Between the Mountaintop and the Dry Valley
Rimes McElveen
Like most people who go off to college to live in a new environment with new people, I had a lot of “first-time experiences.” A few of them were not so wholesome. However, one of the many “firsts” was my first immersive Christian “small group” experience. There was a Tuesday night men’s Bible study group that met on my sophomore dormitory hall. It was started by a couple of guys I knew fairly well who attended the Fellowship of Christian Athletes group on campus, with which I was somewhat involved. After the Bible study had been going on for quite a while, I developed a bit of a chip on my shoulder because they had not invited me to be involved. I knew they knew I considered myself a Christian, at least I would have self-identified as a Christian, despite not living a particularly devout lifestyle. At the time, in my own spiritual arrogance, I saw their failure to include or even invite me as a perfect example of “Christian exclusivity,” and I took on a touch of self-righteousness to say the least, in judging them for having judged me unworthy of their small-group fellowship.
Ironically, months after the group had formed, in a completely unrelated set of (spring break) circumstances, I experienced an incredibly holy moment in my life, and I made a pact with God that if anyone ever invited me to participate in the group, I would swallow my pride and participate in humility and gratitude. The night I returned from that momentous spring break experience in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, while preparing for the upcoming week, in walked my next-door neighbor from just down the hall. Bernie came into my room, closed my dorm room door behind himself, and sat down on my bed. He sort of mumbled a mild greeting and a few other things, and then told me he was leading the Bible study that Tuesday night, and said he would appreciate it if I would join them. I said I appreciated him inviting me, and that I would be there. He nodded, stood up, and walked out of the room. It was one of the oddest and unnatural exchanges Bernie and I have ever shared. It turned out to be a bit supernatural, or at least Providential. To this day, there is nothing anyone can do or say that will convince me it was not God’s loving hand that reached out to me that night through my friend Bernie’s simple invitation. It was the most peculiar interaction we had ever had. It was as if he was literally directed, Old Testament Jonah-style, to come and invite me to join the fold, despite not really wanting to do so of his own accord.
Over the course of the next 10 weeks, we went through Blackaby and King’s, Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing God’s Will. I grew by leaps and bounds in my Christian faith and in my friendship with the men in that group. To this day, I speak to two or more of those guys at least once every other week. But the six weeks after we finished that small group experience were spiritually dry as a bone. I didn’t maintain much of a consistent prayer life, absent the small-group accountability, and the rhythm of the book/study guide that held our spiritual hands and led us in The Way. Shortly thereafter, I experienced another “first,” my first spiritual letdown and emotional plateau. I longed for Christian community and accountability, conversation with fellow strugglers, and the keen insights and rich wisdom from Christians farther down life’s path. I prayed for the self-discipline and consistency I believed I needed to continue to grow and mature in my own emerging sense of self as a newly committed disciple of Jesus. Yet I often found myself flailing about and struggling to find any consistency or devotion. At least it seemed paltry compared to the season of spiritual flourishing I had just passed through.
Over the years, I have participated in scads of small groups as a leader, or a participant, or both. I have weathered nearly as many seasons of spiritual dryness and complacency, though the two are not always related. Every single time I have participated in a small group, I have grown. Not all have been mountain-top experiences, nor should anyone expect small-groups to be mountain-top experiences. But there is always room to grow. That’s part of why now, nearly 20 years into my work as a collegiate minister, our organization continues to offer small-group formation experiences every semester. But a real mystery has remained: how best to support students, faculty, staff, family, friends, and myself, between (and during) those immersive communal, formational experiences, and curbing the more polarized cycle of spiritual mountain top and dry valley.
In our quest to address this mystery, our ministry is creating Plumbline, a Christian journaling app that incorporates scripture, tradition, reason, and experience in equal measure. I was inspired years ago by this passage in the Book of Hebrews, Chapter 8 that quotes Jeremiah 31:
The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they did not remain faithful to my covenant, and I turned away from them, declares the Lord. This is the covenant I will establish with the people of Israel and Judah after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.
But how in the 21st-Century-heck is it still happening? How is the Holy Spirit seeding faith and cultivating forgiveness in our lives? How is Jesus fulfilling his ministry of incarnate grace and perpetual reconciliation among us for two millennia now? What is ours to do in faithful response as co-laborers in the New Creation? How is God’s word being written in our minds and on our hearts? If we aren’t to remain dependent upon a priestly class of leaders to teach us the precepts and laws of God, how are we to discern it in our own hearts, minds, and souls? While I won’t pretend to understand the gravity of all these questions, or the further questions they point us towards, I do believe that there are clues all around us and within us, pointing towards the Author and Perfector of our faith. One such clue was given in 1968 by Paulo Freire, the Brazilian author and educator, who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In it, he articulates the critical importance of praxis - the perpetual cycle of acting in and upon the world, and then reflecting upon that action and its impact on the world and those around you. He emphasizes the importance of reflection because it opens up a space for wisdom, insight, and epiphany to emerge. That’s exactly why we are creating Plumbline, a journaling app that helps people protect time to reflect on their own life experiences and capture their reflections forever. And we have the Wesleyan Impact Partners and the Phygital Fellows to thank for helping make this dream a reality.