Tag Archives: Prayer

The Components of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

I am often asked, “Pete, what exactly is emotionally healthy spirituality?” The above chart describes her five different components. 1. Contemplative Spirituality (Slow Down to Be With God). EHS is a commitment to slow down our lives in order to create a rhythm to be with Jesus. It is about creating space through contemplative practices (e.g. Daily Offices, Sabbath-Keeping, silence, solitude and Scripture) so that we remain in Jesus’ love. We draw deeply from the radical movement of the desert fathers as well as Moses, Elijah and John the Baptist in order that we might love others out of the love we have first received from Jesus Himself. 2. Emotionally Healthy Discipleship – EHS recovers a number of lost biblical themes often ignored in evangelical discipleship. These include a theology of grieving (e.g. Psalms, Lamentations) and limits, of breaking the sinful patterns of our family of origin and cultures, loving well and brokenness as the basis by which we. Read more.

Summer, Our "Rule of Life," and God

I want to encourage you this summer to approach your vacations as mini-sabbaticals in which you build into your time away the same principles of weekly Sabbaths (Stop, Rest, Delight, Contemplate). Instead, then, of being time when you might drift from Him and return home tired, you actually renew your communion with Jesus and yourself. My vacations and summers were revolutionized a number of years ago when I began to do this. It takes planning, forethought, and prayer, especially when you are taking children into account! But it is well worth it! Ask yourself: STOP – What do I need to do to really cease from all my work? REST – What kind of things will enable me to rest this vacation? DELIGHT – What will replenish my soil and fill me with energy, and to delight in God’s gifts? CONTEMPLATE- How can I build in time with God during this extended time? What. Read more.

The Mundane, Prayer and Leadership

I was driving to church the other day for a series of staff meetings and realized I was excited. There was nothing else I wanted to do! What had changed? For most of my 21 years as senior pastor of NLF, most of the time I went grudgingly, preferring to be home alone in prayer and study. Something clicked spiritually a fourteen months ago: all of life is holy and to be lived in the presence of God. For example, managing, looking over job descriptions, discerning the best use of time, energy and money at NLF, planning, hiring, getting the right people in the right roles is sacred work, very sacred work – as sacred as my Daily Offices and Sabbath. God invited me to take responsibility and lead NLF. I am here. But I resisted this role for almost 20 years. I suspect this is related to bad models, poor teaching and faulty theology, but the bottom. Read more.

Leadership's First Task: Monitoring Your Heart

Geri and I were in the car last weekend driving in beautiful upstate New York, taking one of our daughters to look at colleges and began talking about the dynamics of leadership. Soon, we realized we had stumbled upon a simple, but powerful process of leading well – at least in God’s church — that is now helping us quite a bit. 1. Monitor Your Heart. Whether it is preparing for sermons, reading a book on strategy, sitting through a staff meeting, or deciding on priorities, I am guarding my heart. Is my motive really God’s glory or is this about me? Am I anxious? If so why, and how is that impacting my decisions now? Am I avoiding a challenging reality? a confrontation? Is the content of this sermon I am preparing simply head knowledge? How does it speak to my life? Am I really living what I am preaching? This of course requires. Read more.

Teresa of Avila's Seven Mansions – Prayer

This past summer I got to know Tom Ashbrook, one of the founders of an evangelical monastic order called Imago Christi, a ministry of spiritual formation within Church Resource Ministries http://www.imagochristi.org/default.aspx. He later gave me a copy of his doctoral dissertation on Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle and I was deeply impacted. I reread the Interior Castle as a result and found his work immensely helpful in my own prayer journey as well as our work in helping others to pray. Most evangelicals, he argues (rightly in my opinion), do not get beyond the 3rd mansion to the 4th and beyond. There are seven mansions. He writes: “As the believer enters the 4th Mansion, there develops a divinely bestowed absorption in knowing, loving, and seeking God. God has now enflamed the heart. The motivates are driven by love rather than by obligation, personal gain, blessing others, or even doing the right thing The beloved has heard the. Read more.

God and My Blackberry

I cancelled my blackberry internet service yesterday. For the last year I have been able to receive e-mails at any time of the day or night. I was told it would make me more productive, effective. It would save me time. No one talked about its impact on my soul and rhythm. Actually, it hasn’t worked for the last month and I realized how much I loved not having it. I loved not checking e-mails during my daughter’s soccer practice as I waited in the car. (She is in junior high and prefers that her ‘uncool’ Dad keep a very low profile). I loved not looking at it in traffic. I loved not looking at it in the office. If it was the time to check e-mail, I simply chose to look at it during work hours. If we are going to follow Jesus in the 21st century as leaders and model a contemplative life,. Read more.

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