Ecclesiology 13 - A Practical Approach to Small Groups: Prayer and Meditation

     In the next several posts, we will examine how I foresee the small group program working and how it fits in with the larger Church Universal.  Starting the first small group should be fairly simple.  A group of four or five friends, either from the local congregation or not, will decide to try out this prayer/meditation/Bible study thing, one will volunteer the use of their home for conducting the meeting and a date will be set.  Conversely, if the group chooses, the meeting could rotate between each group member's home from week to week.

    I do think it is important for the group to get together weekly to check on one another's progress.  In fact, when I first began pondering this subject, I thought it was important to meet semi-weekly, one meeting just for prayer and meditation and the other for Bible study, sharing and confession.  This is still a good way to conduct the group, but since I will also be advocating separate weekly worship services as a larger group, this may put too great a strain on people's schedules.  As a result, I have concluded that a somewhat longer weekly small group meeting that includes all of the elements will likely suffice if the group prefers that route.  Let us say perhaps one weekly meeting of 60-90 minutes duration rather than two meetings of 30-45 minutes each.

    If the group is to meet weekly in a single member's home, I think it is important for the group to select its first deacon very early on whose job will be to arrive ahead of the scheduled meeting time to help clean the host's bathroom and otherwise assist in tidying up those areas to be used by the group and perhaps stay afterward to help tidy again.  As before, this job could be rotated among group members, but as a simple courtesy to the host the offer must be made one way or the other.

    I do not, however, think it is important to offer the group any sort of refreshments as this will be a function of the worship service.  If the group does choose to have refreshments, then a small money pool should be collected to provide for them and a procurer selected.  Never let the offering of refreshments become a source of competition among the members.  If tea and store-bought biscuits is to be the rule, then tea and store-bought biscuits it shall be.  Let no one decide to offer, on their week, homemade scones as a substitute.  This will quickly escalate to finger sandwiches and sausage rolls, port instead of tea, and we will very quickly be spending the group's entire budget and more on what is, in fact, nothing at all.  In this case, it would be better to simply not offer the refreshments and let that be an end to it.  If refreshments are served as a courtesy, then fine.  If they become a point of pride and competition, let it go.

    Now, what happens in our small groups?  The rest of this post will describe the primary goal of the small group meeting, that of prayer and meditation.  The other elements will be discussed in subsequent posts.  Keep in mind that we are here discussing private prayer and meditation.  Communal prayer is also a function of the small group, but we will save that for a later post.

    In previous posts I have explained the fundamentals of meditation with a few hints regarding the "intermediate" stage of the process.  That is as far as my explanation can go, as it is as far as I have personally yet achieved.    I can, however, expound on the end goal of all this meditating.

 There are essentially four things Jesus told his apostles (and the church they founded) to do by both word and example: prayer, evangelism, baptism and communion.  So far, we have looked at prayer and meditation by using the example given by the Buddha.  I confess that I have here used Buddhism as an easy example, a ready "jumping off point."  While all the Buddhist principles we've so far discussed can easily be found repeated - and even amplified - in the New Testament, thanks to millennia of Western thought and application, it requires more disciplined searching to find these references as most modern translations of Scripture tend to downplay them.  One almost needs to be fluent in ancient Hebrew and Greek to ferret them out.  Later we will discuss how to go about doing this (without a degree in ancient languages), but as we are just starting out, we turn to our Eastern brothers and sisters to simplify the process.

    So we begin with the Three Immutable Facts, the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.  These will not get us to God, but they will set our foot on the right road.  They will help us mature into Spiritual Adults, and that Spiritual Adulthood is the whole point of the small group gathering and the focus of the remainder of this post.

    It is difficult to limn what I mean by Spiritual Adulthood.  This may be another of those ideas that defies description.  But if I am to be of any service to my reader, the attempt must be made.

    Initially, it can be said that Spiritual Adulthood involves the same ideas that we have so far been describing as Enlightenment.  But we've yet to clearly define that term, either.  Perhaps one way to describe it would be to reference Martin M. Broadwell's Four Stages of Competence.  This is a clinical analysis of how people learn.  The stages are Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscious Competence and Unconscious Competence.  Their definitions are below:

Unconscious Incompetence - This student is so unaware of his own ignorance that he neither knows or understands how to do something nor does he recognize his educational deficit in this regard.  This poor fellow thinks that everything he needs to know comes from his friends' social media posts, that nothing unknown is worth knowing.  He doesn't know that he doesn't know.  "My mind's made up, don't confuse me with facts."

Conscious Incompetence - The student still does not understand or know how to do the job at hand, but he has at least come to recognize his educational deficit.  He has reached the point of "Wow!  This is harder than I thought!"  He now knows that he doesn't know.

Conscious Competence - The student has now studied and practiced the steps involved enough to have a general understanding of the work.  He's still prone to mistakes, but he has at least achieved a comprehension of "This ain't so bad."  He now thinks himself capable of someday mastering the task.

Unconscious Competence - The student has now mastered the task.  Through training and repetition, he has developed the muscle memory required to complete the task almost without thinking about it.  He can now accomplish the task with his metaphorical eyes closed.

