How is Your Soul?

The first week of December we had an event at WGM headquarters called The Gathering. All of our missionaries home for fundraising joined our support staff for three days of inspiration and fellowship. Our speakers were Pastor Steve DeNeff of College Wesleyan Church and Steve Moore from The Mission Exchange, which is an association of mission agencies that WGM is a member of. It was a rich time and I want to share some notes I jotted down as I listened to these men.

In this post I will write about the Soul Shift portion of our time together.

Steve DeNeff, along with several members of his staff, presented Soul Shift, which is material that started as a sermon series and now is in a book by that title and a workshop that Steve has taken around the USA. It was great to hear a fresh presentation of the very foundational truth upon which WGM was founded. I think this statement best summed up Soul Shift for me.

With Soul Shift we are not talking about how it happens, but rather what the transformed life looks like.

And so here are some thought provoking bullet points from my notes.

• 100 years ago pastoral care was called Soul Care.
• There is a big difference between the winning of souls and caring for the soul.
• A soul might be saved, but there might still be something wrong with the soul. You can be washed in the blood and going to heaven, but still be lazy. We need to cure souls that have been saved.
• Am I depending on artificial categories that have been created by my culture but that are not Biblical?
• The Bible has a lot to say about the soul. It talks about the heart. About the bent of the heart and the inclinations of that bent.
• Whatever shape the soul is in is expressed in the body. God isn’t just interested in taking us into heaven, but he is interested in taking heaven into us.
• If I am reading the word because I have a message to prepare, but I am not loving the word of God, does that count? If you give more and more, but you don’t like doing that, does that count? When we change the questions it gets harder. That is what we are going to do this week.
• What does it mean to be spiritual?
• For reformed it is to have good doctrine
• For Catholic it is coming apart from the world
• For the Wesleyan it is experience-hungering after God
• For the Pentecostal it is speaking out for God
• For the Charismatic it is having a word from God
• God says I will put my Spirit into you so that when you follow my decrees you will do it out of desire. If I took away heaven and hell you would do my will because your heart and mind are so changed it is the only thing that makes sense to you.
• How is your soul?
• The tying of my shoes has become second nature to me. We do so many things in our minds without thinking of them.. We have been wired to do those things without thinking. Transformation is changing the way we think so that we do things that are like Jesus would do them without eve thinking about them.
• There are seven shifts of the soul.
• From me to you – When you start to think of others before ourselves
• From slave to child – when I go from thinking I should serve God to loving him
• From seen to unseen – when I realize I am not on this planet alone. There is a world I cannot see that is just as real as the one I can see
• From consumer to steward  – when you realize the things you have are not for your benefit but for the benefit of others
• From ask to listen – when they stop asking everybody else for advice and start listening to God’s voice
• From sheep to shepherd – when we wake up one day an realize I am not just here to follow Jesus, but I start to take responsibility for other people’s lives
• From me to we – when we start to defer to the body of Christ

And so we have notes from the first day of the Soul Shift material. This may whet your appetite for reading the book. I will post some more notes from the other two days in another post.

I will also do a blog post on the material Steve Moore brought to us in the weeks to come, but most likely after the Christmas holiday. His topic was Missions in the Context of Deep Change, and brother, was it ever thought provoking!