Have you ever proverbially hit the wall? Maybe like
mentally hit the wall or physically hit the wall, but what about
spiritually? Well, that's what we're going to get into on this episode
of Compass.
Welcome back to Compass, finding spirituality in the everyday. I'm Reverend
Ryan Dunn, host and producer for Compass. We're going
to take a journey from being a nominal
Christian to being a committed disciple, emphasizing
the importance of community, spiritual disciplines,
and authentic faith. Our guide for this journey is
Reverend Roger Ross, author of Kinda Christian,
who recommends some practical ways to deepen your
relationship with God, understand the true meaning of
discipleship, and learn how to navigate spiritual walls and
crises. Reverend Roger Ross has served as a pastor in Texas, the
British island of Guernsey, and in Illinois. He's
a church planter and founder of the Humility Group. His
book, Kind of Christian, offers a grace-filled path
towards a deeper life in faith for anyone who's been stuck
in spiritual neutrality or spiritually neutral.
If conversations like this are helpful for your spiritual journey,
we'd be incredibly grateful if you could take a moment
to leave us a rating and/or a review. Your feedback
not only helps us improve the show but also makes a huge
difference in helping more listeners like you find us. So
let's talk spiritual walls, experiences of glory, and
understanding discipleship with Roger Ross. Reverend
Roger Ross, thank you so much for joining us on the Compass Podcast.
How goes it with your soul today? Thanks for asking,
Ryan. I'm glad to be here. My soul's good today. I have
had a lot of wonderful things happen in the last couple of days, but even
deeper than that, I feel like I'm on a good track. I feel
like I'm where I'm supposed to be in God's grander economy.
Well, we're talking about a book that you've written called Kind of Christian, which
takes us on a journey from being maybe
nominally spiritual or nominally Christian into the pathway
of discipleship. And a lot of times I think that we can
conflate the word disciple and the idea of a church
member, and you pull those out or
separate them pretty well within the book. Can you tell us a little bit about
that? Like, what What is the difference between a church member and a
disciple? That's a great question. Actually, I
think our world is just teeming with good people,
frankly. They would check the Christian box if anybody asked, but they feel
like something's missing. You know, many of them have done church.
They know the routine. It just doesn't feel personal to them.
So the biggest question that they ask in those places deep down
where no one generally hears other than the Spirit of God is,
is there more? And so whether we show up on Sundays or not,
we wonder if there's something that can fill that emptiness
inside. I mean, we may know the Christian story, we may even
believe in Jesus, but we don't always know how to follow him.
That's the difference. Okay. All right.
So can you tell us some of the traits of a
discipleship? Or of a disciple and how that might differentiate
from the traits of a church member? I realize that there's quite a bit of
overlap, but— Yeah, sure. There, there is some overlap. I mean,
one of the things I talk about in the introduction of the book is
what it generally means in Western Christianity to be
a good member. It generally means that you hold a few beliefs about
God and Jesus in your head. You attend, maybe occasionally.
You may give. A little bit, and you may even
serve a little bit, and that makes you a good
member. And it's generally designed around
what, what can help the institution to be able to continue forward.
And there's nothing necessarily bad about that in
and of itself, but it doesn't actually address
the deeper issues in our lives, those places
where we feel like there's a hole in our soul and there's nothing that's able
to fill it. Those times when we feel like we, you
know, we've said the words, we believe in Jesus,
but we can't access his power. You know, one way to talk about
this is to use one of my favorite phrases,
which is genuine imitation leather. Right? Like, what
is that? Right? It's not leather. What is it? Right?
And there are a lot of people that kind of live their Christian life that
way. It's not exactly Christian,
but it's kind of Christian. All right.
And one of the ways that you know that is when you get into
a tight spot, just like genuine imitation leather,
it cracks and breaks. Now they may bear the name of
Jesus, but don't know how to access his power.
