 When Dreams Become Spiritual Direction
I have a friend who is an Episcopal priest who recently woke with a heavy wave of emotion he couldn’t shake. In his dream, he stood in a sanctuary that looked almost exactly like his own church—except everything needed for Mass was hidden, misplaced, or impossibly out of reach. The room was packed with people worshipping with intense emotion: dancing, clapping, and shouting. Amid the noise, he tried frantically to prepare the altar, but obstacle after obstacle appeared. The chalice was missing, the wine and water were buried, and the hosts spilled and scattered the moment he finally located them. The altar itself seemed to elevate, forcing him to climb a platform just to reach it, only to discover the ciborium was entirely gone. He awoke before the liturgy could even begin. Too Much Pizza Before Bed or Something More? Many people dismiss dreams as random neurological noise—a cinematic firing of neurons as the brain tidies up for the night. Certainly, some dreams are exactly that, and Christians should always be cautious about making grand, predictive claims based on a midnight reverie. Yet the Christian tradition has never entirely ignored the sleeping mind. We see this even in the secular world, where some of history’s greatest breakthroughs arrived while the waking mind was offline. Elias Howe famously solved the mechanics of the modern sewing machine after dreaming he was captured by cannibals waving spears with holes near the tips. Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the ring structure of benzene after dreaming of a snake biting its own tail. Even Thomas Edison relied on deliberate “genius naps,” holding steel balls in his hands that would drop to the floor the moment he drifted into the hypnagogic state, allowing him to capture the fluid insights of his subconscious. These stories remind us that the subconscious often sees connections the waking mind misses. Dreams in Scripture and the Christian Tradition For the believer, those quiet places of lowered defenses may also become places where the Holy Spirit gently brings hidden things into the light. Scripture contains significant moments in which God uses dreams as one means of guidance, warning, encouragement, and self-revelation. God speaks to Abimelech in a dream to protect an innocent family; Jacob envisions a ladder reaching to heaven, reorienting his understanding of God’s presence; and Joseph receives crucial direction before and after the birth of Jesus. In the book of Job, Elihu describes this pastoral function of the night: “In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men while they slumber on their beds, then He opens the ears of men, and seals their instruction, that He may turn man aside from his conduct, and keep man from pride.” (Job 33:15–17) What is striking in Job is that the emphasis is not primarily prediction but correction and illumination. The dream exposes what ordinary consciousness avoids. Discerning believers throughout church history have understood dreams not as new revelation meant to rival Scripture, but as a diagnostic mirror—a way for the Spirit to illuminate hidden dynamics already operating within the human heart. A Simple Framework for Listening to Dreams In my own work with spiritual direction, I’ve learned to look at dreams through this exact lens. When a lingering dream needs to be tested against Scripture and parsed with humility, I use a simple five-point framework to look past the surface details:
Looking Beneath the Surface of the Dream When my friend and I began to look through that exact window, it became clear that the dream was not primarily about race or worship styles, even though those vibrant details initially grabbed his attention. Because dreams communicate symbolically, the emotional core was his repeated, frustrated struggle to prepare the Lord’s Table. That detail changed everything. Technically, everything necessary for communion already existed in the room—the chalice, the wine, the water, the bread, and the altar were all present. Yet nothing could be accessed easily; the essential resources had been misplaced, neglected, or hidden from immediate reach. When Grace Gets Buried The image of the hosts buried behind junk is something almost every leader eventually encounters. Sometimes grace is not absent, and the means of healing are already available, but they are completely obscured by layers of accumulated disappointment, institutional memory, wounded relationships, and deeply ingrained habits of mistrust. The Body of Christ remains present, but access to it is blocked by the historical baggage that has gathered around the altar. The Missing Ciborium When the bread was finally retrieved, it scattered—mirroring the exhausting reality of leadership: the feeling of trying to gather people into a single body while personalities, politics, and competing loyalties continually pull them apart. This brings us to the missing ciborium. The ciborium—the vessel that holds the consecrated bread together—became, in the dream, a living image of the Church’s calling to gather the many into one. Its absence was not a failure of resources, but a cry about the missing structure of unity itself. When Dreams Reveal the Real Conflict Shortly after our conversation, my friend