Why is our faith shallow part II.
In the last post on the causes of the discipleship crisis, I explored why Sundays are shallow. The gathered worship of the church is supposed to be the pattern of life for the church scattered and for the life of the world. However, it’s not supposed to be the training pitch of that culture.
Because our communities have narrowed and atrophied our opportunities to encounter and catch what the life of faith and faith formation look like have narrowed to just an hour and a half on a Sunday morning. If you’ll forgive the machinespeak: it’s unsurprising that if you reduce the inputs, the output lowers too. Except that isn’t how it works, but it is how it looks.
There was day, now long past, when we would have all been involved in webs of community within our localities, reinforced through many different associations, of which the church would have been the keystone. For an array of reasons those days are long gone; and while we can lament, they won’t naturally arise again in our lifetimes.
What does that mean that we’ve lost? Previously you would have seen people live their Christian lives in front of you, their foibles and sin visible as you all looked to Christ to redeem you. Their patterns and rhythms of life would have been open to you. The opportunities to express your frustrations and challenges, as well as to see how Christ applies to all of life, would have been myriad.
This is probably a little rose-tinted. I’m sure plenty of ordinary Christians didn’t muse about the faith down the coal mine or bring Christ into everything that they did. However, they would have prayed together and sung together. Those sorts of communal habits are forming to our hearts and our households.
I don’t think we can simply recover those patterns—not in our lifetimes anyway, though working for the long haul two generations hence would be worth a lot—but we should notice that just going to Church for an hour and a half on a Sunday and maybe going to a midweek something every now and again means that the majority of our formation into the Christian life is individual.
This shapes our sense of what it is to follow Jesus. We imagine that it is an individual pursuit, a thing that we do on our own, improving towards Jesus. The idea that to be a Christian is to be embedded into a people, a self-contained nation, with its own culture and ways of being, is entirely outside of our thinking because we don’t live our lives like we’re part of a people. Our relationship to our own nations is often strained or non-existent, so that doesn’t help by way of analogy. We don’t live like we have a ‘people’ most of the time. Christians are often the exception here, but my contention remains that our communities are not much thicker than the communities of our neighbours. We’re trying to be the household of faith, not the strangers in a shopping centre of faith.
What we can imagine is constrained by what we see around us day-to-day. Our Christian lives are shaped, in part, by the material factors of our lives. However much we teach that we’re a community, if people don’t experience a community then one of two things happens:
Either, we continue as individuals living fragmented lives, the truths believable but difficult to act upon due to the lack of examples we’ve seen. This is a plausibility problem. Or we tell ourselves that we are a wonderful community, indulging in a triumph of rhetoric over reality. It’s good that we believe that we should be. However, claiming that we are that sort of community when our lives don’t materially reflect it is an exercise in self-deception. Sadly, I think lots of churches do this. I think I’ve done this. We don’t think we’re being deceptive because we assume that what we’re called to is the sort of convivial atmosphere on a Sunday and a friendly welcome in someone’s home one evening a week.
Dear friends, we’re called to so much more. In the modern west the sort of thick community, that which would allow us to witness each others’ Christians lives lived up close, is often unattractive to us. It requires us to give up some of our rights for the benefits of others. It requires us to privilege particular individuals (rather than a vague ‘everyone’ which is much easier but not what Jesus demands of us) over ourselves. It requires us to allow others access to what we perceive to be our ‘private’ lives, but again not all people like you might on Instagram but specific people in specific ways. Oddly, this more limited decision to live a life alongside others is harder than the generalised openness, which is really a sort of narrative control, popularised on the social internet.
This radical individualisation, reinforced in every part of how we go about our lives, produces a thin-ness in our Christian lives in direct proportion to the thinness in our communities. We’re supposed to be with the church, a particular group of people in a particular locality with whom we are called to follow the Godward call in Christ.
Photo by Magnus Lindvall on Unsplash
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