Both/And

I'm on a dawn-to-dusk social media fast while I work on my writing for a few days. However, while I was researching a quote this afternoon, I came across this insightful interview of Gordon & Mary Crosby, the visionaries behind The Church of the Savior in Washington, DC. (But I waited until after dusk to post it, so I'm still good.) The interview was conducted by Jim Wallis for Sojourners in November 1997.

Here's a taste:

Temperamentally, most people are either given to the inward journey but don't want to be bothered with the outward work and getting their hands dirty with the poor; or they want to get out there with the poor and they don't have time for the inward life-they're just going to get the world fixed. We said both. To me that is one of the most important things we've done.

Anybody can have a prayer group, a group to study scriptures, therapy groups, anything they want to. We've had hundreds of them through the years. That's all right. We welcome it. But the membership structure is based on a person being called to the inward life and the outward journey in the same group. These are not groups just to strengthen each person in his or her individual mission, but in a corporate mission.

I would say that's the most crucial structure we discovered, but it took us two or three years to find out that the cell groups did not know how to make the transition to mission. We prayed until we got tired of praying, until I'm sure God got tired of hearing us. Finally, we just cancelled all of our groups as of a certain date. We started again around this new understanding.

So since the early '50s, we've focused on this business of call, which is to say, "This is God's call. I've got to do this." We're totally committed to the inner life, the life of prayer and worship, of deepening our capacity to love, working with the blockages of love, journaling, and retreats. All of that goes under the heading of the inward life. And with that comes a real, worthy, challenging mission in the world.

Comments

[eric Blauer]

man thats rich.