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 feeler folk often
experience more of the heart of God, and often perceive more deeply and even
more accurately, but have more difficulty translating those revelatory
experience into language. Therefore, their revelations are less often
well-received and understood by the body as a whole.
Our earthly language has difficulty handling feelings well.
That may be partly because our culture doesn't particularly respect taking
responsibility for our feelings.
Folks who experience God in ways that are easy to describe
(pictures, 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.
And so they become the pastors and teachers, the leaders of
the churches. And since, 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 followers,
even though their sermons and classes are primarily academic, left-brained
lessons.
In fact, our seminaries and Bible schools, even our public
schools, don't legitimize and hardly respect such emotive people, and so the
leaders and peers that they turn out don’t understand, and often don’t
acknowledge or respect the legitimacy or sometimes even the presence of the
feelers among us, of our creative and imaginative brothers and sisters.
Our corporate 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, and instead, we see 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 all 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.
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1 comment:
sharing in my journal. yes. agree.
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