A Word From Below: The Space Between

Last week Lina Thompson and I were teaching one of our Street Psalms intensives. We have been teaching for FYI’s Urban Youth Ministry Certificate program for several years now and have really enjoyed it. This year twenty urban youth workers from all over the country attended the training. The time was truly amazing, but I have to confess that, when pressed, it is not easy to say just exactly why the experience was so amazing…

If I am honest, I am sometimes tempted to think that it is the content of our intensives that makes the experience so good. It isn’t. I am tempted to think that our teaching is superior. It isn’t. I am tempted to think that we simply know things that others don’t. We don’t. What makes these intensives work is something of a mystery…and yet they do work, and it almost always comes as a surprise. Our hunch is that somehow the Spirit is delighted when a table is set and an honest invitation is made for an authentic conversation.

Martin Buber once said that transformation happens in the “meeting.” According to Buber, transformation happens, not “in” or “to” a person, but in the space “between” persons. It is in this space that we “meet” each other and this meeting happens in and through dialogue.

At the end of the day, when the intensives seem to work well there is always the unmistakable quality of a genuine, authentic dialogue or conversation. We are not trying to convert people to a particular point of view. Rather, we are trying to engage leaders in an authentic conversation about the nature of Good News in hard places and that makes all the difference.

At CTM we have come to the core conviction that monologue almost always imposes blame, no matter how “true” the monologue might be. I think we all feel this at some level even if we don’t know how else to relate. On the other hand, dialogue, when it is authentic, opens us up to one another, inviting the possibility for a real and genuine  meeting. I think this is a good description of our approach to training and more specifically, our approach to Scripture. We see Scripture, not as a blue print for life, but an invitation to a conversation — a conversation between the Word and the World. It is a conversation that creates the possibility for a real and genuine MEETING. I have come to see this meeting as promise of the Gospel and the very ministry of Jesus.

Truth, grace and transformation, then, are not found in this or that idea. They are found in the MEETING. Paul Tillich called it the realm of the “Really Real.” C.S. Lewis described it as the very essence of prayer: “May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.” Or, to give it a more contemporary twist, Dave Matthews called it the “space between.” This is the realm that Jesus inhabits and invites us into. It is here, in the simple act of an honest conversation that the Spirit shows up and reveals Jesus.

The problem, of course, is that it isn’t easy to have an honest conversation. There is just so darn much static and fear. Perhaps T.S. Eliot was right when he said, “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” And so we prattle on speaking mostly in monologues to each other, half-hoping and half-afraid that God will break through our monologic addictions into that “space between,” where a real conversation is possible, where the Word and the World meet each other in authentic dialogue — that place where the real I meets the real Thou and both are transformed into the very likeness of Christ.

“The Space Between

What’s wrong and right

Is where you’ll find me hiding, waiting for you

The Space Between

Your heart and mine

Is the space we’ll fill with time

The Space Between…”

–Dave Matthews

Guest blogger Kris Rocke is the Executive Director of the Center for Transforming Mission, http://www.ctmnet.org/, whose mission is to “develop communities of grassroots leaders to serve high-risk youth and families in hard places.”  Kris co-teaches one-week intensives in our Urban Youth Ministry Certificate program.

©2009 Fuller Youth Institute