Some people experience God in pictures or visions
(seers); others in dreams (dreamers). Some experience God by hearing things
(hearers, I guess). Those are all relatively easy to describe to others. More
socially acceptable, these men and women are often great communicators.
Some folks experience God and the Spiritual realm through
their feelings (feelers). My experience has been that these folks experience
more of the heart of God, perceive more deeply and often more accurately, but
have more difficulty translating the revelatory experience into language, and
therefore, their revelations are less often received and understood by the body
as a whole.
Our language has difficulty handling feelings well,
partly because our culture doesn't respect taking responsibility for our
feelings.
Folks that experience God in ways that are easy to
describe (visions, words, etc) have a much easier time talking about the
revelation they receive. Because they “fit in” better, they also do better in
schools and seminaries.
So they become the pastors and teachers, the leaders of
the churches. And because as a culture, we’ve delegated responsibility for the
state of our soul to the leaders of the church, they have also become the
standard for how God’s children receive revelation from their father. We can
describe them either in spiritual terms (seers and hearers) or in educational
terms (left brained academics).
As a result, we have a church that is led by academics
and left-brain leaders. I have no complaint against that fact, except this: the
churches they lead are not made up only of academic, left-brained people, even
though their sermons and classes are primarily academic, left-brained lessons.
In fact, our seminaries and Bible schools, even our
public schools, hardly legitimize such emotive people, and so the leaders and
peers which they turn out don’t understand, and often don’t acknowledge the
presence and the legitimacy of the feelers among us, of our creative and
imaginative brothers and sisters.
Our church leaders are generally left unable to train
feelers, people who interact with both the spiritual realm and the natural
realm by way of their feelings. And so we are unable to pastor or lead the
feelers among us, seeing them, through the eyes of academia, as people who need
us to fix them.
Most of the resources for the left-brain, logical
prophetic folks don't fit real well for the right-brained creative, for the
prophetic feeler folk. Much of our basic discipleship training is in academic
vocabulary, leaving the feelers among us less capably discipled than we
believed, and therefore more vulnerable to the ravages of the war that we are
engaged in.
I grieve for my brothers & sisters that we’ve
disrespected and wounded. I’m thankful that God is addressing these disparities
and bringing them back into alignment.
We have a ways to go, but we’re on the way. I look
forward to our continued growth together.