saw this play out in real time. Difficult meetings emerged, old loyalties resurfaced, and he realized people were saying one thing to his face and something entirely different behind closed doors. Questions of control and competing visions for the future were coming to a head, leading him to write to me: “This is not about race, but power.” Perhaps that is true on a natural level, but I wonder if something even deeper lies beneath our battles over power. Again and again in ministry, leadership, and family life, we encounter the exact same mystery: How do people actually become capable of communion? How do we gather a community when everyone arrives carrying their own history, disappointments, and old defenses? How do we prepare a common table when the elements themselves seem determined to scatter? The Spiritual Work of Preparation What strikes me most about my friend’s dream is not the chaos that occurred, but the tragedy that didn’t. The church building didn’t collapse, the altar didn’t break, the people didn’t abandon the room, and nothing holy was destroyed. The Mass simply remained unfinished. The dream seemed to invite my friend to stop pretending the clutter was not there. Rather than forcing quick solutions, it suggested beginning with honest conversations and naming what had remained hidden. Stay at the Table In spiritual direction, I have often found that God rarely meets us in neatly wrapped, completed stories. More often, the Spirit encounters us in the preparation, the interruption, the waiting, and the unfinished business. What hidden chalice or scattered host might the Spirit be asking you to notice this week? In the end, my friend’s dream didn’t foretell disaster—it revealed what was already true. The elements were present but buried. The people were gathered but scattered. The altar was accessible but unreachable. The invitation wasn’t to magically finish the liturgy; it was simply to stay at the table, look honestly at the clutter, and realize that the work of preparation had only just begun. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]
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 Every congregation at some point asks the same unspoken question: “If Jesus has already won the victory, why does it still feel like we’re losing?”
To understand that tension, we have to look back to 1946, when the theologian Oscar Cullmann reached for the freshest analogy available to him. The Second World War had just ended. The images of Normandy beaches were still vivid. And Cullmann, writing in Christ and Time, saw in D-Day the precise structure of New Testament eschatology: a decisive battle that determines the outcome of the war, followed by an interval of continued fighting before the final surrender. June 6, 1944 — the Allied landing at Normandy — marked the turning point. From that moment, the outcome was no longer in doubt. The strategic initiative had shifted permanently. What remained was not a question of whether the Allies would win but of how long the interval would last before the final surrender. The fighting continued for nearly another year. George Eldon Ladd spent his academic career at Gordon-Conwell filling in the map of that contested ground — the Kingdom of God present and arriving, already inaugurated in Christ and not yet fully consummated, breaking into history from the future. Together, Cullmann and Ladd gave the church its most durable framework for the world it actually inhabits. That world still feels like a battlefield. Understanding this changes everything about how a congregation understands its authority — and its assignment. The Tension of the Interval
What Jesus Actually Saw Matthew 9:35–10:23 is one of the hinge passages of the Gospel. Jesus has been moving through the towns and villages healing, teaching, proclaiming. And then Matthew pauses the narrative to tell us what Jesus saw when he looked at the crowds. He saw people who were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. The word translated “harassed” suggests people who have been beaten down, thrown to the ground, and worn out by the blows of life. Jesus looks at humanity and does not see villains or victims in neat categories. He sees wounded people. People burdened by the sins they have committed and the sins committed against them. Often, a transitioning congregation looks in the mirror and sees itself as the wounded one. But Jesus radically redirects our gaze outward. He tells us that the people are harassed — and then he says something that should stop us cold: “The harvest is plentiful.” We look at our cultural moment and see decline. Shrinking congregations. Institutional fatigue. A generation that wants nothing to do with organized religion. We call this a barren field. Jesus, however, calls it a plentiful harvest — precisely because the people are so harassed. They are not looking for a new religion; they are exhausted by the old powers. They are broken by the crushing weight of meritocracy, the endless demand to curate a self-worth presenting, and the internal monologue that whispers: You are not enough. You will never change. You are too broken. That voice is not conscience. It is the Accuser doing what the Accuser does. The Accuser’s Actual Move Scripture gives a specific name to the figure whose particular