on spiritual formation and direction are coming into our seminaries with a rush. I hear all over the place of seminary lecturers advocating the practice of keeping a spiritual journal or modifying Ignatius’ ‘Spiritual Exercises’ in their colleges. Even among more radical Christians there is a confluence of the justice/peace and spirituality streams. We are learning that, without justice, our spirituality is merely an other-worldly piety, but without spirituality, social action can be merely humanistic. A good 1980’s recent publication to help this burgeoning interest is ‘A Dictionary of Christian Spirituality’ (ed. Gordon S. Wakefield). When its revisions come out with more articles relating spiritual disciplines to most major areas of modern life and conflict (rather than merely to some of them), it will be even more valuable!

We are in the midst of a clamorous demand to help one another to know God better and to become more accountable to each other in our prayer. The recent evangelical interest in ‘discipling’ new Christians goes part of the way to fulfilling this purpose, as does the widespread advice to pastors to spend more time with fewer people, training them (their ‘twelve’) for ministry. I am not surprised to read that the man who led John Stott to Christ, Eric Nash, wrote to him every week for the next five years and has prayed for him regularly since! There’s a lesson there for those of us so concerned with numbers that we surrender depth and quality in relationships with God and others.

Other issues

Let us now round off with a ‘pot-pourri’ of other questions evangelicals are asking themselves these days, any one of which is so important as to require a whole book to itself:

1. The role of women

‘If present trends continue,’ I heard in a couple of places in the US last year, ‘by the year 2000, 80 per cent of all students proceeding towards full-time Christian ministry will be women!’

Because of the inherent appeal of the pastoral ministry as a vocation in which women can contribute and be fulfilled, more women will seek ordination. However, once women’s ordination ceases to remain an issue, then the proportion of women to men students can be expected to level off and reflect those ratios in other helping professions.

Evangelicals are increasingly saying to one another on this point: ‘It just may be that traditionalists have misinterpreted the Bible on the issue of women’s ministries.’ Whereas Jesus and the apostles (including Paul) were centuries ahead of their cultures in granting personhood to women, today our churches are creating a scandal for the opposite reason – we are behind our culture.

There may be two reasons for this. First, we have a hermeneutical problem. How universal was Paul’s injunction to women to be in submission to men? Was he perhaps modifying his principle in Galatians 3:28 for a particularly sensitive social milieu? Even if the cultures of the Mediterranean region in those times were not ready for the liberation of their Christian women, it’s interesting to note that even in the twentieth century, in some of our evangelical churches, we do not have women deacons like Phoebe, or prophetesses like the four daughters of Philip!

John Stott says:

I believe that there are situations in which it is entirely proper for women to teach, and to teach men, provided that in so doing they are not usurping an improper authority over them… It seems… to be biblically permissible for women to teach men, provided that the content of their teaching is biblical, its context a team and its style humble… If God endows women with spiritual gifts (which he does), and thereby calls them to exercise their gifts for the common good (which he does), then the church must recognise God’s gifts and calling, must make appropriate spheres of service available to women, and should ‘ordain’ (that is, commission and authorise) them to exercise their God-given ministry, at least in team situations. Our Christian doctrines of creation and redemption tell us that God wants his gifted people to be fulfilled, not frustrated, and his church to be enriched by their service (‘Issues Facing Christians Today’, 1984).

The second problem inhibiting women from using their God-given gifts in ministry may be psychological: men (and, indeed, many women) don’t easily cope with a woman in leadership or in a teaching role. We may be a generation or two away from solving that one!

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