Larry Crabb

The Challenge of True Spiritual Community

Larry Crabb's 'Becoming a True Spiritual Community' delves into the complexities and profound potential of Christian community. Crabb emphasizes that True spiritual community is not easy to achieve. He argues that genuine connections require vulnerability and a willingness to face confusion and disappointment. Crabb writes, 'Every Christian effort to actually change, especially with the help of people, is at times confusing and disappointing.' This highlights the inherent difficulties in forming deep, meaningful relationships within a spiritual context. He suggests that the journey toward Christ and True community is fraught with challenges, but these struggles are essential for growth and transformation.

The Power of Vulnerability in Building True Community

One of the central themes in Crabb's book is the transformative power of vulnerability. Crabb argues that it is our weaknesses, not our strengths, that truly connect us with others. He states, 'It is our weakness, not our competence, that moves others; our suffering, not our blessings, that breaks down the barriers of fear and shame that keep us apart.' This idea is illustrated through various examples and reflective questions that encourage readers to consider their own experiences of vulnerability. This concept challenges the common tendency to hide our flaws and instead promotes an environment where authenticity and honesty are valued.

The Shift from Management to Mysticism

Crabb contrasts the roles of 'managers' and 'mystics' in the context of spiritual community. Managers rely on their own resources and strategies to handle life's challenges, often quenching the Spirit and failing to connect deeply with others. Mystics, on the other hand, are described as individuals who experience an intimate fellowship with God, feeling His presence and movement within their souls. Crabb argues that True spiritual community can only be achieved by becoming mystics who are led by the Spirit. This involves a radical shift from trying to manage relationships to experiencing and sharing the spiritual passions aroused by the Holy Spirit. He emphasizes that this shift is essential for creating a safe and healing community where souls can rest, love, and heal.

Success in therapy depends on the therapists ability to convey to the patient that he cares is competent to help and has no ulterior motive

Conflict is a problem only spiritual community can handle

Only genuine and purchasable love does what needs to be done in the human soul

Brokenness is the realization that life is too much for us, not just because there is too much pain but also because we're too selfish. Brokenness is realizing He is all we have. Hope is realizing He is all we need. Joy is realizing He is all we want.

We’d much rather be impressively intact than broken. But only broken people share spiritual community.

Only a certain kind of community, what I am calling spiritual community, can cut through our commitment to safety from people and allow us to enjoy safety with people.

We need spiritual friends, broken people who will provide safety for us to be broken, caring people who want us to live and believe we can live well, giving people who pour the life they have received from God into us, people of vision who see the Spirit shaping us into the image of Christ.

People in Christ, whether they struggle with alcohol, gossip, or conceit (we all struggle with something awful), are no longer properly called sinners. We still sin, of course, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t saints.

The Necessity of Divine Power in Spiritual Community

Crabb emphasizes that True spiritual community hinges on divine power to navigate and resolve conflicts inherent in human relationships. He argues that human efforts alone are insufficient to overcome the selfishness and pain that fuel conflicts. Instead, an 'energy in the soul that is supplied by God' is essential. Crabb explains that brokenness, hope, and joy are all rooted in recognizing our dependence on God. He quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer: 'Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.' This underscores the idea that spiritual community is built on the foundation of Christ's work in individuals, enabling them to connect deeply despite conflicts.

The Role of Brokenness in Spiritual Growth

Crabb discusses the inevitability of brokenness in the human experience and its crucial role in spiritual growth. He argues that brokenness is not a disease to be cured but a condition to be acknowledged and embraced within a safe community. He writes, 'We live in brokenness. We just don’t always see it, either in ourselves or in others.' The central task of a spiritual community is to create a safe space where individuals can reveal their brokenness and experience the healing power of connection. Crabb uses the metaphor of turning chairs to face each other, symbolizing the importance of mutual vulnerability and support in the journey toward spiritual maturity.

The Concept of Two Rooms: Lower and Upper

Crabb introduces the metaphor of two rooms within our souls: the Lower Room and the Upper Room. The Lower Room is self-furnished, comfortable, and familiar but ultimately leaves us feeling alone and unfulfilled. It represents our natural self, driven by self-preservation and independence. In contrast, the Upper Room is a place furnished by Christ, where our new self flourishes. This room is centered on spiritual communion with God and others, offering a deeper sense of peace and fulfillment. Crabb encourages readers to seek this Upper Room through spiritual community, meditation on God's Word, and passionate prayer.