work is condemnation: ha-satan — the Accuser, the one who brings charges. The Accuser is a world-class lawyer with a terrible heart. He does not usually lie about facts. He lies about futures. He takes your very real, indefensible failures and draws one conclusion: because of this, therefore you are beyond grace. Think of the person lying awake at 2 a.m., replaying the sentence they should never have spoken, the promise they broke, the relationship they damaged, their heart pounding with shame. This is the Law turned into a weapon of despair. It is extraordinarily effective because it uses true premises to reach a false verdict. The crowds are harassed and helpless because they are listening to a legal argument they cannot win on their own. The church’s response to this is not advice. Not inspiration. Not a program or a therapy or a motivational message. It is a counter-verdict. Spoken with authority. By someone authorized to speak it. That is what the Office of the Keys actually is. The Office of the Keys as Courtroom In Lutheran pastoral theology, the Office of the Keys is not a liturgical courtesy or a historical relic. It is the courtroom in which the Accuser’s charges are dismissed — not because they were inaccurate, but because the Judge has already ruled and Someone else bore the verdict. Jesus does not hand his disciples a set of best practices for community development. He gives them authority — the same authority by which he was healing and proclaiming — and sends them out. The Kingdom of God does not advance by better programming. It advances by the exercise of authority that Jesus has already won and now distributes to his church. The absolution pronounced by a pastor over a penitent is not pastoral encouragement. It is not a spiritual pep talk. It is a legal declaration rendered in the court where the decisive battle has already been decided. “As a called and ordained servant of the Word, I forgive you all your sins.” That sentence carries the full weight of the cross behind it. The Accuser’s case is dismissed. Not because the charges were false — they were not — but because the penalty has already been paid in full. This is why private confession and absolution is not optional spiritual hygiene in the Lutheran tradition. It is targeted pastoral medicine for a specific wound: the wound of a conscience that has been told, by a very good lawyer, that grace does not reach this far. It does. The court has ruled. The Interval and the Foxhole We live in the interval — between D-Day and the final surrender, between the resurrection and the return — it is the pastoral situation every congregation inhabits every week. The outcome is secure. But the enemy has not yet laid down his weapons, and the foxholes are still occupied. For many congregations in transition, this contested ground feels particularly long. The pastoral vacancy. The shrinking budget. The Sunday mornings when the harvest Jesus described seems invisible from where you are standing. The mourners have already arrived. Jesus was not deterred by that then. He is not deterred by it now. The church does not go out because it feels powerful. It goes out because Jesus is powerful. We do not go as experts in overcoming darkness — we go as people who have been brought out of darkness and now speak of the One who did it. Sometimes that looks dramatic. More often it looks quiet: a prayer offered at a food pantry gate, a confession made in a hospital room, a promise kept when no one is watching, a wounded conscience comforted by a word it did not earn. The laborers are few, Jesus said, precisely because the sent life costs something. The people who keep showing up — to preach, to serve, to forgive, to comfort — when nothing in their circumstances is giving them permission to do so are not failing to find a better assignment. They are holding ground that He has already cleared. What This Means for Congregations in Transition The interim period has a particular temptation: to spend the entire season asking what the congregation has lost rather than what it has been given. What it has been given is the authority Jesus distributed to his disciples in Matthew 10. Not a strategic plan. Not a program portfolio. Authority. The power to forgive sins, to proclaim the Kingdom’s arrival, to speak a word of life into situations that look like death. A congregation that knows this does not enter the interim period as a patient waiting for a diagnosis. It enters as an outpost of the Kingdom in the interval. To actively “hold the ground” during a pastoral transition, a congregation must step out of waiting mode and take up three specific tasks:
Cullmann was right. The decisive battle is won. The outcome is not in question. The Accuser’s charges are dismissed. Ladd mapped the territory we are living in. It is occupied but not abandoned. Contested but not lost. Go hold the ground. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz is an ELCA-rostered intentional interim minister and congregational consultant based in the greater Houston area. He writes on congregational transition, spiritual formation, and the theology of the unseen at The Marginal Note on Substack. [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]  There is a kind of faith the church doesn't know how to talk about.
