Bodywork and the Dominion Mandate

12 March 2024

For those of you who don’t know, I went back to school when I was 40. I had a Bachelor’s in Biblical Studies, a 4-year Th.M. in New Testament, and was working in my field. I expected to spend the rest of my life in the study and classroom, doing exegetical work more or less full-time. Going to massage therapy school…it was unexpected to say the least. But God has an infinite capacity to surprise.

I remain a theologian, and I want to be able to offer a theological account of what’s going on as I work with a client. By comparison with the exegete’s calling, stepping out to theologize about what happens on the massage table felt a lot like walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon with no net.

Several years into it, I have come to understand that my task is not all that different from any other field. We all plow the fertile fields of general revelation; we just don’t think of it that way. We think in terms of “It works” or “That’s just how you do it.” For example, as a teacher, I had no difficulty showing a new preacher how to set up a 3-point topical sermon. That’s certainly not a particularly biblical structure, but it’s hardly unbiblical. It’s craft knowledge, discovered by working in my calling and paying attention to what works and what does not. The 3-point topical outline just works, and it gives newbies a starting point. There are any number of other teacher tricks — use of slides and visual aids, intelligent use of assignments, questions, discussion, and so on — that are likewise discovered in the doing, and then passed from master to apprentice, down the generations. I learned many of them from my teachers, discovered some on my own, and I pass them on to my students in their turn.

The same dynamic of craft knowledge applies to everything. Scripture tells us much, and it is authoritative. But in most fields of endeavor, special revelation walks us right up to the edge of the field, legitimizing the inquiry — and there it leaves us to explore. Scripture teaches us that the physical creation is real, and good, and worthy of our study, and then leaves us to study it. It doesn’t tell us that the oak tree has several different kinds of tissue in it, nor that all those tissues are composed of complex molecules, nor that those molecules are composed of atoms, nor that the atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, nor that those particles break down into still more elemental particles, and so on. All that, we have to find out by examining the oak tree. Where Scripture speaks about the oak tree, all that it says is true, but it doesn’t speak to every question we have. For many questions, Scripture gives us warrant for the examination, but it doesn’t tell us what we’re going to find.

And so it is with my work. Scripture tells me that the body is real, that it can be ill or healthy. It does say some things about the factors involved (e.g., “A merry heart doeth good like medicine.”) But there’s a lot it doesn’t tell us about how to get it from illness to health: treating specific infectious diseases, setting bones, making medicines, correcting postural imbalances, releasing visceral restrictions. That, we have to learn by exploring the fertile fields of God’s general revelation in the world. And by consistent and careful examination, by honest experiment, we have learned a whole lot — and we have a lot more to learn.

Likewise, Scripture tells me that the spirit is real. So why wouldn’t the same kind of craft knowledge dynamic apply to working with the spirit? Of course we start with what God has given us, but then we learn by experience from there. (If that sounds hazardous, try not learning from experience, and see where that gets you!)

For pretty much any subject, I find the best way to begin is at the beginning, which is to say, in Genesis. The foundations of biblical anthropology are in those first few chapters. We first learn that we are designed to be God’s miniature self-portrait, His signature on the work of art that is the universe, which means we — male and female as a team — are responsible to cultivate and guard the world. Thus far the first chapter. In the second chapter, we discover our composition: God compounded man from dust and breath. Dust is the material part that returns to the earth when we die. Breath is the immaterial part, the spirit that returns to God who gave it. But crucially, in the expression “dust and breath,” what is meant by “and”? There’s a complex interaction between the physical and spiritual, and there’s a lot there we don’t really understand.

Our exploration of the dust and only take us so far. It is now beyond scientific question that living cells respond to very subtle influences — magnetic fields long thought to be so weak as to be indistinguishable from background noise, for example, or electromagnetic inputs as small as a single photon. It turns out that the human hands generate magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation that is certainly strong enough for a body to respond at the cellular level. (See Oschman, Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2nd ed., for a look at the physical science. Thanks to Flexner and his blinkered minions, we’re a century behind on research, so it’s maddening in spots, but it’s also really intriguing. This kind of subtle physical phenomena will be one of the things people mean by “energy work.”)  

But as a Christian, I see no reason to stop with the dust — we know there’s more to a human than that! The things which are seen are not made of things which are visible, and we’re not just talking about subatomic particles here — electrons are visible in principle; it just takes a really expensive set of glasses to see them. But behind all that, behind the physical matter and energy, is something…other. Something spiritual in nature, that manifests in physical reality, but is prior to it and cannot be reduced to it.

In the language of the Eastern Church, everything that exists is made of God’s divine energies. Not His essence — that way lies pantheism or panentheism — but His energies, which flow from His being. There was no pre-existing material; it is all made by Him, and it all exists in Him — in Him we live and move and have our being, as the pagans inferred and Paul affirms. All that is, is the spoken word of God. He spoke, and it is, and He upholds all things by the word of His power.

