Our pastor delivered a passionate and well-structured message Sunday designed to tweak your conscience and motivate you to change a behavior. His message since he started at our church was to encourage an “intimate, passionate, life-changing experience” with Jesus.
I married a Baptist and for several years attended Baptist churches. I was even chairman of the Deacons in one church for several years. Weren’t they all supposed to be old, slightly annoying people? I was young and more-than-slightly annoying, I suppose.
It was the Baptist experience that started a line of thought that has bothered me kind of like an itch in the nose ever since. Every Baptist message is designed to “convert” people. To make them come to a decision. I watched the first people in my life make that dramatic decision. But then I noticed that the church had no means of guiding them into what’s next.
The Bible also bugs me. It says “Jesus went away to pray.” It doesn’t say what he did when he prayed (except for a few public prayers–but those are different from your personal private prayers). Paul talks of converting people, and he talks of staying to teach them. But he never says what he taught them to do. He says to exercise your spirit just as an athlete exercises his body (the terminology is that of athletic training). He never really says how.
I once tried to correct this problem I thought I saw. I taught a class on prayer. My intention was to teach people how to pray. My class’s intention was for me to teach them a bunch of passages in the Bible about prayer.
I stumbled upon the Spiritual Disciplines one at a time. First was meditation. And meditation really does change your life. But you have to practice it. Daily.
Then I found Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines. These are the guidebooks for which I was searching. (OK, if I was any good, I’d have written them. Thankfully smarter guys than I did.)
It’s really very simple–and very hard. Prayer, meditation, study, celebration, service, fasting (and many more). We should have been guiding all these converts to practice these. Daily. Athletes (to return to Paul) do not just exercise on game day. They live a life designed to make them succeed on game day. Working out, lifting weights, running, diet, mental preparation. We need to do the same.
It’s not theology. It’s work.
Faith Venture 
June 20, 2011 at 7:31 am |
Interesting article, but I wonder just who is doing the changing?
You?or the Holy Spirit? Jesus?
Also, are we Jesus’ partner? That we help Him in this endeavor?
“with” Jesus?
I can appreciate your concern about “what comes next” but I see it as being even more important to start out right!
Knowing who and what you are and who God is…
I was also curious as to why you listed meditation AND prayer. I assume you’re not practicing TM right? If meditation has changed your life why not become a Hindu?
In my experience, the quickest way to shipwreck a new believers faith is to overwhelm them with a bunch of legalistic crap-ola that they don’t understand and can’t possibly practice “as prescribed”. This also works with more seasoned church goers as well…it suck’s the life right out of your Christian experience and turn’s it into exactly what you called it…
WORK!
Which is the antithesis of faith!
which is what our “relationship” is supposedly all about
Faith in what Christ has already done for us, not in how well we keep any sacraments or some condemnation that hovers over people telling them their salvation is at stake if they don’t measure up.
Just some points for you to consider… and just what I’d say to you if we met in person and you expressed these things to me. You really sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about to me.
June 21, 2011 at 6:42 am |
Guess in trying to be brief, I didn’t explain to those who don’t understand. I never said anything about legalism. That’s why I’m not a fundamentalist. I’m not really into sacraments that much, although I really like and appreciate the mystery and formality of a Catholic mass. By personality, I’m not a charismatic–in fact I worry about groups that overly rely on emotion. Emotions untamed have ruined many lives. I’ve seen it happen.
The question is, after you have that initial conversion experience, then what. That mountain top experience will only sustain you so long. Then it’s gone. If you never learned to pray, if you never learned to sit quietly and ponder God’s word, if you’ve never learned to sit quietly and let God speak to you, if you’ve never learned how valuable it is to gather together with God’s people to celebrate, if you’ve never learned how fantastic it is to serve others in the name of God, then your “faith” will be shallow and like the seeds scattered on the hard ground will shoot up then wither in the sun.
Transcendental Meditation (TM) teaches you how to sit quietly, but its practitioners usually miss the point. It’s all about sitting quietly in the bosom of God. If you do that over a period of time, it will calm your personality, lead you to insights about God, lead you to hearing God’s voice, lead you to understanding that it’s not all about me–it’s all about God.
It is work. But work is good. You seem to think work is a bad term. This sounds like the boomer generation that believes in retiring early and doing nothing but sitting on their ever expanding backsides. Work is blessed by God and something you should be doing as long as you are able until you die. And take that word in its broadest sense–not just earning a paycheck.
Not sure what you mean by faith, but the longest tradition within Christianity holds that faith is an action verb. There is a strain of thought originating in the mid-late 19th century that holds that faith is agreeing with a set of propositions. One takes a verse from the Bible, often out of context, puts it on a bumper sticker, and says “Here, I believe this is true.”
I have discovered that faith is an ever deepening relationship with God, and because of the relationship you continue to grow and learn until you die. And because of that relationship you do things you’d have never thought possible.
And as for work–one of the best things you can do for a new Christian is to help them figure out their talents and interests and send them out on a mission. Our church has many opportunities — and these have really brought the community together. Groups have gone to New Orleans to help rebuild churches and houses, Haiti to build schools, Mexico to work with orphans and against human trafficking, China to work with orphans, Appalachia to work on people’s houses and churches, Nashville to share love and Jesus to the homeless… People who get involved in a good way, deepen their faith and stick around.
Spiritual disciplines have been taught since the beginning of Christianity. They just sort of got lost, especially over the past 75 years or so.