Not the faith of the triumphant testimony — the dramatic conversion, the answered prayer, the healing that arrived on cue. Not the faith of the theologically confident, who can articulate what they believe and why. The Gospels not only make room for this kind of faith; they name it and celebrate it. But there is another type as well. The faith that has been worn down by twelve years of bleeding, silence, and shame until it's barely recognizable as faith anymore. The faith that cannot make it to the front of the room. The faith that reaches sideways, invisibly, for the hem. That faith is all over our congregations. We mostly do not see it because we are not looking for it in the right places. The Woman and the Number Twelve Matthew 9 places two healing stories in deliberate parallel. A woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years reaches for the hem of Jesus's robe in a crowd. A twelve-year-old girl — the daughter of a synagogue leader named Jairus — is dying. One has lived her whole adult life in suffering. The other has barely had a chance to begin. The number is not accidental. Twelve is the number of the tribes of Israel. Twelve is the whole people of God. Matthew is making a structural argument: these two individuals represent everyone. The ones who have been sick longer than they can remember, and the ones cut off before they could begin. The exhausted and the barely-started. Both belong to the Twelve. Jesus goes to both of them. The woman's situation is specific and worth unpacking. Under the purity codes of her day, her condition made her ritually unclean. Anyone she touched became contaminated. She could not enter the Temple. She could not sit in community worship. She could not be held. For twelve years, the way the purity system was functionally applied in her context marked her as a problem to be managed from a distance. So she does not approach Jesus directly. She cannot. What she does is push through the crowd — invisibly, without permission — and reach for the kraspedon: the ritual fringe, the tzitzit (the blue-tasseled fringes commanded in Numbers 15 as a daily physical reminder of God's commandments). It is a theologically suggestive act of faith. A woman told for twelve years she was outside the covenant reaches out and grabs hold of a visible sign of that covenant. She is not reaching randomly. She is reaching for a sign that she still, somehow, belongs. What Jesus Does with What the World Calls Inadequate Faith Under the Law, contact with an unclean person should have made Jesus unclean. Instead, the logic of the Kingdom takes over: his cleanness spreads to her rather than her uncleanness spreading to him. This is the atonement in miniature. In Matthew 9, Jesus repeatedly crosses lines he was not supposed to cross — eating with tax collectors and sinners, allowing an unclean woman to touch him, taking the hand of a dead girl. Each time, the same thing happens: uncleanness does not transfer to him. His life transfers to them. Jesus stops. He turns. He does not ask how she ended up here. He does not make her explain the twelve years. He does not tell her to come back when she is cleaned up. He looks at whatever scraped-together, desperate, last-scrap faith she dragged to him — the faith that could not even make it to his face, the faith that reached sideways and invisible — and he calls it enough. Then he names her publicly. "Daughter." In front of everyone. He is not just healing her body. He is ending her exile. He is restoring her to the community that had classified her as a contaminant for twelve years. The word he uses — tharsei, "take heart," "take courage" — is a word of commissioning. She is not just healed. She is sent back in. Hesed Against the System This radical re-integration is the flesh-and-blood fulfillment of Israel's prophetic hope. What Hosea names, Jesus enacts in real time on a body the system had excluded. Seven hundred years before this moment, Hosea named the same tension. God's people had run through the cycle of faithlessness and consequence until the silence of God felt like abandonment. And into that silence Hosea speaks: "Come, let us return to the Lord. For it is he who has torn, and he will heal us. He has struck down, and he will bind us up." The God who tears also heals. The God who strikes also binds up. This is the shape of hesed — not a passing feeling, but a stubborn covenant loyalty that does not break. It is the love that holds fast regardless of the other party's condition. It is loyal love that goes all the way to the cross. Jesus brings this hesed into direct conflict with the religious metrics of his day. When the Pharisees object to his eating with sinners, he quotes Hosea: "I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." The system, as she experienced it, treated her as a contamination risk. God's hesed says otherwise. What This Means for Pastoral Care The people who approach God sideways are not doing it wrong. They are doing exactly what the hemorrhaging woman did. They cannot come boldly. Years of suffering, or shame, or silence have made boldness unavailable to them. What they can do is push through the crowd and reach — invisibly, without permission — for whatever part of the Word they can get their hands on. The pastor who knows this will build communities differently. Consider these practices:
The question is whether you can see it. If your ministry is calibrated to recognize visible, articulate, participatory faith, you will likely miss it. It often looks like a brief prayer at a food pantry table. A quiet presence in the back pew. A hospital room where someone can only whisper the name of Jesus. That is last-scrap faith — and it is met, again and again, by hesed with skin on. What Is Your Twelve Years? So, what is the thing that wakes up with you? The thing that drains you quietly, day after day. The thing you have stopped telling people about because nothing has changed and you are tired of looking disappointed. Twelve years of trying to stay sober. Twelve years of leading a congregation that will not turn. Twelve years of praying the same prayer against the same silent ceiling. He stopped for her. He went to that house. If all you can do is reach sideways, reach. If all you can reach is the hem, reach for the hem. He has already stopped. What is your twelve years? I'd love to hear where you're reaching for the hem these days — leave a comment below. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz is an ELCA-rostered intentional interim minister and congregational consultant based in the greater Houston area, with fifteen years on the faculty of the FIND School for Spiritual Direction in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. He writes on congregational transition, spiritual formation, and the theology of the unseen at The Marginal Note on Substack. [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]  Image: freepik.com A church with 30 people in worship fed more than 40,000 people last year — more than the entire population of the city where it operates.