Hmm. Tell me about accessing Jesus's power. I'm,
I'm intrigued. Are there practices that help open that up? Is it
a mindset? So it's a, I believe it's a combination
of those things, but it might be helpful if I just gave
a little bit of a genesis of the book because that I
think will open us up to this really good question you
just asked. In the last church I served, we kept having people
show up that would say, like, we were generally using
the mission statement of the United Methodist Church at the time to make
disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. And
we would have people show up, first-time newcomers,
guests, and they'd say, hey, like that whole transformation
of the world thing, but what's a disciple?
And we're like, well, everybody knows what a disciple is.
You know, it's a little of this, it's a little of that. We know one
when we see one. And that was
spectacularly unhelpful. And it
just kept happening over and over again. Unrelated people who would show up
for the first time and they'd say, yeah, well, when you talk about a
disciple, what is that? What's a disciple?
And it got to the point, I mean, we realized
that we couldn't answer it very well. And that became
embarrassing. So I got the other pastors together and said, look, we got to come
up with a better answer than this. We can't just say we know one when
we see one. Come on. And how hard could this be? Let's just take
3 weeks and knock this thing out and then we'll have a answer.
8 months later, we came back with something
that we thought describes what a real disciple
of Jesus was like, because we had to, like, wrestle that out of our guts.
You know, we had to go deep into scripture. We had to spend time in
prayer. We had all kinds of discussions that went on for months before we
could send something or actually, you know, kind of present something to our
leadership and have them wrestle with a little for a little while and then have
them say, yes, Yeah, this is it. This is what we understand
to be a disciple in our context. And then we had to roll it out
with the whole congregation and go through a sermon series
and a study that was attached to that. And eventually
we made that a part of our discipleship process in the church.
And we came up with 3 kind of general
characteristics of what a disciple looks like. First, a disciple loves
God, according to Jesus. And a disciple launches
community. They're in community with other people,
and they initiate that. And then they also
unleash compassion. And so
broadly speaking, that's what a disciple looks like. Now,
of course, it's hard to live as a disciple
broadly. There's lots of specifics that are involved.
And we realized that
to drill down on that a little bit, there were actually
6 more specific marks of a
disciple that all ended up starting with the word G. So we
called them our G6 network. All right.
And so here are the 6 Gs. They were glory, the
glory of God, grace, giftedness,
I'm sorry, group, growth, giftedness,
and generosity. Now, those 6
Gs all had an inward experience to them and an outward
expression. Now, that's good Wesleyan theology right there. Like,
it's not just one or the other. It's not just about me and Jesus
and all the wonderful things, ecstatic experiences I'm having in the
Holy Spirit. It's also about how does that get lived out in your life?
Wesley often talked about holiness of heart and
life. And so that's where that comes from. And
we called these people deeply devoted disciples.
So that was what we considered to be life in
3D. Hmm. You know,
what was missing in your 6 Gs, and this is
not a critique by any means, it's more of a critique of the
culture at large, was something about sin management. So
I was talking with a friend a couple of weeks and he was talking about
how, as he was raised in a tradition of
faith, that the gospel to him was really about like the gospel of sin management.
And so the mark of discipleship was how
well you were able to really avoid
sin. And I found your
discussion of sin to be helpful and would probably
be like really illuminating for him to read. Can you tell
us a little bit about, well, first your definition of sin and
then what it looks like for a disciple disciple to, in effect,
be sinless? Well, that's a good question, whether a
disciple can be sinless. But for me, you know, sin
is just a total disregard of God and others. I mean, when
we are intentionally disobeying the will of God
in one way or another, whether it's by commission or
omission, that's sin. But when we're also breaking relationship,
not only with God, but with other people, that's sin too. And we
can even break relationship with ourselves. We can even sin
against ourselves. All right. And that's not the
way God created us to live in this world. Sin's always some
kind of life taker. It's a killer. It drains life away
from us rather than bringing us into the life that is
God, which is eternal. Right? So
when we are living a life that
is in blatant disregard to God and others and
breaking relationship with God and others, it's going to be
destructive to us and destructive to those who are
around us. There are practices then that help
us, I guess, restore this right relationship in community.
