SUMMARY: Connecting

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Book Summary: Connecting
by Larry Crabb




Connecting

By Larry Crabb

Word Publishing, Nashville, Tennessee, Copyright 1997

Book Summary by Arlene Klink

Beneath what our culture calls a psychological disorder is a disconnected soul crying out for the nourishment that only a community of connected people can offer. God has deposited within us an energy that can heal the soul, a power to do miraculous work as we connect with one another.

This approach to healing centers on building intimate, healing mini-communities in our lives and churches.

“It’s time to consider a radical understanding of 'going to church' that centers on releasing the power to change lives that God has placed within every member of the Christian community, a community Christ calls his body, a community made up of lots of people connecting to a few others," writes Larry Crabb.

Chapter 1 - Kep’s Story

The author’s son, Kep, had a rebellious adolescence, separated from God, and one that culminated in his being expelled from college. On his way to meet Kep after the expulsion, Crabb prayed, “He needs to meet you. Give yourself to him through me, please!”

When he met Kep, Crabb did not have to control his temper, his usual response, rather he simply said, “How can I help?” A power was released through him that cut through Kep’s hardness and reached his soul with healing power – he came back to his father and God.

Chapter 2 - Three Ingredients of Healing Community

In connected community, there are three ingredients of healing:

1. Letting people know we delight in them as Christ does.

2. Eagerly looking for the goodness in someone’s heart and identifying the passions that are prompting loving choices.

3. Exposing the darkness in someone’s heart, their sin and pain, in order to engage them with the Savior’s kindness. It’s the kindness of God that leads to repentance.

Chapter 3 - Restored through Reconnecting

Many of the struggles in life that we assume are symptoms of psychological disorders are, in fact, evidence of a disconnected soul. The usual pattern for dealing with a hurting friend is to retreat, reprove or refer.

But the spiritual writer Henri Nouwen tells us what he did during a season of anguish. He turned to an elderly friend who many times “pulled my head to his chest and prayed for me without words but with a Spirit-filled silence that dispelled my demons of despair and made me rise up with new vitality.”

Could everyone connect like that with a few others?

Chapter 4 - Designed to Connect

The center of a person holds the capacity to connect. We are designed to live as unique members of a connected community. Power is found in this connection, that profound meeting when the life of Christ in one person is poured into another to awaken in the emptiest recesses of that person’s soul the experience of life.

Chapter 5 - Connecting: The Center of Life

The absolute center of all powerful attempts to impact people for good is connecting. The gospel has given life to us, and we can learn to release the power of that life within us to nourish the life of goodness within another.

Chapter 6 - Connecting and Vision

When a vision of what another person is and could become because of Christ is the passion behind all our efforts to relate to him, then powerful connecting occurs. Powerful-relating consists of grasping a vision of what God has in mind for someone and the faith that the vision could become reality.

Chapter 7 - Vision in the Highest

The Trinity is the eternal community of three fully, perfectly connected persons. The power within us to be released is the actual life of God, the energy with which the Father and the Son relate to each other, a set of inclinations put in our hearts by the Spirit and kept alive by his presence.

It is a power that is most fully released as we develop a compelling vision of who another person is and what he or she could become because of the gospel.

Chapter 8 - What’s Good about Us?

Under the New Covenant, God not only provides forgiveness for everything bad within us, but he also plants a new source of goodness within us from which we may draw.

Chapter 9 - The Enemy Within

God’s enemy creates obstacles to connecting. The enemy within is the flesh, that nature within me inclined to sin. Sin is any effort to make life work without absolute dependence on God. This enemy must be identified and the horror of the enemy’s ugliness and the pain he creates must be seen. Then this enemy must be shot repeatedly.

Chapter 10 - Dying Together to Live Together

We need to mortify the flesh, die to ourselves in the presence of another in order to live together in trinitarian community. We share the life of Christ together and we must also resist the urges of sin together.

Chapter 11 - Urges to be killed

Urges we must kill:

1. Depending on our own resources and devoting them to our own purposes, instead of using God’s resources to serve God’s purposes.

2. Having confidence in the plans we develop, demanding to be right, instead of trusting God.

Chapter 12 - Two More Urges to be killed

Two more urges we must kill:

1. Minimizing risk in order to protect ourselves. Instead, we need to do what the Spirit leads us to do, knowing that we will only be protected from that which interferes with God’s purpose.

2. Demanding immediate satisfaction on terms we control instead of realizing that until heaven, the joy of the Lord coexists with sadness.

Chapter 13 - Connecting in the Heat of Battle

When times are hard is when we need true connection most. Tears, without someone to hear and care, leave the wounds unhealed. When we connect to another, despair seems less necessary and hope begins to stir where before there was only pain.

Chapter 14 - It’s Time to Connect

Three elements combine to generate connection in community:

1. We enter the battle knowing that good and bad urges are jockeying for position in a person, and we intentionally side with the good urges.

2. We believe that God will strengthen us.

3. We release the energy of Christ within us on another’s behalf.

Chapter 15 - Entering the Real Battle

The real battle is to develop a deep relationship with God. Solving people’s problems is a secondary battle. We connect to join together to mutually battle to more fully experience Christ.

Chapter 16 - Developing a Vision

After we enter the battle for someone’s soul, our very next step is to think vision.

How could they be lifted into the stream of God’s purposes? Questions to consider include:

• What does God want to release through all the joys and heartaches of this person’s life?

• What strengths does this person have that, if surrendered to God, could advance the Kingdom?

• What potential remains unrealized because of undealt-with weaknesses?

• How does this person bless me?

• What does this tell me about the character strengths that God is weaving into the fabric of this individual’s soul?

Chapter 17 - Releasing the Energy

Connecting climaxes when the life of Christ within us is released, when something alive and good pours out of us to touch the heart of another.

In order to release the energy of Christ within us, we must understand that the deepest reality within our being is the life of Christ. Our task is to identify that life and nourish it until it becomes stronger. We trust the Spirit within to impress us with what to say and do at any moment to bring out the good urges in others.

Personal Take-Away

That which I personally took away from this book is that we need to develop a deep relationship with God. Then the power of the Spirit that is within us can be released to touch another so that they become more like Christ. These steps can best be accomplished in small groups, such as those we have at Saddleback, but only when authentic connection develops.