The Bartender. Michael McNichols

our role was to cooperate with God instead of expecting God to cooperate with our programs?”

      Paul had been writing while Dean spoke. “Dean, I think I’m getting your point. But take me to a practical level. We’ve got this church of busy, well-meaning people. How does this begin to happen for them? How do they start to take this on? If there is training for becoming evangelistic spiritual directors, or whatever, then haven’t we just created another program for evangelism?”

      “Paul, how about if we just started re-teaching all of us what it means to be a Christian, to follow Jesus, to go where he goes? What if we started really teaching about spiritual formation, not as some new technique, but rather as how to order our lives so that we love God and love others? Maybe incorporating the art of spiritual direction into discipleship training would just give us a way to practically follow Jesus. Didn’t he say that he only did what his heavenly Father was doing? Why wouldn’t we want our approach to evangelism to look like that?”

      Gracie had a distant look on her face as old images from her university days flashed through her mind. “I remember walking through my campus, wondering about all the students around me, many of whom were unresponsive to our evangelistic attempts. I so often grieved over them, considering them to be lost people. If what you are saying has any merit, Dean, then I might have been the lost one. I might have lost out on so many opportunities to spend time with people and look for signs of God’s presence. Instead of being a message-proclaimer, maybe I could have been more like a detective—learning to really listen to people and then sort of dust for God’s fingerprints. I have to really . . .”