You will rarely see a list of the core practices of Jesus—we pray, we read the Bible, we fast, we sabbath, we live together in community, we eat meals together. Nor is there a list of how we behave, the Sermon on the Mount stuff: We love our enemies, we actively reject money and materialism, anxiety and fear, we are not judgmental, we don’t condemn other people, we let our yes be yes and our no be no, we fight off lust and the objectification of women, so on and so forth. That tells you so much about what has gone wrong for us today.
I think the future of the church is ancient. I do not believe the future of the church is cooler websites, better social media engagement and new technology. I think the church of the future looks a lot like the church of the past. It’s a focus on smaller groups, it is more relational, there are a lot of tables and a rigorous commitment to orthodoxy and Scripture. There is also a practice-based approach to discipleship.
So “rule of life” is not a practice in itself. Rather, it is a life architecture that’s made up of a bunch of different practices of discipleship to Jesus.
The history of the word “rule” goes back to a Latin word that the ancient church used, regula. It literally means a straight piece of wood, but some scholars believe it was used in the ancient Mediterranean as the word for a trellis in a vineyard. So, early Christians took Jesus’ metaphor from John 15 on spiritual formation—abide in the vine and you will bear much fruit—to its logical conclusion. For a vine to bear fruit, it needs a trellis to lift it up off the ground. Without that, it will grow very little or not at all.
Early Christians said, “Hey, our discipleship is kind of like that. For us to abide in the vine and bear much fruit, we need a trellis, some kind of support structure to hold and index our life in the right direction. To guard us and keep us away from certain things and guide us into other things.”
Andy Crouch defines a rule of life as a “set of practices to guard our habits and guide our lives.” That’s what a rule of life is. It is a way to guard us from certain things and guide us into other things so that we bear the maximum amount of fruit that is possible.
What are the dangerous (in a good way) questions that pastors and leaders can begin asking to move away from an understanding of discipleship as information-transfer toward what you’re describing?
The two most important questions that every pastor and church must ask are Does our church have an intentional plan for making disciples? and Is it working?
Those are dangerous questions because a lot of us would answer the first question with “Kind of” and the second with “Uhhhhh …” So, those questions can sound scary, but they shouldn’t be. I think we’re way too emotionally wedded to business-as-usual and Sunday-centric attractional evangelical churches. I think we’re way too scared of what other models, philosophies of ministries, and ways of doing life together in community, could look like than we need to be. Our driving motivation should be love, faith and hope, not fear and shame.
All of us grow up in a tradition that often limits the boundaries of our imagination. Modern pastors need a much higher horizon of possibility. They need new pastoral imagination. We need to pay a lot of attention to people who are planting new types of churches, new models of churches that are redefining the metrics of success beyond “bigger and better.”
I describe the church model I grew up in with four B’s: butts, budgets, buildings and buzz. I think we need better metrics for success. We should not be scared to redefine success. We should be excited to do so.
This will be a very Anglican thing to ask, but doesn’t this point us to the perennial need to learn from the stories of the historic saints? Because there is such richness for the church to show us what that success can look like in a wide variety of specific expressions.
That’s not just an Anglican thing, that’s basically an all-Christians-everywhere-except-for-modern-evangelicals thing. I like to say that evangelicals have traded saints for celebrities. We still have these rare individuals that we lionize, that we look to, that we follow, that we listen to. That’s not all bad. We’re all still grieving the loss of Tim Keller, for example. He was such a gift to the world, and he ended well. To pay special attention to his life, his walk with God, his thoughts and his way of reading Scripture is wise. But we need a broader perspective. Because the church has 2,000 years of Tim Kellers to draw on.
In the more historic denominations of the church, the liturgical calendar has the feast days of many of these people. I’m kind of agnostic on the liturgical calendar, but it’s like every two days there is a feast for some saint you have never heard of before. But you get to learn, throughout the year, about an extraordinary person who died, was martyred or was used by God to heal thousands of people. It just sparks your heart.
I think that is one of the main roles of pastoring and preaching: to get people in touch with their latent desire for sainthood. That is to say, to be transformed into people who are pervaded by love, through union with God. I think we all have that desire, even if we would name it differently. Part of the role of a pastor and preacher is to help people touch that desire and then find a practical way to pursue that desire.