A Week at The Stillpoint

For new readers: The Compass is a newsletter on spiritual formation, and “The Dust of the Rabbi“ is one of its recurring series. In the ancient world, a rabbi’s most devoted students followed so closely behind him that the dust of his walking settled on them. They wore it as a badge of belonging. This Monday series draws attention to Jesus. The Monday articles are written to express my love for Jesus and they hold a hope: that you, too, will be drawn into deeper communion with Jesus.

I was a “newbie” in ministry. A generous, more experienced pastor had offered to answer some questions I had about ministry. We had met at a cafe and were enjoying a cup of coffee while I asked some questions about things that were confusing me. As he responded, a woman sitting at the table next to us leaned over and asked, “What is it you do?”

Without missing a beat, he smiled and said smoothly, “I run a church.”

I liked this pastor. I appreciated his willingness to help me find my way. But something in that answer didn’t sit right with me. I remember thinking, “I’ll never say that!”

Years later, I sat in my office one Monday, depleted and on fumes from running a church. Funding the ministry had taken something out of me. Conflicts had been surprising me. Congregants were pointing out deficiencies in me. I had probably been on dangerously low levels of energy and resilience longer than I knew, but on that Monday, I could no longer avoid that reality.

That morning I sat at my desk. I was the only one in the building, but just in case, my office door was closed and locked. Just me, a desk, a chair, and a Bible. I picked it up and it fell open to Luke’s story of Jesus. I’m not sure if you’ll understand what I’m trying to explain, but I’m just going to tell you my experience as plainly as I can. As I started reading this old story about Jesus, written in the last half of the first century, something explosive began to happen inside of me. It demanded that I look more closely than I had before, and in some ways, it felt like I had never even read the story before. I’m not really exaggerating when I say it was like I was meeting someone for the first time. The more I read, the more I was hooked. I couldn’t put it down. I read it the way you might read a letter from someone you’ve desperately missed, over and over again. Years later, I still haven’t really put Luke down. If anything, the story has gotten more interesting to me, not less.

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Here’s what I know about most pastors and ministry leaders: we rarely quit believing in Jesus. We also never quit loving him, not in any deliberate deconstructing way. What actually happens is quieter, more common, and in some ways, more dangerous: the machinery of the church/ministry, the meetings, the never-ending needs of people who love us and drain us all at the same time, gets between us and the love of Jesus that called us into this life in the first place. We keep serving, but somewhere it became more difficult to maintain white-hot love for Jesus.

It intrigues me that Jesus knew about this reality that every ministry leader would face as they lived out their calling. He named it in a letter to a church in Revelation. He didn’t call them out for losing their faith, doctrine, practice, or skill. Instead, he said this: “you have lost the love you had at first” (Revelation 2:4). Return to it, he told them.

When I think of the words of the rabbi I had pledged to follow, I can see that this is what was happening to me as I sat at my desk that day I began to read the gospel of Luke once again: I was returning to the love I had at first.

That was a landmark moment for me. But I knew that I needed to take apart the ministry and leadership architecture I had built that made me more apt to excel at running a church than navigating the way to a deeper love of Jesus. I knew that if I didn’t tear it down to the studs, I’d land back at the same desk, with the same depleted heart, within a short period of time. So, when the church offered me a sabbatical, I took advantage of the chance, not to disappear from ministry, but to put in place a new rhythm and set of practices to make loving Jesus, not serving Jesus, the primary way I lived out my calling as a pastor and guide of a spiritual community.

As I began to live into this new way of ministry that asked not about size of platform but about whether love for Jesus was growing deeper, a dream started developing: what if other leaders, the ones who sat at a desk like the one I had sat at one Monday morning, depleted and exhausted, could be given the opportunity to fall back in love with the rabbi who had years ago said, “Come, follow me.” That dream turned into a missional relationship with Oasis Rest and the development of an Oasis retreat site at our northwest Montana home near Glacier National Park we call The Stillpoint.

I think about that café conversation often, and I think I understand my old friend a little better than I did back then. I don’t think he’d stopped loving Jesus. I think he’d just gotten so deep into running the thing that he found it easier to say what he did rather than why he did it. It was a natural reflex to say that what he did Sunday through Saturday was manage an organization, a ministry organization, but still an organization, than to say he had been falling in deeper love with the rabbi who had invited him to come and follow him.

This is part of why Oasis Rest exists, and why The Stillpoint is one of its retreat centers. Oasis Rest offers retreat sites in multiple places across the United States, Europe, and Central America, each one designed to give leaders room to breathe, heal, and re-enter the work of ministry and leadership with the relationship with Jesus back where it belongs as the reason why the ministry is done in the first place.

The Stillpoint, sitting in a bowl surrounded by mountains and a few miles from Glacier, is one of those sites, the one that the recovered pace of relationship taught my wife and me how to build. Hospitality and good food do some of the work. So does the stunning beauty. The ancient contemplative practices that help you slow down and sit silently with some questions about what ministry and leadership are doing to you also does some of the heavy lifting. They all work together to open the way to healing of wounds of ministry and life while building once again a deeper life with Jesus.

I think what I like most about what I’m doing now at The Stillpoint is I don’t hand you a program. Instead, I ask a a few honest questions, the kind that are easy to avoid during a normal week. I offer a few practices pilgrims have been using for centuries to stay on the path to a deeper life with Jesus. And I point out a few places inside of Glacier where beauty, quiet, hunger for God, and the Spirit can do what a desk and a Bible did for me that morning I started the long journey of returning to the the love for Jesus that called me into ministry years ago.

I know it’s working. A guest left four words in a review awhile back: We found Jesus here.

My first thought was of Luke’s Jesus story lying open on my desk, and I realized: different place, but same story.

My second thought followed immediately: mission accomplished!

Gratefully,

— Gene

If you want more information about how an Oasis Rest might be exactly what your soul, marriage, and ministry needs, you can find out more here. If you want to find out how you can reserve space at The Stillpoint in 2027, you can find out more here.