a fountain flowing deep and wide

I was invited to lead an “Evocative Presentation” for the North Carolina Regional Meeting of the Shiloh Network which I did earlier this week. I thought the task was to talk about how to talk to young people about call and vocation. When I arrived I was reminded that the title of the session was “Recovering the Lost Language of Call.” What I had planned was close enough so that I could make a few extra notes and move forward without too much of a hiccup. Here’s the first point of what I was tried to do in less than 15 minutes. Yeah, I had also planned too much and had to cut how evocative I could be since I was sharing the workshop with another, and evoker. (Maybe I’ll add the rest in a future post to see how provocative an evocative I came up with.)

Point #1 – I read the gospel reading from the Daily Office for the day prior to this event. I had heard this in a podcast and it struck me that this is what should be done when we’re trying to lead others in any way. I read the follow-up verses to the story in John 4 after Jesus had encountered the Samaritan woman. What struck me was what the folks from her village said once they personally encountered Jesus.

They said to the woman, "We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world." (John 4:42, TNIV)

This is a key principle of leadership in most, if not all, contexts (i.e., to help others become able to say, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves.”)

Leading others to Christ has been anything but this for too many years. We’ve tried to make a uniform faith, an orthodox doctrine, or a systematic theology (Uh oh, what did I just attack there??). We’ve attempted to explain the Christian faith in cookie cutter fashion leaving no room for a “see for yourself” gospel reality.

The Samaritan woman teaches a great lesson. Tell others the story, but give them room enough to discover Christ in their own ways. Might this produce richer and more meaningful expressions of faith that aren’t so homogeneous or orthodox?

The richness of a faithful community might best be described by the depth of its diversity rather than the breadth of its conformity.