A Week at The Stillpoint

For new readers: The Compass is a newsletter on spiritual formation, and "The Ruins" is one of its recurring series. Every Wednesday it asks what the church was originally built to be — and what it might look like to build something that true again. Not nostalgia. Recovery.

I was sitting in a new room, a practice room on a nearby university campus. I was in high school and my first lesson with the only professional euphonium player west of the Mississippi was about to begin. My first musical teacher had taken me as far as he thought he could and some of what I had learned from him had worked. I had gone far enough to be able to play some of the exciting stuff and had gained some notice in my small neck of the woods. But this was different. The chance of a lifetime, I thought, to take lessons from a real professional who conducted a university band nearby.

To say that what happened next shocked me is way too much of an undestatement. This pro player had other plans. He took me back to the scales. Not fast ones that challenged fingering patterns. Slow ones. Notes held until breath ran out. Over and over. He wanted tone. he wanted embouchure.He banished speed and riffs from the room entirely.

After a few sessions, I had had enough. I complained. I wanted to know when he’d let me play something impressive. He said to be patient. “You will play those things,” he said. “You have the talent. But we need to start over and develop the foundational pieces that will support the kind of playing you are capable of performing.”

Fortunately, I made a good decision. I stayed with it and with him. Slowly the unglamorous work of building tone and musicality transformed me from a player of music to a musician. Over my four years of high school, I was selected to all-state and all-regional bands and, my senior year, I earned a place in an all-American band. And finally, I earned a scholarship to a school where I began preparing for a vocation of ministry. Heady stuff for a kid from a backwater school. But I already knew what had actually gotten me there. It wasn’t the exciting stuff. It was hours and hours of unglamorous practice that had turned a kid who could play flashy runs into a euphonium musician with real tone and technique.

I write The Compass to help you navigate the interior journey toward a deeper life with Jesus. There are lots of options available to you here: just keep showing up an read, or sign up for a free subscription to get The Compass in your email whenever I publish a new resource about the that deeper life. If you’d like to try the paid side of things, there’s a free trial waiting, no pressure, just a chance to see what a month looks like: a spiritual formation practice tool each month, a video teaching aid that expands it, and a live conversation to walk through it together. If you want to know what it means to become a Waymarker, you can read about it here. What ever works best, you can start here whenever you’re ready.

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Unfortunately, when I turned toward Christian ministry there were no practice rooms that resembled that euphonium practice room. Instead, I was exposed, like most men and women preparing to enter ministry, to a training regime of information and inspiration. Both are important and necessary. Neither have the capacity to build spiritual growth and turn that growth into deep interior transformation. So, I brought an unformed life into ministry. I had experienced salvation through grace. I had sensed a calling to ministry. Good teachers had opened my mind and poured lots of good information into it: church history, theology, scripture, worldviews. All critically important. Others had handed me leadership skills about how to lead and manage a growing organization. Others had even provided rich inspiration, those golden, God-is-right-here moments. But no one thought to put me in a practice room and give me the old practices that for years followers of Jesus had used to be transformed by God into the kind of person who lives life more and more under the influence of Jesus. Who can hold their calling in hard times when everything seems to be falling apart all around them. Or who can help others find and navigate the way to a deeper life with Jesus because they have found it and walked it themselves. So I brought an unformed human life into ministry and offered the only things I’d been handed back out again, information and inspiration. It took years before I understood why that wasn’t enough, and why so much of Western church life is mired in the ruins of shallow spirituality not capable of transforming a human life into the person God designed them to be.

This is what I mean when I call this Wednesday Compass series about spiritual formation on Substack “The Ruins.” We all can see that the church has suffered a genuine collapse in the West. When we pick through the rubble, we can see that much of the cause of the collapse has been the fact that formation went missing in much of the church. Some of that collapse wasn't neglect. Even today, in pockets of the church, these old practices have been labeled suspect, too close to eastern religion, an enemy of grace instead of a means of it. That is an error of judgment as these practices are embedded in the center of Christian theology, not imported from afar. And I don’t think you can rebuild rubble with better information or one more remarkable Sunday morning. It’s rebuilt by time spent by leaders in unremarkable practice rooms, practice by practice, the same ways scales build musicians.

My own path into these transformative practices hasn’t been a straight one. The journey really began about twenty-five years ago. I started experimenting with silence and solitude. I began reading scripture differently, slowly. I found rhythms and patterns that worked for me. And I’ve made real progress. I’ve also slipped backward more times than I can count. Pressures and the parts of me still resisting transformation pushed me out of practice rooms. But the invitation kept coming from the master life, Jesus: Come away with me for a while and rest. Abide. Be with me.

This is why I leapt at the opportunity to turn our Stillpoint home into an Oasis Rest retreat site. Oasis Rest has a global mission built on the simple idea that leaders can be transformed, but for that transformation to occur, a particular environment is needed. The ingredients are not complicated. Rest for weary leaders who have gone too long without rest for their souls. Encouragement, not judgment. Emotional safety to explore the deep stuff within. And portable transformational practices that leaders can take back home to transform the spaces where they live and work. Different Oasis Rest sites hold different kinds of practice. There is one that will offer the practices your soul and community needs. Here, in the mountains near Glacier, we hold the contemplative ones and take advantage of the stunning beauty and silence all around us. You get a delicious chance to be still. Trails abound for prayer walks and pondering. Scripture gets read the old way, slowly. Tea at ten to sit with others for quiet conversation while you soak up beauty all around you. Built into all of these practices is our gift of ears that we offer as leaders and leadership couples name their wounds, identify the frayed places created in a marriage by years in ministry, and wonder if the calling is still theirs.

Sitting here at a window in my office, looking out at Longfellow Peak towering ten thousand feet in the air a few miles from me in Glacier Park, it feels more and more like I’m in that university practice room, being invited to play another scale, holding the tone for longer than I think possible. Some days and weeks I struggle, but that’s alright. I’m just still practicing.

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.