Your Spiritual IQ: Five Steps to Spiritual Growth

YOUR SPIRITUAL IQ

JOHN S. SAVAGE

ABINGDON PRESS

Nashville

YOUR SPIRITUAL IQ FIVE STEPS TO SPIRITUAL GROWTH

Copyright © 2010 by Abingdon Press

All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission can be addressed to Abingdon Press, P.O. Box 801, 201 Eighth Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37202-0801, or e-mailed to permissions@abingdonpress.com. Appendix worksheets may be reproduced and distributed with included copyright information.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Savage, John S.

Your spiritual IQ : five steps to spiritual growth / John S. Savage.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4267-0219-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Spiritual formation. I. Title.

BV4511.S37 2010

248—dc22

2009025850

All Scripture, unless otherwise noted, is from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

Scripture noted as NIV taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. All rights reserved throughout the world. Used by permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture quotations marked REB are taken from the Revised English Bible © Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press 1989.

Scripture quotations marked RSV are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Marcia from Poland from Kilian McDonnell from Swift, Lord, You Are Not (Collegeville, Minn.: Saint John's University Press, 2003) appears by permission of the publisher.

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19—10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To my wife, Joyce, with whom

I can dialogue about deeply spiritual things

Contents

Foreword

Step I: Know Your Own Story: Be a Witness

Step II: Pray Deeply: Dialogue with God

Step III: Simplify Your Desires: Learn to Meditate, Reflect, and Contemplate

Step IV: Face Your Challenges: Finding God in the Spiritual Desert Times

Step V: Expand Your Understanding: Learn, Find Meaning in Your Life, and Be in Mission for Others

A Brief Summary

Appendix: Tools to Develop a Personal Spiritual Development Plan .

Notes

Bibliography

Foreword

Jan, a fifty-year-old woman, sat across the table from me. We were in a restaurant and had a private booth with no one nearby. What I heard from her started my quest to try and understand how she became such a congruent, intelligent Christian. I have listened to hundreds of persons in my life—after all, that is both my passion and my calling. But something special happened in listening to Jan that I had not been aware of before.

She was able to articulate what she believed about God and Christ in such a profound way that if I had not already been a believer, I would certainly have considered becoming one. She was soft in her approach and personal in her demeanor. I was aware that she was in touch with the deep feelings that were within her because her tone of voice and the occasional tears in her eyes said just as much as any word she uttered. She was congruent and authentic. She could articulate her experiences both with God and with others. It was as if God were her closest friend and that her relationship was renewed daily.

When I asked her questions about how that relationship had developed, she told me story after story of how using prayer was essential in developing rapport with God. Her way of using prayer had started in her early childhood, but had mostly developed after midlife, particularly after a series of life events that caused her to doubt what she had been taught in her church. That shifting of faith time, a time I call desert time, came about as a result of an intense struggle about the nature of God. Jan began to alter some of her beliefs about God. Most of all, she changed how she saw herself and how she thought about herself. I would like to add that this shift of faith did not motivate her to move to another church. She has stayed faithful to her current church because it allows a variety of beliefs about God within its system.

These changes that occurred deep inside her manifested themselves in many ways. She changed her career from that of a business executive to a full-time teacher in a Christian organization.This offered her deep meaning, both because she could influence persons more directly about their faith and because she had the opportunity to return to school to get an advanced degree.

The above comments led me to another awareness of the intelligent Christian. Jan never stopped learning. Jan was the epitome of the person who was forever on the move to learn about the world, others, herself, and how God was in it all.

I took notes as fast I could so I could gather the essence of what I was hearing. Then another characteristic came to my attention that I should have already known but did not. The intelligent Christian has an identified life mission and can readily talk about it. Jan's mission was clear as a bell. She wanted to teach, but most of all she wanted to help people find the best relationship possible with God.

In the midst of this interview, a rather subtle and understated concept emerged as an important element in Jan's spiritual intelligence.Each of the experiences that she shared was laced with concepts of meaning. Phrases such as this meant to me or I had to find in the experience its deeper meaning became consistent throughout our conversation. Consequently, bringing meaning to life's events became one of the significant characteristics of Jan's spiritual intelligence.

