For John Ortberg, all of life is a teachable moment. Every experience, sermon, book, or conversation can be used by God to reshape us in the likeness of Christ. Ortberg is among a few well-known preachers who specialize in spiritual formation, an approach to the inner life that has growing currency in Protestant circles.
As an author, Ortberg teaches readers to recognize the holy moments in everyday things, to see when God is at work. His bestsellers include The Life You’ve Always Wanted and If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat.
And as a pastor, he looks for opportunities when, through preaching and personal ministry, he can maximize those seasons when his people are especially open to the Spirit’s transforming work.
After nine years as teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, Ortberg recently moved to California to assume the teaching pastorate of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church. That’s where Leadership editors Marshall Shelley and Eric Reed sat down with John to talk about those times when he and his congregation are teachable and pastorable.
Change is risky, so leading people to personal change is also risky, isn’t it?
I did a “ropes course” a couple of years ago. The instructors had us all sit down while they explained how the ropes and the carabiners work. “You’re all safe. No one can get hurt,” they said. And we all believed that, at least in our heads.
But when we got thirty feet up, our stomachs didn’t believe it. Our sweat glands didn’t believe it. Our eyes looked at the distance to the ground, and our hands got clammy.
Information alone was not enough to transform our bodies. Our bodies did not yet believe that we were safe.
Those who had been working at that camp all summer, who were on the ropes course every day, came to believe with their whole bodies that they were safe, and they could move with ease and freedom and joy. For me, it was a conscious choice to offer my body, as Paul said, as a living sacrifice, knowing that over time, my body would be transformed.
In a sense, what we’re looking for in the church is the ropes course. When I first become a follower of Jesus, I hear that this way of life now includes how I deal with my money, my relationships, my household chores, how I pray, and so on. Eventually I come to believe with my whole self what, at first, I could only say I believed.
Increasingly, I really will be anxious for nothing because I really will believe that I’m living in the hand of God and that nothing can separate me from the love of Jesus.
So the current interest in spiritual formation is driven by-
Experiences. We live now in “the experience economy.” When I was in college, the big book was Knowing God; thirty years later it was Experiencing God. People are hungry to experience God.
And we genuinely want change. When we consider divorce rates, addictions, behaviors, empirically there’s not that much difference inside the church than outside. That raises questions. Are we really producing changed people?
Spiritual formation is a process by which a person gets reshaped, and it is influenced by everything-all of our conscious experiences and probably some subconscious ones as well.
Why talk about “spiritual formation”? Isn’t that just education and discipleship?
Words pick up baggage, so disciple, a great New Testament word, has come to mean a time-limited process that you can finish. Growing up, I’d hear people say, “I’m discipling him.” They meant, we’ll meet for a while and then we’ll finish and he’ll be discipled. That usually involved getting together at Denny’s at 6:30 in the morning and working through some kind of curriculum. The New Testament never uses disciple in that way. To be a disciple of Jesus was something all followers did in community, and did their whole lives long. Discipling has picked up connotations that don’t address the deepest hunger of the soul.
Christian education tends not to strike the same chord as the language of spiritual formation. Education is about conveying information, but while information can change people, all you have to do is to ask yourself, Have I ever known somebody who knows ten times more about the Bible than the average person, but is not ten times more loving or ten times more joyful than the average person? Information alone isn’t enough to transform.
So the goal of spiritual formation is to change the whole person?
It’s about more than a few restricted activities. If you had asked me when I was growing up, “How’s your spiritual life?” my reflexive thought would have been, Am I having quiet times on a regular basis? And as long as I did that-and you were supposed to do it in the morning-then I could cross that off the list and the rest of the day I didn’t have to worry about my spiritual life.
Well, that’s a very narrow understanding. God is not interested in some little thing called your “spiritual life.” He’s after your life, the whole thing. That means everything that goes on in my life, all the things that I take in, all of my experiences.
Every moment is an opportunity to be with Jesus and learn from him how to live in his kingdom, and to learn how to be like him.
What we want to do is to help people participate in that process of spiritual formation in an intelligent, thoughtful, effective way.