I think when we think about the rhythm of
faith at large, a lot of times it kind of hinges
around maybe a Sunday morning event or this large
body gathering. That's the central part of our community
experience together. And you actually push for a
different expression being the central part of
our, I guess, our faith or discipleship journey
together. Can you tell us a little bit about the small group
experience, why that is so important in our path towards
discipleship? Well, you know, when we get the early
church, the first snapshot of the early church in Acts in the second chapter,
you see that the earliest Christians, earliest followers of Jesus—they
weren't called Christians at the time—the earliest followers of Jesus were
people that met together in the temple courts, and then they met together
in their homes. And you had this wonderful dual combination:
temple courts, large group, and in their homes, small group. Because, you know,
people back in the day did not have these palatial
2,000-square-foot homes, right? Like, if
you had a 500-square-foot home, you probably had a pretty good-sized home. So you're
not going to be able to hold a whole bunch of people in that size
of a place. But people gathered together with glad and
sincere hearts in their homes, eating together. And
scripture says the Lord added to their number those who were being saved
day by day. He doesn't say every Sunday.
And I also didn't say every Wednesday night when you had your church
programs. Like, this was a life-on-life, 24/7,
365 living of the gospel.
And so if that's the case, then there must be some practices
that we would be involved in that have
not much to do necessarily with corporate worship.
Corporate worship really is designed to be the outgrowth.
That's the extra, that's the icing on the cake. That's not meant to be
the main meal, right? So what is
the main meal? Well, there are all kinds of spiritual
disciplines, spiritual practices that can make the main
meal. One of them is what we just talked about, is getting
together in a group of other people where you can pull down the
mask and say, look, I know this is the image that I project,
but underneath it's really not that good. This is what I'm afraid of.
This is what's keeping me up at night. This is the issue that I'm having
with my wife or my kid. And I
just, I just need to be real with you about what's happening in the
lower regions of my own life. And
that's when you have a chance to get into
authentic discipleship because that's the real stuff of life. And
I don't know about you, but I've run across what I could
only call blind spots in my life, right?
And then I realized, you know what, maybe I'm not the only one that has
a blind spot. And it's become apparent to me
that all of us kind of live with who we are right back here,
right, right to your right or left ear, right in that spot that
you're blind to. And if I wasn't looking into a
camera right now, I wouldn't be able to see this, right? But
you could. You could see what is
a blind spot for me. And you could say, you
know, Roger, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but there are some things
that aren't actually lining up with who you say you want to be.
And they're living right back here. They're out of your sight.
I think they're in your blind spot. And if you did
that in a way that was lovingly telling me the truth about myself,
you would be helping me live into what it means to be a real
follower of Jesus. And it turns out, Ryan,
you have blind spots too. Yeah, I guess so.
Yeah. And there are things that I can see, and if I got to know
you, if we were in a group over time, there would be things that I
would be able to see in your life that you can't see
yourself just yet. And if you were willing to open
yourself up to that and invite that, I could say, well,
Actually, yeah, there's one or two things I do see here,
Ryan, that you might not be able to see yourself at the
moment. And that's one of the beauties of Christian community, when we can
get to that level of authenticity and vulnerability
to be able to help us to actually live into who it is that
God's called us to be. In your practice of parish ministry, how
did you help people find those small connections, those
small groups? Well, actually, I have been a big
proponent of small groups for the vast majority of my adult
life because I just had that experience early on from
college, even a little bit in high school, but mostly from college on.
I was shaped. I was transformed. I
really sensed my call into ministry through a small group. There
was one in particular that had a huge impact on my life, but there have
been others along the way. And I've I've
always found out more about who I really am in Christ
in the context of a small group where I allowed them to get
to know me and they allowed me to get to know
them. So because that's been such a vital part of my
own faith journey, I've always been a big proponent of that in the
churches I've served. And so I would preach about it. All right.
