I’ve argued that we’re in a discipleship crisis in the charismatic church in the UK. Friends from wider spheres of evangelical churches in the UK and elsewhere seem to agree. I’ve tried to plot some sense of what that looks like and why that might be the case. We’ve explored a model of formation, seeing the importance of doctrine, duty, and devotion (or head, hands, heart).
In the charismatic world we do well with the devotion side of things, but less well on the other two. I’m hoping to write slowly through a list of things that might help. None of these are solutions, and I keep emphasising that because we’re prone to machine thinking—if we do x we’ll get y result—and neither people nor the faith are mechanistic. Instead, I hope they are suggestions that could shape a community together over time.
They fall under three headings, which are my real prescription of a way forward in this particular cultural moment: Embedding Habits, Thickening Communities, and Stretching Minds.
Embedding Habits I
There are three kinds of habits we need to embed at the three layers of ‘society’ that the church usually thinks in: individually, in the household (or community), and in the church. I think we could think about what habits of life in cities or nations look like, but I don’t think most readers have access to levers there so I’m not going to touch on them.
We start individually, looking at what someone like John Mark Comer would call ‘a rule of life.’ He’s drawing on the old monastic traditions that would require monks to subscribe to a rule: a set of conditions that the community was formed around with each monk adhering to. Essentially, I’m arguing that each Christian should consider carefully how they can embed particular habits into their life in order to submit all of their life to Christ.
Before we turn to what that could look like, I’d like to address two objections. Firstly, someone might point out that monastic communities were a very small percentage of mediaeval Christians and whether we think that phenomenon good or bad, surely it isn’t for everyone? The thing is, in countries like the UK where evangelical Christianity is a small minority of people, we’re all monks now. I also don’t expect every Christian to do this, or any of my other suggestions. Every way we can shift the temperature of Christian faith in local churches will involve doing so with a small number of those in our congregations whose consciences are in some way pricked by the Spirit. While that could cause division if done badly, a good aim is turning a small number ‘hot’ in order to raise the general temperature a little. Think of them like early adopters on a technology adoption curve.
The second objection is that I said I wanted to consider individual habits and then compared a rule of life to a monastic community. I’m making the individualistic move that Comer does, and perhaps that’s illegitimate. I think this is a better objection, because that is what I’m doing. Ideally, we also move towards communal habits, but I don’t have many good examples here. We will explore that in a couple of posts time. I see this as more a case of doing what we can to make shifts that are plausible, though I entirely admit that anything that further embeds our individualism is potentially introducing new challenges.
Since I first drafted this a couple of months ago, this second objection has got a good airing publicly in response to Comer’s Practicing the Way. Erik Coonce at Mere Orthodoxy wrote the critique, raising some valid points, and Ian Harber wrote a defence in the same ‘pages.’ I’m with Ian on this one. As a complete aside, read everything Ian writes.
What would a rule of life look like?
At the very simplest level: when do you pray? When do you read the Bible? There’s more than one right answer here, and the traditional devotional time isn’t the only way to do this, but some sort of habit of reading or hearing the Bible and of prayer (e.g. 1 Thessalonians 5) is a good start.
Then you can consider other habits: when do you pray with others? When do you switch off from the noise of life (there are lots of things this could mean)? How do you rest? When do you eat and who with? When do you feast? When do you fast?
My daily Bible reading and prayer is part of this. I made a conscious decision to rise early to pray many years ago and then learned that I’d feel less tired in the morning if I didn’t have a lie-in on a Saturday, so trained my body to wake at 6am. It’s not that early in the grand scheme of Christian prayer warriors. I’m not a morning person so will still fall asleep if I don’t get up; the cat helps with her affectionate (to begin with) pawing at my face because I feed her first thing. Another, accidental, habit that helps me to pray.
Decisions as to what to do, or not, on a Sunday are part of this. When we were stuck in lockdown and our house had fallen apart after a cowboy builder wrecked it and ran off with our savings, we were finishing the restoration project ourselves as much as possible. We were both working from home so weekends were most of the time we had to do this. The decision to not work on the house on a Sunday was costly—and of course some weeks we made a different decision—but it was a pattern we set to try to learn how to rest even in that strange frozen moment where rest wasn’t really possible.
But other things, like my fortnightly hang-out with my best friend is too. We often play video games, which doesn’t sound particularly spiritual, but as a wise man once said, “quality time is quantity time” (it was this friend) and our friendship blossomed because we see each other frequently. Men need side-by-side time, and friendship is vital to the Christian life.
A rule of life could also include things that help you flee from sin: don’t go here, don’t look at that, don’t have this sort of internet access at this time of day, phone this friend when I’m tempted so we can pray on the phone. It could go much further.
My point is simply that if you don’t actively embed habits into your life then they won’t get there any other way. It takes, depending on who you ask, between three and seven weeks to form a habit. Once they’re formed they last until a strange sequence breaks them, and then they need forming again. Discipline your life, like an athlete or soldier (1 Corinthians 9, 2 Timothy 2), and you will reap rewards.
Decide what you’re going to do. Tell someone about it. Make a start. Fail. Keep going even after failing. The rewards are worth reaping. Will Jesus love you more? No. But will you love him more? Yes, I think so.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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