Short presentation on the role of spirituality in the lives of ministers and the role of ministers in the lives of believing communities

1. Spirituality
in Ministry
A Shockingly Brief Overview
Elizabeth Drescher, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Christian Spiritualities

2. What is spirituality?

3. Approaches to
Spirituality in Ministry
• Spirituality for ministers of the church
• Mystical
• Ascetical
• Spiritual instrumentality of ministers of the
church
• Liturgical
• Sacramental
• Pastoral

4. Lex orandi – Lex credendi
• Attributed to the 5th century anti-Pelagian
monk Prosper of Aquitaine
• Bonus Question: What was the Pelagian
heresy?

5. Dialectical Christian Praxis
• “The Latin tag, lex orandi, lex credendi…may be construed in two
ways. The more usual way makes the rule of prayer the norm for
belief: what is prayed indicates what may and must be believed.
But from the grammatical point of view it is equally possible to
reverse the subject and the predicate and so take the tag as
meaning that the rule of faith is the norm for prayer: what must
be believed governs what may and should be prayed. The
linguistic ambiguity of the Latin tag corresponds to a material
interplay which in fact takes place between worship and doctrine
in Christian practice: worship influences doctrine, and doctrine
worship.”
[Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and
Life. A Systematic Theology (London: Epworth Press; New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980) 218; emphasis added.]

6. A Contemporary Extension
with Spiritual Implications
↕ Lex orandi – the law/rule of praying
↕ Lex credendi – the law/rule of believing
↕ Lex vivendi – the law/rule of living
↕ Lex agendi – the law/rule of ethics

7. Biblical/Theological Grounding of
Christian Spiritual Praxis
1 Timothy 2:1-10
Instructions on Worship
1 I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and
thanksgiving be made for everyone — 2for kings and all those in authority,
that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. 3 This is
good, and pleases God our Savior, 4 who wants all men to be saved and to
come to a knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God and one mediator
between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom
for all men—the testimony given in its proper time. 7And for this purpose I
was appointed a herald and an apostle—I am telling the truth, I am not
lying—and a teacher of the true faith to the Gentiles.
8 I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer, without anger or
disputing.
9I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with
braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, 10 but with good deeds,
appropriate for women who profess to worship God.

8. NT Roots of Contemporary Xtn
Concepts of ‘Spirituality’
•“To be united to Christ is to enter
into the sphere of the spirit
(pneuma)” [1 Cor. 6:17]
•“Faith in the Lord is from and in
the Spirit” [1 Cor. 2:10f]

9. With important caveats…
• Latin spiritualitas attempts to translate Greek pneuma;
• Not contrasted with the material or bodily (as with Greek
soma; Latin term corpus);
• The soma is, in Paul’s use, an accomplice in sin, but it also
is the carrier of redemption; it is neither inherently good
nor bad
• The sarx, the human being corrupted in the flesh by sin,
does not participate in redemption
• It is contrasted with all that is opposed to the Spirit of God –
Greek, sarx; Latin, caro
• The opposition of the pneuma with the soma is at the core
of many Gnostic teachings

10. Some Contemporary
Definitions of ‘Spirituality’
• Bernard McGinn: “Christian spirituality is the lived experience of Christian
belief in both its general and more specialized forms ... It is possible to
distinguish spirituality from doctrine in that it concentrates not on faith
itself, but on the reaction that faith arouses in religious consciousness and
practice. It can likewise be distinguished from Christian ethics in that it
treats not all human actions in their relation to God, but those acts in which
the relation to God is immediate and explicit.”
• Sandra Schneiders: “…the experience of consciously striving to integrate
one’s life in terms not of isolation and self-absorption but of self-
transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives.”