The Role of Spiritual Friends and Directors

Crabb introduces the concept of spiritual friends and directors as crucial elements in a spiritual community. Spiritual friends provide a safe space for brokenness, offering acceptance and support while also challenging selfish motives. They help individuals draw on spiritual resources to replace negative passions with positive ones. Spiritual directors, on the other hand, guide individuals in recognizing and addressing the deeper issues fueling their conflicts. Crabb illustrates this with a personal anecdote where a simple prayer with a friend led to significant emotional healing, highlighting the power of spiritual relationships over professional therapy.

Accept Disappointment

Recognize that disappointment is a natural part of the spiritual journey. Use these experiences to reassess and realign your expectations, focusing on the deeper, more fulfilling aspects of community and spiritual growth.

Turn Your Chairs

Make a conscious effort to engage in face-to-face interactions with fellow believers. This can be as simple as arranging seating in a circle during small group meetings to foster more intimate and meaningful conversations.

Embrace Confusion

Instead of shying away from confusion, use it as an opportunity to explore new perspectives and deepen your understanding. Engage in open, honest dialogues where questions and uncertainties are welcomed.

Seek Inclusive Relationships

Avoid forming bonds based on mutual disdain for others. Instead, strive to build inclusive, loving relationships that reflect Christ's teachings.

Use Resources for Community-Building

Evaluate how you use your resources, such as money and talents, and make a conscious effort to invest them in ways that build and sustain healthy communities rather than for self-importance.

Cultivate Spiritual Conversations

In your interactions, focus on the Spirit’s movement and the good in others. This can be done by actively listening, showing empathy, and encouraging others to share their spiritual journeys.

Embrace Mysticism

Shift from trying to manage your life and relationships to experiencing and sharing the spiritual passions aroused by the Holy Spirit. This involves being open to the mystery of God's presence and movement within your soul, allowing for deeper connections with others.

Every Christian effort to actually change, especially with the help of people, is at times confusing and disappointing.

Our souls need to face each other. And then I want us to get off our chairs and onto our knees.

Confusion isn’t always a bad thing. If we’re not confused about anything it’s likely we’re grasping the truth about nothing important.

At its core, the church is a spiritual community journeying together toward God.

Only broken people share spiritual community.

The first thing is to find that room, that place in your heart where the Spirit is alive, and to release the spiritual energy He has put there.

There is no way through the conflict to True connection without divine power.

Brokenness is realizing He is all we have. Hope is realizing He is all we need. Joy is realizing He is all we want.

We experience a sense of belonging here by not belonging there, and by spending time with people who don’t belong there either.

Wretchedness—our own wretchedness—must be recognized before True greatness can be properly defined and passionately desired.

Our capacity for relationship has become a desperate longing for relationship that quickly translates into an indignant demand for relationship.

It is our weakness, not our competence, that moves others; our suffering, not our blessings, that breaks down the barriers of fear and shame that keep us apart.

A connecting community, where each member is joined together in dynamic spiritual union, is a healing community.

In real community people know each other; they relate in ways only God’s Spirit makes possible.

Christianity promises happiness—that’s part of its appeal—but we will not find it by traveling the route we’ve already laid out in our heads. Disappointment, severe enough to be called death, is unavoidable in a true spiritual journey.

The upside of confusion is openness. Confused people listen better, not always, but more often than people whose minds are made up.

Disappointment has an upside as well. It inspires hope by making hope necessary.

I believe that under the terms of God’s New Covenant with humankind, the Holy Spirit has graciously placed resources in every Christian that, when released from one person and received into another, can promote substantial healing and change.

We’re a community of fixers. We can’t stand to see a problem we can’t do something about.

We need to dive into the unmanageable, messy world of relationships, to admit our failure, to identify our tensions, to explore our shortcomings.

In a spiritual community, people don’t merely talk about woundedness and brokenness. They leave their comfort zones and expose the specifics, not to everyone, but to at least one other person.

A spiritual community consists of people who have the integrity to come clean. It is comprised of those who own their shortcomings and failures because they hate them more than they hate the shortcomings and failures of others.

