Dr Cathy Ross(Photo: © CMS/Jeremy Woodham)It’s as you engage in mission that your spiritual life develops, says Dr Cathy Ross
Author David Bosch once said that we are called to live a spirituality of the road, not of the balcony.
A spirituality of the road evokes images of movement, change, journeys, new places, discovery, and crossing borders. It can also suggest feelings of weariness and disorientation. But the idea is that we grow more as participants than as observers. I personally found this to be true; it was during my time in Uganda that I began to more fully understand the goodness of God.
When it comes to a spirituality of the road, we must ask a couple of questions. One, at what pace should we travel? Should we rush from point A to point B, ignoring the scenery along the way? Or should we travel at the speed of love, as Kosuke Koyama suggests in Three Mile an Hour God? Koyama writes:
Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is ‘slow’ yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.
Koyama says that Jesus’ pace was not rapid; it was more like this speed of love. Think of the journey along the Emmaus road and what riches those followers of Jesus (and all of us since) would have missed out on had they rushed past Jesus and ignored him. What is our pace? Are we so busy engaging in mission that the scenery and relationships pass us by? Are we so caught up in achieving and doing that we do not pause to engage with the stranger and listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit? If so, we may as well be in the balcony.
A second, related, question to ask is, in our rush to do more ‘important things’, are we missing out on what Bosch calls the spirituality of the commonplace?
It’s easy to be captivated by the spectacular, by wonderful meeting and powerful ministry – we sing about “more love, more power”– but is that really what God calls us to? Is that really the experience of most people?
People underestimate how challenging, yet rewarding, it is to discover spirituality in daily life. Yet, kingdom life is ordinary life lived in the real world: in things like earning a living, bringing up a family, having fun, enjoying parties, building cities, mourning loved ones, healing sickness, making music, playing sport, studying and travelling. It’s all about doing these things to the glory of our Creator and Redeemer, and resting in who we are meant to be in Christ.
As we engage in mission wherever we are, I suggest some characteristics or disciplines that we might observe in order to develop our spirituality of the road. They’re disciplines because they take some effort.
1. Inquirer
Ask questions about every facet of life – the political, the economic, the industrial, the social, the spiritual.
2. Learner
We need to learn the culture and subcultures of where we are. In learning from others, we begin to learn more about ourselves, what makes us function, how we can grow and develop. As we learn let us maintain a self-awareness and practise humility under God.
3. Listener
We must listen to the assumptions behind the words and worldviews of others and learn to hear Jesus speaking through them. This will challenge our own understanding of how God works in the world, which will in turn deepen our spiritual life.
4. Lover
As we learn to love others with patience and gentleness, we will find our hearts being opened out and softened. As we grow in Christ-like love, our spiritual life will be enhanced. Ask yourself, “How can I live at the speed of love? What will that look like in my life?”
5. Disturber
What does it mean to be a disturber? I think it means questioning the status quo, and engaging with people who may have very different ideas to ours. We are inviting others to see Jesus and live in relationship with him, so this will likely disturb their lifestyles, relationships and futures. As TS Eliot expressed in Journey of the Magi, the three kings, those enigmatic wise men, returned to where they had come from “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods.” Once they had seen Jesus, they knew. They knew this baby, this King of the Jews, was one to adore. They knew that somehow Jesus changed their lives. As followers of Jesus, we must allow people to see another way of living and being.
This will have profound implications for our spiritual lives. We may indeed be out of synch with the world in which we live, we may be uncomfortable, and this will force us to rely on God more.
6. Sign of the end
We are to live as visible signs of hope that God’s kingdom is reality, that we are living on the frontier of a new heaven and a new earth, and that will have profound implications for our spiritual life.
Conclusion: not “how to” but “where to”
You may be surprised that I haven’t yet spoken of reading the Bible and prayer. Yes, we do need God’s word to nourish us and we need to develop a deep and ongoing life of prayer, as John Taylor explained in The Go-Between God: “To live in prayer, therefore, is to live in the Spirit; and to live in the Spirit is to live in Christ…. Prayer is not something you do; it is a style of living.” Prayer is both our privilege and our responsibility as we engage in the missio Dei.
A spirituality of the road embraces prayer as an integral part of the journey. It is not all about living a life of relentless activism (though this may be part of it); the end to which we strive ultimately is, as Roland Allen has expressed it so beautifully, “the unfolding of a Person” – the revelation of Christ. The heart of mission is communion with Christ – daily, constant, ongoing – through the enabling of the Holy Spirit.
Further, a spirituality of the road realises that models and “how to’s” only get us so far. There is no blueprint, or map or sat nav that contains every turn, bump or unexpected circumstance. We will have our challenges and disappointments, our dark nights of the soul. We will have our feelings of betrayal, and thoughts that God has left us to struggle on this road alone. Are we willing to face that? Is our spiritual life robust enough to face the heartache and brutalities of a broken world? As we give up our seats in the balcony and step out along this road, committed to a long obedience in the same direction, maybe some of the above qualities can help us live life in all the fullness to which Jesus has called us.
Dr Cathy Ross is the manager of the Crowther Centre for Mission Education and JV Taylor Fellow in Missiology at the University of Oxford