Is spiritual formation today different from how the ancient fathers practiced the disciplines?
The center is the same. The center is How does the human person become transformed? How can communities of genuinely loving, joyful, vibrant, alive, winsome, courageous persons be created? The packaging looks different in different cultures at different times, but the essential quest is the same.
I remember one conversation I had with Dallas. I should say that Dallas Willard is like the unseen person in this interview. He’s an enormous influence-I think of my ministry, in part, as “Dallas for Dummies,” because nobody has helped me understand things the way that Dallas has.
I was talking to him once about reading. My temptation is to read way too much-too broadly. He said: “It’s good to aim at depth when you’re reading, because if you aim at depth, you’ll get breadth thrown in. If you aim at breadth, you will get neither depth nor breadth.”
So in spiritual formation, if you get deeply into Ignatius or Wesley, you’ll find at the foundation the same kinds of practices. You’ll find the use of solitude is always there. You’ll find the need for self-examination and confession. You’ll find the need for study and for worship. You’ll find the same practices, because human nature doesn’t change and the process by which human nature gets transformed remains constant.
If the spiritual disciplines are a means of transformation, what is the role of the Holy Spirit?
Transformation is always grace. We sometimes think that although we’re “saved by grace,” we’re supposed to change by effort. Either that, or people become passive.
One of the analogies that’s kind of been helpful to me is the difference between a motorboat, a raft, and a sailboat.
In a motorboat I’m in charge. I determine how fast we’re going to go, and in what direction. Some people approach spiritual life that way. If I’m just aggressive enough, if I have enough quiet times, I can make transformation happen on my own. Usually that results in people becoming legalistic, then pride starts to creep in, and things get all messed up.
Some people have been burned by that kind of approach. So they go to the opposite extreme and will say, “I’m into grace.” It’s like they’re floating on a raft. If you ask them to do anything to further their growth, they’ll say, “Hey, no. I’m not into works. I’m into grace. You’re getting legalistic with me.” So they drift. There are way too many commands in Scripture for anybody to think that we’re called to be passive.
On a sailboat, however, I don’t move if it’s not for the wind. My only hope of movement is the wind. I can’t control the wind. I don’t manufacture the wind. Jesus talks about the Spirit blowing like the wind. But there is a role for me to play, and part of it has to do with what I need to discern.
A good sailor will discern, Where’s the wind at work? How should I set the sails? Spiritual formation is like sailing.
As pastor, how can you tell when the wind is blowing in the lives of your people?
I think people have an openness quotient. The more somebody experiences growth, the hungrier they get for it. You can sense it. You can tell the difference when someone comes up after a service and says, “Nice message, Pastor,” as opposed to somebody who identifies some aspect of the message in which God was speaking directly to them.
Part of what I want to do as a pastor is to identify those people and ask, How can I keep throwing fuel on that fire? What’s a book that they might read? What’s an experience they could have? What’s a group of folks could they plug into who could really help to fuel that growth? That’s a big part of the pastoring challenge.
Are there times when people are especially open to change?
We did a survey when I was at Willow Creek and asked thousands of people, “Think about an era in your life when you felt like you were growing the most spiritually. What contributed to that?” The number one answer: Pain. So I think a helpful thing churches can do is provide lots of pain for people. (Chuckles.)
Because pain is such a vivid, intense, and unpleasant experience, it creates motivation to seek outside help in a way that hardly anything else does. Pain has a way of opening somebody up to say, “The way that I have been doing life is not working.” It creates openness that often is not there in the routine of day to day.
So as pastor, I continually ask, “Where are folks in pain? How can I be with them? And how might God be at work in their lives?”
So pain is a good thing?
Pain doesn’t necessarily bring about spiritual transformation. Pain in the default mode will produce anger, resentment, despair, and enormous problems in human life. Hence the need for the pastoral moment, for wise spiritual guidance. Pain will lead to Christian spiritual transformation only if it is handled well and wisely, if it causes the person to open up to God.
So how does a pastor change the default setting?