I am the supply preacher at that congregation. I watch it happen every week. And I want to tell you what our standard instruments for congregational health would say about this church — and why that should trouble every mission board, every judicatory committee, and every denominational leader who makes decisions about where to invest missional resources. What the Numbers Actually Say In 2025, the Ray of Light Food Pantry — operated by Light of Christ Lutheran Church in La Porte, Texas — served more than 40,000 people, distributed the equivalent of more than 430,000 meals, and moved more than 600,000 pounds of food. The tracked value of what passed through its hands exceeded $1.1 million. That figure is a floor. It does not count the prize-winning steer donated from the Pasadena Livestock Show, the fresh seafood diverted after a contract snafu, or the pallets of unsold bread from the local Panera. The human engine behind it: roughly a dozen core volunteers, an 8-person board, and approximately 140 volunteer hours poured into the neighborhood every single week. At the Independent Sector's current valuation of $36.14 per volunteer hour, that is more than $260,000 in annual labor — more than four times the congregation's entire operating budget — generated entirely off-books, fueled by nothing but neighborly devotion and a theological conviction that the person at the door is not a client. Now here is what our standard instruments would say about this congregation: small, under-resourced, no resident pastor, no program staff, no strategic plan. Attendance: 20–30 on a good Sunday. Budget: under $60,000 for all of 2026. By every metric the institutional church uses to assess congregational health, Light of Christ is a congregation most denominational bodies would overlook — or quietly flag for consolidation conversations. That is not a small problem. That is a broken instrument. What We Are Actually Measuring The metrics we have built our missional infrastructure around — attendance, budget, staff, facilities — measure one thing: institutional viability. Whether a congregation can sustain itself as an organization. They do not measure missional vitality. Whether a congregation is an actual presence of Jesus in its neighborhood. Those are not the same thing, and we have spent decades pretending they are. A congregation that scores well on viability may be scoring near zero on effectiveness. A congregation that scores poorly on viability may be doing things no strategic plan would have generated and no spreadsheet will ever capture. We keep making resource decisions based on the first set of numbers while the second set of numbers goes unmeasured — and therefore unseen. Roland Allen identified this problem in 1912, writing about the contrast between Paul's missionary strategy and the Western missionary apparatus. Paul planted churches that could stand on their own within months because he trusted the Spirit to do what the Spirit does when given room. The Western model, Allen argued, creates dependency rather than capacity — importing systems rather than trusting what the Spirit was already cultivating in the local soil. A century later, the apparatus has changed considerably. The structural tendency Allen identified has not. What Better Instruments Would Measure Intentional interim ministry work has taught me that the questions a congregation asks during a transition period reveal what it actually believes about itself and its mission — not what its metrics say. The same principle applies to the instruments denominations use to assess congregational health. The questions we ask reveal what we believe is worth measuring. Here are four questions that would produce better data:
Learning to See What Is Already There Light of Christ does not need to be fixed. It needs to be seen — clearly, with the right instruments, by people with the authority to name what they are seeing and invest accordingly. The congregation that learns to be the church without waiting for institutional permission is not a congregation that failed to grow up. It may be the congregation that never needed to. The Spirit does not wait for institutional permission. The Kingdom is advancing in places our spreadsheets were never designed to find. If you are a denominational leader, a judicatory staff member, or a congregation council member trying to understand what your congregation is actually doing in its neighborhood — the instruments matter. The questions you ask determine what you are able to see. The full version of this argument, including the data behind it, ran in the June edition of The Marginal Note right here. If you work with congregations in transition, the interim period is exactly the right moment to recalibrate those instruments — before a new pastor arrives and the old assumptions reassert themselves. That is the kairos inside the crisis. It does not last indefinitely. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] |
