word | spirit | world | church
Thickening Communities II How do we ‘thicken’ our communities? Basically the same way I think we solve everything: we eat together. We experience the deepest communion with God and with each other when we come to God’s table. We’re made to be companions, literal ‘sharers of bread,’ friends in modern parlance, as God the host… Continue reading Come to the Table
Thickening Communities I The lack of male friendship is nothing short of an epidemic. The rise of therapy and a therapeutic culture for men and women is, not always but more often than we’d like to admit, a substitute for friendship. We’re lonely, we need friends, and you need good friends to live the Christian… Continue reading Friendship is a Discipleship Issue
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… Continue reading Habitual Communities
Embedding Habits II The second way we can embed habits to help us in the discipleship crisis, is by what we do Sunday by Sunday in our church’s liturgy. I suspect most of my charismatic friends don’t want to admit that we have a liturgy, as that word is used to describe a different sort… Continue reading Liturgical Habits
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… Continue reading The Rule of Life
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… Continue reading The Matter of the Heart
Christian Formation III 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 think work? You do actually need to learn the faith. We balk at this, for good reasons. Can knowledge of the Bible puff up rather than lead us… Continue reading You Need to Learn the Faith
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… Continue reading You Become What You Do, and Who You Do It With
I’ve highlighted what I consider to be a discipleship crisis, where we separate discipleship from ‘life’ and we struggle to live Christianly. I’ve then tried to outline five reasons why our faith has grown shallower. It’s important to try and understand problems before we try to solve them. I’d welcome pushback on that sketch of… Continue reading What is Christian Formation?
Why is our Faith Shallow V Matthew Lee Anderson says that our culture is in a crisis of attention. I think we all know this, even if we haven’t used this language. Have you noticed that it’s increasingly difficult for you to read books with sustained or difficult arguments? Or to read a physical book… Continue reading A Crisis of Attention
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