Spiritual Disciplines and the Confusion About "Practicing"

One of the pervasive temptations of the flesh is to embrace a false way to grow that is untethered from the gospel. We see this happen in the very earliest churches. Right away in Gal. 3:3 we find Christians trying to begin with the Spirit to only be perfected by the flesh.

But there is an opposite error as well that I sometimes see today. When people hear that we cannot grow ourselves many assume we don’t have to do anything. Or, to be more specific, we all have a tendency either to believe that spiritual practices grow us in the same way that physical practices do (“working out”), or else assume they do nothing and we just wait around until God “zaps” us into action and formation.

Overreaction and reduction.

Interestingly, even though I’ve written a book on spiritual practices, people sometimes react to my emphasis on God’s action and grace as undermining any of our work. That is far from the case. Sometimes, oddly enough, the responses to what I argue (which is just reasserting what Protestants have historically said about means of grace) are absolutely unhinged. On the fundamentalist side, I hear that since I teach on spiritual disciplines I must believe in new age practices! On the other side, I hear that I reject spiritual disciplines.

Overreaction and reduction.

Part of the confusion, I have no doubt, stems from the form of my teaching. Unlike the 70s when Richard Foster wrote his Celebration of Discipline, we live in a day obsessed with life-hacks, life optimization, and the self-obsessed desire to squeeze advantage out of every situation. We cannot simply present spiritual disciplines to people and expect that they can pull these apart from this new cultural orthodoxy.

The other of my emphases that might confuse people, admittedly, is that I tend to dislike the language of “spiritual disciplines.” I prefer the historic language “means of grace” because it locates our efforts within a Christian vision of life. But instead of using that phrase, recognizing that it might be confusing to some, I tend to talk about spiritual practices. But when I do so, I mean means of grace (none of these semantic decisions are set in stone, but I made these decisions in 2010 when I started working on Formed for the Glory of God where I talk about these things).

My allergy to the language of “spiritual disciplines” has everything to do with how people hear the word “discipline” in a culture inundated with work-out regimes and personal trainers. Using this language, I fear, locates spiritual formation in the same individualistic, self-improvement projects that dominate American culture. Sadly, many who teach and write in spiritual formation don’t seem to know the difference, and so they fluidly go from talking about Myers-Briggs to spiritual disciplines as if these are all a part of the same “project of the self.”

Rather, as I lay out in Formed for the Glory of God, when we think about the Christian life we need to recognize that the nature of our spiritual practices are not akin to our formation at the gym. That would be an Aristotelean model of formation that the church has always rejected as Pelagian, but that has reinserted itself in American Christianity.

As an aside, there are two major forms of Pelagianism that are highly influential in American Christianity right now. There is your garden variety moral formation of the self, built on self-help projects and habit formation. But there is also its more bougie cousin, what I call “liturgical-Pelagianism.”

But there is another problem here as well that I think leads people to misunderstand my view. I have been reading, discussing, and engaging the spiritual formation conversation for 30 years, ever since my pastor at the time, John Ortberg, introduced me to the work of Richard Foster. Much later I got to know Richard and Dallas and take part in what ministries like Renovare were doing.

As I got to know them both a bit more in person, I expected them to emphasis spiritual practices more and bristle at my worries, but what I found instead was that they simply nodded their heads. In fact, when I gave my address at the Renovare National Conference thirteen years ago, on this very point, Richard bounded on stage with affirmation.

But I worry that people who read folks like Foster confuse what he was up to, because they read him in light of our new cultural context of life-hacks and self-help projects.

Importantly, the first generation of the spiritual formation movement was not attempting to start from the ground-up to give an account of spiritual practices. We don’t find a full account of what the Christian life is and how spiritual disciplines function within that. We find books that point that direction and that attempt to respond to where the church is. But there are no examples of what we might call a full-fledged “spiritual theology.” That simply isn’t what they were up to.

This shouldn’t surprise us because the first generation of movements always do this. This is the prophetic call of these forerunners. Their call is not to provide a holistic construction of something, but to name the problems, failures, and limitations of what has been going on and point to a new way that is actually an old way.

Let me say that again differently because I think it is so important and because so many confuse this. What the first generation of folks did was to highlight our failures and emphasize what had been ignored. That is not the same as giving an account of what matters. It is an entirely different task.

So here is the problem: Folks who read these books and heard these talks often confused what they were doing. They took their emphases as providing the proper order of things.

They were right. But they were misheard.

If you are an evangelical in the 80s, wanting to highlight features of the Christian life that other evangelicals have missed, you wouldn’t lead with going to church, listening to sermons, praise God together, etc. Everyone assumed that as obvious. So you would talk about the real possibility that folks are doing all of these things in the flesh.

But let me be clear: I think silence and solitude are incredibly important - maybe more than they ever have been given our new technology - but silence and solitude will never be as fundamental as listening to a sermon is for the Christian life. We are a people who hear the Word declared. We are a people who have been created by a Word declared to us.

So we should be the kinds of people who can listen, attend, and be present. This is why silence and solitude are so important. Their importance is not because they are somehow more fundamental than the “normal means of grace,” like the Lord’s Supper, listening to a sermon, praising God communally, etc., but because they attend to who we are as people who have built a life ordered by these things.

I will say more in the next post about the role of spiritual practices as means of grace, but for my paid subscribers, I have a video below talking about how these things have been confused in the spiritual formation conversation and what we need to do about it.