You sure can’t go up to somebody who’s in enormous pain and say, “Well, now this is good news, because now you’re really going to grow a lot.” Pain is much deeper and more mysterious than just that.
One thing I do for a whole congregation is teach on the subject. I start on a practice level. I might tell how I was frustrated while standing in line at 7-Eleven. That’s a one on a scale of one to a thousand, but I can use it to make a point. How will I respond to the line, to the wait, to the clerk who doesn’t speak English very well? Am I patient, or do I nurse angry thoughts?
Let them know that pain is one of those inevitable crossroad experiences. Either you choose to embrace God or flee from God. So as folks experience pain in deeper places later on, they’ve developed a way of thinking about it that will serve them well. But you can’t start with it when people are in catastrophic pain.
How has personal pain taught you about ministering to others who are hurting?
Four or five years ago-it was a very painful time-I was recognizing the kind of fuel I was running on. A lot of my life had been about wanting people to think I’m doing really well. So somebody would kind of tell me what to do-parents, teachers, whoever-and I would try real hard to do it really well so they would think I was doing well. I would use my gifts to “do well.” Ultimately that gets hollow.
I hit a point in my life where I was feeling intensely the hollowness of my existence.
So I called Dallas and Jane Willard.
I spent the better part of a day just saying, “I feel empty. I feel like I’m doing all of this stuff, and I know it’s good stuff, but I don’t feel the goodness or the joy of it.”
We talked about growing up and my family. I remember Jane drew a little diagram that I still have in my journal that was very helpful. And then Dallas said, “Let’s pray.”
I prayed. Jane prayed. Then when Dallas started to pray, he put his hand on my chest-and just that touch-it was powerful.
I had been trying so hard to have people think I’m doing well and to live off that; and to be at a place where I had just been fully honest about that, and embarrassed and ashamed about that. And then to have what the hunger is really for-to be loved-expressed in that moment of real vulnerability by a touch and then by a prayer. I will remember that as long as I live. That was a moment of true pastoral care.
I don’t know what to do with something like that. It’s not like it’s a tool that I can put in a kit. It was just something that touched me in a way that I really, really needed to be touched.
But you were surely pastored.
Oh, I was pastored! In that moment I experienced what a gift it is to be pastored.
And it illustrates some of the non-negotiables of pastoring: to ask good questions, to listen well, to name what’s happening, and to offer that whole package to God believing that he’s in it and working through it for a good purpose.
Exactly. Very, very well said. And not to do dumb things: not to deny it, not to try to fix it too fast, not to say it isn’t so, not to put a Band-Aid on your stump.
Pastoring is sometimes about comforting. Is it ever your job to create discomfort?
Oh sure. Absolutely. The production and management of discomfort is one of the great pastoral arts.
How so?
It’s like a violin string. The tension of that string is essential to the music to be played. If it’s too loose, there’s no music; that’s bad. If it’s too tight, it breaks; that’s bad. If the tension is just right, then there’s music.
In life, our default mode is comfort. But comfort ultimately is fatal. From a pastoral point of view, to find the right mixture of challenge, admonition, reassurance, hope, stretching experiences that will produce the right kind, the productive kind, of discomfort and tension-that’s huge.
People who are really good at changing lives-whether therapist, leader, or pastor-these people are geniuses at the art of tension management-discomfort production, and resolution. For good authors and artists, this is the basic theme of life.
So tension is the tool of the trade.
Yes. Patrick Lencioni, the business consultant, talks about staff meetings. He says meetings ought to be more exciting than movies. Why? Movies you just watch, but in a meeting you participate. A movie isn’t going to affect your life, but the meetings you participate in usually determine a lot about your life. But most meetings are boring because people don’t identify the tension, or what’s at stake.
He actually spent a year as a scriptwriter. He learned the essential component in a good movie is tension. In a movie it’s the tension that grips you. It better not get resolved till near the end.
One of the problems with meetings is there’s not enough tension and conflict, at least not the right kind.
How do you create good tension?
Ask a good question, a question with substance and that has consequences. Questions are huge for congregations and for teams and for individuals.
