For the past five years, I’ve taught principles and practices that give shape to the Christian ministry of spiritual direction. Spiritual direction is a historic ministry of the Christian church where one person (sometimes called a spiritual director) walks alongside a sister or brother in Christ (sometimes called the directee) as they seek to discern God’s presence and activity in their life. Spiritual direction is a process of prayerful conversation. This ministry requires spiritual maturity on the part of the director and a call to spiritual work on the part of the directee. It involves compassionate listening, the gift of attention, discernment, good and God-honoring questions, and an openness to God’s leading. God is, in the end, the true spiritual director.

My training in the ministry of spiritual direction began in 2013. I received a certification in spiritual direction in 2015. That means I have been practicing this mode of ministry for over a decade. When I began work at Baylor’s Truett Seminary, I became a supervisor in our Spiritual Direction Training Program. This role helped me think about my experiences as a spiritual director in a new way, from the viewpoint of a teacher, not only that of a practitioner.

As I’ve talked with others who are learning this mode of ministry, I’ve arrived at a conversational model for spiritual direction. This model is based on my approach and experiences. When someone meets with me for spiritual direction, we 1) begin with courtesy and friendliness, 2) transition to prayer, 3) seek God during a process of discernment, 4) clarify God’s communication in light of what has been shared, 5) discern how to pray in response, 6) pray, and 7) send forth with blessing and encouragement.

The spiritual director and the directee each take on their respective roles in undertaking shared spiritual work. And the process itself can take the shape of a funnel.

Above, you’ll notice the spiritual director on the left and the directee on the right. In between is the conversation that will be shared. The spheres represent points of focus or topics of conversation, matters that are brought forth for discernment.

In offering the ministry of spiritual direction, the director assumes a compassionate, loving, and prayerful presence. They are a spiritually mature person who loves God, and they desire to see others grow in intimacy with God. They do not bring an agenda. In so far as they direct, they seek to maintain attention on God. The director seeks to pay attention to God. The director also hopes the directee will be attentive to God, and through listening, noticing, and good questions, they seek to help the directee do just that.

The directee brings their experiences. These experiences may concern people, thoughts, feelings, or stories that seem significant to them, and could be of significance in their relationship to God. As a person begins direction, many experiences may seem to be relevant at any given time, or none at all. The directee may begin with what is most fresh on their mind. But as they learn to be attentive to God, it may be that they become more clear on which aspects of their experiences in life are in most need of tending in the light of God’s love and care. In the illustration above, there are five spheres, representing five possibilities. Some directees may bring more than five possibilities, some less. And some, on certain occasions, may bring just one.

The director invites the directee into a time of prayer. This time of prayer could include a reading from Scripture, a moment to be still, or a period of silence. During this time of prayer, the directee is invited to seek God. They may notice an experience they have brought arises and seems to require attention. They may sense that God is directing their recollections and thoughts. They may not be sure. It may begin as a suspicion this experience or set of experiences could be the thing God desires for them to consider. Discovery may not occur until they begin. As the directee tells of what they perceive, the director listens patiently and compassionately, interceding for their sister or brother and attending to the Holy Spirit.

As the directee unfolds their experience, they attempt to discern exactly how, and exactly what, God is up to in their lives. They share their story. They seek God. They pick up on Spirit-issued invitations. They make spiritual connections, growing in knowledge of God and in knowledge of self. They consider how they are living, and how they are being called to live. They may be moved to confess sin or practice repentance. They may feel unburdened as they share struggles. They may find that God loves them more than they suspected. They may sense that they are being instructed to take action as God’s agent.

These discoveries take place while in the presence of the spiritual director. The spiritual director helps by praying, listening, by combining the two as prayerful listening, by noticing what seems significant, by asking questions that invite deeper reflection, and by offering the ministry of encouragement.

Both directee and director seek to discern the presence and activity of God.

After this period of sharing, seeking, contemplation and connection, there comes a moment of discernment. The director asks the directee to try and identify God’s invitation. The directee, having articulated their sense of God’s movements, prayerfully considers their response. They may feel called to do something. They may see a need for transformation in character. They may need to open themselves to God’s grace. They might not know exactly what God wants them to do, be, or receive, but they may know what to hang on to and continue praying about. I call these “ongoing matters for discernment.”