And so when there is a person on my massage table, there is dust and breath, body and spirit. Following the biblical anthropology, I can use my body to work on their body, relaxing hypertonic muscles, waking up hypotonic ones, reorganizing fascia, breaking up unhealthy adhesions, releasing trigger points, mobilizing organs, and so on, right down to (maybe) using my hand’s magnetic field and biophotonic outputs to affect the injured area at a cellular level—but that’s not all. If I can use my body to affect their body, why can’t I use my spirit to affect their spirit?

It seemed a hypothesis worth exploring, at the very least. Upon experimentation, I find that approaching the interaction conscious of both dust and breath makes for a more effective result. Moreover, when I set to work with that intention, and invite God to enter into the work and accomplish His will for my client’s well-being, I find that He shows up, and very interesting things happen. With some clients, all that happens very quietly (because they’re not ready to be prayed over out loud), and with others, I come all the way out of the closet. We pray together, and God often moves in dramatic ways. I’ve seen everything from physical healings to spiritual turnarounds on my table. This is work I was born to do, and in all modesty, I’m good at it — but I’ve seen God do a lot of things that go way beyond anything I could accomplish.

As best I can tell, my work is partly manipulation of the body, partly communication with the body through subtle physical energies that we’re only beginning to understand, partly my spirit working on my client’s spirit in much the same way that my body works on his body, and partly the Holy Spirit (or whatever delegated angelic powers may be at work) responding to my prayer of invitation to do what the client and I are unable to do on our own.

I need to emphasize that the above is a description of my bodywork. I make no guarantees about someone else’s. Insofar as it’s an interaction between two fallen people, it’s certainly possible there will be demonic attack or interference, and some practitioners openly invite it, addressing the demons by name. Others address themselves to “the universe,” which is sending your request into the spirit world addressed “To Whom It May Concern” — a dangerous practice if ever there were one. Lots of entities out there that might answer that request, and not all of them friendly. Some seem to address their requests to God without quite knowing who they’re talking to — “to the unknown god,” as it were. It is my pleasure, in that instance, to make the introductions. As with Paul’s experience in Athens, I find that most people aren’t too excited to have the veil of divine anonymity ripped away. But some want to hear more, and they’re the ones I came for.

The possibility of demonic intervention makes a lot of Christians nervous, and they want to be able to set up some kind of wall to separate our work from the bad stuff. A lot of people want that separation to be a matter of technique, as if you could photograph the difference between a prophet of Yahweh and a shaman — but no. There are doctrines of demons, but we don’t differentiate our teachers from theirs by their teaching techniques; we discern the content and results of the teaching. Moses and Jambres both threw a staff on the ground that became a snake, both poured out water that became blood. It’s not the technique that distinguishes us; it’s which outlet your power cord is plugged into. That leaves us with no escape from the task of actual discernment. But in my experience, the difference between God and a demon is not particularly subtle.

In my practice, I work spirit-to-spirit under God’s authority, and by His leading. The Scriptures lead me to expect that this might be a fruitful endeavor, practiced in service to Christ and under His Lordship, and I find that it is. I have seen wounded bodies restored and broken hearts healed. Some of that work was a stunning demonstration of human possibility. Some if it was plainly beyond my ability — and yet it happened nonetheless, thanks be to God. As with physical healing, not everything I try works — so I remember what does, and what doesn’t, and next time, I try to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

I look forward to growing in craft knowledge as I go. I already have a fairly good stock of knowledge that I couldn’t back up with a verse, any more than I could put a verse behind quenching O1 tool steel at 1475 degrees. But O1 hardens best when quenched at that temperature all the same; the only verse we need is the Dominion Mandate. Likewise for much of what I’ve learned about bodywork. The more I do, the more I learn. I can’t wait to see what God will show me this week!

2 Comments | Autobiography, Dust and Breath Anthropology, Functioning Supernaturalism, Healing, Livin' the Bivocational Dream, Physicality | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Hidden Costs of Disobedience

20 February 2024

Well over a decade ago, I was challenged by another pastor to become a psalm-singing Christian. The New Testament said to, and I wasn’t one, which seemed like something I should fix. I had no idea where to start, but I dug around and found a few resources. Armed with a few CDs (remember those?) and a psalter/hymnal, I dove in. Not being much of a musician myself, I shared the idea with some friends who were, and the result was a partnership that invested long-term in singing the Psalms, and doing it well. We’re still at it.

Back in those early days, we had no idea what the benefits of psalm-singing would be. We just knew that God said to do it. As we shared the idea with other people–especially worship leaders–a pattern quickly emerged. They could see the obstacles and costs of adding the Psalms to their repertoire, and they could see the benefits of continuing to do what they were already doing. But they had a hard time seeing the benefits of psalm-singing, and an even harder time seeing the costs of their current practice.

Anytime you’re contemplating a change, you are not contemplating it from some blissfully neutral limbo. What you’re doing now has costs. If those costs are so baked into your thinking that you can no longer see them, you won’t be able to make an honest assessment of the proposed change. When that’s the case, it’s time to get fresh eyes on the problem.

