Teaching

Excerpt - Being Heard

Sometimes we just need a space to be heard and to speak what is true regardless of how morally correct it is.  The following excerpt is from the Q4 Workbook - When God Breaks In.

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Objective #2 – Being Heard: Once a safe space has been created, the second objective is for each participant is to be heard, to speak what is going on in his/her heart and life.  Communicating what is going on in the heart is a vital work. So often what causes a breakdown in our personal lives is the fear that grips us from the unknown, the inability to deal with a problem, or denying what is true in the present.  By addressing it in a safe space, the participant can begin to see that he/she is not alone in the experience.  Others are there for support.  In communitas we can address and stand up to the fear with courage.

Often the tension of being heard is that we won’t be saying “the right thing.” Often we feel something that is not morally or politically correct so we deny the reality of how we feel.  We don’t want to say it because of how others will think of us.  Yet, in denying that reality, we are denying what is true in the moment, that we feel a certain way.  Instead of speaking it, we hide it, which allows it to embed itself into our lives and fester.

Integrity means first speaking what is true about how we feel so we can begin to root out what is not true.  It allows us to put words to the tension we are experiencing and to be honest about how we feel. But in speaking honestly we can begin to unpack what we feel, why we feel that way and the story behind it.

Most of the time really addressing the concern or fear and figuring out what the person feels about it provides very deep work.  This initial process allows the person familiarity with what is “really” going on and stepping into what is honest, even when it doesn’t feel morally right.    By putting language to the concern provides real meat to the matter.  It becomes something they can grab onto and work on.

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Q1 Teaching Map

We’re in the process of updating the Leadership Manual to include a section on the content of the teaching, called the Teaching Map.  So over the next couple of weeks I’m going to be posting the teaching summaries of each workbooks to give you an idea of what the teaching sections look like.

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Y1 | Q1 – Come Follow Me: An Orientation To The Journey

1.01 – Missio Dei: This week begins an overview of where the group is doing over the next three years.  It’s called Missio Dei and it means engaging God’s mission of restoration. This week also discusses the gift of participation and why we should participate.

1.02 - Communitas: This week explores the concept of Communitas as a context for the group meetings.  Communitas is a deeper form of authentic community and sets the table for effective mission.

1.03 – Good News: This week we begin to look at the grand narrative in Scripture.  What is the big picture look like and what is God trying to accomplish.

1.04 – Four Relationships: This teaching explores the nature of the mission and what is being restored.  The fall was a loss of relationship and the mission is about restoring them.  There are four that we will specifically look at in this teaching.

1.05 - Love: This teaching explores the nature of love and wholeness and what abundant life looks like.  Love is central to the mission of God.  It is through the truth of His love that we are transformed.

1.06 - Redemption: This teaching explores the role redemption plays in the journey.  Redemption is the process of trading in what we have created and leaving it at the cross.  When we trade it in, we are now able to receive what God has for us.

1.07 - Restoration: This teaching explores the cost of our brokenness and the value of the examined life.  What does it mean to step into restoration and wholeness?  The call to follow is to step into that space of exploration.

1.08 - Reconciliation: This teaching explores the role of reconciliation in the mission.  Reconciliation is central to community and yet is often avoided because of the conflict.  This teaching sheds light on the process groups use to practice reconciliation.

1.09 - Voices: This teaching explores the nature of what it means to listen to God’s voice in our lives and how we can learn to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit.  Learning to follow means working past hearing and listening and engaging what His voice calls us to.

1.10 – Two Kingdoms: The teaching looks at the two opposing kingdoms. God kingdom is primarily defined by love and restores us.  The enemy’s kingdom is defined by fear and control.  We are born into the enemy’s kingdom.  Following means coming over to the winning side.

1.11 - Enemy: This teaching explores the presence of the enemy; it’s history, how it works and how we destroy its work in our lives.  The primary work of the enemy is through lies.  Restoration comes from removing those lies.

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The Story Of Trust

Many people ask, “Why do we begin with the Old Testament in the Thrive Workbooks?”  And they usually follow with, “But isn’t the real story in the New Testament?”  Great questions.

The first workbook is an orientation process to engaging God’s mission of restoration and reconciliation.  But from there we begin with Genesis and continue with the story in Scripture.  Eleven out of the twelve workbooks tell the story in Scripture.  It was our desire to tell the entire narrative.  But it wasn’t always like that.  We’re a ministry in process, you could say.

When we first began the process of developing the workbooks we considered all kinds of possibilities for spiritual formation and what would lay the foundation for teaching in the Thrive groups.  Many were based on really good methodologies.  We knew we wanted to engage what it meant to follow Jesus but the rest was sort of up in the air.  The early iterations were good but ultimately we kept finding ourselves wanting to tell the story of God in Scripture.  We were discovering the value of a narrative approach to Scripture, or seeing the story God was trying to tell, and we decided to simply tell that story.

And as we made this shift we discovered some surprising things.  God had an amazing story to tell.  And it began in the Old Testament.  In fact, much of the story of spiritual formation, of learning to trust in relationship, and of coming out of oppression and into wholeness resided in the story of Israel.  And the more we listened to that story the more we saw the bigger picture emerge.  God was drawing us into a relationship of love and trust.  It wasn’t about some grand principles (even though there were some) but about relationship.

Much of the stories in the Old Testament are of humans just like us wrestling with the idea of what it meant to trust God, which was a central component of spiritual formation.  And the story, although not always pretty, gave us a real picture of this process.  It gave us permission to be human AND continue to step forward in relationship.  God was inviting us to wrestle with him and sit with our Papa.  We essentially discover a love story.

The Old Testament also gave us a perspective of what problem God was trying to solve.  The relationship issue that was shattered in the Garden.  So much of the story we were reading was understanding the trustworthiness of God and seeing His character in action.  And the more we stepped forward in trust, the more we were restoring our own hearts.

And it occurred to us in the middle of the process that God was not an angry God looking to “get” us, the great cop in the sky as so many of us had previously learned.  He was a compassionate God relentlessly seeking out our restoration.  He was deeply pursing our reconciliation so we could engage His Spirit.  And much of the story He was trying to tell was of His desire for our wholeness.  And the pinnacle of that story was Jesus.  In Jesus we found the true expression of both the Father and our humanity.  In Jesus we found the love of the Father complete.

To read the story without understanding the problem God was solving was like reading  the last two chapters of a great Grisham novel.  It was good and interesting.  But it left us with so many more questions than we started with.  To read the whole story was to see the big picture unfolding.  Ultimately we realized that there was a really great story of trust to tell.  And we wanted to tell it.

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