11. Some Definitions Proposed by
Anglican Scholars
• Urban T. Holmes, III: Spirituality is “(1) a human capacity for
relationships (2) with that which transcends sense phenomena; this
relationship (3) is perceived by the subject as and expanded or
heightened consciousness independent of the subject’s efforts, is (4)
given substance in the historical setting, and (5) exhibits itself in
creative action in the world.”
• Arthur Holder: “…the lived experience of Christian faith and
discipleship”
• Elizabeth Drescher: “…the concrete forms of Christian practice as they
are undertaken personally, in community, and in the world”

12. Incarnational Practice
• Pierre Bourdieu: Practice is a “dialectic of the opus operatum [the finished
work] and the modus operandi [the process of working]; of the objectified
products and the incorporated products of historical practice; of
structures and habitus.”
• Habitus: “…a system of lasting, transposable dispositions
which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a
matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the
achievement of infinitely diversified tasks, thanks to analogical transfers
of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems, thanks
to the unceasing corrections of the results obtained, dialectically
produced by those results…”

13. Xtn Spirituality as
Incarnational Habitus
• Practice can be understood as “cognitive doing” or
“embodied knowing” whereby, in Christian terms, we
enact our understanding of fundamental human
relatedness with God through the actions of
prayer, meditation, contemplation, fasting, worship, wi
tness, service, etc., and these, in turn, institute—
structure—our knowledge of God.
• BCP: Be present, be present, O Jesus, our great High
Priest, as you were present with your disciples, and be
known to us in the breaking of bread; who live and
reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and for
ever. Amen.

14. Xtn Spirituality in Relation to Other
Religious and Secular Spiritualities
• Understanding spiritualities as “practices” in the more complicated sense
of habitus insists that within every spiritual practice is a theology or
ideology that is communicating itself through action, enacting itself in the
body, mind, and community of the practitioner
• ‘Woo Woo’ / New Age / Grass Roots spiritualities, e.g., have identifiable
ideological groundings:
• Eshana: “‘Woo woo’ refers to the commercialized, self-focused
transformational workshopping craze which has become associated with the
‘New Age.’ ‘True woo woo,’ on the other hand, is the use of similar
depth/spiritual techniques for the development of psychological and ecological
wholeness.”
[Eshana (Elizabeth Bragg), “Towards Ecological Self: Deep Ecology Meets Constructionist Self-Theory, Journal of
Environmental Psychology, 16, quoted in Christopher Hugh Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative
Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture (New York: Continuum, 2006), 70.]
• Robert K. C. Forman: “Grassroots Spirituality involves a vaguely pantheistic
ultimate value that is indwelling, sometimes bodily, as the deepest self and is
accessed through not-strictly-rational means of self transformation and group
process that becomes the holistic organization for all of life.”
[Grassroots Spirituality: What is it? Why is it? And where is it going? (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic Press, 2004), 51]

15. What’s up with Woo-Woo and
Why does it matter to Christians?
• “The salvation Jesus offered was the same as
Buddha’s: release from suffering and a path to
spiritual freedom, joy, closeness to God. In that
light, the real Jesus is as available today as he ever
was, perhaps more so. Instead of relying on faith
alone, we can go beyond worship to find a body of
teachings consistent with the world’s wisdom
traditions, a corroboration in Christian terms that
higher consciousness is real and open to all.”
Deepak Chopra, The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore (New York: Harmony
Books, 2008), 139.

16. On Resurrection of the
Body of Christ
• “With the resurrection a flesh-and-blood man
was transformed into completely divine
substance—the Holy Spirit. There is no need,
then, to use history to find the real Jesus.
Spirituality is about truths that cannot be
understood from a strictly rational
perspective. Because the Holy Spirit is
transcendent, Jesus must be found not on
earth, but in the Kingdom of God. He is a fact
of the soul, not of archaeology.” [The Third Jesus, 136]

17. On Evil
• “Only someone who knows the reality beyond good and
evil can know me. I am in all things without division. This
Satan wants you to believe that he rules in the place where
I am not. But even he is made of God.”
• “Only someone who can see the demons as part of God is
free. Good and evil dissolve. The veil drops away, and all
you see is divine light—inside, outside, everywhere. The
sight of a rotting corpse becomes as blessed as a rainbow.
There is no reality but the light, and you are that light. Your
soul is the world’s soul. In your resurrection will be the
resurrection of the world.”
Deepak Chopra, Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 220-221.

18. Contemporary Spirituality
Questions for Ministers
• What questions do woo woo/new age
spiritualities pose to Christianity? To
Anglicanism?
• What questions do Christianity, in general, and
Anglicanism, in particular, pose to woo
woo/new age spiritualities?