About

Jill Weber is a prayer missionary and author who for the last five years has been establishing a new monastic community at the Waverley Abbey Estate in the U.K. Her desire is to cultivate "thin spaces" where Jesus is loved.Show Notes[1:48] Could you share with us about the project you’ve been working on for the past 5 years?We’re working on establishing a prayer community/monastic community at the Waverley Abbey Estate in the U.K. It’s the site of the first Cistercian Monastery in the U.K. There has been prayer on this estate for over 1000 years. We are at the beginnings of building what we believe is going to become a mother house for the 24/7 Prayer movement for the lay ecumenical religious order called the Order of the Mustard Seed. We want to create a place where Jesus is loved.[5:37] Tell us about Order of the Mustard Seed.The original OMS was founded in 1716 in Eastern German by a handful of friends who shared commitments and practices that would hold them to faithfulness to Jesus and the Gospel, commitments which included a praying community that started a prayer meeting that went on for over 100 years. 24/7 Prayer is all about prayer and mission and justice. So they dug up that mustard seed in 2005, and took vows to be true to Christ, kind to people, and take the Gospel to the nations. Like every other religious order, we’re trying to live into the Gospel n a particular way. We’ve taken six practices - prayer and creativity, mission and justice, hospitality and learning – and shaped our lives around those. It’s for regular people in their day-to-day lives. [10:18] How do you live into it? What does it look like for you personally to hold those practices and values in front of you.I’m a monastic, a prayer missionary, so this is my vocation. My days are shaped by rhythms of prayer. We’re all over the world, and realized that we can get on zoom and pray. When COVID first hit, we set four times a day to pray together, these prayer watches. I also exercise my creativity in creating this new monastic community. Hospitality is a vital practice for us, creating space for God and for others. We offer spiritual direction to groups and individuals, which is hospitality as well. We do work around justice – taking seriously the creation mandate to love the world we’ve been given, and also work addressing racial injustice.[14:27] It sounds like an idyllic life.When our lives are small and we’re concerned only with our immediate environment, we don’t get touched by the suffering of others. I’ve found it difficult personally this year to be surrounded by it. We’re carrying it every day. I said this week on the Lectio 365 app, “Instead of talking to God about your problems, talk to your problems about God.” To get declarative as say, “This is the Lord, this is what he can do. He is the God of the heavens and earth. He can do anything.” But at other times I just feel the weight of other people’s crosses as I daily bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. And it costs.I also pioneered a new monastic community in Canada in a little steel town outside Toronto. The first 2 or 3 years was so hard – everything that could go wrong went wrong. Pioneering is extremely costly. Yes, especially when people are involved. But Jesus asked me to, and I said yes, and trust that there is a joy set before me down the road.[18:30] It’s a noble calling to enter into the suffering of others.We’re all invited to. If we look at the way of Jesus, it was a descending way. He came down entered into it right with us. The invitation is always to cruciform love. Are you willing to stretch yourself out, open yourself up, give yourself freely, knowing that it’s going to cost you.[19:38] What do you say to people who are carrying a lot and not having room to go beyond their own family or the struggles that they are in?I did a 2-year program with Ruth Haley Barton at the Transforming Center, and she introduced me to a mode of intercession where you just hold people in the presence of God in the place of stillness. This is where contemplative pray, solitude and silence, are so important. I don’t have the magical incantation prayer that is going to fix everything. But I can hold people in his presence. My most common prayer is, “Come Lord Jesus, Maranatha.”[21:36] A friend of mine (Bill Vaswig) taught me much about prayer. When I go into certain spaces where there is so much suffering, and I’m just overwhelmed by it and don’t know what to do, he said, “Nate, you’re supposed to pray. You see all this so you can pray. Just walk around and lift them up.”The other thing that helps me is worship. Coming into the presence of Jesus and just look at who he is and declaring his beauty and his strength helps with so many things, gives us the right perspective. It lifts the burden – we don’t have to know what to do, because he knows what to do; we don’t need to be the one to fix because we can’t. He is the only one who can. It’s his presence that changes everything.