I would preach about the importance of being in little communities
where you can know and be known. Where you can love and be
loved, where you can celebrate and be celebrated.
And then I would also choose people who I thought had the
potential to be small group leaders and small group apprentice leaders,
and then actually train them in that
kind of work, encourage them to be inviting people to become in their small groups,
but also talk about that from, you know, from
the pulpit in the big room to say, here are some of our small group
leaders. If you're not in a group yet, let me tell you what you're missing.
And Let me encourage you to give this a try. And then, you know,
from time to time, we literally have like sign-up times, you
know, like, oh, we're gonna do small groups, like as a congregation,
everybody that we can possibly get in a small group, we're gonna get in a
small group for 6 weeks and just try it out. And my experience with
that is when people get a taste of it, like the real deal,
they don't wanna go back. Yeah. I want to
hinge back to worship for a moment. Oftentimes when we talk about
worship, we do imagine it being within the context of like the large group
gathering. Again, happens on a Sunday morning
in most of our communities. You define worship as really
just being an encounter with God's presence. And so I'm
wondering how, as we start talking about a life of faith that lives
beyond that Sunday morning experience, how does worship go
beyond that Sunday morning experience? Yeah, there are
a lot of ways that that happens, but this really is
the place that the glory of God comes into play. So
when we enter into worship, we have the
opportunity to experience the glory of God.
And in my experience, whenever we experience God's
presence, we encounter God's glory. And I don't know
if our listeners are aware of this or not, but
the word glory is used over 250 times in the scriptures. I
mean, it's rampant throughout the scriptures. And it's
often talking about this sense of power, of presence, of the
weightiness, the kabod, that's what it's called in Hebrew, the kabod,
the glory of God, the kabod of God. I love that phrase. And
many of us have had an experience of that where God's come close,
where all of a sudden that thin veil
between what is eternal and what is temporal
gets pulled back. Sometimes that happens at the birth of
a child or at a funeral, or sometimes it
happens in a time of great crisis. Sometimes it happens
in a time of great beauty when you're just overwhelmed with
the awe of beauty before you. And
the presence of God draws close.
And that doesn't necessarily happen every single Sunday in a worship service.
Not that it can't, but it doesn't always. And it's not meant
to only happen when you're together in a large group worship setting.
In fact, I would suggest that it's as much as
likely to happen outside, if not more so, than inside
a large group worship experience. And
there are ways that we can cultivate that through daily
solitude, through an ongoing conversation with God, and
through a daily review of the way the presence of God
has drawn near or been distant to us over the course of our past
day. And so those are the three practices I talk about in some detail under
the glory chapter. But I'll just talk about that first one to
begin with, just to give a little taste. I mean, what would it be like
if you were to set your watch
for 5 minutes and you found a
quiet place, you would not be disturbed, everything else is turned off,
and you just sat alone with God
for 5 minutes. Now, you can do
almost anything for 5 minutes, but to actually
intentionally have solitude with God for 5 minutes,
and you may need to pick a word or phrase to say silently to
yourself over and over again to keep you focused, because
we all have that challenge. I certainly do. I sit down
quiet for a while, my mind goes off in a thousand different directions. And
so So one of the ways that I use
a, you know, kind of a toy, so to speak, to give my mind something
to play with is to pick up a word or phrase and just say it
over and over again. For instance, Jesus,
Jesus, Jesus. I just
say that silently to myself to center myself and
keep my focus there when my thoughts start going off in some other direction.
To bring them right back to Jesus.
And to do that for just 5 minutes gives you a chance to actually
be in the presence of God instead of trying
to do something for God.