The spiritual director then creates space for intercessory prayer. They ask, “In light of what you are sensing, how can we pray?” The “we” is important here. The director may offer the prayer. The directee may offer the prayer. Both are praying together about the invitation the directee has discerned. As a spiritual director, I’m glad to be an intercessor. But sometimes, the most helpful thing is to invite the directee to pray with their own words.

The directee then enters the shared space for intercessory prayer. Director and directee address God. When the spiritual direction conversation concludes, the directee seeks to live in response to God, to proceed faithfully in light of the encounter.

Spiritual direction, like all Christian ministry, depends on the gracious movement of God. Forms are tools. People are participants. Growth is God’s.

Playlist is here on Tidal.

I spend a lot of my time around preachers and teachers, people entering the fray week after week offering sermons and talks to congregants and parishioners, members of the public, saints and sinners, together seeking to make sense of it all.

Claims are made, arguments are formed, stories told, illustrations tendered, questions raised, answers given, each in search of the truth about existence, meaning, life, and everything.

Some of these talks are good. Too many are weak. But the effort is made.

And it should be made, not only because the preacher or teacher may have something to say. People have a longing to hear, reason, wrestle, question, think, and apply what makes sense. We’re all seeking wisdom. Step in the box. Learn to discern between a ball and a strike. Learn how to pick out a pitch worth the chance. Learn which pitches to let whiz past. When a good pitch presents itself, take a swing.

You might hit a slow dribbler to first. You might fly out to the catcher. You could get fooled on the curve and hit a chopper to short. You could even take a mighty swing and, whoosh, miss.

Even a failed attempt can lead to gain, if you learn from the experience. That first missed swing has a name. We call it “strike one.” Step back in. Take another swing.

If you stand in there, keep your eye on the ball, time it right, and everything comes together at just the right moment, a liner might find a gap between the chalk populated only by green grass. If it’s rolling, you’re running. Or, if you connect on the sweet spot, crack, that ball might carry over the wall. Round the bases. Touch’em all.

Fear of criticism, social media backlash, the appearance of looking foolish, or the possibility an argument will fall flat keeps too many from taking the bat off their shoulder or stepping into the box at all. Don’t quiver and qualify and then go quiet. Instead, form convictions and make claims. Reason calmly. Argue boldly.

We’re here to take swings. We’re here to search for meaning, divine right from wrong, distinguish good from evil, develop a moral vision, answer ultimate questions, and build a life based on conviction. That’s what it means to be human. Once we arrive upon solid answers, we offer them up. They’ve helped us. They might help someone else. Pass wisdom along. Wisdom is the kind of thing that increases in value the more it is shared.

If we encounter others on an identical quest, we may help one another. Dialogue can sharpen arguments, solidifying the footing. Better to know you stand on a shoddy foundation before a crisis comes. Socrates exposed the weaknesses in arguments, and for that, he is remembered as one of the greatest and wisest philosophers who walked the earth. When what’s underfoot is discovered to be sandy or shaky, you can continue the search for bedrock elsewhere.

It’s tough to learn how to take a good swing if you have never taken the risk of committing a few bad ones. Get in the box. When a good pitch presents itself, turn it around with a good swing. Encourage others to do the same.

I serve in higher education, where most of the people around me know a whole lot about a few things within a narrow field. They are specialists. It is very good to have specialists. It is even better when specialists talk to other specialists across specialities. Occasionally these conversations yield fresh insight that breaks new ground, all because of a profound connection.

Yet, generalists can be helpful, too.

Last week I heard someone bemoan the lack of generalists in the academy, people publishing in multiple fields across multiple disciplines, offering grand theories of everything in the study of politics, economics, and social science. This same pundit said scholars who were generalists did exist in a previous age (a few decades ago), but cannot exist in today’s academy.

I’m skeptical about that claim. I think someone who is intellectually curious and prolific enough can roam wherever they would like, though I do agree that the incentives run in the other direction. It is good to have generalists, so long as they talk to specialists and glean enough deep knowledge to then put pieces together in a way that hangs together, that makes sense.

(An aside: I don’t know how much better off we’d be, if at all, if generalists talked to other generalists about generalities, because if that’s all they did, their theories would never become comprehensive nor coherent or deep and detailed enough to ultimately do anyone any good.)

The remark about specialists and generalists did lead me to think about wisdom and where it comes from. Wisdom is not less than abiding by a designated set of moral rules, but certainly it is much more. Wisdom is taking the right course of action in the vast majority of life’s situations where the moral rules do not clearly apply. A wise person may have some specialized knowledge. But the sage goes beyond specialized knowledge, arriving at a general set of principles and practices encompassing a number of different fields of endeavor, even all of life.

