Waiting in Nashville

Hello from Nashville. I've been here now for a few days, on my way to Grand Rapids for the conference next week on Ministry in a Secular Age. I’ve visited some churches, met up with a local pastor, and used the time as a personal retreat to pray and write.

Believe it or not, there are some striking similarities between Inner North Melbourne and Nashville, especially Downtown and East Nashville, most notably the many progressive young musicians and creatives. In American political terms, it’s a small island of blue in a wider red sea of the state of Tennessee.   

Nashville is also called Music City because of its deep musical heritage and global influence. The name dates back to the 1870s when the Fisk Jubilee Singers impressed Queen Victoria, who reportedly called Nashville a “music city.” In the 1920s, WSM radio and the Grand Ole Opry established Nashville as the centre of country music. Over time, it became a hub for recording, publishing, and performance across genres. This is the town where artists such as Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash made their name and recorded many of their biggest hits. Music Row, major universities, and institutions like the Country Music Hall of Fame all contribute to its reputation. From gospel to rock to pop, Nashville’s sound continues to shape American music and culture.

Nashville is also the heart of the Bible Belt: evangelical Christianity is highly influential. A large proportion of residents identify as Christian, and church attendance is high. The city hosts major Christian institutions like Belmont University, Lipscomb University, and the Southern Baptist Convention headquarters. It is also the centre of the contemporary Christian music industry, home to artists like Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. Public life often includes prayer and church visibility, though Nashville is growing more religiously diverse and secular among younger generations while maintaining strong Christian roots. To put it in context, a local pastor explained to me that Nashville is probably ten years behind Melbourne on the “secular curve.”

Sit in your cell

I’ve had a lot of time alone this week in Nashville, which is a bit of a challenge for an external processor. But it’s been good. I’ve been doing some thinking and writing about the idea of “waiting on God.” 

Egyptian monk Abba Moses famously said, ”Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” This reflects the Desert Mother and Fathers’ belief in solitude, silence, and staying put as paths to spiritual wisdom. The “cell” is the place where distractions fall away and God can be encountered honestly. For us modern Christians, this challenges our restless, achievement-driven, and screen-distracted lives. It invites us to resist constant motion and instead cultivate stillness, attentiveness, and presence. In a noisy, distracted age, “sitting in the cell” means creating sacred space—whether in silence, Scripture, or prayer—where God shapes us not through striving, but through steady, faithful presence.

We are so busy, we have no time to sit in our cell. This comes with significant spiritual problems. We are left alienated from each other, from God and even from ourselves. An antidote to our hectic life is to learn to sit in our cell and wait on God. 

To wait on God is not passive, like sitting frustrated in an airport terminal. This waiting emerges from the conviction that God is wild, free, and utterly uncontrollable. God doesn’t bow to human manipulation or become a domesticated self-help tool serving our personal agendas. His freedom means our task is not to manufacture spiritual results, but to discern and prepare for transformative encounters with what lies beyond our control.

We wait with the gospel story. This story shapes how we understand and participate in the ongoing sacred action in the world, providing both hope and direction for faithful presence. This vision ultimately invites us to abandon our fearful obsession with personal decline, failure, or meaninglessness and embrace a posture of faithful, humble engagement with the living mystery that acts decisively for the world's healing.

The spiritual discipline of waiting has manifested across Christian traditions in diverse yet interconnected ways throughout history. The Desert Fathers and Mothers of the third through fifth centuries pioneered this practice in the Egyptian wilderness, embracing radical stillness to encounter divine presence. Their approach emphasised interior quietude—called "hesychia" in Eastern Orthodox tradition—believing God could be discerned within the human heart. The hesychasts developed the Jesus Prayer, using rhythmic repetition synchronised with breathing to achieve profound contemplative states. Gregory Palamas argued that through hesychia, believers could genuinely experience God, making waiting an authentic encounter with the divine. Celtic Christianity integrated nature into contemplative practice through peregrinatio pro Christo—wandering for Christ. Monks like St. Cuthbert and St. Kevin demonstrated how attentive listening in natural settings facilitates divine encounter, understanding creation as the theatre of God's activity rather than something to withdraw from.

The Quaker tradition democratised contemplative waiting by making silent worship central to corporate gatherings. German Pietism and Moravians brought a systematic structure through watchword devotionals and prayer vigils. The century-long Moravian prayer watch at Herrnhut exemplified waiting as trustful surrender to divine timing rather than human effort. Modern Pentecostal and Charismatic movements reinterpreted waiting through "tarrying" services, combining contemplative receptivity with expectation of dramatic spiritual manifestations like tongues and healing.

Despite these different expressions, each tradition has come to the same conclusion: encountering God requires shifting from human busy activity to still divine receptivity, making waiting on God both challenging and rewarding as a spiritual discipline.

What would it mean for you to move from being a hectic person to a waiting person? Moreover, what would it mean for us to become a waiting church? 

A waiting church is defined by presence and trust. It stands in contrast to the modern tendency toward efficiency and control, resisting the pressure to produce outcomes, craft experiences, or accelerate spiritual growth. Instead, it embraces the slowness of God’s time and the vulnerability of human existence. Waiting ministry would fundamentally be about accompaniment—being with people in their suffering, their questioning, and their waiting—rather than offering quick fixes or solutions. A waiting church recognises that it cannot manufacture transcendence or transformation; these are gifts that come through encounter, not engineering. 

To wait is to live with hopeful patience, trusting that God acts, even when God seems silent. It is to say, “We do not generate life by our own strength.” This kind of church is marked by a deep openness to being affected and transformed, not through spectacle or strategy, but through faithful presence. 

Waiting becomes an act of resistance against the secular impulse to manage time, to secure meaning, and to rush toward visible success. A waiting church inhabits the present fully, allowing God to be God, and allowing itself to be a witness to divine action on God’s terms, not ours.

The Invitation to Wait

As I prepare to leave Nashville and head to Grand Rapids, I'm struck by how this Music City has taught me something profound about rhythm. Just as the greatest musicians know that the spaces between notes are as important as the notes themselves, perhaps the most revolutionary thing the church can do in our frantic age is to master the sacred art of pause.

The call to become a waiting church is not a retreat from the world's urgent needs—it is a radical repositioning. When we learn to sit in our cells, when we resist the tyranny of constant productivity, when we trust in God's timing over our own, we become a different kind of presence in the world. We become people who can truly see, truly listen, and truly be with others in their deepest moments.

This is not passive resignation but active hope. It is the courage to believe that God is already at work in ways we cannot orchestrate or control. It is the faith to know that our frantically busy efforts to fix everything may be preventing us from participating in the deeper healing God is bringing about.

So perhaps the question is not how we can do more for God, but how we can make more space for God to do what only God can do—in us, through us, and often despite us. In a culture obsessed with the next thing, the waiting church offers something countercultural and desperately needed: the gift of presence, the ministry of being fully here, fully now, fully open to the wild and wonderful ways God chooses to show up.

The cell is waiting. The invitation stands. Will we have the courage to sit still long enough to let it teach us everything?