Before Dallas Willard taught a room of pastors anything about the kingdom of God, he gave them an assignment. Keith Matthews remembers the words: “the first three nights, I want you to get 10 hours of sleep.”
That is where a graduate course on the spiritual life began. Sleep.
The class was a two-week intensive for Fuller’s Doctor of Ministry program, held in a Catholic retreat center outside Los Angeles. Keith sat beside Willard for eighteen of those years. He says the pastors arrived in rough shape. “Many of them came broken. Many of them came weary and tired.” Willard judged that the first thing standing between them and the material was exhaustion, and he treated their bodies as part of the curriculum, because he believed they were.
By the last week of the course, Willard turned the class over. “Ok, we’re moving toward the conclusion,” he tells them, and hands Keith the floor to talk about “how he works with this material, both in churches and in groups that form around conferences.” What follows is the session Conversatio titles Practical Matters.
You can watch the full session or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/practical-matters/
Last summer Keith gave me an hour over Zoom for my dissertation research, retired now, living on the central California coast, thirteen years out from Willard’s death. He has been making the same argument for thirty years, and he makes it about himself first.
A congregation stops growing where its pastor stopped. A growing pastor is no guarantee of a growing church, and plenty of holy men have led churches that went nowhere. But a pastor who has quit growing leaves his people nothing to model.
This is where a teacher of the nations does his quietest work. Willard gave pastors three tasks: proclaim the kingdom, teach it, and manifest it. Proclamation and teaching can be prepared on Saturday. Manifestation is the kingdom showing up in a life, and a pastor can only manifest what he has actually received.
The Answer Is You
Keith opens on a gap our congregations have quietly agreed to live with. People believe for forty years and change very little, and we have made that normal. Then he moves the charge closer to home: “Another big tragedy is that the pastorate; we are complicit in the game.”
We stand up each week and describe a life we are not living. We recommend a water source we have not drunk from. Keith says it three times.
“The answer is you. The answer is you. You need to drink deeply from the well.”
“Many pastors themselves haven’t drunk deeply at the well, and yet they point to it and say that’s what you have to do.”
Keith had a working example of that in front of him for eighteen years, and when we talked he kept returning to Willard’s manner rather than his material. The class was not working because the content beat other content. Willard was not, by any account including Keith’s, a compelling speaker. “He was not a dynamic speaker, as you know,” Keith told me. He toned himself down on purpose, because he wanted the Spirit doing the work rather than the speaker manufacturing an effect. Keith knows what the alternative produces: “Something of a feeling that would fade.”
What moved the room was that the man had been to the well. Willard wrote the same instruction in Renewing the Christian Mind: “I encourage pastors to have substantial times every week when they do nothing but enjoy God.”
Every week. Substantial. Doing nothing but enjoying God.
Willard was drinking in front of them. That was the point of the two weeks, and the reason the room filled with pastors who had come to check whether the writing matched the man. They went home to stand in front of their own congregations, where the same transfer would run again. What a pastor has received is what his people get to watch.
The Go-To Guy Was Dying
Keith taught this material for a living and drifted anyway. He was ten years into a church that had grown, and what shaped him over those years was the congregation’s demand rather than his own training. “I realized how the church demands had started to form me in ways that were now working inside of me in a very unhealthy way.”
He was the go-to guy, the fireman, the executive pastor. Every major crisis came across his table, and he was good at it. “I got a tremendous amount of affirmation for being the ‘go-to’ guy but that wasn’t where I was called to be, but I found myself doing something everyone thought I should do because I was good at it and I got affirmation for it.”
“My calling was teaching and spiritual formation and I found that all I was doing was all this other stuff and the church needed it and they would clap for me and say, ‘How great!’ but I was dying. I started to die.”
The older name for it is the fear of man. Keith was being formed by the approval of the people he had been called to form.
He had given the class the general version earlier in the hour: “as a vocational group, pastors are some of the most unaware people of themselves in general.” And the mechanism: “Everyone thinks they have the job description for you.” A congregation hands a pastor a job description per member, all sincere, most of them reasonable, none written by anyone responsible for who he becomes. “Often times you get into the pastorate and you literally lose yourself in the pastorate.”
What stopped it was the friendship. Keith was across the country by then and still had standing meetings with Willard, and in those conversations a verse surfaced that he still calls his wake-up verse, Hebrews 13:7.
Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you.
Keith stops the class there and makes them guess what comes next. Then he gives it to them.
Consider the outcome of their way of life.
The verse asks a pastor where his way of life is going to land him, and it came to Keith while he was succeeding and dying at the same time.
What he changed was the order. He borrowed a tool from Willard that he still uses, “the life circle,” which puts the permanent relationships first: time with God, then family. The church takes its place behind the two that outlast the job.