Jesus asked people questions. He’s the Son of God. He knows the answers. So how come he’s asking questions all the time? Because it produces tension, and then energy, and then change in people in ways that giving them the information simply wouldn’t.
It’s probably a fault that a lot of pastors have. I certainly do. I am much to quick too give information and show that I know stuff. Good questions often produce much more change than good information.
Any other producers of good tension or good conflict?
One ministry we most neglect is admonishing. We don’t do that very well-speaking up when I discern that something in your life feels off track, when there’s not the kind of joy in you there could be. I think the New Testament commands us to have those conversations, those kinds of interventions with folks.
Actually, my wife, Nancy, has been a great teacher for me on this thing because she just does it really well and does it often and in love.
How do you coach people to admonish in a way that it doesn’t come off as condescending?
Again, teaching: Talk about times when someone has done it for me. I remember telling in a sermon that, when I was in college, I was relating to other people in ways that felt to them arrogant. They felt they were being put down. A guy came and tried to talk to me about that. I felt so sensitive that I just shut him out. After-wards I’d be polite toward him, but distant. So I talked about how that could have been a chance for me to grow; but because of my own feelings of hurt, I shut out the opportunity.
I also talk about how I admonish others. I explain there’s a law of supply and demand involved. If I’m giving you a large supply of admonition and your demand level is low, it’s probably not going to work very well.
There are some concrete elements here: Is the person looking me right in the eye or looking around the room? Is their body posture turned away? Those are all signals they don’t want to listen to this.
Sometimes you can teach this by role playing: Here’s how to do it badly and how to admonish well. Doing it badly is fun to demonstrate. Trying to do it well in a compelling way, that’s much harder.
What does a church look like that practices frequent, loving admonition?
In communities that do it well, there’s a higher level of truth telling, which means a higher level of trust. In a lot of churches, polite treatment of each other replaces trust. There’s no deep level of trust because people aren’t willing to take that risk. Then community gets kind of stagnant.
That’s one reason small groups tend to break up. People start to feel intuitively they’re not talking about the deepest issues.
Admonishing is often about correcting failure. How many of our teachable moments are connected to failure?
Many. A friend of mine had a child who’s having a difficult time in college. He was saying it’s really hard for his son because failure had never been a part of his vocabulary. And I said, “Oh, man, it really needs to become a part of your vocabulary.” For us to develop communities where it’s okay for people to experience failure and talk about failure is huge. Failure avoidance is a big obstacle to spiritual formation.
I was talking to our staff folk last week. I need to be able to say to them, “You know what? On this project you failed” or “In this job you failed.” We run from saying that, and that only makes it worse. So to create such a culture, I admit to folks I failed.
How do you do admit failure in such a way, though, that those who follow you don’t lose confidence in your leadership?
Demystify failure. Teach that failure is essential to learning. And it’s not the same as competence.
I read a study involving a pottery class. They divided students into two groups. One group would get A’s by making one really good pot. The other one would get A’s by making 50 pots, no matter what they looked like. Guess what? The students in the 50-pot group made the best pots! They’d make one and it would be no good. And they’d make another one, get a little better. They’d make another one, get a little better. They just kept learning how to make better pots.
The one-pot group put all this pressure on themselves over one pot, but they never learned how to make a pot well because they didn’t fail enough.
One troublesome aspect in encouraging transformation in others is waiting. Have you had a pastorable moment that was worth the wait?
We had wonderful next-door neighbors in Chicago. They had some church in their background but had given up on it.
For seven years we befriended them-dinners, doing stuff together. We invited them to some things at church, but no response. For seven years.
Then the husband had heart surgery, and I went to visit him in the hospital. After that, there was an openness. Things took off from that point.
At the last baptism service we had at Willow before I came out here, I baptized him and his wife. A seven-year period of nothing … and then one day something opened up.
God did something that I hardly thought would happen. That was a cool moment.
John Ortberg’s seminar “Flowing with the Spirit” will be offered at the National Pastors Convention in Nashville. See www.nationalpastorsconvention.com
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