you can bend my ear

The office is completely empty. I’m brown-bagging it today, which in my case simply means a couple of energy bars and a cup of water. Not exotic, not even remotely tasty, but it fills me up and keeps me going. I love good food but I don’t have a psychological dietary requirement for variety, and in many situations, even taste. Case in point–my breakfast over the course of the past several years has simply consisted of a bowl of frosted mini-wheats with no milk. I pop them down on the way to work or the airport or what-have-you and it lasts me the morning. Functional = good.

Coffee Theology last night. I took a different tack this week: Instead of conjuring up semi-culturally-relevant discussion starters to paste on a handout, I simply posed the group this question, “What is the state of your soul?” They were free to answer it at whatever level they chose and I mediated (read: mainly listened) as best I could.

I suppose it was a bit of a easy question to ask if my goal (which it partially is) is to attract people to the group and make them feel comfortable and like they fit in. There’s something about sharing of yourself that’s quasi-cathartic, and even if there’s no true understanding on the other end (which in last night’s case I think there was), just having someone, or a group, to listen fills a void in our lives and creates a certain sense of well-being.

I still don’t have a concise, clear statement about what I want the group to be. It makes me feel a bit hypocritical given what I’ve related so far concerning the elements that I feel the group should have. A main one would be that I want the conversation to be very down-to-earth, in plain language without all the ethereal Christianese and spiritual jargon that we tend to throw around (at least without first establishing some semantics). But in trying to describe the mission statement, I feel all I have spoken in has been abstract, general terms. So from the get-go there’s been something of a disconnect between what I want the group to be and how I act myself.

Every time I try to compose a coherent description of the group’s vision I find I can only really describe it in terms of experiences I’ve had. That was the dilemma I ran into Saturday over lunch with Larry. I could relate to him groups I’ve been involved in where I felt the kind of collective excitement over learning more about His Word–the kind of excitement I want to nurture in Coffee Theology. But to transpose, to distill that perspective into something communicable… It’s more difficult that it would seem. Maybe I should just describe those experiences–that might be sufficient to create understanding. We’ll see.

One thing I discovered is that in the absence of a statement of purpose people can easily hold in their minds and come back to in order to self-guide their own contributions to the discussion, more active leadership is required on the part of the person who does have the vision in mind. That, by the grace of God, was the major breakthrough for me last night in terms of managing the group dynamics. It’s an artificial structure since the discussion isn’t self-perpetuating, but at least in the beginning I think it’s necessary. We’re a work in progress, and I’m okay with that.