But when we’re talking about direct instructions from God, fresh eyes are kind of a moot point. You should be obeying because God told you to. You don’t need to assess whether obedience is worth the costs; by obeying, you’ll be doing better than you could know. But obedience is hard, and there are times when you’ll wonder, “Why am I doing this?” At those times, it can be helpful to look back and ask yourself if you can see the costs of your former disobedience.

In the case of psalm-singing, I can tell you that I’ve come to pray more often and more deeply, I’ve grown more emotionally honest, and I know how to talk to God and other people in ways I couldn’t before. Leithart was right: “Worship is language class.” You learn how to talk.

Sometimes, the Scriptures themselves will peel the scales off your eyes. I had this happen to me a couple decades ago reading Hebrews 3. “Exhort one another daily, while it is called ‘Today,’ lest you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.” The straightforward command is that believers should encourage one another every day. I remember thinking to myself, “I don’t even see another Christian some days.” I realized that in modern life, we are more separated from one another than they were back in the day, and despite all our communication technology, it’s harder to connect.

Well, so much the worse for modern life! Since when do we accept “We don’t really live like that now” as a valid reason to ignore a command from God? If we need to modify our form of life so that we are able to obey, then we should do so, trusting that God will make it worth our while.

I’ve been at it for a couple decades now, and I can tell you: He has. Lack of fellowship was hurting me more than I knew back then. I was lonely, in my own head too much, immature. It was hard to see that at the time, because I was used to it. Two decades later, I’ve been blessed with a place in some of the best communities I’ve ever seen, or even heard about. From my current perch, it’s easy enough to see what I was missing back then.

Far more than these two specific items from Hebrews and the Psalms, though, the point I want to make here is…what else is there? How many direct biblical instructions are out there that we could merely obey, and reap the blessings? Let’s go find them!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Trying on a Mind

5 December 2023

I was raised to be a student of great thinkers. My parents were modeling and teaching good hermeneutics in family Bible study before I could even read. My whole life, I was taught to do the research and expend the imaginal effort to grasp the situation of the writing: what was happening for the writer? For the readers? What was their culture, language, cause for writing the message? It was understood (long before I ever heard of speech act theory) that writing is hard work, and the writer isn’t just spouting off for self-expression; he’s trying to do something to the readers. What are the readers supposed to see and hear? What are they supposed to do?

All this is just basic to being a good student of the humanities, but being raised on the sacred text, there was also an additional dimension: application. Of course a good teacher can bend your ear at length about the value of, say, Abraham Lincoln’s discourses on slavery or St. Patrick’s Confessio for our present day, but a student can just add them to his fund of knowledge of history with no particular thought to present-day lessons. A faithful Christian student of Leviticus has no such luxury. Our fundamental orientation toward the Scriptures is obedience.

Some Scriptures are written closer to our immediate situation (e.g. Romans), and others (Leviticus) further away, but toward all of them we bring a desire to hear what the Holy Spirit will say “Today, if you will hear His voice….” Failure to bring that desire to the text is a moral failure, as demonstrated in the next breath: “…do not harden your hearts as in the Rebellion.”

Coming into my own as a student of the humanities in high school, I applied all my background to my studies. My biblical lessons gave me a leg up on my classmates in grasping the underlying source material for the (Western) literature we studied. More than that, my reflexive habit of looking for application added dimension and depth to my study and commentary. Which is not to say that I had nothing to learn: I came out of high school with two big additional pieces. First, I fell in love with the beauty of the arts. I didn’t come from a background that appreciated beauty, so waking me up was not a trivial task. I was blessed with teachers that tackled the job with great enthusiasm. (Bornarth, Brinkley, Kuyper, and Virgo: Thank you all!) Second, I learned how to drill down into an author’s biography and body of work, to become a student of that author in particular and begin to see the world as he or she saw it.

My first project of that nature was a months-long team effort with two other students, focused on George Bernard Shaw. It had honestly never occurred to me that one could develop that kind of grasp of a particular person’s work. I was hooked. Since then, I’ve devoted serious attention to authors as diverse as Plato, Euclid, Flannery O’Connor, St. Patrick, Matteo Ricci, Stephen Barnes, Rex Stout, George Leonard, Peter Leithart, Orson Scott Card, Frank Herbert, and N. D. Wilson.

Every human is handcrafted for eternity; there’s not the slightest chance that even a prolific writer will successfully convey all their own depths to even the most apt of readers. Happily, you need not be the most apt of readers to immerse yourself in a particular person’s thought for a time. The strength of this sort of experiment is that you get a chance to try on someone else’s mind, see what they see, think what they think. It’s never a perfect fit. Of course it’s not. The places that fit don’t fit easily are the whole point.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Not Against It

14 February 2023

Last night, a client asked me why I’m drawn to pastoral work with homeless folks. I’ve been asked this many times, and there’s usually a genre expectation: people expect me to tell a story where I was once homeless myself, or a homeless guy’s generosity changed my life, or where I failed to help someone who later died, or a “lightning rod moment” when God gave me a special burden for the homeless population, or some such thing. (None of that is even close to true, by the way.)

