A Spiritual Hopper Deck

What if we developed a constantly varied approach to spiritual training based upon the hopper deck model?

The idea would be to convene a small group of people who wanted to train for Christlikeness and embraced the concept of constantly varied training. The facilitator would identify 20 possible exercises that could be done by the group in an hour or less.

Here are few examples:

• Memorize a portion of the Sermon on the Mount.
• Sit in complete silence for 20 minutes.
• Go out to the surrounding neighborhood and take prayer requests for 45 minutes.
• Write a letter to God expressing your deepest pain to him.
• Write a letter to someone you need to forgive.
• Write 10 encouragement cards to people in your sphere of influence.
• Read a chapter from the Bible and write as many questions as you can think of in 15 minutes. Then come together as a group and spend another 15 minutes coming up with even more questions.
• Spend 45 minutes preparing care packets for the homeless. Then take the packets you prepared and give them away during the week.
• Sit in a circle and ask each person to spend 5 to 10 minutes telling their spiritual story.
• Compile a list of all the things for which you are thankful.
• Get with a partner and practice having a difficult conversation with someone you need to challenge or confront.

The facilitator would take all of these ideas and put them in a box. After saying a prayer asking God to guide the experience, someone would draw one of the exercises out of the box and then the group would do it. The group must  be prepared to do whatever comes out of the box. No excuses. If special supplies are needed, then the facilitator has to have them ready. The group will spend the prescribed time doing the exercise and then come back together for the last 15 minutes and process their experience. There should be a mixture of activities and exercises so that no matter what is drawn it will address both the strengths and weaknesses of various members of the group.

If I were in such a group, I would love to spend 30 minutes reading the bible and asking questions. If we drew the card that said we had to walk around the neighborhood and take prayer requests I would not be excited. But I would do whatever came out of the hopper because I need to train my weaknesses as well as my strengths.

The group comes back the next week and does it again. They work through the cards, never repeating an exercise until they’ve gone through them all. Constantly varied. Sometimes hard. Sometimes easy. Never boring. After a couple of months of this kind of training, hopefully every member of the group would be stimulated to grow in areas they would have otherwise never explored or addressed. A few might even find new strengths they didn’t even know they had because their past church experience had consisted of participating in only a handful of the same activities over and over again.

What do you think? Would you want to be a part of a group that trained for spiritual fitness in this way?