And when we put ourselves in a position where we're receptive and
we're just being, we're not, you know, we were created to be human beings,
right? Not human doings. So when we place ourselves in
a position where we can be with God, we're much
more likely to be in a spot where we could experience
God's glory. Has there been a time when you've
been surprised by God's presence or God's
glory or by a moment of worship? More times
than I could count. Yeah, absolutely. Because
you can't control that. God is free. So God
God chooses to show up in our lives. But I will say,
when you practice these disciplines that I've just mentioned and others,
you put yourself in a position where you're more likely to be present to the
presence. Right? And become
aware of those times when God is showing up that previously may
have just gone right by. I'm like, I,
you know, I have these kinds of moments all the time. I have these moments
at the grocery store. This morning I was in a number of coaching calls with
people, and there were moments where the glory of
God entered into the conversation. Didn't
necessarily last for the entire time, but there were moments when it's
like, oh, there's a fullness there.
There's a weightiness there. There's some of the
glory. And sometimes you could sense
yourself starting to tear up, or the other person that you're talking to starts to
tear up. I mean, we have those natural human emotional
actions when the glory of God comes close.
Have you run any marathons lately? I have not.
So you're referencing something I talk about in the growth
chapter. I did back in the day, I think it was 2009, I ran the
Chicago Marathon for the first and only time. And so I was
a one and done with regard to that. I did a half marathon after that,
6 months later. You're supposed to do that in the opposite order, but I would've
left. You would go big, right? Yeah.
Go big or go home. And so I, I did both. So I went big
and then I went home. But that was, that was a great experience. I learned
a lot. I learned a lot about what you can do with your human body
in training over time. And I also learned a lot about
how to live with sustained pain while you're
exercising because that's, that's what it's like to run
a marathon. Yeah, well, and you talk about hitting the wall, that point
in which physically, like, your body just stops responding. It's out of
energy and it can't do anymore. Sometimes they call it
bonking. And you're able to tie that together with the fact that
some of us in the course of our lives, we hit the
wall spiritually. And so I'm wondering if you can
describe for us a little bit some of the symptoms of maybe hitting the wall
spiritually and then how we might push through those.
Yeah, you know, we're on a faith journey. All
of us are on a faith journey and we're all someplace on that journey. And
some of us are in stage 1 where either we haven't yet or we're
beginning to recognize God. And that
recognition stage often happens when we
have some kind of trouble happens in our life and we sense a need,
or we're experiencing something that's so beautiful and we're just
awestruck. And we realize, oh, there's something greater in this universe
than just me or just us. And that's the
beginning. That's the kind of the barest first part of
a journey, which then leads us, if we
continue on that journey, leads us into a real relationship with
God through his son Jesus. And then at that point, we're
like newborn spiritual babies, right? So
now we're starting like a whole different part
of this journey where we're getting into the life of discipleship
and we're beginning to learn what it means to do
things that are spiritual disciplines, learning about how to pray, learning about how to
read scripture and apply it to our lives, learning about how to
have solitude with God, as I mentioned before, all those kinds of things.
That leads us to a third stage, which is the more, more of
an outward stage, you know, where you're going out to serve
and care for and help others. And
it's a very productive part of the journey, right?
And when you're in that spot and you're practicing
spiritual disciplines and you're being very productive and you're serving
for others, or there's fruit that's being born, you think, well, this is like
great. This is how it's all supposed to work. This is wonderful.
And then you hit the wall. It's very much
like when you're running a marathon. You're running along and all of a sudden,
Boom. Usually it's like mile 18 to 20, somewhere in
there. And the, uh, the energy that's been
stored in your legs that you've been working on and building up over the course
of months, if not years, in preparation and in your training is
finally gone. All the glycogen is gone. And now you're just
gutting it out. Uh, 'cause the problem, of course, with that is if you get
to mile 18, uh, you still have
8.2 miles to go in a marathon. Right.
Yeah. Right. So now it's like, okay, how am I going to
push through the wall to actually finish the race?
And this is what happens in our spiritual lives. We'll be going along and
things will be going great. And all of a sudden we hit a wall. Now,
wall generally is when some kind of crisis happens. You
know, when a parent is in a car accident and
dies unexpectedly. When the phone rings the wrong way and you pick it up and
the doctor says, well, I'm sorry, it's cancer. Or your spouse says, hey, it's been
great, but I'm out. Or, all of a sudden your child
has gotten into so much trouble that now
she or he is going to prison. Or maybe you've
had a bankruptcy or you've lost your job or some kind of sudden
crisis hits your life in a way that you didn't see coming.