Members of a spiritual community look at each other with the conviction that God has placed something terrific in every member.

When Jean Vanier states that community is the place where ego dies, I understand him to mean that our determination to fully trust no one must die and an eager willingness to receive what is best from others and to give what is best from within ourselves must take its place.

I believe in that position because I believe that the root of all non-medical human struggle is really a spiritual problem, a disconnection from God that creates a disconnection from oneself and from others.

I wholeheartedly agree that when therapists accomplish good results (and many do), it is because they are lovers, in the personal sense of that word, and not experts.

In every human heart there is the sense of something more. The primitives in Plato’s cave thought they were living in the real world when they had never seen a bird, never smelled a flower, never watched a sunset.

When the Spirit resurrects the soul and infuses it with new life, the room sparkles with light. The fire in the fireplace roars with crackling heat, the icy heart thaws, and the thrill of life fills the room.

Leaving the Upper Room always means entering the Lower Room, trying once again to manage the difficulties of life, and every day becoming less and less substantial— more of a ghost than a solid person.

The end of modernity, a resurgence of interest in spirituality, and a greater vulnerability about our disillusionment and disappointment with life have made us seriously wonder if there is another room.

Our freneticism is really our thirst for heaven’ s stillness, just as our loneliness is our hunger for God.

If we hear only words that are spoken to the Lower Room and if we spend our time there, we will live like citizens of that room.

For him, one essential symptom of the regenerate life is a permanent and permanently horrified perception of one’s natural and (it seems) unalterable corruption.

To become a solid person, I must give up whatever idols I am depending on to give me life.

I am learning that the best cure for hypocrisy is community. Hypocrisy is not so much the result of not living what I preach but much more of not confessing my inability to fully live up to my own words.

Suffering brings into focus what my soul most deeply yearns for and I am directed to God. I learn to depend on Him.

In spiritual community, people participate in dialogue: They share without manipulation, they listen without prejudice, they decide without self-interest.

Only in Christianity is there a clear basis for regarding each other as having profound worth. Christians believe that within every person, something exists of inestimable value.

The more I see my sin in the presence of a spiritual community, the more I see Christ and celebrate Him and long to know Him and be like Him.

Forming spiritual community is the Spirit’s work. It is not ours. Our contribution is limited. Most of what we do is give up control, get out of the way, and let the Spirit take over.

God’s Spirit has created a place in our souls deeper than the cesspool, and He has built Himself a home there. A tabernacle in the wilderness once blazed with His glory. Now our souls radiate His presence in a dark world.

The choices we make to live in the energy of Christ, including the private choices no one can see, have a far greater impact for good on other people’s lives than we suspect.

Every bad desire is a corruption of good desire. And every good desire is a meager expression of our deepest desire: to know God.

We need a safe place to admit and explore our desires, a community of fellow journeyers who believe that our desires are not at root shameful but thoroughly human and already met in Jesus.

Spiritual community can be thought of as an exchange between two or more people that reflects those four passions: the safety of celebration, the hope of vision, the wisdom of loving discernment, and the power of touch.

Spiritual community first celebrates God, and people secondarily as marvelous opportunities to display God’ s grace.

When my needs and my feelings and my self are the indulged center of things, all hell will eventually break loose. When Christ is preeminent in me and in my friend, the kingdom of heaven arrives on earth.

The church is a community of people on a journey to God.

Orthodoxy that is cold is only academically orthodox. It stimulates the Lower Room passion to manage.

Until we recover the biblical idea of heart, until we get in touch with the Eternal Community’s creation of our inmost being that yearns to connect with a perfectly loving person, we will remain rationalists, managers, orthodox in doctrine, perhaps, but stirred primarily to control.

The spirituality of a community can be measured not merely by its doctrinal statement but by the passions that are most deeply aroused.

Perhaps that’s a good definition of spiritual community —“a safe place to hit bottom.” We all need a place safe enough to embrace our brokenness, our failure, and our inability to cope, and, in the midst of torment, a place to again discover life.

To be broken in the midst of spiritual community brings a quality of rest and hope that cannot be duplicated.

We now see people as reasons for celebration, as possibilities in the making, as fellow strugglers who sometimes fail miserably and do the darndest things, as opportunities to give and receive our common life in Christ.