The assumption behind the question is that ministry to homeless folks is uniquely hard, and unless you have some kind of special calling to that population, you couldn’t or wouldn’t do it.

The truth is rather more mundane: I’m not against it.

I know that sounds odd, but think about it this way: there’s a seminary just down the road full of students aspiring to “the professional ministry.” Guarantee you, very few of them are looking forward to a ministry that involves hugging someone whose last bath was 2 weeks ago at the sink in a Burger King bathroom. They’re looking for church jobs in the well-heeled suburbs. Most of them are realistic enough to know they aren’t going to waltz into a senior pastor gig first thing; they expect to pay their dues. They’ll start out as youth pastors, or associate pastors at a small church, before moving up to the mid-size churches. Some of them will be happy to stay there; others aspire to the megachurch, where there’s an on-site nursery and day care for the employees’ kids. Others are angling more toward a Ph.D. and a career in academia; still others for positions in publishing.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that, of course. We need books and professors and churches in the ‘burbs; there’s good work to be done there. But the point is, serving the homeless population is simply not on their maps as something one might do. Of course they know, at an intellectual level, that some people do that kind of work, but it’s never seriously occurred to them that they might do it.

And so, mostly, they won’t. They’ll continue to think of the default “ministry position” as a full-time staff position at a mid-sized suburban church, and caring for the homeless as an exotic burden specially gifted to other people. Some of them will think that we are losers — the ones who failed to make the cut for the cushier jobs. Others will think we’re especially dedicated. But neither is true. Me, I’ve no special calling or exotic gift for homeless ministry. But neither am I possessed of the delusion that such a thing is necessary. It’s just feeding Christ’s sheep and loving the lost.

Which ones? The ones He put in front of me. Who’d He put in front of you?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Shot in the back

11 August 2020

“Tragically, many sectors of the church have become so worldly that they too are hostile to the demands of Jesus. If you call the church to repentance, be prepared for the assaults. Don’t take up the task unless you’re prepared to die.”
-Peter Leithart

That has been my experience as well. You know how often an angry unbeliever has ruined my life?

Never.

Not that it couldn’t or doesn’t happen. I’m aware of plenty of people it’s happened to. I’ve certainly had unbelievers angry at me. But in my life thus far, every time someone has betrayed me and tried to ruin my life and reputation, every single time, it has been a fellow Christian.

One time it was disagreement, personal offense, and wanting me out of the way. Another it was vendetta for wrongs partly real and partly imagined. Twice it was protecting my assailant’s hegemony over his petty fiefdom, which he felt I threatened. Once it was totally ordinary sin and lack of character, and as far as I can tell, I wasn’t even particularly a target; I just happened to be in the way.

As I say, it’s not that unbelievers can’t or won’t do this, and I’m only middle-aged. If the actuarial tables are to be believed, I have a long way to go yet, and there’s plenty of time for the pagans to get around to savaging me. But it’s worth noting how much danger comes from inside the family.

 

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Providence, Vindication, Vengeance

26 April 2019

I take an occasional interest in a doctrinal fight that I really don’t have a stake in, some bit of inside baseball in a tribe that’s not my own. It’s a tedious exercise, since it requires me to get up to speed on issues I wouldn’t normally pay any attention to, but the work pays off. When you’re not on one side or the other, you can see a bunch of other things more clearly: how they treat one another, how they treat the Spirit-created unity they all have despite their differences, how the fight is perceived by the outside world, that sort of thing. In this way, I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons that I apply to the fights I do have a stake in. Here follows one of those lessons.

Many years ago, some folks in the PCA went after Peter Leithart, accusing him of heresy. At the time, I didn’t know Leithart from St. Moses the Black, but the accusations were related to one of those controversies I was studying. The matter went to trial before the presbytery; I remember listening to the recordings. The lead prosecutor in that trial, one Jason Stellman, argued (among other things) that Leithart was sliding slowly toward Rome, and had departed from the doctrine of the PCA.

As it happens, Leithart was (rightly) acquitted, amid much howling by the heresy-hunters, but that’s not really the point here. The point is what happened next. Fast forward a couple years, and lo and behold, this same Jason Stellman resigns his ordination in the PCA…and joins the Roman Catholic Church. Meanwhile, Leithart remains (as ever) a Presbyterian.

***

In Philippians 3, Paul urges his readers to have no confidence in the flesh, and recounts his own fleshly pedigree:

If anyone else thinks he may have confidence in the flesh, I more so: circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church; concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ.

Because we’re conditioned by our heritage of revivalism, the meaning we see right away is the individual salvation from hell: Paul has forsaken his reliance on fleshly credentials for the sake of justification by faith. He now trusts in God alone. But there’s more here: a social layer of meaning as well as a theological one.

Remember that Paul had been excommunicated from synagogues multiple times for teaching that Jesus is the Messiah–which He is! They should have welcomed Paul with open arms for teaching the true meaning of the Hebrew Bible, and instead they threw him out.

