Embedding Habits III
If part of recovering from our discipleship doldrums is to embed habits—and I think it is—then we will need to do something beyond thinking individually and thinking about the worship of the church. The church’s worship should be our starting point, and then the church should have a wider habitual life—as they all do, this is what a pattern of prayer meetings is for example—that serves the formation of Christian character.
The trickiest element, that I’m going to try and tease out in this post without having clear answers, is the potential for habitual life in the space between individuals and churches. We could go ‘beyond’ churches and think about cities and nations, and I think that could have some value but is entirely theoretical in the UK’s current moment. Instead, I’d like to look ‘between.’
By this I mean that there are a number of small institutions between the individual and the church. The household is the most obvious, whether that dictates a nuclear family, a much looser collection of housemates, or the explicitly Christian concept, but there are other possible forms of community. I suspect most people jump to those that are organised by churches: small groups and sports clubs and knitting circles and such like. These aren’t out of scope, but I want to include something broader, as the group of mates from your church (or many churches!) that hang out together to do a thing regularly should be included too. I’m talking about any loose form of ‘institution’ or ‘community’ that has a habitual life. That habitual life is then open to being thought about theologically and as a locus for formation.
I can sense that my writing is vaguer than I’d like because I’m searching for terms for a concept that I suspect is easier to draw. I want to argue that there is a sort of Christian community that can be found whenever you gather with Christians and that habitual elements of this also teach us that all of life is meant to be about following Christ.
Most British Christians find this concept off-putting. If I were to suggest that the group of mates who’ve gathered to watch a film could maybe pray together before they do, many would scoff. Perhaps you might accuse that of sounding dreadfully American. I’m sorry American readers, but we’ve become culturally allergic to earnestness, and often find those who take their faith seriously a bit kitsch. I feel it in myself, I don’t want to pray with my friends when we’re doing something else that we find fun. I’m certainly not arguing that you have to, but I wonder at the fact that I bridle at the suggestion. I think our lives are much less Christian than they could be.
If we were to pursue this thought all the way to its most extreme incarnation, we could propose some sort of Protestant monastery—nowadays these are branded as ‘intentional communities’—where multiple individuals or families (or both) live in a connected way and have a rhythm of prayer and eating together. These are rare and ad hoc, but I think can be good endeavours as long as, like a monastic vocation, we recognise that it’s not a goal for the majority.
What I’m pondering, because we’re all monks now, is whether in our particular cultural moment there is good cause to reclaim more ‘monastic’ behaviours. Even the very simple idea that perhaps when this group of friends gather you briefly pray before you do the thing you’ve gathered to do. We could add regular gatherings to pray with friends and family members.
Certainly, for families with children we could consider some sort of appropriate ‘family worship.’ I suspect this would vary widely in what works for different children, but my suspicion is that most Christian families don’t do this. I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t see it as a familial practice very often when in others’ homes (individual Children reading the Bible with a parent before bed is very common); I’ve certainly never heard a church teach its parents suggestions on how to do this. I’m not sure I’d know where to start. My impression is that this is much more common in America. My point here isn’t that a particular practice is important, but that parents consider embedding Christian habits into their households, rather than just individually with their children. The point I want to make is doing something together, whatever the most appropriate something might be. As an aside, these practices become the sort of hospitable moments that you can invite others into your household in true welcome too.
I’d make the same suggestion to everyone else’s households and then to those looser ‘communities’ however defined: are there Christian practices that can build people into a rhythm of shared Christian life?
This is a less concrete suggestion, it’s certainly not ‘do this practice and win,’ it’s primarily ‘these parts of your life should be Christianised too.’ I can’t give a bullet-pointed list of suggestions, other than to say that I need to start seeing myself as not an individual who is also part of this local church (in turn a part of the cosmic body of Christ), but also as embedded in a web of communities. We naturally think of our marriages this way, I hope, and that bond is often a different nature and strength, but there are also a series of weaker communal ties that we form. In those, could we pray, could be read the Bible, could we eat together? I suspect yes and no, but where there is ‘yes’ perhaps we should lean into it.
This thought needs further development, and probably some clarifying, but there’s an opportunity for us to live differently. It’s also true that these looser connections (‘mediating institutions’ in Yuval Levin’s language, or ‘associations’ in Robert Putnam’s) have been diminishing in the last fifty years; it’s indisputable that our lives are impoverished by doing so.
Do we have to do this? I’m not going to drop a proof text for you, but there is an opportunity here I think, in a world where infinite ‘connection’ with like-minded folk is possible online, to commit to the real. Actual people in front of you are harder to love, and actual practices—rather than an app that beeps and says ‘pray’ while you swipe away the notification guiltily—form us.
Photo by Rosie Sun on Unsplash
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