The Spiritual Disciplines

There are few good numbers for the church. What positive reports surface are usually focused on a particular church, not the church overall.

Researchers report a mass exodus from church by those Barna terms the committed Believers, meaning: those people who want their faith to be relevant seven days a week. It’s not surprising that when asked why they are leaving, these folks indicate it’s because the church and its message are no longer relevant.

No longer relevant. To life. To daily struggle. To influencing culture. To knowing God more fully. To work, and faith, and family, and finance, and yes, irrelevant to having fun.

This trend did not start yesterday, or last month, or last year. The decline due to perceived irrelevance has been transpiring for over two decades.

Gallup notes that 69% of Americans were members of a church at the turn of the century. Eighteen years later, in 2018, the percentage had dropped to 52%. Gallup also reports that the number of Americans reporting no religious affiliation has more than doubled since 2000 from 8% to 19%. Church attendance declined by about 10% over the same period across all adult age groups, but the difference in church attendance between seniors and Millennials is 26%.

Church as it once was is dying.

True, the living church, the Body of Christ, is alive in all sorts of places. But the entity through which the Body of Christ can leverage collective influence, benefit from scale, and speak with a powerful voice is in a precipitously steep death spiral.

Reaction to these poor numbers by church leaders has been varied. Most churches of numerical size offer a smorgasbord of programs and a variety of worship service styles. Dress codes have eased, coffee is served, shirt tails are out, music is louder and more contemporary, common areas have been created, more women in leadership, better lighting in the auditorium, streaming is offered, a smoke machine for ambiance, screens and more screens, topical sermons related to issues of the day, exegetical sermons related to issues of the day, more enthusiastic greeters, security, refined check-in procedures in the children’s wing, and so much more.

But the numbers continue to slide. Folks that should be core church members keep departing. And when asked, the criticism is the same: The church and its message are irrelevant.

Unless we are talking a church that preaches social gospel pablum, it’s not possible for the church’s message to be irrelevant. How can the Gospel be irrelevant? How can Scripture be meaningless?

Over the last several years, the question of relevance has wandered the corridors of my mind. I’ve read, listened, prayed, and observed. What’s really going on with people of sincere faith in Christ?

I won’t bore you with all my rationale in this article, but if there’s nothing wrong with the message, then it must be the delivery. However, see four paragraphs above regarding delivery. Churches are trying everything to entice people to their campuses.

So, if it’s not the message, and the experiments in delivery aren’t making a difference, then the criticism of irrelevance must signal that the congregants either don’t understand the message, can’t manage the message, can’t apply the message, or perhaps all of the above. 

The first question is, how do we locate and communicate with a dispersed, disaffected, and disenfranchised group of people who are unlikely to return to the brick and mortar of the mother ship?

The second question is, if we do locate these disaffected folks, and can somehow gain the attention of those still ensconced within the brick and mortar’s programs and inertia, what do we tell them and do for them that will transform the irrelevance into vibrant relevance? 

Let’s answer the first question first: Those of us who are convinced of what follows about spiritual life, must talk, share, promote, testify, and otherwise engage with our disaffected brethren and sistren such that they appropriate into daily practice the spiritual disciplines of the faith.

If what you read from me resonates within your soul, please pass the article along. Encourage your friends and those in your study groups to subscribe to my articles. If my writing is divinely led, then my thoughts will cross-reference to something else you read or hear that corroborates or otherwise develops further the march of the Spirit into our dark world.

Our goal is to create focused momentum.

So the answer to the first question is that we must talk, share, pass along what guides our faith to diligent application, and we must stay with this resolve until it creates focused momentum.

Before I address the second question, let me emphasize the need for fidelity to fundamentals: I encourage you to stay focused. The church must return to her spiritual fundamentals. Now is not the time for a study on the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, as interesting as that might be.

As you will soon see, I’m advocating that we streamline the magnitude of all that is Christianity in devotion to the spiritual fundamentals that are key to Christianity’s relevance but that currently are not part of routine Christian life.

I once asked a friend who played professional football how he diagnosed getting beaten, not as a team, per se, but as an individual player. He said that invariably, when watching the films afterward, he realized he had failed in a fundamental: led with the wrong foot, not had his shoulders square, his head was down, etc. If you think about it, this insight applies to every practice in life, including our spiritual lives.

When there is a mysterious failure to produce or perform, the best wisdom is to return to your fundamentals. For Believers, the fundamentals are what we know as the spiritual disciplines.

The second question: The message isn’t landing, isn’t finding a purchase, isn’t taking root—it’s not relevant. Why?

There are two major reasons underlying the criticism of irrelevance: 1) The Gospel, faith, biblical instruction, spiritual training—while each is true, each is also an abstract truth. An abstraction must become concrete before it is useful and can be mastered. A vision needs a strategy. A plan needs management. A goal requires objectives. Action requires measurement and evaluation. And faith is useless without action.