Now imagine what would have happened if he’d gotten hung up on that. If he’d spent his whole life in a vain search for a retrial, for a fleshly vindication that he’d been right all along. Hold on to that idea, and read what he says next.

Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Again, the individual, theological meaning is there, but so is the social meaning. Paul is not seeking a vindication before the Law. A human court has nothing to offer him. He’s leaving all that behind to pursue Christ. If he suffers, if he’s wrongly convicted–that’s just another way to be more like Christ, isn’t it?

If God wants to vindicate him, then God can do it. Paul isn’t going to waste energy chasing that vindication. As it happens, God did vindicate him, although Paul didn’t live to see it. In A.D. 70, God delivered Jerusalem into the hands of Titus the Roman, and expressed His opinion of the Temple that rejected His only Son. Not one stone was left on another.

***

If we wait, if we just keep pursuing God, we often find that God will vindicate us. He vindicated Paul in the destruction of Jerusalem. Anybody with eyes in their head could see what was happening there (although many are blind).

The same thing happened with Leithart’s heresy trial, not through the acquittal, but in the subsequent events. If you have eyes to see, Providence has painted a little picture in the form of Jason Stellman–the federal head of the heresy-hunters–swimming the Tiber. We are being invited to consider the Romishness of their position, and it’s right there in the trial transcripts, if you missed it the first time through. God has decisively vindicated Leithart in this matter.

I’ve been on the receiving end of similar attacks myself–two stand out as particularly memorable. In one case, I don’t think it was all that hard for bystanders to see what was happening at the time. In the other, it was very hard to see. “The sins of some follow after them,” like Paul said. But in both cases, as time has passed, Providence has done its vindicating work. The people that matter, know. They may be fuzzy on some of the details, but they know enough.

Things become clearer over time.

  • One person holds to the doctrine he was accused of abandoning, while his accuser—that guardian of orthodoxy–abandons it.
  • One person remains faithful to the people he was accused of failing to serve, while his accuser skips town, leaving a trail of wrecked relationships in his wake.
  • One person continues in unity with the believers around him, while the one who excluded him in the name of “preserving unity” excludes more and more people until there’s only a few he’s not at war with.

Over time, it becomes easy to ask a few clarifying questions. Where are the two parties today? Look at one. Look at the other. What do you see?

***

“He who covers his sin will not prosper,” the proverb says, and the sin of slander is certainly included. God has the habit of causing the truth to come to light in time, and this is one of the practical reasons for leaving vengeance to God.

God does not say “Vengeance is bad;” He says “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” As we are tempted to push for vindication, we are also tempted to seek vengeance. Don’t. God’s got it…and He’s better at it than you are.

Count it all loss for the sake of Christ. Pursue knowing Him. Let God take care of the rest.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Another Look at 3DM

2 April 2019

Fast forward from 2011 to 2018. By this time, I’d spent quite a bit of time with 3DM materials, read most of the books, and could comfortably use the concepts I’d found helpful. During my years of work in the biblical Story, I had developed a lot of my own tools that stayed closer to the biblical text. But in real-life ministry, you use the best tool for the job, no matter where it came from. If my tools were a good fit for the person I was discipling, I used mine. If a 3DM tool was a better fit for the specific person and situation, I didn’t hesitate to use their tool instead, with joy and thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, my friend and mentor Dave, who originally introduced me to 3DM, was looking for a successor to step into his role at Centerpoint Church, a mission congregation composed mostly of homeless folks. He asked me to consider it, and as I prayed about it, God put a couple things in my heart: first, that I should say yes, and second, that there was no way I could do the job without serious coaching, accountability, and support.

Now, where does the new bivocational pastor of a 90% homeless congregation go to get coaching? Not a lot of places leap to mind, I can tell you.

In God’s kind providence, there was one place I knew I could trust…and we already had a relationship with them. It was Centerpoint’s parent church, Faith Community Church in Littleton. I had known Faith Community’s pastor, Jeff Allen, for years. In fact, Dave had introduced Jeff to 3DM in that same group I’d been part of back in 2011. In the intervening years, Jeff had gone all in with 3DM, becoming a coach, leading learning communities, and even writing a book (Small Church on a Big Mission) that used the 3DM platform to equip small churches.

Jeff was more than ready to have me…and he was ready to release control of the ministry, if that’s what I wanted. “I know you have great relationships with the churches in Englewood,” he said. “If there’s someone else that you’d rather have as your umbrella organization, we’ll be happy to have them step into our role.”

“No way!” I told him. “You have two choices: parent us and get us into your next Learning Community, or find someone else to do the job.”

And that’s how I came to be in the first-ever 3DM Hybrid Learning Community. Jeff’s passion is helping small churches, and learning communities have always been cumbersome for smaller churches. For a church with a full-time staff of 10, it’s no big deal to commit a team of 3 to multiple weekdays of training twice a year; they’re on salary anyhow, and it’s part of their job. When your whole staff is bivocational or volunteer, well, that’s a little different. This learning community is optimized for us.

