EMQ » October–December 2019 » Volume 55 Issue 4
By Caprice Applequist
I’ve been training to become a spiritual director for the better part of the past two years. My faith has been stretched, expanded, and sometimes confused. At first, many of the things said in spiritual direction class felt contrary to my calling as a missionary, but I’ve begun to see the principles of direction as essential parts of my mission practice.
Being A Spiritual Director
As a part of my training, I wanted to provide spiritual direction to someone who does not identify as a follower of Jesus. Aisha is a nominal Muslim, who, in our first meeting, struggled to speak about God. When we began, she was dealing with some very difficult relationship issues. I desperately wanted to bring Jesus into the conversation. For me, Jesus is the only answer to suffering. Yet, as a spiritual director, it is not my role to bring Jesus into the conversation. The conversation is meant to be led completely by the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the directee. My role as a spiritual director is to pray for them to find God and to create space for that to happen. As someone who is trained in traditional evangelical missions practices, this less direct approach was, and continues to be, a challenging approach for me.
I’m regularly asked to explain what it means to be a spiritual director. Quite simply, the practice of spiritual direction is about helping people find where God is present and working in their lives. We work to find the Holy in the mundane. I believe that every part of life is a part of our spiritual experience. Many have compared being a director to being a midwife—my personal favorite comparison. I, like a midwife, have the skills to recognize what’s going on, but I don’t actually do any of the work; I just encourage it. Contrary to the word “direction,” it’s not meant to be a very directive practice.
My basic thesis is this: a mission-minded spiritual director could be a valuable asset to urban mission strategy because of its unique approach to cultivating desire for God. Moreover, anybody can integrate the principles of direction into a ministry practice. Finally, direction is a helpful resource for ministers because of its focus on being instead of doing—a common point of contention for practitioners.
In this article, we will explore three helpful aspects of spiritual direction. First, the spiritual director focuses on listening. Next, she offers an experience of Jesus through her presence, which helps to cultivate a desire for God. Finally, a director is trained to find the places in people’s lives where God is working.
Listening
Listening forms the foundation for spiritual direction practice. Directors are taught that one of the most important things to establish with a directee at the outset is her image of God. We all have different images for God. These often change and shift throughout our lives as we understand ourselves better and how God relates to that self. So, even with Christian directees, it is important not to assume that I know how they’re relating to God. Maybe they really struggle to accept God as a father figure because of their own struggles with their human father. Maybe they struggle with God seeming masculine. Maybe they like to pray to the Holy Spirit more than Jesus. In other words, with Christians and non-Christians alike, it is very important not to make assumptions about how they think of, relate to, or approach God. In mission work, I wonder how often we might need to adjust our typical Gospel presentation to better fit how the recipient views God.
Being a Presence
In the earliest sessions with my Muslim directee, I asked her questions about how she perceives God. She answered by describing Islam to me. She talked about what she’s supposed to do and how she struggles to do it. A lot of Christians do the same thing. I might ask them about God and how they relate to Him and they’ll start quoting Scripture, saying what they should believe. They might talk about how Christians should pray, go to church, and do good things (whatever those might be). If anything is clear in the gospel, it’s that God works with us as we are, not as we should be. So there’s very little point in discussing the “shoulds” of our religious practices.
I asked Aisha how she would like to think of God. How does she think he really is, not what does her culture’s religion say about him? She said she’d like to hope that he is truly compassionate and merciful, fairly unconcerned with whether or not she does her prayers everyday, has sex, or wears a hijab. I told her that was how I perceive God—that he is loving, desiring to have relationship with us regardless of what we do. So then we explored what it feels like to believe that God is like this. How different is it to think of God as loving and merciful instead of vengeful, waiting for us to sin? She felt like there was a lot of freedom in that. I encouraged her to explore what it would look like for her to treat God like he’s not waiting to punish her. I can’t help but wonder if this process of listening fostered more openness to Christ than if I had been quick to “preach the gospel.”
Finding Where God is Working
It is so strange to not be allowed to share the gospel with someone when we’re talking about spiritual things. I thought that would weigh heavily on my conscience. I’m not taking the opportunity! What if she dies in a car accident on the way home? Yet I am learning to trust God’s good work in people. I am learning how little power my words have with them. Through this training I have learned to listen, to really listen to people. I get to hear how God is beckoning them closer to Him, and then I get to encourage them to listen to Him. I get to tell them to listen to God instead of listening to me. Somewhere along the way, that started to feel like a substantially more comfortable place for my conscience.