Spiritual friends listen to God, they listen to what He is stirring in their own hearts as they engage with us. With a freedom only broken people know, they simply give that to us, whatever it is, as faithful messengers of God and lovers of our soul.

The church is meant to be a community of spiritual friends and spiritual directors who journey together to God. We must become that community.

Spiritual directors are men and women who know the Spirit, who trust the Spirit, who by virtue of calling and gifting and self-awareness can see into the workings of the human soul and can direct it toward its end.

The choice is not between psychotherapy and spiritual direction. It is rather between independence and community.

Our natural foundations must be destroyed if true spirituality is to develop. And this happens when, in His bewildering mercy, God sometimes shatters our fondest dreams, or at least allows them to be shattered.

The path to the joy of God’s presence always leads through joyless isolation, when the part of us that most longs for connection is alone.

Only a certain kind of community, what I am calling spiritual community, can cut through our commitment to safety from people and allow us to enjoy safety with people.

We need spiritual friends, broken people who will provide safety for us to be broken, caring people who want us to live and believe we can live well, giving people who pour the life they have received from God into us, people of vision who see the Spirit shaping us into the image of Christ.

People in Christ, whether they struggle with alcohol, gossip, or conceit (we all struggle with something awful), are no longer properly called sinners. We still sin, of course, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t saints.

Every Christian effort to actually change, especially with the help of people, is at times confusing and disappointing.

Our souls need to face each other. And then I want us to get off our chairs and onto our knees.

Confusion isn’t always a bad thing. If we’re not confused about anything it’s likely we’re grasping the truth about nothing important.

At its core, the church is a spiritual community journeying together toward God.

Only broken people share spiritual community.

The first thing is to find that room, that place in your heart where the Spirit is alive, and to release the spiritual energy He has put there.

There is no way through the conflict to True connection without divine power.

Brokenness is realizing He is all we have. Hope is realizing He is all we need. Joy is realizing He is all we want.

We experience a sense of belonging here by not belonging there, and by spending time with people who don’t belong there either.

Wretchedness—our own wretchedness—must be recognized before True greatness can be properly defined and passionately desired.

Our capacity for relationship has become a desperate longing for relationship that quickly translates into an indignant demand for relationship.

It is our weakness, not our competence, that moves others; our suffering, not our blessings, that breaks down the barriers of fear and shame that keep us apart.

A connecting community, where each member is joined together in dynamic spiritual union, is a healing community.

In real community people know each other; they relate in ways only God’s Spirit makes possible.

Christianity promises happiness—that’s part of its appeal—but we will not find it by traveling the route we’ve already laid out in our heads. Disappointment, severe enough to be called death, is unavoidable in a true spiritual journey.

The upside of confusion is openness. Confused people listen better, not always, but more often than people whose minds are made up.

Disappointment has an upside as well. It inspires hope by making hope necessary.

I believe that under the terms of God’s New Covenant with humankind, the Holy Spirit has graciously placed resources in every Christian that, when released from one person and received into another, can promote substantial healing and change.

We’re a community of fixers. We can’t stand to see a problem we can’t do something about.

We need to dive into the unmanageable, messy world of relationships, to admit our failure, to identify our tensions, to explore our shortcomings.

In a spiritual community, people don’t merely talk about woundedness and brokenness. They leave their comfort zones and expose the specifics, not to everyone, but to at least one other person.

A spiritual community consists of people who have the integrity to come clean. It is comprised of those who own their shortcomings and failures because they hate them more than they hate the shortcomings and failures of others.

Members of a spiritual community look at each other with the conviction that God has placed something terrific in every member.

When Jean Vanier states that community is the place where ego dies, I understand him to mean that our determination to fully trust no one must die and an eager willingness to receive what is best from others and to give what is best from within ourselves must take its place.

I believe in that position because I believe that the root of all non-medical human struggle is really a spiritual problem, a disconnection from God that creates a disconnection from oneself and from others.

I wholeheartedly agree that when therapists accomplish good results (and many do), it is because they are lovers, in the personal sense of that word, and not experts.

In every human heart there is the sense of something more. The primitives in Plato’s cave thought they were living in the real world when they had never seen a bird, never smelled a flower, never watched a sunset.

When the Spirit resurrects the soul and infuses it with new life, the room sparkles with light. The fire in the fireplace roars with crackling heat, the icy heart thaws, and the thrill of life fills the room.