So I’m taking a deep dive into 3DM’s resources. I don’t expect to change my basic “eat the meat; spit out the bones” approach to things. And knowing Jeff and his team, I don’t expect that to bother them much.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Meeting 3DM

26 March 2019

I first encountered 3DM in 2011 or so. I had just come off a 7-year stint as a pastor of a small church that turned out to be more of an exit ministry for people who were leaving a cult. Once they were nursed to spiritual health, my people fit beautifully into a local Bible church, and my work with them was done. Even before I had really begun to consider what to do next, God called me to a bivocational gig in Colorado.

One of the local pastors — a seasoned church planter named Dave Cheadle — was starting a mentoring group for young pastors. He invited me to join it, and I did. It was through Dave’s ministry in that group that I really learned how to make disciples.

Embarrassing as it is to admit it, I had managed to grow up in a Bible-believing church, get through Bible college and seminary, and begin in pastoral ministry without ever really grasping how to make disciples. Looking back, I’m grateful that God arranged things so that I did some disciple-making without really understanding what was required–He is good! But my intentional attempts at discipleship always dissolved into just another Bible study. I didn’t really understand life-on-life discipleship until Dave modeled it for us. The group walked together for a couple years, and along the way we worked through a few books and a lot of Bible.

The group had been going for some time when Dave encountered 3DM. Favorably impressed, he had us read through Building a Discipling Culture (then in its first edition).

I’ll save my commentary on the book for a review later. For our purposes now, it’s enough to say that I was deeply unconvinced of the need to develop our own language (the shapes) to disciple people, and at the same time deeply blessed by the way Breen had successfully organized, clarified, and added to my understanding of discipleship. It was worthwhile enough for us that Dave ended up taking a deeper dive into 3DM, and over the coming years I engaged 3DM’s other books and resources.

As I dug deeper into 3DM’s resources, I found a few things:

  1. A lot of the content was solidly biblical, but some of it was exegetically or theologically weak.
  2. A certain amount of the material seemed not true to real life, either because it was missing key ingredients (like trying to re-create oikos without shared housing and a business at the center), or because it was greatly oversimplified (like “language creates culture”).
  3. The delivery vehicle could cause problems.

The delivery vehicle was very carefully crafted.  3DM was working hard to offer multi-million-dollar church corporations exactly what they wanted to buy: a slick, professional suite of tools and systems. (Yes, I know the official line is “there is no 3DM system.” But the medium is the message.) In our case, the slick package presented to us was definitely not a match for our scruffy, working-poor town and the ministry we were doing here. We adopted a “eat the meat, spit out the bones” approach to 3DM, and moved on.

Since then, I’ve read various other writers in similar fields of endeavor: Soma, Hugh Halter, The Faith of Leap, Reggie McNeal, like that. I found a lot of good insights, but also an embarrassing tendency to act as if returning to basic Christianity is some unprecedented move of God. I understand how someone might feel that way: recall how far I got into my ministry before I understood disciple-making! But no. Living on mission, in close community, making disciples–that’s been Christian practice all along, and there have been people doing it all along. We haven’t discovered something new; we’re just ignorant of our own history.

Lots of us come from traditions that got distracted by other things at the expense of the fundamentals. The answer is as simple as it is unmarketable: admit that we have a problem, dump the distractions, and start investing the bulk of our time and effort in the most important things. (In other words, repentance.) But it’s easier to sell a book about the new thing God is doing than it is to sell a book about repenting of your distractions.

As we repented of our distractions, we turned to the Bible for answers. The more deeply we engaged the biblical Story, the more we found that the Bible has its own language and tools for cultivating disciples. Consequently, we paid less and less attention to various missional authors. We gratefully used tools from the missional genre when they fit the job at hand, but I honestly never expected to revisit this material in any kind of deep way.

But God–while very reliable–isn’t particularly predictable, and He had a plot twist headed my way….

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Posted by Tim Nichols

2018 Books in Review

31 December 2018

I set goals every year, and I always include a reading goal. This year was a little different for goal-setting, but I still set a reading goal to finish 30 books. I read 40. Over drinks a couple nights ago, a friend asked me to name the top five, and after some thought, here they are.

Spirit of the Rainforest: a Yanomamo Shaman’s Story by Mark Andrew Ritchie

This was the hardest book I read this year. Replete with rape, murder, torture, sickness, and death, it is also a stunning tale of beauty and redemption. We in the modern West like to keep spiritual and physical as separate categories; in these pages, you’ll see spiritual and physical as a single, complex world–the way they really are.

Here, through the eyes of a shaman who calls himself Jungleman, you will find the unvarnished truth of Yanomamo life before they ever made contact with modern culture, and how things changed across the decades as they made (often traumatic) contact with traders, missionaries, anthropologists, soldiers, and other outsiders. The author chose to tell the story as Jungleman told it to him, in Jungleman’s words (as nearly as translation allows), but he also worked hard to verify the events described from multiple sources where possible. For this, he has been excoriated by missionaries, anthropologists, and other modern folk for telling the unvarnished truth about them all. Some folks apparently want the freedom to opine about all things Yanomamo, but don’t want the Yanomamo to have the same freedom to comment on them back–and especially don’t want the folks at home to hear how they behave in the field. Colonialism dies hard, I guess.