And suddenly life doesn't make sense anymore.
And God seems immensely distant, like
God has left the room. And apparently God has left the
universe. It feels like your prayers are bouncing off the wall. You're not getting through.
All this richness in your spiritual life that you were experiencing
previously, it just feels like dust and ashes in your mouth.
And you're like, my gosh, was I just fooling myself?
Like, was this thing just a hoax and I somehow got
sucked into it? Like, what happened here? And
what happened is you just hit the wall. And
that wall is that place where your will
is now struggling with God's will. You're in a wrestling match. For
the first time on a much deeper level in your life, you're being invited
to truly surrender the deeper things in your life to
God. And there are a lot of people that just aren't too keen
on that whole idea. Yeah. Right? So they
hit the wall. Oftentimes what people do, I've had this experience in my own
life, they hit the wall and they just bounce off. It's like, well,
I'm not doing that anymore. That was painful. Like, I'm
smarter enough to at least not do that again. I'm backing off of that. And
sometimes they'll go back into stage 1 or stage 2 or even
into stage 3 and try to recreate what
they had before, but it's not the same. And they
realize, I'm going to have to do something in this wrestling
match with God. Just like Jacob at Peniel, I'm going to have to wrestle
with God through the night. And what most
of us don't realize is that the wall is really
a door in disguise.
It's an opportunity to go through the wall to the other side
where there is a deeper, richer, more transformative
relationship with God than you could ever have on the first side
of the wall. But to go
through the wall is painful and it deconstruct some things in your life,
perhaps, that you had all figured out and you knew exactly the way it was
all supposed to work until that crisis came.
And God really wants to invite us to
surrender some of the deeper things in our lives. Not that we
would completely give up who we are or who God made us to be,
but we would surrender those things into God's hands so he could give them back
to us in a different form.
And now instead of us kind of, you know,
thinking it's pretty great to have God on my side, now
we're on God's side. Right?
And so Jesus is not around to help me be a success.
Now I'm around to help Jesus be a success. And
it's a completely different approach to a relationship with God
and living as a follower of Jesus. Yeah. I'll tell you,
Ryan, I wish to God someone would have explained this to me about 30
years ago. Right. Because I've been through several
walls in my life, and probably I'm going to
go through some more before it's in, before the whole thing's over. Because
walls are meant to purify us, to deepen us,
to winnow out the dead branches in our lives so
that we can grow strong and true. In the life that God has
created for us. Amen. That is a
word of strength to take us out, Roger. For those who are
looking to maybe connect with you a little bit more, you mentioned The Humility
Group. Is that a good website to check out more of your work?
It is. That's the best place to go, thehumilitygroup.org.
I have the privilege of working with lots of pastors
and church leadership teams and some conferences
and districts and the like, just to really help spiritual
leaders live grace-filled lives that can transform the world.
I've spent most of my life as a pastor and I love pastors.
I love to see the church thrive. I love to see pastors
thrive. And it's my privilege that I get to do that every
day. Well, once again, thanks for taking the time to talk with us, for
offering your experience. My pleasure, Ryan. Thanks for having
me on. All right, friend, thank you for being a part of our
Compass community. We look forward to continuing to
explore spirituality in the everyday with you. You might want to
listen to another episode of Compass. I recommend it. And if you
liked this episode, then I recommend episode number
173, Breaking the Evangelism
Stereotype with Stephanie Moore Hand. Or
you can do a deeper dive into contemplative
practices with episode number 159.
That's How a 500-Year-Old Practice Can Help Calm
Modern Anxiety. And again, while you're listening, leave a
rating and/or review. The Compass Podcast is brought to you by United
Methodist Communications. And that's all for this week. We'll be back with a new
episode in 2 weeks' time. I'll chat at you then. Peace.