Leaving the Upper Room always means entering the Lower Room, trying once again to manage the difficulties of life, and every day becoming less and less substantial— more of a ghost than a solid person.

The end of modernity, a resurgence of interest in spirituality, and a greater vulnerability about our disillusionment and disappointment with life have made us seriously wonder if there is another room.

Our freneticism is really our thirst for heaven’ s stillness, just as our loneliness is our hunger for God.

If we hear only words that are spoken to the Lower Room and if we spend our time there, we will live like citizens of that room.

For him, one essential symptom of the regenerate life is a permanent and permanently horrified perception of one’s natural and (it seems) unalterable corruption.

To become a solid person, I must give up whatever idols I am depending on to give me life.

I am learning that the best cure for hypocrisy is community. Hypocrisy is not so much the result of not living what I preach but much more of not confessing my inability to fully live up to my own words.

Suffering brings into focus what my soul most deeply yearns for and I am directed to God. I learn to depend on Him.

In spiritual community, people participate in dialogue: They share without manipulation, they listen without prejudice, they decide without self-interest.

Only in Christianity is there a clear basis for regarding each other as having profound worth. Christians believe that within every person, something exists of inestimable value.

The more I see my sin in the presence of a spiritual community, the more I see Christ and celebrate Him and long to know Him and be like Him.

Forming spiritual community is the Spirit’s work. It is not ours. Our contribution is limited. Most of what we do is give up control, get out of the way, and let the Spirit take over.

God’s Spirit has created a place in our souls deeper than the cesspool, and He has built Himself a home there. A tabernacle in the wilderness once blazed with His glory. Now our souls radiate His presence in a dark world.

The choices we make to live in the energy of Christ, including the private choices no one can see, have a far greater impact for good on other people’s lives than we suspect.

Every bad desire is a corruption of good desire. And every good desire is a meager expression of our deepest desire: to know God.

We need a safe place to admit and explore our desires, a community of fellow journeyers who believe that our desires are not at root shameful but thoroughly human and already met in Jesus.

Spiritual community can be thought of as an exchange between two or more people that reflects those four passions: the safety of celebration, the hope of vision, the wisdom of loving discernment, and the power of touch.

Spiritual community first celebrates God, and people secondarily as marvelous opportunities to display God’ s grace.

When my needs and my feelings and my self are the indulged center of things, all hell will eventually break loose. When Christ is preeminent in me and in my friend, the kingdom of heaven arrives on earth.

The church is a community of people on a journey to God.

Orthodoxy that is cold is only academically orthodox. It stimulates the Lower Room passion to manage.

Until we recover the biblical idea of heart, until we get in touch with the Eternal Community’s creation of our inmost being that yearns to connect with a perfectly loving person, we will remain rationalists, managers, orthodox in doctrine, perhaps, but stirred primarily to control.

The spirituality of a community can be measured not merely by its doctrinal statement but by the passions that are most deeply aroused.

Perhaps that’s a good definition of spiritual community —“a safe place to hit bottom.” We all need a place safe enough to embrace our brokenness, our failure, and our inability to cope, and, in the midst of torment, a place to again discover life.

To be broken in the midst of spiritual community brings a quality of rest and hope that cannot be duplicated.

We now see people as reasons for celebration, as possibilities in the making, as fellow strugglers who sometimes fail miserably and do the darndest things, as opportunities to give and receive our common life in Christ.

Spiritual friends listen to God, they listen to what He is stirring in their own hearts as they engage with us. With a freedom only broken people know, they simply give that to us, whatever it is, as faithful messengers of God and lovers of our soul.

The church is meant to be a community of spiritual friends and spiritual directors who journey together to God. We must become that community.

Spiritual directors are men and women who know the Spirit, who trust the Spirit, who by virtue of calling and gifting and self-awareness can see into the workings of the human soul and can direct it toward its end.

The choice is not between psychotherapy and spiritual direction. It is rather between independence and community.

Our natural foundations must be destroyed if true spirituality is to develop. And this happens when, in His bewildering mercy, God sometimes shatters our fondest dreams, or at least allows them to be shattered.

The path to the joy of God’s presence always leads through joyless isolation, when the part of us that most longs for connection is alone.