Personal Statement

Who am I? I am a lifelong follower of Jesus who remains deeply grateful for my evangelical foundation while learning to live from the deeper truth that I am God’s beloved, apart from my usefulness, accomplishments, or failures. Through suffering, silence, prayer, and the wisdom of the contemplative tradition, I am discovering that the Christian life is not primarily about achieving more for God, but about being transformed into the likeness of Christ. This personal statement tells the story of where I have come from, what is shaping me now, and my continuing journey toward a life of prayer, honest community, and service flowing from love rather than obligation.

Who Am I?

A Personal Statement of Faith and Spiritual Formation

I. Where I Have Come From

I am a lifelong evangelical Christian. The faith I received was a good one — grounded in Scripture, serious about salvation, and genuinely concerned with living rightly before God. I was shaped by a tradition that believed the Bible, that took the cross seriously, and that understood the Christian life as one of active discipleship. I am grateful for that inheritance. I do not disown it. It is the soil in which I grew.

But somewhere along the way — and I cannot point to a single moment — I began to sense that something was missing. Not missing from the faith itself, but missing from the way I had learned to practice it. My Christianity had become, in large measure, a Christianity of doing: of serving, attending, studying, producing, and performing. I was busy for God. I was sincere. And I was slowly running dry.

Ministry had taken its toll. The demands were real, the needs around me constant, and the pressure to be useful — to justify my place at the table by what I contributed — had quietly become the air I breathed. I did not recognize it as exhaustion at first. I called it faithfulness. But faithfulness was costing me something I could not name, and the well I was drawing from was growing shallow.

II. What Broke Me Open

Then came a season of suffering — the particular kind that does not resolve quickly and cannot be managed by effort or willpower. I will not detail it here. What I will say is that it stripped away the scaffolding I had built around my sense of self. The things I had quietly relied upon — my usefulness, my competence, my ability to hold things together — were suddenly unavailable to me. I was left with a question I had not known I was avoiding: Who am I when I cannot perform?

It was in that place of emptiness that I first encountered the contemplative tradition in a way that reached me. I had known about it in the abstract — had heard of Thomas Merton, had come across references to the Desert Fathers, had perhaps skimmed a paragraph of Julian of Norwich. But now I was reading Henri Nouwen, and something in his pages found me where I was.

“You are the Beloved. This is your identity. This is your calling. Claim it. Hold it. Let it shape everything you do, everywhere you go, and everything you are.” — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Nouwen wrote not as a theologian presenting a system but as a wounded man who had learned something true. He had left Harvard. He had gone to live with people who could not value him for his accomplishments. And in that descent, he had found the thing he — and I — had been circling around for years: that the love of God is not a reward for performance. It is the ground of existence. It is what we are, before we do anything at all.

III. What I Have Come to Believe

I am still an evangelical Christian in the most important senses of that word. I believe in the authority of Scripture. I believe in the grace of God revealed in Jesus Christ. I believe in the necessity of personal faith and the reality of the Holy Spirit’s work in the human soul. None of that has changed.

What has changed is how I understand the practice of the Christian life — the interior architecture of faith. I have come to believe several things that were not prominent in the tradition that formed me:

I am the Beloved of God. Not because of what I have done or will do, but because of who God is. This is not sentimentality. It is the foundation of everything. Until this is settled — really settled, in the deep places of the heart, not just acknowledged in the mind — all my service will carry a taint of performance, a need for approval, a subtle anxiety about whether I am enough. The contemplative tradition insists that the work of formation begins here, and I have found this to be true.

Silence is not empty — it is where God speaks. My evangelical formation valued the Word of God, rightly. But it often treated prayer as primarily verbal: petitions offered, Scripture recited, intercessions made. What I had rarely been invited into was the prayer of listening — the prayer of simply being present before God, with no agenda but to receive. The contemplative tradition calls this the prayer of the heart, and it has become, for me, the most essential practice of my day.

The spiritual life is a journey of transformation, not a project of achievement. The goal is not to accumulate more knowledge of God, or to perform more acts of service, but to be changed — to have my inner life gradually conformed to the love and humility of Christ. This is slow work. It cannot be hurried. And it requires a willingness to be present to my own poverty, not just my potential.

