Christian Formation IV
Our formation involves our minds, freeing them from sin and growing in knowledge of God, and our lives—learning habits and being embedded in Christian community—but it also involves our hearts.
To grow to be like Christ is to gradually change our loves, to war for them, so that we love God above all and our other loves are rightly ordered and keep us from sin. We crush idols, the things that we love more than God or love not for God’s sake, reordering what we were idolising into its right place in the ‘economy’ of our inner lives.
We aim for a place where we can confess with St. Augustine that:
He loves you less who together with you loves something which he does not love for your sake
Confessions 10.28
We care about our inner lives, about our motivations, about the way that our stories and the things that we’ve done and have happened to us have influenced the way we see the world and God. We carefully correct all of this through our lives.
In other words we make sure that the stories we live by are the stories of the Bible and we learn to renarrate our lives in light of Jesus’ story.
How do we do this? Prayer. Christian worship. Community. Talking with trusted brothers and sisters. We forgive, we repent, we believe the gospel.
In other words, we live the Christian life sincerely and the bedrock assumptions we make about life in our desires are slowly reformed like chalk cliffs eroded by the force of the spray. Or, perhaps a better metaphor, like Michelangelo with a block of marble: ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’ God is a sculptor who works through the ordinary norms of Christian life to reform us into beauty.
The only thing that I think can help us here is an awareness of our need for renarrating. For, in academic parlance, our social imaginaries to be shifted through the acquisition of a new narrative to act. The excavation of the heart includes us having our faulty foundations gently pointed out.
There is a risk of navel gazing perhaps, but this is the reason we consider discipleship to be mind, body and heart: habits, thinking, and loves. All of these can be detrimental when overemphasised. We aren’t, however, looking for balance. Avoid balance at all costs. We’re looking to wholeheartedly devote our whole selves to the Lord. Run after him.
This is the area of formation where I feel like we’re least in need to course correction to do something about what I’ve been calling ‘the discipleship crisis.’ This isn’t because it’s easy, it’s anything but easy, but it’s because this is what the average evangelical charismatic church thinks formation is and is doing a reasonable job of it. This is the kind of growth in Christian faith and character that we do see lots of. I certainly don’t have suggestions for how we should do this better.
If you do, then please write about them and let me know—or message me to say—I would be very interested in reading them.
In other corners of evangelicalism, I think these things might be less of a strength, but I’m not well positioned to comment on that. The important thing to remember is that all formation is supposed to be these three ways of knowing and growing in tandem (or whatever the right word would be for a tricycle). We don’t actually do one then the other, though it can feel a little like it as we live our lives. We do all of these together.
This brings us to the end of charting the discipleship crisis. To reiterate, I’ve argued that:
We are facing a number of crises, and no one is talking about the discipleship crisis.
This is partly because we think that discipleship is a ‘thing’ when it’s just life, and results in us having Christian lives that don’t look different to our neighbours.
I then began to think about why our faith might be so shallow, giving five causes:
- Because our Sundays are
- The loss of thick community
- The loss of catechism
- The application ‘cart’ in our preaching
- The prevalence of entertainment
It would be fair to say that there are some deeper ideological and material causes we could reach for under the surface—the why of why these things are the case—which is important to our thinking. My suspicion is that they’re the same things I’ve been writing about for a while.
And finally I’ve considered what Christian formation actually is, with a broad overview and then focus on our heads and hands before turning to our hearts, briefly, in this post.
The problem with blogging is that’s it’s a surface medium. I think all I’ve managed is to sketch the shape of something rather than give more penetrating insight into it, but hopefully if you’ve been following along, you can see that shape and decide whether or not it’s an accurate depiction of Chrisitian faith in your circles.
The next step is to write about how we deepen our faith. I don’t have solutions, but I do have suggestions as to a way of being in the world that I think will help.
We’ll explore three ways to embed habits, three ways to thicken communities, and eight ways to stretch minds. I’d love it if you came along for the ride!
Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash
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