[24:10] It makes such a difference when there are others involved. It’s one thing to do this on your own, but it’s something else when you have a community or a couple of people that are inviting you to take some time.A lot of times in COVID my get up and go got up and left. But I knew that we had our call at 7 and that they were waiting for me. And when I had nothing to pray, I was held by the prayers of others. It got me through because I showed up whether I felt like it or not. And we just carried each other.[25:25] What it your hope for the community there; what would you like to see happen in the years to come?I want a space where Jesus is loved. I want a place that is for him, by him, through him, and about him. I want people to walk on the property and experience the presence of Jesus. We get these beautiful thin spaces where people have prayed. I long for a place of restoration, where people can come off the front line of their lives, settle in, and nestle into the Lord’s presence and into a loving, hospitable community. The interesting thing about the new monastic movement in Protestantism, is there are people out there who have a call to a lifestyle of prayer. But because they’re not Catholic, it hasn’t been identified and they haven’t been channeled in the monastic arenas. So we’ve got monks without monasteries in the Protestant church. And one of the joys of my life is finding people who have a vocation and inviting them in family, into a community of shared practices. And you cannot spend long in a prayer room without touching the heart of a God who weeps over a lost world. Night and day prayer inevitably, as it always does in history, to global missions.[29:11] You’re not walking with a lot of agenda – there is a lot of openness.We pray all the time, “Jesus, we don’t want you to build our house. We want to build your house. What is the house you are building?” We keep asking him what’s the next right thing. We’re just all disciples wandering around behind Jesus. We’ve got this unpredictable Rabbi who knows what he’s going to do next. And he invites us along on a journey. One of the things that has wrecked me the most is your dad’s “Prayer of Relinquishment (see below),” giving it all back. So I don’t know what my life is going to look like a year from now, and it doesn’t matter. We get attached to all kinds of things, so I’m just learning to let it all go.[33:53] How does discernment work in your community? When you make a decision to move forward, what does that process look like?It comes out of that prayer of building his house. It comes out of a commitment that if we’re going to follow this Rabbi Jesus, who said I only do what I see my father do, and if Jesus is truly the head of his church and we believe that he speaks today, then it’s a good idea to have a listen, to hear how he wants to exercise his leadership over our community. We’ve drawn on Ignatian models of discernment, to pay attention to the movements of the Holy Spirit within us, to pay attention to how God’s word comes alive to us in various ways. As we interact with Scripture, creating space for Scripture to speak and to transform and invite us, for us it’s a lot of listening to God, a lot of listening to one another. Ruth Haley Barton has a book called Pursuing God’s Will Together that’s the gold standard. Starting with a posture of humility, saying, “God, we need wisdom.” And relinquishment – paying attention to our own egos, agendas, preferences, and being willing to let that go and say, “What do you want, Father? What would please you?” She also takes about the prayer of quiet trust, so relaxing into the care of God and the provision he gives us. We also listen deeply to one another, which requires safety in the room and in relationships. And we watch and wait to see what God brings our way. We wait and we watch and we pray. And if the way feels blocked, we will stop and attend to our relationships and we will repent.[41:23] You can extend this to a church, ministry, family, or small group, to pause and ask if there are apologies that need to be made, to repent. God seems so intent on his children playing well together.Psalm 133 says, “How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head, running down on the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running donw on the collar of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion! For there the Lord has commanded the blessing, life forevermore.” We want to see God do amazing God-sized things. And he wants our hearts, our relationships. He wants the Kingdom of God amongst us. If he can’t trust us with the little handful of relationships, why would he give us more?Resources Mentioned 24/7 Prayer Order of the Mustard Seed Ruth Haley Barton, Pursuing God’s Will Together Richard Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home The Prayer of RelinquishmentToday, O Lord, I yield myself to you. May your will be my delight today. May you have perfect sway in me. May your love be the pattern of my living. I surrender to you my hopes, my dreams, my ambitions. Do with them what you will, when you will, as you will. I place into your loving care my family, my friends, my future. Care for them with a care that I can never give. I release into your hands my need to control, my craving for status, my fear of obscurity. Eradicate the evil, purify the good, and establish your Kingdom on earth. For Jesus’ sake, Amen.