Despite not being a “theology book” as such, this is the best theological book I read this year, by far.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of my Life by Scott Adams

Books about success are largely written by successful people, about their big successes. That approach delivers what people want to read (and the story a successful person wants to tell), Adams says, but it leaves out crucial parts of the story. In this book, Adams–himself an indisputable success–takes us on a guided tour of his lifelong string of failures, and shows how they contributed, over time, to his success. (And in concrete, imitable ways, not just “building character.”) More importantly, he shows you how you can do the same: choose projects and partners and set processes in motion so that even when you fail, you get something out of it, and increase the odds of future success.

Adams’ conversational style and self-effacing manner make this an easy, fun read, and it is brimming with clear, immediately actionable advice.

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle

Healthy cultures have certain elements in common, whether you’re talking about a military unit, a sports team, or a restaurant staff. In Culture Code, Daniel Coyle profiles successful cultures: the physical practices, beliefs, and emotional landscape that separate stimulating, rewarding, effective cultures from the rest of the pack. Liberally illustrated with examples both good and bad, Culture Code is not just illuminating, it’s applicable. Coyle concludes with an epilogue describing how he put his insights to work in his own life, coaching a team of young writers, with excellent results.

This one is a must-read for church leaders. If your organizational culture does not reflect the profile Coyle is describing–which tracks pretty tightly with how the Body of Christ is supposed to work–it would be worth your while to ask why. And fix it.

The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss

Slow Regard is an odd little book, and it might not be for you. It’s a week in the life of a singular character named Auri, who lives a life of self-imposed exile in, and under, the world of Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle. You need to read book 1, The Name of the Wind, before this one to get necessary context, but that’s not going to be a chore. (This one’s labeled #2.5 in the series, but you can read it after #1; there’s no spoilers.) TNOTW is a stunning achievement in fantasy fiction, and if Rothfuss can deliver the finish that the first two main volumes promise, he will be deservedly mentioned in the same breath with the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert. I wouldn’t take anything away from the achievement of the series as a whole…but Slow Regard is important.

In Slow Regard, Rothfuss takes us inside Auri’s head. She’s beautiful, whimsical, deeply intelligent, powerful, and absolutely broken. She sees the world in a unique way, a way that might be totally delusional. Then again, it might be uncommonly perceptive. Or maybe a bit of both; you’ll have to decide for yourself.

And then you’ll have to decide how that maps from her world into ours. It might be one of the more important decisions of your life, because, you see, there are real people like Auri. You can write them off and be the poorer for it. Or you can learn to love them, to dance with the oddness, to profit from the things they see that you cannot. There is so little space in the world for such people; if some corner of your life can hold space for an Auri, that’ll be a kindness well worth doing in itself, and both of you will be richer for it.

If you can stand to, read this book. Whatever you do, don’t skip the author’s foreword.

Internal Body Mechanics for Tai Chi, Bagua, and Xingyi: The Key to High-Quality Internal Structure and Movement by Ken Gullette

Despite the title, this one is not just for martial artists. If you’re a massage therapist, an athlete, or you just want to learn to use your body in an attentive, aware way, there’s a lot here for you.

The standard disclaimer applies: there’s no substitute for personal instruction from a qualified teacher, etc. But you learn martial arts by practicing, and there’s a lot here to inform your practice and make it more fruitful.

When it comes to “chi,” Ken Gullette is an uncompromising materialist: for him, there is no non-physical energy, just a very sound–if uncommon–set of body mechanics. Being a Christian, I don’t think the world is quite that simple, but Gullette’s line of inquiry here is undeniably productive. Whatever the truth about chi, there are physical mechanics at work.

Selecting a series of six key mechanics–groundpath, peng jing (which I’m not going to try to explain here), whole-body involvement, silk-reeling (spiral) movement, dantien (pelvic, kinda) rotation, and proper use of the kua (hip hinge)–Gullette walks us through key exercises and practices to develop each one. Start practicing even a couple of these together, and you’ll instantly understand why so much of Tai Chi practice is done slowly.

Gullette has been teaching for many years, and I’ve benefited from some of his and Mike Sigman’s earlier efforts. (Thanks, guys!) This book shows the results of a lot of trial and error to find the best words and exercises to convey these key concepts. The explanations are crystal clear and the photos are shot from useful angles (which is a lot harder than it sounds, y’all.) I’ll be spending a lot of time with these practices as I work to refine my own movement–as a martial artist, as a massage therapist, and as a structurally healthy human being.

***

So that’s my top five of a lot of good stuff–a total of 40 books and 8,389 pages, according to Goodreads, which is kind enough to track all this for me (and sell my data to the highest bidder, no doubt, but who isn’t, these days?)

