Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).
This podcast and article addresses a question from a listener, Hannah, on the episode about ‘spiritual disciplines‘. The question:
I’ve been wondering whether you might consider using a podcast episode to speak to the current trend towards formation as a major strand in Christian discipleship. I understand that it’s particularly prevalent among students and in the United States. But I’m also aware that there are more and more people in the UK and Australia reading and identifying with some of the big names in this new movement, of whom John Mark Comer and his ‘practicing the way’ is a prominent one. People seem especially enthusiastic about the idea of adopting a Rule of Life to guide discipleship.
As it turns out, about a week before Hannah’s email arrived Tony had spotted Comer’s book in his local Christian bookshop, and picked it up. As to why he bought it, and what he made of it, and what it all means for Hannah’s question, listen or read on.
The previous episode is An Unconventional Farewell. The next episode is Submission.
Spiritual Formation or Transformation?
HOW CAN WE REALLY CHANGE?
Tony Payne: Phillip, I wonder if you can guess why I bought this book by John Mark Comer (Practicing the Way).
Phillip Jensen: Because of a good picture on the front?
TP: No, there is in fact no picture on the front. But as I flicked through to the contents page, and there was a chapter called ‘The trellis and the vine’. I thought this was plagiarism! What’s going on?
PJ: No, it’s self-centredness.
TP: You mean you’ve never looked to the index of a book to see if you’re quoted? But anyway I quickly skimmed his chapter on ‘the trellis and the vine’ and it made no reference to me whatsoever. It was simply emphasizing that you need a structure in your life in order to make the vine grow. So I thought I should be a good citizen and actually pay for the book, and check it all out at home.
Overall it’s a very breezy, relatable kind of book, and Comer identifies a problem that I think many people feel. I think one of the reasons that this movement is popular is because it identifies that sense of “I go to church, I read my Bible, I do the stuff I’m told I’m supposed to do, but it doesn’t seem to be making much difference. I don’t feel like my life’s changing. I don’t feel like it’s working.” For a lot of people, if you said to them, “Do you feel really close to Jesus, like you’ve got a vital daily communion with Jesus”?”, they’d say, “Oh, I don’t know. Probably not.” So he’s he’s addressing the sense of dissatisfaction in the Christian life.
PJ: Which has to do with expectation, doesn’t it? I clean my teeth regularly. It’s a nice feeling when I do it, but I don’t feel my teeth are getting better or anything like that. But I know that if I didn’t do it regularly, it would be noticed.
TP: It would lead to problems. So one thing to talk about as we try and answer Hannah’s question is what are our expectations of the nature of the Christian life and what we experience?
PJ: Well I notice that one of his first major emphases is ‘being with Jesus’. What does it mean to be with Jesus? How do you get to be with Jesus?
TP: There are probably two major emphases in the book. One is that the key to spiritual growth is to relate to Jesus, to ‘be with Jesus’, and he quotes this idea from John 15 of abiding in Jesus and he in us. He suggests that means that we need to spend time in solitude and quietness and meditation and prayer until we really feel that we are with Jesus. So being with Jesus in his terms means that you make your ‘emotional home’ with Jesus.
PJ: In general, it seems to me that the word ‘abide’ as an English translation is unhelpful because people take that word and push it much further than is possibly meant by the Greek word that lies behind it.
TP: It’s a fairly simple word that just means to remain or stick with or keep going in, or it can mean to dwell somewhere. But it’s not implying or meaning in John chapter 15 that what Jesus is calling them to do is to go and dwell in a meditative state for a long period of time until you experience being with Jesus.
PJ: You could use the word ‘abide’ to mean to go into that mystical experience. But that’s not what Jesus was saying. He was just saying, stay with me.
TP: And in particular, I’ve given you my words. My words are in you and with you. Keep hold of them. Keep my commandments. If you love me, abide in my love and you’ll keep my commandments. It’s about persevering in loyalty to Jesus and what he’s taught them in the face of the hatred that’s coming from the world. And it’s about the fruit that then comes from remaining connected to Jesus. There’s nothing in the passage that is about being ‘with him’ in an emotional, spiritual, psychological, mystical sense.
And so, like many of the spiritual disciplines we talked about some weeks ago, this book defines a relationship with Jesus, or being with Jesus, or growing closer to Jesus, as essentially being a mystical process of getting into a state of sufficient solitude and meditation and quietness that you experience an emotional sense or consciousness of viewing or seeing Jesus, or kind of being with him in that sense. Whereas if you go to the New Testament, what would you say it teaches on what means are we united and in communion with Jesus?
PJ: It’s trusting in his Word.
