In the first post of this series, I named what I called a “modern church machine” that describes how our focus on spiritual practices implicitly teaches us to approach faith like a vending machine.
Press a behavior; out comes a solution. Press a bunch; out comes a disciple.
The power of the practice of spiritual disciplines such as prayer and fasting has been en vogue for some time now, and for the most part I applaud it. But let’s be careful, lest we think disciplines create disciples.
They do not.
In fact, with our modern, rational minds, it is quite easy to make such a common assumption. When we approach the practice of faith syllogistically—when we reason that if we practice the disciplines faithfully enough, we will get it right—they end up being just another technique in a long line of them, all the way down through the entire tradition, by which we have tried to do or achieve certain behaviors to find God.
I should say that the caution against reason is itself en vogue, to some degree. We put the blame on the Enlightenment, or on megachurches, or on individual pastors, leaders, and writers.
But the tendency to turn faith into technique is the oldest reflex we have.
We grip and squeeze at every good idea until all that’s left is a shrunken peel.
Prayer, fasting, Scripture—each a gift from God, a means of grace, that we somehow turn into levers on a machine.
This is the issue that Jesus addresses in the critical story of Mark 2:1-12, as we end Book 1 and begin Book 2. Four friends bring their hurting man to Jesus on a mat, and the scribes have something to say about it. Jesus forgives the man, but not according to any rationale that makes sense to the teachers of the law.
So a debate ensues.
The question behind their question is this: what ought people do to achieve wholeness of body, mind, and spirit?
The witness of my own tribe’s founder, John Wesley, is proof that the desire to focus on technique is timeless. He preached on the “almost Christian,” the faithful churchgoer with the whole form of godliness and none of its power. Prayerful, useful, methodical, and cold down in the boiler room of the soul, where the love of God is supposed to be burning.
Such behaviors are as easy to find now as in Wesley’s day, or Lewis’. If you have been following along with me in the More Like Jesus series thus far, you know that I don’t speak from on high but from amid the trouble. For years, I kept a machine-like input-output mindset about faith.
I didn’t know it of course. Few of us do.
But we do recognize the consequence of the machine approach: what I called a “quiet cracking” state of fatigue, spiritually exhausted by the complex, pharisaic systems we have built.
I wonder if this is simply part of the journey—to take up the practices, keep them a while, then wake one day and realize they’re not enough. As I said in Book 2, we should be careful to paint the Pharisees as cartoon villains, because in them we see ourselves.
Which makes me wonder, what is your story?
Have you tried the spiritually disciplined life?
Read the Bible, pray, fast, journal, attend all of it, and remain somehow incomplete anyway?
It is instrumental faith, friend. It is what I lived. It is when Jesus becomes a tool or instrument by which we’ve done something else. It turns faith into a human work. It keeps the ego in charge.
The disciplines are not the problem. The reflex is — the ancient, tireless desire to control, to master what we were meant to receive. As we’ve seen, the teachers of the law that spoke with Jesus were quite good at it.
If we cannot technique our way to God, what do we do?
Jesus answers it in the story. It’s easy to miss though, because we tend to want to focus on the first half, and the way in which Jesus responds to the man on the mat who has been lowered in by his four friends.
But there is another gem in the story of Mark 2:1-12 that I didn’t include in our first walkthrough. It directly addresses this issue of the machine. Next time, we will enter the house again and see what we else we can find.
If you have been a Jesus follower, has any spiritual practice ever turned into a technique? Which one(s), and when?
If you have never been a Jesus follower, have you watched someone perform a faith that seemed to be hollowing them out rather than filling them?
HOW TO EXPERIENCE GOD INSTEAD OF JUST STUDY GOD
Aug 27 | 1: The Modern Church Machine
Aug 29 | 2: Just Another Spiritual Technique
Sept 1 | 3: Three Ways of Knowing God
Sept 5 | 4: Trust in Order to Understand
Sept 8 | 5: What We Can Learn From the Most Effective Teacher in Human History
Sept 12 | 6: Learning to Let Go of the Performance
Buy the ePUB version of The Way to Begin Again.
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