My wounds are not liabilities. Nouwen’s concept of the Wounded Healer has been, for me, among the most liberating ideas I have encountered in decades of following Christ. The suffering I have carried — the failures, the griefs, the seasons of dryness — are not disqualifications from ministry. When brought honestly to God, and offered vulnerably to others, they become the very source of genuine compassion. I can only truly accompany another person in their pain if I have been willing to be present to my own.

IV. How This Differs from My Evangelical Formation

I want to be honest about this without being unfair to the tradition I love. Evangelical Christianity, at its best, has given the world a deep commitment to Scripture, a passion for evangelism, and a serious doctrine of grace. I honor that. But in my own experience, and in the experience of many I know, certain emphases can quietly crowd out others:

Activity over interiority. Evangelical culture tends to measure spiritual health by external markers — attendance, service, giving, biblical knowledge. The inner life — the actual state of the heart before God — receives less systematic attention. Contemplative Christianity begins there, insisting that outer fruitfulness is only sustainable when it flows from an interior life genuinely rooted in God.

Information over transformation. Much of evangelical spiritual formation consists of learning more about God — through sermons, Bible studies, books, podcasts. Knowledge matters. But the contemplative tradition asks a harder question: Is the knowledge changing you? Is it reaching the level of the heart, or only the level of the mind? Lectio Divina, the ancient practice of slow, receptive reading of Scripture, is designed not to give you more information but to allow the Word to address you personally and do its transforming work.

Performance over being. Perhaps the deepest difference is this. Evangelical Christianity, at least in the form I absorbed it, communicated — not always in words, but in culture — that God’s primary interest was in what I did for him. The contemplative tradition insists that what God is most interested in is who I am becoming with him. Service matters. But it must flow from a place of rest, not restlessness; from fullness, not depletion; from love, not obligation.

This is not a rejection of evangelical faith. It is, I believe, a recovery of dimensions of the Christian life that were always present in Scripture and in the great tradition, but that my particular formation had underemphasized. The Desert Fathers, the medieval mystics, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen — these are not innovators. They are recoverers. And I am grateful to have found them.

V. The Practices That Are Shaping Me

I have learned, slowly, that the contemplative life is not a feeling or a philosophy but a set of concrete, daily practices — disciplines of the heart that create the conditions in which God can do his forming work. For me, these have included:

A daily practice of silent prayer. Following the tradition of Centering Prayer — developed by Thomas Keating and others from the ancient practice of The Cloud of Unknowing — I set aside time each morning to be silent before God. I choose a sacred word as a simple expression of consent to his presence and action. When thoughts arise, I return, gently, to the word. This is not dramatic. It is not always consoling. But over time, it has begun to change the quality of my inner life in ways I did not anticipate.

Lectio Divina. Rather than reading Scripture to extract information or prepare for teaching, I have learned to read it slowly, receptively — to allow a short passage to rest in me, to sit with a word or phrase that catches my attention, to respond from the heart rather than the intellect. This has opened Scripture to me in ways that years of analytical study alone had not.

The Daily Examen. At the end of each day, I sit quietly and review the day in God’s presence — not to evaluate my performance, but to notice where I was consoled and where I was desolate, where I was most alive and where I closed down. This practice, rooted in the Ignatian tradition, has developed in me a slow attentiveness to the movements of the Spirit in ordinary life.

Genuine community. The contemplative tradition insists that the inner life and the communal life are not separate. Nouwen’s movement from hostility to hospitality has become a framework for how I try to relate to others — particularly the difficult people and situations I would prefer to manage at a distance. True community, marked by honest sharing and genuine welcome, is itself a spiritual practice.

VI. Where I Am Going

I am not at the end of this journey. I am, in many ways, at the beginning of understanding what it might mean to live from a deeper place. The false self — the self that finds its identity in usefulness, approval, and achievement — does not surrender quietly. The work of formation is lifelong.

But I am no longer running. I am learning, slowly, to be still. To receive before I give. To let my ministry flow from a well that is being continually replenished, rather than from reserves I accumulated long ago and am slowly spending down.

Henri Nouwen, near the end of his life, wrote that the Christian life can be summarized in three movements: from loneliness to solitude, from hostility to hospitality, from illusion to prayer. These are the movements I am trying to learn. They are not destinations. They are practices — daily, imperfect, and graced.

I am the Beloved. I am learning to believe it. And I am learning to live from it — in quiet prayer, in honest community, and in service that gives not from compulsion but from love.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” — Augustine of Hippo, Confessions