From Publicity to Intimacy

This slide is from a 4-pane powerpoint display that my friend Mike Ward passed on to me.  It lured me back to my psych 1&2 studies I took in uni to break the boredom of engineering modules (anyone remember the bending schedules?). The mysteries of the human soul, ah! I still think so many of us underrate the powerful role the "psuche" plays in our relational dynamics (i.e. In the overall success or failures of our LIVES!).

As Mike spoke to these slides, it was an "Aha!" moment for me. I love those moments. Simply put, this presentation illustrates the 4 levels of human relationship...from the closest ('intimate'), to the furthest in our sphere of community (‘public’). We like being in public meetings, such as church gatherings, where we can mingle with people in our 3 to 8 metre zone. We can go home and say with relief, “ I am part of a community”. Then we can enjoy developing social friends, and drawing each other into our 1 to 3 metre zone. We have barbeques and home groups for that sort of thing. But then we have closer conversations and sharing moments, one on one, and things become personal in the 0,3-1m zone. And, for a few such as children and spouses, comforters and counsellors, we are drawn into the most intimate of relationships.

Where does effective discipleship take place? Well, we could get hung up on exact distances from ‘a’ to ‘b’, but the truth is personal and intimate access is the harbinger of discipleship. Preaching and teaching doesn’t need the personal and intimate zones. God can get really close with anointed messages. But the discipleship that makes church an acts-experience, person to person, only takes place in the closer zones.
You can’t force a person from public- to personal/intimate space and expect anything other than harm. Mike called this “rape”, that being ‘forced intimacy’.

• When we insist on all members being part of a home group – i.e. going from public to social space in the church – without the grace of God drawing them in – it is a violation of the inside-out gospel that draws wounded people close to a warm-hearted Jesus.
• When we only reserve personal space for our fellow elders, thereby holding out the incentive for public and social members to find intimacy and personal identity by chasing the dream of becoming an elder, it is relational abuse.
• Or maybe we can fake intimacy with warm language, while keeping the unsuspecting brothers well outside of our true personal space.
• When we expect people to be vulnerable with us without us showing our shame or our weak leg, it is an illegitimate relationship, or something professional at best.
• When we crash counsel upon a saint for whom we have not wrestled and with whom we have not built and shared personal or intimate space, it is precarious at best.

It is these relational errors that so often oblige others to become ‘robots’ or ‘rebels’.

Where do we spend the most of our energy? For many pastors, it is in the big Sunday meeting. This is largely the public space. This is a sacred meeting undeniably, but unless the pastor is willing to go the painful route of opening up the table of his heart and the guts of his time to some for personal space, discipling will be stunted and the people will continue to lean upon public spaces and social gatherings. They will not become “telios” – mature and complete.

This also implies that   discipling occurs where these personal-space relationships exist. No-one can contrive them, nor presume them into being; nothing can be forced and produce the life of God. So, where a mature saint, a home group host, a deacon, a mother, a uni student, has this relationship, he or she is the discipler.  “Then they can train the younger women” (Titus 2:4). For all primary discipling to “hub” around one man (the senior pastor), or the pastors (plural), zones of belonging will be continually violated, and discipling will be ineffective (unless the church has 12 members or less, so to speak). Nothing could more stunt the gospel bearing fruit through discipleship than a man insisting that he is the psychological hub of all “significant relationships” (see my blog, "No Dominant Synapse", 15 March, below). 


How then can the Spirit blow where he pleases?

Undoubtedly, reformation starts with a man or woman, someone who brings the power of the gospel to a place and time. But, from that time on, as he or she preaches and lives and goes from house to house, he or she should have the same heart as Paul...

“ You are witnesses, and so is God, of how holy, righteous and blameless we were among you who believed. For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.” (1 Thessalonians 2:10–12)

Jesus, Son of God, knew the most effective way for the gospel to take root and spread all over the world was not to forsake the man for the crowds, but to invest his life and finest time to a few individuals. These days, success paradigms embedded in our hippocampus from an early age drag us incessantly towards crowded places and popular applause. But Bill Hybels’ confession in 2010 that Willow Creek had blessed pre-Christians but been of negligible help in developing “fully devoted followers of Christ” should show us the folly of shifting the focus from intimate Truth to sovereign Audience. One day, if we refuse to surrender our core ambitions to the broad path of the public space, we too might be able to say with Charles Spurgeon, “Here I am Lord, and the children thou hast given me”!


Thanks Mike


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