FROM RELEVANCE TO PRAYER

The first temptation is the desire to be relevant. What an interesting choice of terms. It is the very word used by most new church plants in the last ten years. We want to meet practical needs, speak in the language of the cultural milieu, and answer all the questions the world is asking. So, while we are preoccupied with being relevant, Jesus is resisting that very thing. Nouwen says, I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God’s love. . . . In this climate of secularization, Christian leaders feel less and less relevant and more and more marginal. Many begin to wonder why they should stay in the ministry. Often they leave, develop a new competency, and join their contemporaries in their attempts to make relevant contributions to a better world. . . . It is here that the need for a new Christian leadership becomes clear. The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there.

What is more important than being relevant? Loving Jesus. The rejected, unknown, wounded Jesus asked Peter three times, "Do you love me?" Perhaps another way of putting the question would be: Do you know the incarnate God? . . . The Christian leader of the future is the one who truly knows the heart of God as it has become flesh, "a heart of flesh," in Jesus. Knowing God’s heart means consistently, radically, and very concretely to announce and reveal that God is love and only love, and that every time fear, isolation, or despair begins to invade the human soul, this is not something that comes from God. This sounds very simple and maybe even trite, but very few people know that they are loved without any conditions or limits.

What is the discipline needed to love Jesus? Contemplative prayer. Nouwen writes, we have to be mystics. A mystic is a person whose identity is deeply rooted in God’s first love. If there is any focus that the Christian leader of the future will need, it is the discipline of dwelling in the presence of the One who keeps asking us, "Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?" This is the discipline of contemplative prayer. Through contemplative prayer we can keep ourselves from being pulled from one urgent issue to another and from becoming strangers to our own heart and God’s heart. . . . [F]or the future of Christian leadership it is of vital importance to reclaim the mystical aspect of theology so that every word spoken, every word of advice given, and every strategy developed can come from a heart that knows God intimately. . . . Their leadership must be rooted in the permanent, intimate relationship with the incarnate Word, Jesus, and they need to find there the source for their words, advice, and guidance. . . . Dealing with burning issues without being rooted in a deep personal relationship with God easily leads to divisiveness because, before we know it, our sense of self is caught up in our opinion about a given subject. But when we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible without being relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft, and true witnesses without being manipulative.

All of this was faced by Nouwen when he moved to L’Arche. No one had read his books, or could even read, for that matter, and no one knew of his life in the greater circles outside the home. They were only impressed with whether he would be home by five o’clock to be part of their supper routine. He says, I was suddenly faced with my self, open for affirmations and rejections, hugs and punches, smiles and tears, all dependent simply on how I was perceived at the moment. In a way, it seemed as though I was starting my life all over again. Relationships, connections, reputations could no longer be counted on.