Reordering a life that way sounds like works-righteousness to a certain kind of pastor, and Keith took the objection head on in the same hour, turning to Willard as he answered it: “People think that if we are asking you to do something, now you are practicing works righteousness. Again, God is not opposed to effort; He’s opposed to earning.”
Training over trying is his phrase for it. What he means by it is a slow, methodical, grace-fueled process, which is a different animal from a program of self-improvement.
“The bottom line is: does your congregation want the empty cup that you bring or a full cup coming to them?”
Our churches accept the empty cup because it is what has been on offer. Set a full one in front of them and they will taste the difference before anyone explains it. A congregation that watches its pastor come back from the well week after week starts to believe the well is there, and that the walk to it is short enough for them to make.
Close Enough to Be Watched
Paul tells Timothy to train himself to be godly. A few verses later he tells him why the training has to be visible: so that everyone may see your progress. Keith builds the hour on those two verses. “You’ve got to be close enough to people for them to see your growth,” he tells the class.
The congregation is meant to watch someone change. A pastor who is already finished teaches his people that the life he preaches is a destination other people reached, and they will file it accordingly.
Keith hosted a conference at his church in the Bay Area, five or six hundred people. A young man whose father was in the church was studying philosophy at Stanford and asked whether he might grab a meal with Willard. Keith made the introduction and expected nothing. At lunch, instead of going to the green room, Willard found the student, took him to the side of the stage, and the two of them sat on the edge of it with box lunches.
Keith watched from the back. A few people drifted up and stood listening. Then a few more. “By the end of lunch, there were a hundred people around them on the stage leaning in to listen to what he was saying. And he was not even looking at the mass. He was with that student.”
People told Keith some version of the same thing everywhere he took Willard: “I felt like he made me feel like I was the only person in the room.”
“It really shifted from I want to get what he’s saying to I want to be like this guy.”
The pastors in the classroom at Fuller came to study a theology of ministry. They left with two examples in front of them, Dallas and Keith both living the thing they were teaching. Keith put it to me this way: “pastors as teachers of the nations, we better radiate Jesus absolutely, or it doesn’t matter what we say.”
Being close enough cuts both ways. The people near enough to watch a pastor grow are also near enough to tell him what they see, and Keith counts that as part of how the growing happens. He quotes a friend: “there is no transformation without feedback.” He could go to a monastery for twenty years and God would do a great deal, “but there are some things that He will not do without me getting feedback from some eyes in front of me.”
Monday to Monday
Keith kept waiting for the class to become unnecessary.
“I thought after five or six years or 10 years I wouldn’t have to teach this class anymore,” he told me, “because all of these people that are coming from evangelical churches will have already read Dallas.” It never happened. “Every year I taught the class it was new because the default system for a faulty gospel is so powerful and we are locked into a seven day a week work model, church model that keeps us locked into this default system.”
His name for the repair: “A paradigm shift from a Sunday to Sunday model to a Monday to Monday model.”
Sunday to Sunday is the arrangement most of our people already live inside. Church is where the spiritual feeding happens. Keith names the tell: “isn’t that what people say? Well, were you fed today?” The week is what you survive between meals. You do your best, you fail, you come back Sunday to be forgiven and fed, and the cycle runs again.
Monday to Monday relocates it. “The place of my growth is not primarily Sunday. It’s when I’m at work, my family, my play, all the other aspects of my regular life I live.”
“I am not, as a single man, the church. Even though I’m a Christian, I am not. I’m not the church. The church comes into being in its gatherings.” The gathering is real and necessary. It is also one location among the several where the life actually gets lived.
So Sunday changes jobs. Preaching creates the vision, “wet the appetite of the Church to see the unseen.” Vision alone leaves people wanting a life they have no means to enter. “None of us will change unless time and intensity is a piece of that,” Keith says, “and this is why generally a Sunday morning service is not enough.”
So we teach. We find a venue where we can do more than talk at the backs of each other’s heads, and we put the means in people’s hands.
And we go first. Monday to Monday is a life our people have to see somebody living before it becomes available to them.
My last question to Keith was what he most hopes gets carried forward, now that Dallas is gone and he is no longer teaching the course.
“That people see that this life with Jesus is primarily lived in your local community. And if you as a pastor or even a layperson see that the spheres of influence that God has you in is your place of ministry and you are radiating Jesus, you are the aroma of Christ, then that would be fulfilling everything Dallas would have loved.”
For Reflection
Keith says pastors are among the most self-unaware people in any vocation. If someone stood close enough to watch your week, what would they say you are being formed into?
Keith reordered his life so that time with God and his family sat ahead of the church. If someone charted your last month by the hours you actually spent, where would the church fall?
Keith asks whether your congregation gets the empty cup you bring or a full one. Which have they been getting this month?
Dallas Willard was willing to do a 4 credit hour Independent Study on Spiritual Formation for me as a DMin student at Fuller. Of the 250 credit hours of higher education (BA, MDiv, DMin) those four hours were the most impactful in my life.