The Way of God

Every minister within the Order of Jacob's Well is first and foremost a disciple of our Lord Jesus Christ.

That discipleship has to be maintained throughout their lives through prayer, worship and the study of Scripture, the driving force being the need to deepen their own relationship with God.

As a result of that discipleship, the Jacob's Well minister continues his or her own walk through life but in a particular way, the way of God.

The way of God is the way of weakness. The great news of the Gospel is that God became small and vulnerable and hence bore fruit among his people. Jesus did not cling to his divine power but became like us, bringing new life to others through his ultimate vulnerability.

At our re-birth the divine lover comes to impregnate our spirits with his disposition to deity in the hope that our souls will be evangelized by him into becoming vehicles for the display of his divine splendour. That disposition to deity is nothing for us to rely on, rather it is something that belongs to him for his use alone. The fruit of a life spent in spiritual poverty and apparent failure is eternal life with him.

The central message of the Christian faith is this, 'My life for yours'. To interpret this ideal in ways which lead to total availability to those we pastor is to miss the mechanism through which God really works in his love.

Loving others fruitfully and loving God are not two separate issues. Fruitful and healing love for others only grows out of our relationship with God. The depth of this relationship is entirely dependant on how much we are prepared to give up to him, and whether we have the will to allow ourselves to receive, both directly from him and through others.

The deeper we love God, the fuller he is able to love others through us.

The ministry temptation is to go on giving at any cost, believing that this was Christ. To long overmuch to be in ministry situations as Prayer Minister, pastor or leader, is usually a security of our own making, rather than a calling by God. It places us always in control and releases us from the prospect of personal fears.

As long as we only want to give and resist the thought of becoming receivers, we betray our desire to stay in control at all costs, remaining in the house of fear when we could spend a greater proportion of our daily time in the house of God.

Most of us live in this house of fear most of the time. It has become a natural and an obvious dwelling place in which to live, an acceptable basis on which to plan our daily lives and hang our minute-by-minute decision making.

But why are so many of us so terribly afraid, and why are fearless people such a rarity?

The very existence in such quantity of this fear of revealing the true self to God in love at the deepest levels presupposes that it must be of use to somebody. It is an active tool in the hand of the prince of this world, the only one whose interests would be completely served by a shortage of ‘Jesus vulnerability’ in the Church.

Fear is the opposite of worship and is the great enemy of intimacy. It makes us cling to each other, or run away from each other, but does not create deep, true and lasting intimacy.

Our search is to be Christ-like in that he alone is free enough from wounds to offer anyone else a fearless space. It is only in, and through, God that we can be faithful to each other, in ministry, friendship, marriage and community.

Such an intimate bondage with God, constantly husbanded by prayer, offers us a true home, free from fear of ourselves.

This spiritual experience shows us something often quite new in the Christian life, the absolute necessity of learning self-knowledge.

As ministers, we do not need to have committed a particular sin to have compassion towards those who have. Neither is it essential that we have suffered in any particular way to feel at one with, or share pain with, a sufferer. What matters is that we are aware of our own potential for evil.

In the wrong circumstances and with the wrong influences each one of us is capable of committing any and every kind of sin.

Self-knowledge, rather than experience and theological training, is the minister's qualification.

Our instinct is to try and solve people's problems for them, and we sometimes feel frustrated when we don't know how to. But that is not our job. They must solve their own problems or at least learn to cope with them in Christ.

Our job is to listen to people with great care and compassion, so self-knowledge is important. Without self-knowledge our ministry may all to easily be interpreted as intolerant, judgmental and condemning.

We hope that, through our listening, they learn to listen to themselves and to God, and discover within their own souls the strength and wisdom they need.

As ministers in the field of Pastoral care, our job is to help people to love and to understand themselves, the whole of their personhoods, the not-so-good bits as well as the holy pieces, and we do that by trying to love and understand them ourselves. Once they can love themselves as a whole, then they may begin to get all the different bits to work together with God's healing help and our prayers. When that truly happens, many physical, emotional and relationship problems can begin to improve.

We need to know the peace and acceptance of being in a secure home of intimacy with God, holding our own darkness to his light, before we are ever truly able to encourage others to go that way.

Self-knowledge teaches us the fullness of the Fall of Mankind and its dwelling within us. The absence of such knowledge leads to spiritual arrogance.

We are not completely holy and are not likely to be so in this life. Our Lord manifested holiness only because his disposition was Deity. His command to be perfect, because he is, leads only to despair. To be told to be what we never can be, to be set an ideal that we can never come anywhere near, plants only frustration and surrender to the status quo.

If he is indeed a regenerator, one who can put into us his own heredity, then his command begins to make sense.

Through this life-consuming healing process of sanctification, Christ imparts his inheritance into us, allowing his deity to affect our own fallen natures.

Christians, who have entered deeply into their own hearts, and found there that intimate home-place of encounter, come to the mysterious discovery that the intimacy of God's house excludes no one, but includes everyone.

They start to see that the home they have found in their innermost being is as wide as the whole of humanity, and it is in that realization that the heart, the Christ within, truly stretches out to surround them.

The candidate for the Ministry Licence of the Order of Jacob's Well is aware that their preparation for the Licence has not been a Course that in any way empowers its ministers to do anything.

The Church's Ministry of Healing and Wholeness, and therefore the Order, consists of those who wish, first and foremost, for their own love relationship with God to deepen. This is a function of vulnerability, not power.

Through this desire we hope that God will find us to be more open channels of his grace into a world that so needs the healing touch of his son, Jesus Christ.