Small Group Leadership as Spiritual Direction

I've been reading Small Group Leadership as Spiritual Direction: practical ways to blend an ancient art into your contemporary community by Heather Webb. The forward is by Eugene Peterson

One of the images that Eugene uses is that of wilderness and maps [as someone with a geology beckground that always interests me... in fact Eugene & I had some good conversations about wilderness when I was at Regent College.]

Eugene writes,

“William Stafford... an American poet... writes of people who ‘want a wilderness with a map.’ Most of us have become accustomed to a life that is laid out in streets, each designated by a number or a name... we like the ordered predictability of…city life. We want to know where things are and how we get to them. But we also, from time to time, get a little bored by it – we miss the element of surprise and discovery... and so we go looking for adventure."

The adventure reintroduces us to mystery, but mystery and uncertainty are about, lack of control and lack of security. Eugene continues,

“Stafford’s ‘wilderness with a map’ describes a great deal of what goes on in the Christian church these days. We think we want God beyond our understanding so we can worship largely, God sovereign in all our circumstances and suffering so we can be cared for securely, the God of Paul’s exclamatory, ‘How searchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Rom. 11:33). But then we get nervous about the “unsearchable” and the “inscrutable.” We hesitate; maybe that’s just a little too much mystery. We hesitate, get cold feet, pull back. We want a ‘wilderness with a map.’

And so we send in bulldozers to clear roads through the mystery, straight and narrow doctrines, so we know where we are. Then we erect signs that tell us what we need to look for and what to be wary of. Soon there is no wilderness, no mystery"

He then concludes

"Spiritual direction, directing or being directed in matters of God and the soul, is the prctice of using language regarding things we don't know very much about, language that does not strive for mastery, language that slowly but surely becomes comfortable with mystery. We come to Jesus wanting answers and miracles, and he most certainly gives answers and does miracles - but rarely on the terms in which we expect them.

...spiritual direction is another way of language, a way of approaching the mystery of our lives. It is the practice of providing a safe time and place in which the mysteries of God ands the soul are honoured – not reduced to problems, not explained as symptoms... we are all bundles of uncharted idiosyncrasies. And God by his very nature cannot be contained in a definition: one of our ancestors said it well: 'A God who can be understood is not God'.”

I think that what Eugene says here is so appropriate to the whole discussion on post-modernity and the emerging/emergent church. Modernity, has, tended to want "wilderness with a map"; whereas post-modernity, recognizes that there is "mystery", that we enter into life - especially in a time of change - as going into the "wilderness without a map" - not because we are foolish, but because we are moving into uncharted territory.