I’ve spent six months now blogging about what I’ve dubbed the discipleship crisis: our collective Christian mind is poorly formed and our lives don’t look that different from everyone else around us. We’re meant to be Christians in everything we do.
We live in a particular moment where in the UK the cultural power of Christianity has faded, for all its cultural legacy is everywhere you look. Religion is now strange, niche, to be kept in ‘private’—which is a claim that demonstrates the person saying it knows nothing about religion or faith—and perceived as widely irrelevant. We don’t talk about it. Others have charted these changes better than I could, but we find ourselves decidedly post-Christian: not a return to a former paganism but a jadedness that comes after a culture has been Christian for more than a thousand years.
That’s the context, or that plus the attention crisis caused by the digital revolution. We’re still at the very beginning of those titanic shifts, understanding them little and adopting them unthinkingly.
In that milieu we need a Christianity that is different, that is clear, that is weird in its depth. We need to see the world like Christians, but so often we view it like post-Christians: flat, dull, uninspiring, explainable by observation, drained of meaning. The idea that we might do anything ‘because of the angels’ (1 Corinthians 11) is so inexplicable it feels like a category error.
I think we need a Christianity that is in full voice, confident that we know the ruler of the world, and that we can communicate what is truly good, true, and beautiful in a way that no one else can. I think that will take a long time to grow authentically, and that just acting in that mode will mean we’re rude rather than prophetic. I think change starts in the church rather than in us telling off the world. I think as we revive and reform ourselves, we should find that our households change, and then our communities are shifted. That isn’t everything we need to do, but it is where we should start.
I attempted to sketch why we’re here, focusing on the church, highlighting our shift towards shallow worship and preaching, the loss of community, and the loss of our knowledge of doctrine. Of course this is all downstream of those shifts a few paragraphs up. It’s downstream of a shifting social imaginary towards the ‘secular’ (itself a Christian concept), and downstream of technological shifts in the nature of labour and the way we can gain meaning from our work.
Why we’re here is a fun question, and relevant, but we must admit that we are here. Shifting society is in no one’s gift. The only lever you have is prayer, which is admittedly a very effective lever at moving the world. Archimedes quip that with a big enough lever he could move the world is true for all Christians, you have the ear of the Ancient of Days.
In this series I then took a detour to explore what discipleship, or ‘formation,’ actually is. I explained my understanding of it as tripartite, involving heads, bodies, and hearts (or guts). Then I suggested my three paths out. None of these is a solution, but I do think they’re pathways. Follow these for a hundred years and we might find ourselves out of the woods. That’s the kind of timescale we need to think on, by the way, we shouldn’t expect to meaningfully shift this in our lifetimes. We need a long view. Evangelicals struggle with this. We can’t build cathedrals. We need to relearn this. We’ll need institutions, including churches, to get us out of this long term.
The three pathways are: Embedding Habits, Thickening Communities, and Stretching Minds. We need to do all three at the same time because discipleship is heart and body and mind. In fact, these pathways address body and mind, but not so much the ‘heart.’ That’s mostly because I think we have the right tools here already, but I haven’t spelled this out in depth in these blog posts.
To Embed Habits we need to think about our individual lives, our church lives, and all the intervening mediating institutions. At some point we’ll need to think cities and nations, and Political Theologians do that work, but I think it’s a touch previous right now.
To Thicken Communities we need to recover friendship, gather around tables, and rediscover expansive Christian households.
And to Stretch Minds we need to build communities of enquiry, learn to teach in new ways and places, read the Bible, and teach the faith.
Simple then right? I mean, it really is. I’ve said very little that’s revolutionary. We just need the will to actually try it. First we have to admit there’s a problem. Naming something is the battle half won. Then we turn our hearts to Jesus in prayer. Then we walk his way.
Then we inherit the earth.
Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash
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