Why Is It Rare?

After posting Friday on some of the difficulties of pastoral leadership, I ran across this quotation in this book

One of the greatest obstacles to effective spiritual formation in Christ today is our failure to understand and acknowledge the reality of the human situation. We must start from where we really are.

Some years back, within a period of a few weeks, three nationally known pastors in Southern California were publicly exposed for sexual sins. But sex is far from being the only problem inside and outside the church. The presence of vanity, egotism, hostility, fear, indifference, and downright meanness can be counted on among professing Christians. Their opposites cannot be counted on or simply assumed in the standard Christian group, and the rare individual who exemplifies these opposites - genuine purity and humility, death to selfishness, freedom from rage and depression, and so on - will stand out in the group with all the obtrusiveness of a sore thumb. This person will be a constant hindrance in group processes and will be personally conflicted by them, for he or she will not be living on the same terms as the others.

Paul summed up the root of human evil by saying, "There is no fear of God before their eyes." When God is put out of the heart and the soul, the intellect becomes dysfunctional, trying to devise a "truth" that will be compatible with the basic falsehood that not God, but rather man, is god; and the affections (feelings, emotions, even sensations) soon follow along on the path to chaos.

The path of spiritual transformation today lies through the illumination that we have ruined souls. This must be gratefully and humbly accepted and applied, to oneself above all. When the prophet Jeremiah, for example, said, 

"The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?" (17:9),

we have to recognize from our heart that we are the ones spoken of, that, indeed, I am the one described. Only then is a foundation laid for spiritual formation into Christlikeness.

I could not help but be dumbfounded by the statement that the attributes of real spiritual transformation and not merely rare in the church, but perhaps considered a "hinderance to the process."

This tells me that our institutions are very sick. We breed our leadership to show attributes other than what we desire, and we reward those that show not the correct attributes, but the ones we encourage in leadership.

How do we fix this?

Dear Lord help us!

Related Tags: church, leadership, transformation, reward, institution