My spiritual direction supervisor once told me a story she heard long ago about a little boy struggling to sleep at night. There was a storm and he was afraid. His parents put him to bed and prayed with him, asking that he would know Jesus is with him so he doesn’t need to be afraid. In the night, he came and joined his parents in bed. When they asked why he was afraid since he knew God was with him, he replied, “I know God is always with me. But tonight I needed Jesus with some skin on. That’s why I came to bed with you.”
How many of us regularly need “Jesus with skin on?” What could be more biblical, since our bodies are declared to be the temples of the Holy Spirit of God? I often think about how loving and open and friendly Jesus must have been to get away with some of the stuff he said. There are a few things in the Gospels where he says things I would never say. Yet people felt so loved and accepted by him (everyone but the Pharisees of course). A part of my role as a director is being Jesus with skin on.
Sometimes, spirituality is complicated, because it’s all unseen. We talk to God, whom we can’t even prove exists. So I wonder how many people just need some sort of experience of the compassion and love and openness Jesus offers. Maybe if I sit in kindness with someone and listen to her struggle and pray for her, I am giving her a taste of Jesus. Maybe Jesus is a little like Doritos—once you taste one, you need to eat the whole bag. I wonder if maybe sometimes we hijack desire. We think if we can prove to someone that they are sinful and they need Jesus, then that will mean they want Him. But they often don’t. Cultivating desire is an important aspect of mission strategy. I believe that God is beckoning all people to Himself, and in direction I have the unique opportunity to poke around in someone’s life to find where that beckoning is taking place. In Aisha, we found Him in her suffering and struggles.
Outcomes
It has been incredible to see the giant shift in how Aisha’s relating to God and allowing Him to be a part of her life after just four sessions—that’s only four hours. She went from talking about God as a set of rules in Islam to talking about him as a place of comfort and security as she deals with her pain. She specifically told me how wonderful it’s been to think of God as knowing everything about her and still offering his presence. She has even opened herself to practicing Lectio Divina with the Psalms.
As I hear her talk about God as potentially loving and accepting, I have a lot of things going on in my brain. Of course, I desperately want to tell her that Jesus is the embodiment of this God she desires—this God who gives up everything for relationship with us. I want her to understand that she has some distance from God because of her sin. I want her to know the fuller sense of freedom when you experience God through the gift of Jesus. But our spiritual direction sessions are not the place for that. As much as my missionary heart wants to stop everything and preach the gospel, I’m not allowed to, because it’s not the right context.
All that being said, I see more movement toward an understanding of the gospel in her than in my friends whom I openly share about Jesus with. I see an increased desire for God and an openness to growing in relationship with him.
Personal Spiritual Growth
Finally, the context of spiritual direction has the potential to encourage missionaries toward health in their own inner life. Serving as a single missionary for several years, I can see how easy it is to start to find my worth in what I’m able to achieve for the cause of the gospel—and that’s just with very limited time on the field. Missionaries develop God complexes so easily. It is not difficult to start thinking that you are capable of saving people. That you are the only way they are going to truly experience God. It’s not true, but it is really easy to believe that either implicitly or explicitly.
As I sit with my Muslim directee, desperately wanting her to know Jesus, I have to trust that God is working in her. Through her time with me, she is learning to listen and be open to his work. I think she definitely needs to hear the gospel message laid out for her. So I am forced to trust and to pray, differently than I usually do, that someone will make it clear to her. God is big enough to use multiple people to bring someone to Christ. Actually, He almost always does! For this reason, I think it makes perfect sense to enlist a gospel-oriented spiritual director on your missionary team. If you meet non-believers who are open to exploring their spirituality, send them to that person who can provide space for that. You can work with them. You can be the person to explicitly share the gospel as the director works to help the person’s heart soften and open to it.
Being a Witness
I hope I’ve said it enough times, but I’ll say it again. People need to hear the Gospel proclaimed. I’m also saying that maybe that proclamation is only one piece of how God is working in people. For me, spiritual direction has given me new tools and training for guiding people to Jesus. It’s not for everyone, but it seems helpful for some. The practice has also substantially grown my own faith in the sovereign work of God, and it forces me to a greater awareness of the small role I play in someone’s salvation story. It’s all about God’s work. We just get to join.
Caprice Applequist lives and works in San Francisco, California. She loves connecting with the vibrant and diverse Muslim communities of the area and enjoys the food that comes with those connections. She recently began to practice as a spiritual director, but contemplative prayer practices have been nourishing her traditional Baptist spiritual life for the past five years.
