The Contemplative Christian

Explore the healer's path through spiritual assessment, ignition discernment, pastoral inquiry, and healing prayer, social entrepreneurship, communication, path-finding, and bridge building, underscoring personal transformation as a catalyst for world change.

Promote wholeness and healing in self and creation through the healers' path, guided by contemplation, discernment, and joy. Rooted in theology and ethics, it centers love of God and neighbor.

Explore healing prayer foundations and discernment methods, using SHIP and Seven Pillars to assess people and places. Build compassionate leadership, cross-cultural outreach, and creation care for hopeful, peaceful service.

Discern spirits with Loyola's healthy/unhealthy and consolation/desolation grid, identifying what helps or hinders God's will, and advance the gifts of the Spirit through the SHIP framework.

Explore how faith functions as a special skill, blending biblical insight with practical ministry. Learn to recognize and develop diverse gifts, from language sensitivity to interpersonal leadership, guided by love.

Practice non-duplication by partnering with existing efforts, sharing credit, and avoiding harm, while embracing feedback, trusting in God, and building bridges for world healing.

Explore historical and contemporary models of healing and nonviolence, from Jesus’s response to othering and healing to Maria Montessori’s critique of one-size-fits-all education and the call for healthy heterodoxy.

Highlight Bonhoeffer's stand against Hitler and courage of Christians in Nazi Germany as models of costly grace and nonviolent resistance. Encourage thinking beyond dominant culture as a guide to justice.

Explore how contemplative Christian leaders unite spirituality, psychology, and social action to uplift the vulnerable through kinship and a circle of compassion.

Adopt a decision-making method rooted in what Jesus did: help others, not judge, while considering your hero’s example as you become the next face of the discipline.

Cultivate self-awareness to manage spiritual power and avoid harm in daily life, recognizing Jesus at work in you while practicing meekness and responsible action.

Gather honest feedback to understand who you are and how others see your ministry, using self-knowledge questions, anonymous surveys, and the Spiritual-Holistic Inquiry Process.

Compare Tai chi's gentle, mindful movement and self-guiding class with Aikido's harmony, non-resistance, and teacher-led beginner mentorship, illustrating how different approaches shape learning and character.

The beginner mind unlocks overlooked possibilities by valuing beginners, while the tea ceremony shows that simple practice, mastered over a lifetime, invites presence and loving kindness.

Adopt a beginner mind by gradually warming to new ideas, using controlled momentum with mastery to prevent ignition and hurt.

The lecture offers resources that foster basic biblical literacy in a fun, healing format, introducing creation, the Beatitudes, the Good Samaritan, Noah, and David and Goliath to nurture resilient faith.

Explore radical hospitality in worship, as a church welcomes the marginalized with openness over rules. A candle moment from Advent prompts imagining how to welcome visitors from Mars online.

Honor the beginner by keeping an open heart, inviting and supporting them through barriers to entry. Trust in the Holy Spirit and serve beginners with encouragement and gentle guidance.

Explore how tolerance can enable peace yet risk othering, and learn to move beyond tolerance by examining internal landscapes, fears, and cravings for power, cultivating a circle of compassion.

Assess how extremism and coerced conversion arise from closed mindsets, and how the Holy Spirit opens four gospels to move beyond tolerance toward compassionate bridge-building.

Explore willful blindness and the pain of being tolerated, as personal stories of poverty challenge assumed narratives and reveal how difficult it is to change minds.

Practice agape by offering self-giving, no-strings-attached love to show the face of God, while recognizing suicide warning signs, debunking myths, and promoting open, compassionate help.

Move beyond tolerance by expanding the circle of compassion to include difficult or dangerous others, guided by loving your neighbor as yourself and practicing self-care with divine help.

Explore how creation care blends Christian stewardship with practical green design, from biblical calls to action to local green building stories and historical environmental movements.

Explore how oceans and the water supply sustain life, and enact creation care through actions—reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle, rethink, re-envision, refrain—guided by prayer and advocacy.

Explore creation care through simple acts that protect the environment, empower communities, and advance green design for a joyful, sustainable future.

Practice dialogue as a two-way dance in one-on-one, conversation, stage, and paper. Choose words that are true, loving, and useful, avoid labeling people, and pause before responding.

Practice active listening, read nonverbal cues across cultures, and stay engaged by asking clarifying questions and recognizing context to communicate clearly and respectfully.

Communicate with the suffering by practicing solidarity, concern, and honesty, and avoiding theologizing, minimizing, and identifying to offer a healing presence.

Explore formal communication on the stage or screen as a dialogue, focusing on convening, connecting, conveying, and closing to engage audiences through target analysis and hope.

Examine the four Cs of presentation—Convene, Connect, Convey and Close—and learn to communicate with suffering, anchored in scriptural wisdom about the power of speech.