Christian Formation II
If we’re formed by what we think, what we feel, and what we do—as I’ve argued we are—how does being formed by what we do work? I think there are two components to this: community and habit.
We become what we do. James K. A. Smith’s famous ‘pedagogy of desire’ argues that rather than doing what we love, instead we love what we do. If you want to train yourself to love something, then do it. Part of the Christian life is repetition. If you want to become a person who prays, then you need to start by praying. Obviously, there must be more to it than this—and there is, all three angles of formation are present all the time—but you won’t become a person of prayer unless you actually carve out time to pray in, and then pray at those times.
Of course, the early steps are faltering; of course it’s hard; and of course you can’t do it without the Spirit’s help. Charismatics sometimes make it sound like all you need to do is wait on the Spirit to change you. While a good thing we also need to ask him to change us (please teach me to pray is a powerful prayer) and then start doing it in our lives. This is partly because of the way the Lord has made us as creatures, but it’s also because the Christian life is one of actions: as I’ve argued before hope is an action, as are love, faith, and perseverance (1 Thessalonians 1).
Sometimes we can be down on the idea of daily devotions. You won’t find a direct reference to them in the Bible, which is understandable because they largely assume that you can both read and have the Bible in your native tongue. Devotions also have an individualised sense of how to pray; assuming it’s something we do on our own. The early Christians would have gathered to pray in the mornings. The common practice of morning and evening prayer arose from this. We could probably discuss the benefits of different types of daily prayer, but practice does make perfect in the Biblical sense: it makes us mature. Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s good to do it habitually.
Note the second feature rising up in that discussion, you often see Christians praying together. If you want to love to pray, then pray with people who love to pray. Do it a lot. Habitual actions are easier, and easier to sustain, when done with others. That’s because that’s the kind of creatures we are; firstly, for the love of marriage and the immediate family, and then secondly for the love of the kingdom, for friendship.
If you keep doing something you will grow to love it. If people in your church don’t like the Lord’s Supper and seem confused by it, just start doing it weekly. You’ll find a love for it will grow. You’ll also be in line with the Lord’s commands and the tradition, but that’s another topic. If the people around you love something, you too will grow in love for it.
Paul Vander-Klay argues that if you want to believe something, you should find a community of people who believe it and hang out with them. If you want to follow Jesus, hang out with those who love him. This sounds like ‘fake it ‘til you make it,’ which makes sound Evangelicals wary because it sounds like a recipe for nominal belief. There’s something to that concern, but I think it misunderstands how people actually change: you need to be immersed in something’s plausibility structures (so for Christianity, that’s the church) in order to change in its direction. Will hanging out with Christians bring you to conversion? It’ll bring you to the doorway and get you looking at it.
Of course, this is a psychological way of thinking about it. Theologically someone becomes a Christian, or starts to live in a more Christian way, by the gift of God in Christ. The Spirit opens our hearts and enlivens our minds and gifts us life in abundance so that we can turn to Jesus. He pours it out on who he wills. Funny then that he tends to pour it out on those who get to know Christians. This is the plan of the cosmos, that Yahweh’s agents in the ‘holy nation’ (1 Peter 2) would be ambassadors to bring others in. How can they hear if no one tells them (Romans 10). Perhaps Paul could have added, how will they believe if no one shows them?
Just habit and just community aren’t enough to change anyone. Of course they aren’t, we’re formed by our hearts and our minds too. We need to hear the gospel and we need to love the truth. These things are all connected.
A lot of nonsense gets paraded under the banner of ‘belonging before believing,’ and I think it can lead to the contrast between the church and others being unclear in ways that don’t help anyone, but there is a truth of Christian formation tucked away in there: we are changed by doing things, and by doing them with those who have been changed by them.
While that’s about conversion, the same principle follows all Christian formation. We’re changed by repetition, and by community. Sometimes people bemoan that the preaching isn’t good enough to change anyone. There’s something there as we need to be changed in our minds, but the repetition of being fed in the word by your Shepherd (in both senses) week by week will shift things in you, slowly. Is it enough? No, but it’s a vital part of it. Christians need to go to church.
We grow to be more like Jesus as we repeat the actions of a Sunday: hear the word read and preached, say the creed, pray, sing, take the Supper, speak in tongues, hear and receive prophetic words. We grow to be more like Jesus as we eat with other Christians in their homes and they in ours; as we serve with them to help the poor in our church community and in the wider place that we live; as we speak the gospel to each other whenever we encounter each other.
The tricky thing about formation is that this can easily sound totalising. I think charismatics have underdone the importance of habit, and—to a lesser extent—of real community, but they can be overdone too. You get this going well without attention to forming minds and hearts and you have a recipe for highly liturgical churches crammed with nominal Christians. The answer isn’t ‘balance’ either. Balance is very rarely what we want, we want all the things. We need to be formed by living the motions of the Christian life alongside others over lifetimes.
How does the discipleship crisis affect us here? In three ways. Firstly, our communities have thinned out as the wider culture’s have which makes living alongside people need significantly more intention than it used to. Secondly, our love of entertainment has meant that the idea of things having a similar form week by week because its good for us seems unexciting. Thirdly, we’re always in a rush—which is connected to our entertainment problem—which means the idea of something that forms us slowly over a long period of time is unattractive. We want solutions rather than to follow our crucified saviour.
The good news is that he hasn’t given up on us. He never will.
Photo by Jack Sharp on Unsplash
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