CRM - Empowering Leaders

InnerCHANGE is a Contemplative Community in the World

Neither the missionary task nor the prophetic message should be allowed to replace the Lord God Himself, and walking humbly with Him.  We remind ourselves that we can do nothing apart from intimate relationship with God. Without that intimacy, we are driven to seek identity in task, and become harassed missionaries and cheerless, cynical prophets.

With so many unreached poor and so few missionaries who will live among them, it is easy to feel like five little loaves and two fish in the face of five thousand.  The contemplative current encourages us that He will multiply our lives as He sees fit.

We are fortunate in that the work itself naturally fosters intimacy with God.  Jeremiah 22:16 suggests that we know God more fully as we advocate for the poor.

Responsive Spirituality

This isn’t to say that knowing God and knowing about God are the same.  To be contemplative is not to be confused with knowing a lot of good theology.  In fact, what we know about God can often interfere with knowing God because it can lull us into a reflexive spirituality in which we know God into a rut and form rigid expectations of how He will behave.  Contemplative spirituality, in contrast, is a responsive spirituality in which we wait on God moment by moment.

Contemplative spirituality helps us stay tuned to the Spirit and avoid such relational miscommunications as celebrating the victorious Christ when He is at that moment grieving for the people of the city (Matthew 23:37).

Perspective from Pain

Many of us have been pressed to contemplation by pain.  Like Job, we have found that pain, our own or our neighbors’, cries out to be reckoned with.  Job cried out:

“Oh that my words were written!
Oh that they were inscribed in a book...
engraved in the rock forever.”
                                                       Job 19:23-24

Most InnerCHANGE staff have found journaling in God’s presence an outlet for pain that cannot be contained yet cannot be heard.

Disappointment, too, has driven us to seek God’s presence in the form of contemplative, and sometimes active prayer.  Unmet expectations of living and ministering among the poor have pushed us out of our theological paper houses. Left unsatisfied by the the shallow comfort of answers, we have developed a hunger for the comfort of God’s constant company.

Further, God has invited us into the contemplative life by giving us special glimpses of the Kingdom from the perspective of the poor.  All of us in InnerCHANGE, at one time or another, have walked streets and been startled by a powerful impulse to “remove shoes” in the deepest parts of our hearts because God has transformed the poverty landscape to holy ground.

Finally, like the apostle Paul, we have found that living simply has pressed us further in intimacy with God.  Paul wrote:

“But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish in order that I may gain Christ...”
                                                            Philippians 3:7-8