As with any goal-setting exercise, I review my reading list periodically to make course corrections. A few things stand out to me about this year’s reading list:

  • It’s low on classics and poetry.  Be good to re-read some Shakespeare, Bacon, and Frost, just for the joy of the language.
  • I have some quality theological work on my shelf that I want to read, and didn’t quite get to. I want to do more of that this year.
  • I set the goal low on purpose, knowing that this was going to be a demanding year in other ways, and I might not have time for a lot of reading. And then I way overshot the goal without really trying. I expect this year to be equally demanding, but I should probably raise the goal a bit.

Also with any goal-setting exercise, it’s important to celebrate what went well. My standout items are…

  • I read 40/30 books!
  • I had fun! By setting a number goal, with just a few must-read items, it didn’t ever feel like something I had to do. I was just having a good time reading about whatever interested me. That’s ideal; I retain a lot less if it becomes a chore.
  • I finished The Unshakeable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person. That doesn’t sound impressive, but I’ve been chewing slowly away on that book for three years. (It’s not that long, but it was meaty. I’d read a few pages, and then have to go think about it for a week. So it took a while. I got most of the considerable benefit from it in the first year, but this year I finally finished, which feels like a significant accomplishment.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

A Year in Review: 2018

30 December 2018

2016 was a dumpster fire of a year, a torrent of damage. It’s no exaggeration to say it was by far the worst year of my adult life. 2017 was a year of recovery, not in the good way, but more in the sifting-the-ashes-of-your-burned-home-through-a-screen-box kinda way. 2018 was a year of new direction. But you wouldn’t have known that from the way the year started….

I usually set 8-12 goals for the year, spread across the categories of Body, Spirit, Calling, and Relationship; I’ve been doing this for years. (I generally only hit about 60% of my goals, but that’s way better than I ever did with New Year’s resolutions, so it’s all good.) By the time I’d dragged myself through 2016 and 2017, I was in no shape to choose goals. I tried, and I just couldn’t do it. Nothing made sense. I found myself incapable of believing any set of goals I put on paper. I didn’t know what to do.

And then, as so often happens at those moments, God spoke. He told me if I wanted to take the safe road, get a bodywork job working for Hand & Stone or whoever, and do another season of true bivocational work–one job to pay the bills, and a ministry gig on the side–that there was a job out there for me, and it was ok to do that. I’d done that before; it’s a tough life, but I understand how it works, and it’s known territory for me. But God also told me that wasn’t the only road open to me. If I wanted to go for the dream, He would support that too. The dream was…poorly defined, to put it mildly. But I knew exactly what He meant: I could live a life that seamlessly blended my ministry and my livelihood, a life where all my gifts came into play together. It was what I’d been dreaming of my whole adult life. I thought I had it, briefly, a bit over a decade ago, during the short time when I was a full-time professional geek…but no. That turned out to be too sterile, too one-dimensional. And it didn’t last anyway.

God told me (via a prophetic friend that I deeply trust, and confirmed various ways) that my dream life was now within reach…if I was willing to take the risk. I thought about the safe road, and the security it offered, and waiting another five years (or however long) before this opportunity came my way again. And then I muttered something like, “Oh, what the hell, it’s too late to start playing it safe now,” and went for it.

I kept my freedom and plowed into developing my business and my ministry, all at the same time. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and let me tell you, it showed. My marketing was beyond amateurish. My bookkeeping needed serious help. I had poor judgment in my partnerships. (I had some great partners, but also some that were…well, let’s just say not great, and leave it there.)

But you know what? God supported it. Clients came. The business side got (somewhat) organized. God winnowed out the partners that didn’t belong. The bills (somehow!) got paid. In a month when the bottom fell out of the bodywork business, I inexplicably got extra ministry funding; when the ministry funding dried up, suddenly more massage and Trauma Touch clients came my way. I had day after day when I went home, sat down, and thought, “YES! This is why I do what I do!”

And after a year of that, I finally have clarity on what God has given me to do. Back in early 2015 when I first started my business, God told me clearly that there were four skills that would define what I do. I tried to list them, and every list I made came out to three or five. I could never quite get a list of four that made sense…until now.

The four skills that define my calling are

  • Massage Therapist
  • Minister
  • Trauma Touch Therapist
  • Martial Arts Instructor.

Those are the four corners of my existence; I play in the space between them. And the center, the bullseye, the place where it all comes together? Spiritual healing that takes the body seriously. That is the center of what I do. Of course, depending on the needs of the moment, sometimes I’m just giving a massage or whatever service they came for. But often–very often, in fact–I find myself holding a space where God shows up, and my client receives spiritual healing. That’s what I do.

A year ago, I couldn’t say that without feeling silly. After a year of doing it, seeing God bless it and people blessed by it, I don’t feel silly at all. I feel like I have purpose again. I know what I’m shooting for; I know what I’m asking God to bless.

And I am asking. I don’t want to bury the talent in the backyard; I want to put it to work in the marketplace. Let’s grow this thing.

Comments Off on A Year in Review: 2018 | Autobiography, Livin' the Bivocational Dream | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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