I thought of examples of a wise person. This then led me to think of the office of pastor. Then, thinking beyond the pastor, I thought of the congregation, and congregants. A Christian minister, or a Christian congregant, has some specialized knowledge, each according to the areas of mastery. Pastors, hopefully, bring forth wisdom from the Scriptures, and plumbers, hopefully, can correctly install pipe.

But Christians in any field will also possess general knowledge about how the world works, not just specialized knowledge applicable to their profession. The Bible contains a great deal of information about politics, social dynamics, morality and ethics, and more. The Scriptures tell a story that touches on various aspects of what it means to be human, as well as what it means to be in relationship to the divine. If you read the Bible, or regularly hear it preached and taught, you’ll glean a great deal of generalized wisdom about how the world works. And if you are part of a community of wisdom, you’ll talk across specialities and gain a greater overall picture of how human beings can best move forward in view of a comprehensive approach to reality.

As a Christian person, there are incentives to being a generalist. A generalist can connect with a broader range of people and address a broad range of human problems. You don’t let go of your specialities while doing so. You also don’t hoard all of your treasures and keep them to yourself. You share them, not to increase your status, but to serve the community. You build everyone else up in knowledge. You love your neighbor as yourself. You give witness to God, who is the source of all knowledge.

We live in a day and age in which people chafe against grand claims and sweeping narratives. But even the claim that there is no big story, no all-encompassing truth, is itself a story. We may be more comfortable with specialists, because first, few of us are equipped to argue with them. We can live and let live. And second, they have a narrowly defined lane which we may seldom enter.

Generalists are more dangerous. Their ideas challenge us all. It’s why Christian people who tell their story boldly yet humbly have often found themselves getting into trouble.

We need generalists. In some respects, generalists will be shown to be wrong, usually by specialists. But generalists also shift the ground, change the frame, help us to see things we may have missed, help us to arrive at new conceptions that can move us forward.

Let’s continue to equip and encourage specialists. But let’s have more generalists.

Alan Jacobs, in a recent edition of his newsletter, quotes Oscar Wilde on choosing what to read (and what to recommend):

Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes:

1. Books to read, such as Cicero’s Letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, St. Simon’s Memoirs, Mommsen, and (till we get a better one) Grote’s History of Greece.
2. Books to re-read, such as Plato and Keats: in the sphere of poetry, the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants.
3. Books not to read at all, such as Thomson’s Seasons, Rogers’s Italy, Paley’s Evidences, all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, Butler’s Analogy, Grant’s Aristotle, Hume’s England, Lewes’s History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything.

The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.

Pall Mall Gazette (1886)

I am occasionally asked for reading recommendations, and I tend to share what I have read, or what I have seen, or what I am confident rests along the lines of interest of the inquirer. And I occasionally have people ask me if a book is worth reading. That is an entirely different question. When that is the question, more often than not I answer, “no.”

Ecclesiastes 12:12 reads, in part, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.” That verse came up repeatedly during my days in seminary, and I think of it from time to time. There are more books in print than any one person would every have time to read. More and more books are published each day. Not every concern that rises to the level of public debate is worth addressing. Not every question is worth the time and effort it would take to research. While it is delightful to learn new things and to explore new frontiers, conceding that others have more knowledge in a given area and admitting that you do not know is perfectly okay. Some books are not ours to read; some topics are not ours to master.

My advice to aspiring readers is to ask those who are well read what they are reading, to build lists, and to diligently and patiently chase authors and interests. I’ll add an admonition to pray and bring to one’s reading a faith that God is with us in our studies. We do not always appoint or choose our influences, rather, they find and grip us. This can be interpreted as a sign of divine providence. I have often heard it said, or testified, that the right books seem to find us at the right time. (Do the wrong books ever find us at the right time, or at the wrong time? Lord only knows how often we’ve been spared!)

We should not put aside our responsibility to seek faithfulness, to be discerning and discriminating with regard to what is ours to read and what is ours to set aside. We should also seek wisdom, and choose reading material that is timely and profitable for the season of life in which we find ourselves, or the line of inquiry that has been appointed for us to pursue. We should also choose that which is true and edifying, rather than trash. More reasons to be prayerful, all. In all things, desire that the Lord directs your steps.

We take one ride on this rock we call Earth. If you’re going to spend time with books, think before you read.