I’ll write more about this as we go, but action steps—the transition from an abstract idea to concrete application—must be instructed, then practiced, and evaluated, not left to the recipient to figure out for themselves.

It is an abstraction for me to tell you that Jesus provides salvation—forgiveness of sins, a new identity, the indwelling Spirit, and eternity with God in heaven. You can believe this abstract idea, even believe that it is true, but until you comprehend and identify your sins, repent of them, and declare Jesus Christ your Lord, you won’t concretely comprehend what salvation means to you. Until you define your old self prior to salvation, you can’t possibly appreciate the death of the old self and rise of the new self declared of you by God when you are saved. Further, until you rigorously personalize your new identity, you won’t comprehend how the new you treats your spouse, loves your kids, or manages professionally.

The second underlying reason we feel our faith irrelevant is, 2) we have failed to understand, implement, practice, and problem-solve the disciplines of the spiritual life. Every aspect of life requires practice.

It is true you are alive as a human being. It is also true that you are alive as a spiritual being. Any undertaking in life, whether physical, mental, or spiritual, requires diligence. We are exhorted by Paul, “The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things; and the God of peace shall be with you.”

The Bible is filled with action words and imperative statements to help us comprehend and make relevant spiritual truths. Action in conjunction with faith is not so we gain acceptance with God or enhance our transformation. Action alongside faith is intended to make the abstraction of faith concrete, i.e. a faith that is relevant to life, thought, and belief. (This is the purpose of my book, Swagger.)

While our acceptance with God is complete and our standing with God is secure, our struggle to perform our faith—to apply it, to live it, to practice it, to demonstrate it—is irregular and imperfect.

Failure is not pleasant. It’s like getting burned: we don’t want to do that again. Failing motivates us to change, modify, reevaluate, and so forth. In actual fact, failure is essential to learning.

Epstein’s research in his book, Range, concludes that true learning, resilient learning, learning that is flexible across multiple fields, requires failure to develop—and not just a little bit. Repeated failure is what creates the grit of a resilient, flexible, learned, skill set. “Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful. The harder it [learning] is, the more you learn. Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.”

The good news is that failure does not change God’s acceptance of us. And, failure causes us to learn more deeply such that our spiritual character is reflective of spiritual grit, the steadfast endurance spoken of in Romans, and the set-mind referenced in Colossians that is focused on things above.

Practicing the spiritual disciplines does not change us. We are already changed, transformed, and made new by the finished and complete work of Jesus Christ. Rather, the spiritual disciplines place us in position so that the Holy Spirit more effectively and efficiently correlates spiritual reality with our earthly experience and vice versa.

We know we have faith in Christ for salvation. The practice of the spiritual disciplines positions us where this faith and earthly practice meld into understanding, knowledge applied, faith in action, the Gospel appropriated and relevant to life and living.

As I’ve written before, Bonhoeffer taught that the Christian life absent the spiritual disciplines was cheap grace. When asked why the German church did not resist Hitler’s rise or the atrocities of Nazism—why the church was irrelevant in a society cascading into darkness—Bonhoeffer said the church’s inaction was due to its adoption of cheap grace.

Thus, my conviction that the reason the American church and its message are considered irrelevant, and the reason the arrays of remedies are failing, is that we—the church in the West—have embraced a cheap grace, absent the robust grace of Scripture, and the rigorous grace learned in the practice of the spiritual disciplines.

Dallas Willard, one of the more recent to write about the spiritual disciplines, adds in his teaching that more important than the disciplines themselves, is the attitude with which we approach the practice of the disciplines. It’s an either-or proposition.

We either practice the disciplines as an attitude of the heart that deeply desires to meet with Christ regarding all things related to life and godliness or we practice the disciplines via self-effort for self-centered gain. Of course, there is another option as well: not practicing the spiritual disciplines at all.

Sadly, there are many Believers who are educated about the faith, and informed about Christ, but they have missed Jesus Christ Himself. They engage spiritual learning to satisfy some personal incentive—to participate with their people, learn something new about an interesting subject, to keep pace, to show up within their circle; or perhaps in an effort to enhance their standing with God—which of course is an impossibility.

Why are we motivated to practice the spiritual disciplines?

Our motive must be to know Christ and be guided by Him in the life of faith. And the truth of the matter is, awareness of this motive reveals the true desire of our heart.

For our purposes, we will explore some-or-all of these spiritual disciplines: solitude, silence, fasting, confession, sabbath, secrecy, submission (both men and women), Bible reading, worship, prayer, soul friendship, personal reflection and journaling, and service, which includes giving.

More soon. Thanks for reading. I’m honored that you consider my writings.