If we need something bigger than information transfer, then what do you propose?
There is no silver bullet for discipleship. It’s not, “Read this book and let me give you the formula.” But I do think that there is what Jesus called the Way, or the road, or the path (hodos in Greek). There is an ancient way of following Jesus in community. Much of it has been lost in our culture, but we can recapture, rediscover and follow it. Jesus said, “Come and follow me.” If we do that, it will lead us to transformation. The two broad categories are practices (the practice-based approach to apprenticeship to Jesus) and deep, relational spirituality.
Regarding practices, in the Protestant-Roman Catholic divide, what Christians experienced was almost like a divorce. Some of the furniture went with Mom and some of it went with Dad. Some of the spiritual disciplines went with the Protestants, like Sunday church, preaching, the Bible, service and giving. Others went with the Catholics like solitude and prayer. And there were others nobody really wanted in a consistent way, like Sabbath or fasting. It is a real tragedy when that wholeness of Christian practice is lost.
I grew up and was very well-trained in a small set of disciplines for the spiritual life, but I was missing a few key ones. In an era of hurry, busyness and digital distraction, where most people are exhausted and on the verge of burnout all of the time, the practices that become the most important for our generation are practices of not doing rather than of doing. Willard called these “practices of abstinence.” Those would be practices like Sabbath, where you are not working. Or silence, when you’re not around other people or noise and the input of other information and other people’s voices. You’re just there with your soul before God for input. Fasting would be another one: You are not eating. These practices of abstinence, of not-doing, are important for all people in all time, but are crucial for our people in our time, and have largely been lost.
We need to recapture a practice-based approach to discipleship that takes the body seriously, our habits, our emotional life and even our health at a holistic level.
The other category I would want to focus on would be what Todd Hall at Biola’s Rosemead School of Psychology calls “relational spirituality.” Spiritual formation is a relational process. Humans are relational beings, created in the image of a relational God that we call Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This means that discipleship cannot be only a one-to-many monologue-based lecture learning or book learning. Not that those are bad things; I do both of those. But it must be a deeply relational process. And the kinds of relationships that are most conducive to formation are small-scale: you and a couple of others or a dozen other people, not large-scale. I think evangelicals are much better at the large-scale side of Christian spirituality than at the small-scale side of it.
How does this rediscovery fit the unique wounds of our culture right now?
It’s no secret that we live in a time of painful loneliness. The digital age has given us the promise of connectivity being the same thing as community, and it’s just not. In a bunch of different social theories of relationships, there are about three or four categories of relationships. The first and most important is what sociologists call your intimates, which is one to five people max that know you as you actually are, love and accept you as you actually are, and know your shadow. Most people in America, the largest category of Americans, have zero. None. No confidants. They may have some friends, but nobody at that level. That is a major problem. People are painfully lonely.
I think there is an extraordinary offering here. Christians have a 2,000-year tradition of deep, relational community. The church is a communal reality. It is a community of people. One way of understanding the kingdom of God is as a new society of peace, justice and love. While we constantly fall short of the vision of Jesus, we have this rich history to draw on of doing life together. Many parts of that we take for granted, like knowing other people and talking about soul stuff and being able to confess your sin and your shadow side, and having people love and care for you in times of suffering. To us, these things are often normal if you’re in a healthy church experience (it is for me certainly). It is often radical to our neighbors, co-workers and people in cities.
On the practice-based side, it is fascinating—in many ways, I think the world is ahead of the church in understanding the needs of the hour. I think a lot of churches are responding to the problems of the 1970s and ’80s, not to the problems of today. For example, if you look at the explosion of mindfulness meditation, apps like Calm or Headspace, yoga, workout groups, reading groups, therapy, etc., all of this is naming the acute problem of our era. I think most of it has much good to offer the world, but basically a Christian equivalent exists for every single thing I just named, and is even better. Instead of just calming your nervous system or helping your body attune, or having someone to process your pain with, it’s doing all of this in a way that is opening the deepest part of our self up to God, who is the great doctor of the soul (as Jesus called himself and all the ancients called him).
I think a return to a slower, quieter practice-based, emotionally intelligent, body-informed model of discipleship is not just in keeping with the need of the hour, but I think we have a unique contribution. I don’t think there is anything in the mindfulness world that the Christian contemplative tradition doesn’t have that’s a thousand times better. We have this rich legacy of truth, beauty and access to the Trinity that is a powerful witness in our day.
It strikes me that often it is a crisis that helps us find the path into a rediscovery of a richer spiritual practice. What would you say to urge people who may not have met that crisis yet, that this is still worthy and needed and a perennial rich tradition in which they can experience a greater depth of Christian life?
l love that you’re asking that. I agree with you. We generally only go on the spiritual journey based on either pain or desire. And it seems like for most of us, it is by pain. But I think you can go on it just based on desire. Most of us don’t—it’s too un-American, too counterintuitive, too against our flesh to enter a life of discipline without enough pain. Yet, desire is still the best lead-in.
I would say if you are doing the more standard “American church” thing, there is likely a depth, joy, peace and possibility of a life with God that is so much deeper, that no matter how good it is right now, you are only scratching the surface. There is so much more that God has for you. Find that desire. It is in you. If you have the Spirit of God, that desire is in you, no matter how buried. Find that desire, unearth it and let it roar.
I love that dichotomy of pain and desire, and it leads us to the subtitle of your book: “Be with Jesus. Become Like Him. Do as He Did.” Talk about the path here.
That subtitle is just me channeling some of the best of Willard and others. Jesus didn’t invite people to convert to a new religion called Christianity. He never once used the word Christian. The New Testament barely uses it at all. Jesus invited people to apprentice under him.
The Greek word is mathetes. In most of our Bibles, it’s translated as “disciple.” It means “learner” or “student.” I am with a number of scholars who argue that “apprentice” is the best word we have in English to capture it. So, I frame following Jesus as an apprenticeship to Jesus. That’s what Jesus was calling Peter, James and John to do: to become his apprentices. This is my summary of Jesus’ call in the gospels.
I define an apprentice of Jesus as one whose life is organized around those three driving goals: be with Jesus, become like him and do as he did. That means a non-apprentice of Jesus, whether they are an atheist, or a Buddhist, or a Hindu, or whether they self-identify as a Christian, is anyone whose driving goal in life is anything else, anything other than being with Jesus, becoming like him and doing as he would do if he were them.
The term “rule of life” will be familiar to people who have been doing reading in spiritual formation, but it may be new for a few of our readers. What is a rule of life meant to do for us?
The ancient church had not one but two rules. They had a rule of faith, which was a statement of theology and doctrine: what they believed. And then they had a rule of life. This was a codification of how they lived, their shared rhythms of prayer, discipleship and formation that bound their community together around Jesus.
The modern church still has a rule of faith, though most of us don’t call it that. We call it a statement of faith or a doctrinal statement. But go to pretty much any church website in the English-speaking world, and dink around in there, and you will find a page that says something like “what we believe” and then has a link to something with the core tenets of a Christian theological worldview. But on almost no websites anywhere will you find an equally emphasized page next to it saying “how we live.”