God’s Perfection Is in Connections

Becky Rische thought she had been handed the dream team.

Her Story Circle was made up of Bishop Sue Briner and the staff of the Southwest Texas Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.  This group of leaders was already accustomed to vulnerability, theological reflection, and speaking openly about faith. They were people whose work required them to live close to the heart of the church: one coordinating migration ministry, another focused on evangelical mission, one centered on faith formation, another helping recruit and connect Spanish-speaking communities across Texas. They already knew one another well. They already trusted one another.

Still, every week they logged onto Zoom from across Central and South Texas, some from San Antonio, others from New Braunfels, Becky from Austin. Dogs and cats drifted in and out of camera frames. Occasionally someone switched from a home office to the car while driving to the next appointment, but no one left. Despite the demands of ministry and life pressing in from every direction, the group protected the time. It felt quiet, respectful, and unexpectedly intimate despite its online format.

Becky kept asking herself and them what a group like this might still discover together.

These were not reluctant participants or strangers fumbling toward trust. They were spiritually mature leaders, already comfortable with silence, already practiced in vulnerability, already fluent in the language of faith.

Then one of them named it. “This is storytelling,” they told her, “but it’s also group spiritual direction.”

The phrase stayed with her.

Week after week, the group gathered in silence, letting the noise of the day settle before anyone spoke. Then came the prompt, then the stories, then the listening. No interruptions. No fixing. No pressure to formulate a response while someone else was talking. Just story, silence, and the simple refrain of thank you.

The silence itself became part of the practice. At the beginning of each gathering, the group checked in honestly about the professional demands, emotional burdens, and constant responsibilities tugging at them from just outside the frame. Becky noticed that the quiet did two things at once. It exposed how crowded and urgent their lives had become, while also offering a kind of permission to breathe deeply and let those demands “dance with God alone for a while,” as she later described it. As the group settled into the silence together, the stories that emerged carried a different kind of clarity and reverence.

The surprise was not that the group found the process meaningful. It was that even people who already knew one another so well kept discovering there was more to know. One example came during the session on resistance.

That day, the conversation turned toward what it means to stand up for one’s convictions, to live out what prayer and faith have taught you, even when the world pushes back. Someone introduced a distinction that stayed with the group: companionship versus heroism. Faithfulness, they reflected, is often imagined as heroic, solitary, dramatic. But more often it looks like companionship. It looks like standing with one another. Walking beside one another. Refusing to let conviction become isolation.

Near the end of each gathering, the group created a collective benediction by typing a word or short phrase into the Zoom chat before ending with an “Amen.” That phrase stayed with Becky long after the meeting ended: companionship versus heroism. The Story Circle was teaching her that most people do not need fixing or saving as much as they need someone willing to stay beside them.

For Becky, the moment clarified what had been happening in the room all along.

Story Circle had not simply helped the group know each other better. It had created a space where they could hear God through one another’s stories, through the quiet, through the connections forming between them. A place where discernment was not individual but shared.

In a subsequent gathering, another phrase surfaced repeatedly, first spoken by the bishop and then echoed by others that day until it became something like a refrain:

“God’s perfection is in connections.”

And in that room, that no longer sounded like a theory.

It sounded like something they had experienced for themselves.