The Spirit of the Disciplines

Over the past several decades if not centuries, the church has been very good about answering the questions of WHAT, WHO, and WHY of Christianity. What we have lacked is the HOW.

The practice of our spirituality, then, ends up in program after program that “surely” will bring the church to a place where it can now grow. “We only lack a proper focus”, it might be said in some church leadership meeting somewhere around the U.S.

In truth, this is correct. We have lacked the proper focus. We’ve become distracted with evangelism programs, missions programs, children’s programs, teen programs, worship programs, social outreach programs, and on and on with very little real progress.

These miss the point because our Christianity and the Church’s expression of it has nothing to do with any of the programs that we hold at the corporate level. We forget at times that the corporate level of our churches are actually made up of individual people, and these people each individually must have a life-changing experience (and ongoing life-changing experiences) with the Gospel and when this is done, we will see the aggregate effect of a Church, a body of believers, built on the correct foundations and together they will, in community, enter into the Kingdom of God and announce and demonstrate its presence and availability to the world.

Dallas Willard says that there are three stages to change. These are the same no matter what topic area you are discussing, but they are especially true when it comes to our spirituality. They are these:

Vision – This is the end-goal. What you are ultimately wanting to achieve.

Intention – Do you actually intend to carry out what you say is your vision? Are you willing to pay the price to complete the task laid out in the vision?

Means – Okay, so you’re going to do this thing… How?

One illustration of this comes to mind in the world of sports. Let’s say you are to be the coach of a Little League baseball team and your vision, shared with the team, is to win the Little League World Series. However, these are kids 10-12 with very few skills, if any at all. You’ve decided, though, that this is your goal, and you are willing to do what is necessary to reach it. How are you going to go about this?

Should we say, “Okay guys, get out there and win all of your games so we can go to the World Series?” For a team that barely knows how to play the game, this is getting ahead of ourselves. What about, “First, you hit the ball, then run around the bases without being tagged, and touch home plate to score”? At what level does our instruction begin?

In baseball, even though there are various positions with different skills associated with them (pitcher, catcher, infielders, outfielders, etc.), there are fundamentals that must be mastered to play the game well. You must be able to throw and catch, hit, and run. If there is any one of these missing from your overall skill set, then you will either be mediocre in the game or some type of “specialty” player because you are such a stand-out in one of those areas.

Notice, though, that it not even enough to tell my Little Leaguers to go out and hit, run, throw and catch well. These are skills that must be mastered, but can only be done through regular exercising of the skill through practice, through the “drilling” of that fundamental over and over until it becomes second nature to each kid on the team.

Once we have built this foundation, then, we have a deep well of skill sets that we can draw from to ultimately accomplish our vision. Our exercise has produced good fundamentals. Our fundamentals have produced good play. Good play has produced wins in our games, and wins have produced a path to and a championship in the World Series.

So what does this mean to us and our purposes with Levi’s Table? This week I read this passage from The Spirit of the Disciplines:

Today we represent ourselves through our public media, our arts, our education, and our political life as a people of great practicality. This tendency extends to our church life also, where the laying out of clear organizational objectives and the efficient marshalling of means is frequently regarded as the key to successful ministry. While the exaltation of the practical is especially characteristic of American culture, it has now spread around the world, as the idealization of political revolution and of technological development sweeps everything before it. This modern outlook sharply criticizes The Way of Christ as impractical in relation to the ideals of justice, peace, and prosperity.

That criticism is largely justified when applied to the form usually taken by Christian faith throughout our history. More often than not, faith has failed, sadly enough, to transform the human character of the masses, because it is usually unaccompanied by discipleship and by an overall discipline of life such as Christ himself practices. As a result, when faced with the real issues of justice, peace, and prosperity, what is called faith in Christ has often proved of little help other than the comfort of a personal hope for what lies beyond this life.

Willard doesn’t paint a very pretty picture in these words, but I believe that by looking into them, we actually find a vision for our Christianity. Imagine if the last part of the words I just spoke read like this:

Any criticisms of impracticality are, of course, unjustified when considering our Christian faith and its tradition through history. Our faith in Christ and his power has succeeded and continues to transform the human character of the masses precisely because it has been accompanied by discipleship and by an overall discipline of life such as Christ himself practiced. As a result, when faced with the real issues of justice, peace, and prosperity, faith in Christ not only produces a hope of life after death, but also of great help for the problems of today.

Can you imagine such a society? It is incredibly difficult to even conceive of it because it is so foreign to our experience. Note that we are not out to just change our society. Like saying we want to go win the Little League World Series, we end up way ahead of ourselves. And in fact, this is not even our goal at all but only a symptom of the lives that we lead in and amongst the world.

So we look at our Vision: We want to announce and demonstrate the availability of the Kingdom of God to all peoples. Big Vision.

Intention: This could be one of our stumbling blocks. Do we truly intend to do what is necessary to accomplish this vision? Are we willing to put aside our lives to accomplish this end?

Means: There are fundamentals that we must master, but even the fundamentals themselves must be practiced. They must be “drilled” so these become second nature to us. Scratch that – we want them to be our FIRST NATURE.

Our vision, then, is only possible when we have exercised the fundamentals, the fundamentals become our daily walk in and around the world, and our daily walk happens together as a community for the purposes of encouragement and offering ourselves as living sacrifices before the world to our One God and Lord Jesus Christ.

Proposal

I believe that in Levi’s Table, we have the potential to look back and have the “vision” of my rendition of Willard’s words be spoken of us. I also believe, though, that we need to figure out how to do this, that none of us practice all of the fundamentals and live our whole lives in the way that Christ lived his whole life. Is this even possible? I believe that it is because I don’t think that Jesus would have called us to this life if he didn’t think that we could actually live the life that he lived.

But we must live the whole life that Christ lived and I’m not sure that we know how to do that. Therefore, a “reprogramming” is in order and I believe God wants to use Dallas Willard and his book to speak to us and help us in this reprogramming process. Therefore, I am proposing that we take the next month and work through several chapters in this book and with prayer, decide if we are truly intentioned to live out the vision that God has put before us. We will then, I believe, begin to understand the means by which God will go about changing our lives, helping to form a foundation for our Levi’s Table community, and ultimately that we as a community can begin to announce and demonstrate the availability of the Kingdom of God to our broken and fallen world.

Ryan's Reaction