TP: Yes, through the gospel. Which is what’s kind of curious about this book and similar books. The New Testament is so strong about the fact that we’ve got no way of getting close to God or being in or with Jesus, except that we hear his promise, his gospel promise that we can be forgiven, that we can die with him on the cross and rise to new life with him and be seated with him in the heavenly places, that we can be united with him. As it says in Colossians 3, set your set your mind there, think about and rely on and trust in the fact that you’re united with Jesus and have a place in his heavenly kingdom now because of his death and resurrection for you. And therefore live a new life, as it goes on to say.
So one of the striking things about Comer’s presentation is that it seems possible to ‘be with Jesus’ just by waiting for long enough and being silent enough and having the appropriate attitude and technique—which is just so different from the way the New Testament talks about as being united with Christ and in Christ.
PJ: Yes, “teach us how to pray” was what the disciples asked. And so Jesus taught them how to pray by telling them what to pray. There was no discussion of technique in prayer, breathing or quietness, or hands together or eyes closed, heads bowed or kneeling or sitting. I wonder, with this whole kind of movement, because it’s bigger than just this book, how much it is a failure to actually understand the gospel; a failure to understand how to be a Christian. It is a movement that happens within a Christianized community that is trying to tell Christians how to grow as Christians, but in fact, it is based in a false gospel.
TP: Hannah points this out in the rest of her letter—that in this book and in similar books, it’s as if coming to know Jesus is a matter of adopting a certain technique of prayer and practice, and that really the Christian life is imitation of Jesus, being like Jesus, rather there being any emphasis on the fact that we aren’t able to be with Jesus. We just can’t, apart from his grace and his gospel promise.
The second main aspect of the presentation is “be like Jesus”.
PJ: “What would Jesus do?”
TP: In this section of the book, the emphasis shifts to the practices and the Rule of Life that can help you become like Jesus.
PJ: Where you don’t have a haircut, wear a beard, walk around in a dressing gown and wear sandals.
TP: Well, that’s one of the problems and challenges with it—that the approach is if we’re going to become a Jesus person, we’ve got to see what Jesus did and do the same thing. And from that there are nine elements of the rule of life that you’re supposed to keep. But the problem is, they are a bit arbitrary which nine you pick.
PJ: Yes, and a different book would give you a different seven or twelve.
TP: The ones he focuses on are the classic monastic sort of Christianity, the kind of Christianity where you adopt a rule, a set of guidelines or practices that you promise to keep and that you conscientiously keep every day, so that by doing these things regularly and habituating yourself in these things, it is supposed to change you and make you a different person.
PJ: But will it make you more like Christ?
TP: Well, that’s the question. I’ll tell you what the nine practices are. First is Sabbath, making sure you keep one day off completely. We do absolutely no work.
PJ: Interestingly, Jesus was constantly criticized for not keeping the Sabbath.
TP: Two, solitude. Going off on your own, as a regular practice. And yes, Jesus did do that, but how much of that is necessary for us to do is hard to know.
PJ: And he didn’t teach his disciples to go off into solitude, did he?
TP: Well, that’s the real question in all of these. How much of these are things that Jesus did, and how much of these are things that Jesus taught his disciples to do?
Anyway, the next one is prayer, and by prayer he means talking to God and requesting, but a lot of it is listening and meditating and dwelling in silence.
Fasting is number four. Then number five is reading Scripture, especially working your way the set readings for the year in the Christian lectionary. Number six is community, living with other people, doing all this with others. Seven is generosity. Eight is service, by which he means doing works of hospitality and godly service for other people. And the last one is witness, which is mainly about hospitality and living an open, attractive life before other people.
So these nine practices become your rule of life.
PJ: Yes, you could do those, but I don’t think you’d be like Jesus.
TP: Why not?
PJ: Well, for a start, as you think about each one, it’s not really what Jesus did. So, for example, the word prayer means ‘asking’. It doesn’t mean ‘listening’. There’s no evidence that Jesus listened in prayer. So to see prayer as a listening activity is not what we saw Jesus doing, so you won’t become like Jesus doing it. And that’s not what Jesus teaches about prayer.
Fasting. Did Jesus fast?
TP: He was accused of being a drunk.
PJ: Yes, John the Baptist fasted. But Jesus feasted. It was the exact opposite.
TP: Because the bridegroom is with you.
PJ: Yes. And so this was not the time for fasting, he was saying. And the only other thing I can think of about Jesus and fasting was him attacking the hypocrisy of false fasting in Matthew 6.
On Scripture, Jesus did not read the lectionary of the church year. And why limit yourself to that form of reading? And if you follow the church’s year and what it tells you to read, how do you avoid the church giving you your Bible instead of the Bible giving you the church? It’s a back to front authority to say, well, I’m reading the Scriptures because the church tells me to read this Scripture. That doesn’t work.
Community. Jesus did live with his disciples, but that’s what he did. Should we all go off and live with each other in community?
