Like Murphy’s Law suggests, it’s easy to do the wrong things and like the guy in the picture below, it is also easy to do the right things in the wrong way.
Humanity’s moral frailty may offer a substantial explanation as to why we do the wrong things; but another part of the reason we do the wrong things or why we do good things the wrong way is that we just didn’t pay enough attention to get it right--we just didn’t understand what was important to understand in the first place!
And getting things wrong can have undesirable consequences.
In the spirit of wanting to reduce bad choices and of wanting to reduce the number of things we do the wrong way, we offer these encouragements and caveats:
- We have envisioned what we are trying to communicate on this site in holistic way.That is, even though we have organized our resources into various categories the big idea that can be lost in those details is that we are intending to provide a spiritually intuitive approach. So for one, this site emphasizes the work of God’s Spirit and our responsibility to season our speech with salt with whom we offer guidance--both in evangelism and mentoring. At the heart of that approach is the idea of taking the time to accurately assess where people “are” in terms of their life’s journey and using that information in a non-manipulative way to help clarify issues and provide useful advice. In the case of evangelism we call this approach conversational and relational evangelism. With the relevant changes we call this approach in mentoring, conversational and relational mentoring.
- We intend to provide a wide variety of resources to help you think through various aspects of helping people find their way to faith in Christ and growing in their faith. We do not intend to provide every resource on every issue that could be raised. By providing numerous resources and at times countenancing disparate points of view on this site we do not intend to communicate that anything goes when it comes to spiritual guidance. Some ideas are better than others and it’s up to your discernment to take away the best ideas from this site.
- It is our intention to simplify things where we can by various means (like using schemas to illustrate different aspects), but in so doing we do not intend to take a simplistic or cookie-cutter approach to spiritual guidance. For instance, in breaking down various aspects of the communication process--something we think is helpful in order to season our speech with salt--we don’t intend to say that all that is needed in effective spiritual guidance is well-trained communication skills.
- At some point you need to get beyond just accessing these resources and digest what is appropriate for you through application. Hopefully integrating these ideas will make you more effective at understanding and clarifying the key issues so that your spiritual guidance will be more and more effective to the glory of God.
- In conclusion, let us remind you that our pragmatic use of the metaphor of “journey” is just that. We liked the idea of organizing our resources around it, but there are many other metaphors we could have used like “fishing for men” or some sort of “salt” allusion. We liked “journey."