Mark Buchanan is a pastor and award-winning author who lives and speaks on the West Coast of Canada. His writing has been published in numerous periodicals, including Christianity Today, Leadership Journal, and Discipleship Magazine. He is the author of five books including Your God Is Too Safe and his new book Spiritual Rhythm: Being With Jesus Every Season of Your Soul.
Here’s the first half of our interview with Mark on Spiritual Rhythm. The second half can be found here.
EC: What does spiritual rhythm mean?
MB: I distinguish between rhythm and balance. Balance is what most people seek, but I think it’s is a myth. Balance in life is something that, even if we can attain it, is not worth the effort. It’s like standing a kayak: it’s fragile, inert, and a misuse of the kayak.
Rhythm is what we seek when we paddle the kayak. Balance flows out of rhythm as a natural by-product of it. Balance is not the point of life any more than it’s the point of kayaking, but it’s what happens without our even having to think about it when we get our rhythm right.
In a spiritual sense, rhythm is comprised of our pace of life and our ways of engagement in any given season. A good rhythm is what serves us best that season. In winter, we move at a different pace than, say, in spring. We engage life and God differently. That difference is defined by rhythm.
EC: What prompted you to write this book?
MB: The death of a close friend. That experience plunged me into a winter of the heart. I had never been through anything like it before, and I thought I was crazy or lazy, that I’d failed God, or he’d failed me. Then I realized that my heart was in wintertime. That realization then opened up a whole new way of looking at spiritual formation. Spiritual maturity is measured, on a biblical scale, not by how busy we are, but by the abundance and richness of the fruit we bear. But fruit implies seasons. Every season is needed to grow fruit, but only one season actually bears it. Winter’s dormancy is as important as fall’s harvest.
Christ forms us through seasons.
EC: What’s unique about Spiritual Rhythm for pastors and church leaders, or even volunteers?
MB: The idea that Christ forms us through seasons is, I believe, a more biblical and a more practical way to understand and steward our spiritual formation. Most models of Christian spirituality measure progress by the depths and strength of our commitments. Busyness is equal to maturity. The model of seasons – that our souls pass through winter, summer, spring, fall, often in no particular order, and that Christ meets us in all these places - measures maturity by how well we steward each season. Winter, for example, is about pruning our activities, not adding more. It’s about becoming unbusy.
I think that insight alone will help leaders and volunteers find better ways to help themselves and help others to fulfill the central call of discipleship – to bear much fruit.
EC: How do you hope pastors will use Spiritual Rhythm?
MB: I’d love it if pastors would preach on the idea. When I preached this to my congregation (before writing the book), it washed over them in waves of relief. For example, I estimate that a third of any congregation is, at any given time, experiencing some kind of heart’s winter. Most of the way we do church makes these people feel like failures, heretics, renegades. Our “busyness” model alienates people already in the throes of alienation. That is a pastoral crisis. It fails to bring the full weight of biblical witness to bear on the lives of our people. I have taken to asking pastors, “Have you ever preached on Psalm 88?” I’ve yet to meet one who has. And yet, many of your people live there.
I recently taught a 2-week course at regent College on the book’s material. Many of the students were pastors, and in conversation with several I discovered a use for the book I’d not envisioned while writing it: that whole denominations can go through a particular season. One pastor felt that the book gave him insights to help his denomination diagnose and tackle issues that had plagued them for years.
Here’s the rest of the interview!