TP: The problem all the way through this is how do you sort out those things which Jesus did without turning every ‘is’ of Jesus into an ‘ought’? And if you’re going to say, “Well, you don’t have to wear sandals, that’s ridiculous”, how do you discriminate between all the things that Jesus did, all the practices of Jesus, and decide which ones we should practice as a rule so as to make us like Jesus?
PJ: Especially if you ignore his teaching as to what you are to do.
TP: That seems to be the key point. So just as in the previous heading, we were talking about ‘being with Jesus’ and how there’s a gap in his discussion of that. There’s a lack of the idea that Jesus is present with us as he speaks to us, and we are connected to him and one with him and united with him as we trust him and trust his Word, and by his Spirit, are made one with him through the Word.
And there’s an absence of the Word here as well. Rather than asking, “What did Jesus teach us to do?”, we try to discern which actions of Jesus we should or shouldn’t imitate. It becomes arbitrary. And I guess it also fails to recognize that what Jesus did was teach and give commandments to his disciples, which he then told them to keep.
PJ: Yes, arbitrary, that’s a terrible failing here, but nearly every one of them I might disagree with anyway. Witness was described as mainly about hospitality, living a beautiful, attractive life. Well, that’s not actually what witness means. It means to testify. It means to justify, to speak.
TP: To stand up and hand on heart say, “This is the truth”, particularly the truth about the fact that Jesus is resurrected from the dead.
PJ: And testifying leads you to conflict with people because they will disagree with that. That’s why in John 15-16 it says the Holy Spirit will witness and you also will witness and it comes in the context of conflict and persecution, because that’s what testifying does. Me living a hospitable, beautiful, attractive life never leads to persecution.
TP: Indeed. Attractiveness leads to my popularity rather than my persecution.
PJ: It’s using biblical words unbiblically. So you’re right, it’s wrong because it’s selective and arbitrary, but it’s also wrong because even the ones they select are wrongly understood.
TP: And it leads us to the bigger question, which is: What is it that really changes people? How are people formed? I guess we would say perhaps transformed, rather than just formed.
PJ: I think that’s an important difference. It’s the gospel that transforms us, that moves us out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son, through the forgiveness of sins, by his death on our behalf. What we’re talking about here is not Christ and cross-centred.
TP: No, nor is it sufficiently Word and mind-centered. So when you think of where the Bible does talk about transformation, you think of places like Romans 12—where the mercies of God transform us and give us a whole new existence, blameless before God in Christ. And in view of those marvellous mercies, there’s a mental transformation by rejecting the old ways, not being conformed to the world and its way of thinking, but having a whole new way of thinking that then drives a whole new practice that proves what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
PJ: Which is the renewal of the mind by the work of the Spirit in our lives, isn’t it? But it’s a renewal of the mind that gets us to test and to prove what is right.
TP: Which does land in practice, right? It does mean doing things, but it’s got it the other way around. It’s not “Go and do a whole lot of these particular things, and you’ll be changed”; it’s “Be changed by the renewal of your mind and the work of the Word and the Spirit, and you will do these things”. And so the two things are backward.
I’ll read out the second part of Hannah’s question at this point:
“I think given this, that this doesn’t seem very gospel-centred as a way of thinking about the Christian life. Do you think there are ways in which our churches might benefit from thinking more in terms of healthy gospel-centred formation, as the word is often used? We are, in general, less disciplined than generations who have gone before. Is this to our disadvantage? We use little liturgy in our church gatherings, often neglect to plan them as well. Are we the poorer for it? In our own immediate context, we don’t have much of a grasp on the church calendar and the patterns that it develops in us. Might we be missing out by not having this? In short, how can we better encourage those who have received Christ Jesus as Lord, to continue to walk in him, and what dangers must we be wary of, especially in light of this current teaching about formation?”
PJ: Well, before I speak negatively about any of those things, let me at least put a little bit of balance by saying some positive things.
Yes, practice makes perfect, in most things in life. If I have a more disciplined, organized life, so that I give myself time and persistence in doing anything, it will have good effects for me. And so it’s very hard to speak against a disciplined, organized, practised life. And I think there’s a truth in that.
But I think I’ve ran out of positives about the book. Some people find it helpful to have other people organize how to read the Bible for them. I don’t think the organization of reading the Bible is important. I think reading the Bible is important. How I organize my life is what I’ve got to take responsibility for, and how I organize which parts of the Bible I read when. If having someone give you a list of what you read every week is helpful for you, that’s good. But once you start laying the responsibility on other people, then it’s not. I remember when I first started reading the Bible, we had a little card that you put a little hole in every day so that you could know where you were up to as you read your way through the Bible. I was more interested in the little holes in my card than I was in reading. It became terribly legalistic. What the passage said meant nothing compared to being able to hold my card up and show that I’d done it every day.