As a result of interviewing this dedicated person and many others like her, I have found a set of useful and consistent factors in the highly developed spiritually intelligent person. Thus, this book is a reflection of two primary areas: first, the exploration of those findings; and second, how an individual or group of individuals can develop these characteristics.

Though Jan was one of the first persons I interviewed, what I learned from her and the others gave me the insight to write about what I learned. This book is the result of the expression of these persons of deep faith who live congruently, make statements of their faith, live their lives in the act of unending learning, and who have had to struggle with the meaning of life and all that it offers. In all of that spiritual developing, these persons have grown to become the kinds of people who are living out their Christian lives in the community, working on changing that community, and serving God in the many different aspects of her life.

This book would not have been possible without the help of the persons in a variety of religious systems who allowed me to interview them. They include persons who belong to the following churches: United Methodist, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Presbyterian, Southern Baptist, American Baptist, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Nazarene, Salvation Army, Quaker, The Uniting Church of Australia, and The United Church of Canada. I am deeply grateful to them all.

A Spiritual Jolt

About two years before this book was published I took part in a prayer vigil in a church that has a beautiful stained-glass window at the front of the worship area. There was a kneeler placed in front of the altar (Communion Table). The sanctuary had been dimmed to enhance the silence. I moved and knelt on the prayer bench and focused on the well-lighted stained-glass window of Jesus kneeling in the garden of Gethsemane. In a moment of meditation I imagined myself kneeling next to Jesus. I asked, Jesus, do you have a word for me? The response was startling, fast, and clear. Write, he said. This book is a response to that command.

An Overview

What I heard from the persons I interviewed was remarkable.Regardless of their denomination or faith orientation, I found the same qualities repeating themselves over and over. At first I thought it might be the questions I asked, but then I noticed that my questions were quite open-ended, allowing the respondents to go wherever they wanted in their answers. For example: What have been your most significant religious experiences, and when did they take place? Or What has most guided or influenced you to become the kind of Christian you are today? Because my interview style is to follow the agenda of the interviewee, I followed up their answers with more questions to get more in-depth information and insights.

I have divided this book into a foreword, five chapters, a brief summary, and a Personal Spiritual Development Plan, and notes with a select bibliography.

Here is an overview of this book.

Step I. Know your own story. This step covers the first of five predictable characteristics of the spiritually intelligent person.Another way of stating this is that such a person has the ability to be a witness to his or her own religious experience. Though knowing your own story is much more complex than this one statement, it is a key factor. After all, if persons do not have this skill, they would not be able to pass their faith to the next generation.

Step II. Pray deeply. The second characteristic is the skill of prayer. Each spiritually intelligent person has a profound prayer life. This step explores what that means and also introduces a variety of forms of prayer that can be used in the development of praying persons' relationship with God. It explores in detail how we communicate with God and also how God communicates with us.

Step III. Simplify your desires. In this step I will present what I learned from these persons' ability to meditate, reflect, and contemplate.This section introduces the important skills of silence and how to be still. A series of strategies will be presented to help the reader develop these spiritual characteristics.

Step IV. Face your challenges. The fourth spiritual intelligence is the willingness to be stripped down inside so that internal struggles are used to build character and understanding; or, in brief, it is the experience of entering spiritual desert time. This section of the book is devoted to understanding what happens when faith goes through major changes. Each of the persons I interviewed had these intense spiritual experiences, and they were able to use the desert times to discover and they greatly benefited from the intense relationship with God that occurred.Most people became very frightened of this stage of spiritual development and simply tried to avoid it. It is my intent to share in depth the things that are necessary to go through the desert time with meaningful persistence and purpose.

Step V. Expand your understanding. Within a very few minutes of the start of the interviews, the fifth of these characteristics became very obvious to me. In fact, most of the people started by telling me something that fell into this category. In its shortened version it is the ability to be in mission for others: To share one's self with the world both in and beyond the local church. Another way of stating this: To discover and act on your deepest passion for living. This chapter will give you strategies and processes to identify your deepest drives and emotions so that you may be able to act on them and thus find the deepest meaning for yourself by