6 Spiritual Pathways

sometimes that can develop shame. So how, as a discipleship, mentor, as a leader, as a pastor, how do we not create pathways to shame, but pathways to God,

yeah. And so the way that we actually, in my congregation, we use a tool, like a like a batch of content I got years ago, and I keep always trying to look for who to attribute this to. I heard it from a guy named Ron walborn, but I know he didn't come up with it. He got it from somebody else, but it's, it's called,

people connect with God through listening and the interior. The student instinct, where people connect with God through truth and study, and the relational instinct, where people connect through relationship and love. They connect with God when they're with other people. And so one of the first things we do is we orient people to this content, to say, hey, there's

not only one way to connect with God, and maybe. And the first thing we point out when we when we do this teaching, is like you may have been in communities before, where they said there was one way to connect with God, or they promoted one way to connect with God. And that can do a couple of things. One, it can cause you to question yourself and say, What's wrong with me? That God's not connecting with me? Or it can cause you to question God and say, maybe God has gone silent.

This is why, this is one of the first things we do as we're starting to walk with people on a journey of discipleship, is say, hey, let's help you reflect on what's what's the easiest way for you to connect with God, and how can we equip you to do that? So what are you I would say that I tend toward the contemplative instinct and maybe the student instinct. I mean, look at all those. Because I like understanding, but I'm not like

a big, quiet time guy. That's not what. So that's what you would think like, not like a big discipline guy, but unlocking he's looking at me funny, like, I don't wake up every morning at 5am and read my Bible. That's not what I do. Wait, wait, what? Yeah, that's right. See, that's not God, bad things. Bad things. Yeah.

God find me and calm me down and recalibrate me. And I talk to God while I'm gardening. I talk to God while I'm hiking. I can hear him most clearly in those in those places, because, for whatever reason, maybe it's my ADD, but it calms the rest of the noise down, and his voices, or his presence is what remains for me. So, and then the experiential I love joy. I love encountering silliness. I think God is super silly. I think there's, like, I don't think the enemy can be silly. I don't

think the enemy's got a sense of humor and can't tell a joke. So, like, okay, so. Joy is also one of those pure things for me, so probably those two. So

planet Earth, and you pick these guys. I mean, they probably had salty language, they probably had a few beers, and

lady is about to be evicted. And they would all do it. And it was like the pied piper leading all these people and, and, and like, 20 years later, they're still at the church, even after, uh, Jake's dad passed away because of the legacy and the activist mentality that Paul built in that place, and so let's say you're the you're the activist, or you're the contemplative, or you're the student. You can get those people that are like

minded, and you can evangelize them pretty quickly. But Is it tough for somebody who, let's say, is an activist to disciple somebody who's in another category?

find that. Find that right, just like you know, as a parent you are, you don't necessarily want your kid to do the same job that you do, but you want them to do the job that they find fulfilling, that they the vocation that they are interested in. Maybe that's the same as you but maybe it's something totally different. And I think the worst thing we can do as a disciple maker is that if we don't understand, and we can't actually resonate with how they connect with God, like the

thing you don't do is shut that down, right? Shut them down. Tell them, Oh no, that's not legitimate, because you may not understand, and you can say that, like, wow, I don't actually connect with God that way. Tell me more about that. Oh, and learn from them what that's like. And then you can, like, share, oh, this is how it feels for me. This is the thoughts that go through my head. These are the feels that I

have. Here's what my experience is like. Tell me about your experience, and you can learn from them, theirs and like, like, that's a beautiful thing. You're both shaping each other and learning from each other in that. Because maybe as I look at this list, I kind of have different seasons. Yeah, there are times where God has moved and I need to go find him in a new way. And so contemplative is way more part of my life than it used to be and, and I'm like, Oh, wait, I can actually sit

still and abide, Oh, that's good. That's nice. I couldn't do that for decades. Oh, that's good. And if I hadn't hung out with people who connected with God that way, and they, and I, like, learned from them, I would, I would think either I'd done something wrong or I wouldn't know how to do that,

like we go through seasons. So I would hope that at some point I would, I would have an experience of God in each one of those, even if it's not my primary, even it's not my default, even if it just happened by miracle one time, but I don't know, appreciation for the the way God meets us is is an important aspect of being a disciple maker.

a spiritual misfit, where. You felt like you were the turtle in the punch bowl of the faith community, you know? And so that allows people to reflect on it. And what I even get from people more than oh my gosh, I have a I know clearly who I am in this schematic, what I hear them say is like they're just encouraged to know that there are different ways and that there's not just

one way in this class, this opening class, we do. I've gotten run it twice in the last 12 months because we've had a lot of new people showing up. And there was a guy recently in one of the classes who said, you know, I've been through a lot of these, like new member classes in churches. And he said, usually they're about trying to figure out how I plug into the church. He's like, what I like about this is it's actually about helping me figure out how I'm gonna live my life shaped by

Jesus. And that's like, I think, to your question of like, can you disciple somebody who's different than you? I think you can, if you understand that discipleship is helping them become themselves, if you think discipleship is making them look like what discipleship means to you? Well then, yeah, it's going to be tough.

to be here. My heart told me to say something to that person, or give them money to the the person on the street, like, like, they they their heart told them something, and they responded to it, and someone else says to them, oh, you can't trust your heart. Like, like, boom, force field, your heart is I was raised in a church. They said your heart is deceptive.

They would quote, your heart is wicked above all things, you know, and that's a that's a verse in Old Testament, and and that stuff makes me crazy, because here's here's the other part of that, like whole paradigm. Truth is that God loves your heart. God made your heart. God thinks your heart is great, and he wants to restore it where it's broken. He wants to heal it where it's wounded. He wants to refine it where it

believes a lie. But that doesn't mean your heart is bad. And I remember like the season of my life, because I grew up in this fundamentalist church that shut down all emotion and heart and everything like they it was a Cessationist church. We got kicked out. It didn't go well. We didn't we didn't abide with that very well my whole family, and because I had had this practice of, oh, my heart says that I can't listen to it, and I would shove it in the corner. And we do this with our

emotions, right? We're like, oh, you can't trust your emotions. They lie to you. And that's not that's equally untrue. What your heart says and what your emotions say are information for you. They're They're your they're yourself talking to you, or God, talking to you. It just may be incomplete. It may not be the whole picture, right? But it the answer to that is, is to listen to it and bring it before the Lord. The answer to that isn't to shove it in the corner and tell it to shut up, right?

That's how we end up in therapy, because that is not honoring ourselves or honoring, you know, the way that that God made us, and God's a lover of our soul. So when we tell people to shut down their heart, we are we are severing a major line that God can talk to them and they can receive from God. And if that's their primary line, the way that God made them, then you just cut them off from being able to hear God, and you put them in like

solitary confinement. So instead of doing that to one another, we need to encourage them, have them voice. What is their heart saying? Let's talk about that. Let's bring that into the light. Let's see if there's anything else to like add to that to make

it more complete, more whole, more healed. But we need to encourage people to listen to how God is talking to them, even if it's in mixture, even if it's like, not totally accurate, you know, even if it's not totally pure, we got to encourage that, to make it healthier, not shut it down, because, you know, there might be taintedness in it, like it's, oh, it's past the expiration date. And so, you know, we got to throw out the

milk, because it might have some. Sourness in it, like, like, that's not how we're supposed to treat our heart or soul, because then we won't hear from God and it'll shut us down. I just

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