TP: Part of what concerns me about the whole way of thinking is that I think it misunderstands Romans 12:1-2 and what the New Testament says as a whole about how the world forms us and conforms us to itself. We’ve rebelled against God. We’ve turned our backs on him. We’ve collected ourselves into a world that by its practices, by its culture, by everything it does, reinforces and gives expression to our rebellion against God. We have become darkened and futile; and there’s a downward spiral that the New Testament talks about.
PJ: But I can be very disciplined in that downward spiral. So discipline and practice is not the essence of getting out of it.
TP: Yes, and that’s the whole point of the gospel—that when you’re in when you’re in the world and being conformed to the world and discipled by the world’s practices, there’s no way out of it. You can’t just replace those practices with better practices and hope it’ll get you out of it. The whole point of the gospel is that we can only escape from that prison by God crashing into it from outside and flinging open the doors and light streaming in.
PJ: Yes, there’s a confusion here between becoming a Christian and living as a Christian. You can’t by living as a Christian become a Christian. I become a Christian first then I should live as a Christian. But does living as a Christian have to be disciplined like this? No, you don’t have to.
TP: And do you live as a Christian any differently from how you become a Christian?
PJ: Indeed.
TP: One of the few places in the New Testament I can think of that talks in this kind of language is the “train yourself to be godly” type of language in 1 Timothy 4, which is about effort and habituation in the Word of God and the gospel and the commands of Christ that we live out in our lives. But it’s not train yourself to be godly by doing certain practices.
PJ: The contrast in 1 Timothy 4 is with not giving yourself over to old wives tales. And it’s not train yourself to be godly by rules such as ‘no Bible, no breakfast’.
TP: It’s by applying yourself to godliness rather than to old wives tales and myths. And in 1 Timothy, ‘godliness’ is more than just godly behaviour. It’s the mystery of godliness. It’s the gospel. Christianity is more about transformation than formation–about what God does in us through the word of God and the Spirit over time that results in a changed life in the fruit of the Spirit starting to sprout, and us keeping in step with that and growing more and more in that.
PJ: It’s love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self control—those are the kinds of marks of the Christian person, rather than saying your prayers every day.
TP: You could say that it’s a seven-fold fruit rather than a nine-fold practice.
What forms us or transforms us as Christians are the means of grace that made us Christians. That is the word of God in all its facets, being applied to us in all kinds of ways, not only from preaching and reading, but from the word we say to one another in the midst of life—to help each other remember what the gospel says we should be doing, to be encouraging when we see each other doing things that show the gospel. There’s a mutuality in our encouragement and transformation. And it’s always those three things over time. It’s the word of God in all kinds of forms, and the Spirit of God working as we pray that he would. And it happens between us as we keep sharing the word and prayer with each other. And it just all happens over time. It happens as we persist in that transformation which leads to new practice.
PJ: Yes, it’s not the forming but rather the transforming effect of truth.
TP: I suppose you could say that training, regularity, habituation, the use of the human structures of life and and community to keep ourselves at these kinds of things—all of these provide as many opportunities as possible for us to be in the word together in prayer by the Spirit over time to see that transformation take place. We need to be in church every Sunday. That’s a habit, that’s a form, that’s a structure. that’s the time you gather to sit under the Word of God, to respond to the Word of God in faith, to encourage each other in the Word of God and to pray together. It’s because of the things that you gather to do, Word and prayer and people. This is why we should not neglect gathering, as Hebrews says.
PJ: But don’t make rules and regulations, because people are made to feel guilty and spiritually inferior because their life is a more chaotic or disorganized life than other people.
TP: It might just be their season of life or their personality. There are so many factors that determine the rhythms and ebbs and flows of your day and your life.
PJ: Yes. Discipline is a helpful thing, practice is a helpful thing, but when you turn the discipline and the practice into godliness, you’ve missed the point completely.
TP: Because the path to godliness is through the truth and the grace of the gospel that teaches us to live a godly life. It’s not through adopting a set of rules or practices that somehow by managing to keep them form and change us. And I think that difference is the difference that Hannah has noticed and is asking about, and very helpfully. So she says right at the end of her letter:
“I’m sensing Colossians might provide the answers to many of these questions.”
I think so too. It’s interesting how Colossians talks about continuing to walk in Christ Jesus as you’ve received him and the gospel. How do you continue to walk in him? You watch out very carefully for people who are trying to tell you that there are special practices and ascetic kinds of operations you can do that somehow manage to curb your flesh and make you a more godly person. Don’t be fooled by that sort of thing. Set your heart and mind on Christ Jesus who’s above and put to death the deeds of the body as you do that with one another in the Word.