    I think of Spiritual Adulthood as having achieved Spiritual Unconscious Competence.  One is no longer having to think about being a good person or about "praying without ceasing."  One's soul is so attuned to God that goodness and mercy have become second nature.  Practice and training have honed a sort of spiritual "muscle memory" and moral action has become subconscious.  Holiness is not something one does or even strives for but something one simply is.  [The downside here, of course, is that, while the professional tennis player will make far fewer mistakes than the amateur, those that she does make will be all the more spectacular because, unlike the beginner, the whole world is watching when the pro screws up!]

    Another part of spiritual maturity is accepting responsibility, not only for oneself but for others as well.  A new parent quickly learns the value of soap and water.  Anyone who has never been a parent will be quite dismayed at the very thought of changing a dirty diaper, and most new parents will readily admit to the disgust involved in their first diaper-changing experience.  However, one quickly learns to quell their apprehension and get on with the job.  It must be done - the baby cannot be allowed to simply remain in the soiled nappie indefinitely - and it does no good to expect the baby to change herself.  So, the new mother must make the sacrifice, get in there and get her hands dirty, do what must be done for the infant's safety and comfort, and take what solace can be found in the thought of washing up afterward (and I say "mother" - in fact, as a father, I changed at least half my kids' diapers).  Christian Adults don't mind getting their hands dirty, although they may wisely choose to keep plenty of metaphorical soap and water on hand for the aftermath.

    Another way to look at Spiritual Adulthood is when we take up the question of discipline.  To begin with, a Spiritual Adult understands that the word "discipline" is akin to the word "disciple," and means precisely the same thing.  To a child, the word discipline conjures up ideas of punishment.  An adolescent will likely think of discipline in terms of oppression, especially the oppression of his own individual desires.  An adult knows discipline for what it really is: obedience to a moral code intended to help a person navigate the rather murky waters of human interaction.  C.S. Lewis likens discipline to a convoy of ships and says there are three things the captains of the ships must clearly do and understand in order to successfully complete their mission: (1) They must maintain distance so as to neither drift apart nor collide with one another. (2) They must see that their individual ships are in proper working order.  A ship whose engine is out or whose steering system is disabled can hardly avoid colliding with another ship. (3) They must all know where they're going and move together in the same direction.  Every captain in the fleet must understand his/her own role in the mission and carry it out, not in hopes of a commendation afterward or begrudging the chain of command that issued the orders, but because he/she knows that it will only be through both the individual and corporate effort that the mission will be a success.  This is partly what we mean when we speak of Emptiness; understanding our place as part of the greater whole.

    Adults don't worry overly much about justice.  By this, I don't mean to imply that a given Christian might not at some point see the necessity to take up arms against the Nazis or Mongol hordes, nor that we should never find it necessary to join a peaceful public demonstration in protest of a systemic oppression.  Both of these things can and do happen.  But the majority of our assertions that a thing "just isn't fair"  really mean one of two things: either "it isn't fair to me; it doesn't leave me with the advantage" or that life in general isn't fair.  Of course, in the first case, we can see the selfishness in our thinking immediately upon it being pointed out to us.  In the latter case, it appears at once unselfish, but can usually be found to actually still be a selfish thing, but in a less literal way.  In truth, when we comment that "it isn't fair that a tornado came through town and destroyed so many homes," we are usually only in the position to note the unfairness of the situation if, in fact, our own homes were spared.  Frequently, we follow this statement with the observation that "God has blessed me and spared me," none too subtly implying that God favors us over those whose homes were destroyed.   One can almost always sympathize with another's tragedy, but, unless one has shared in that tragedy, it is almost impossible to empathize.  From Impermanence we learn that everything ends as a matter of universal fact.  From Suffering we learn that our concept of tragedy is a delusion of our own making.  As Richard Bach says, "The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in tragedy and injustice.  What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly."

    Spiritual adults are never, or almost never, offended by the words or deeds of others.  In the first place, we are aware that very little of what others say or do is intended as a slight toward us.  In point of fact, we must admit that for someone to go out of their way to contrive an offense against us would require that they spend a great deal time thinking about us, and this is highly unlikely.  As children we worry about what people think about us.  As young adults, we don't care what people think about us.  As older adults, we realize no one was ever thinking about us in the first place; they were too busy thinking about themselves.  Therefore we see that, in the rare event that someone actually does offend us, it is almost always by accident.  We cannot withhold forgiveness for others' accidents if we expect to thus be forgiven for our own.

    In the second place, if indeed a personal offense is offered, so what?  What we learn from Emptiness (at least the Christian application of it) is that, as Spiritual Adults, we are ourselves dead, having vacated the space and let the Holy Spirit move in.  We are almost never concerned with offending dead people, nor is there any reason why we should be in any but the rarest of circumstances.  Adults know that we can only be offended by our own choice.  Others may offer a stimulus, but the actual offense is our own.

    Finally, I think of Spiritual Adults as those who have broken free of their self-imposed prisons.  As children, we are ridiculously hedonistic.  We cannot see beyond our own pleasures.  We confine ourselves in these tiny cells of self-importance and self-gratification.  As C.S. Lewis said in The Weight of Glory, "It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea.  We are far too easily pleased."

    These are the sort of traits we think of in connection with Spiritual Adults, the ones we should incubate in our small group prayer and meditations.  We must begin our renewal of the church by creating Spiritual Adults, aka Enlightened People, for these are the people with the maturity needed to carry out our mission as the Church.

Pax