12.10.08
habits of the heart
In most of my writing post-Seabeck I viewed the creation of a missional order through the lens of covenant renewal (see this post as well as others). But there is another lens, equally valid and equally valuable: the lens of culture formation. I understand the church as an alternative (kingdom) culture, and I see one of the central tasks of leadership as cultivating alternative practices. Culture is a cultivating force, and we are formed by the soil we grow in, primarily through what we practice – our habits become “habits of the heart.†Alan Roxburgh writes that the work of leaders,
“will equip and support the congregation on its journey, however tentative and exploratory that may be. But what determines these skills and strategies for leadership is the larger image of the pilgrim people of God as a covenant community. The leaders primary skills are directed toward intentionally forming such orders within the community.
“This can only happen as leaders themselves participate in such orders. Leaders must exert the greatest attention and energy at this point for a number of reasons. First, it is the covenant community that witnesses to the gospel as an alternative logic and narrative within the social context, including in particular the larger unbounded congregation. Second, this area is precisely where leaders have been given almost no preparation; there are few models from which they can learn. The leaders themselves must therefore become a novitiate, embark on a missional apprenticeship, in order to give the kind of direction needed by the emerging missional community. This is a demanding task that cannot be given a secondary role in the church.†(Missional Church, 211)
Perhaps we are more ready to embrace covenant structures in these days because we are becoming comfortable with paradox. We are more ready to entertain the possibility that a rule of life can root and empower freedom, and that a shared rule provides a sustainable center for a missional community. Covenant becomes a vehicle for shared exploration, a shared journey, but a journey with focus and intention. Moreover, because it is foundational to discipline, it is a tool that assists us in transcending ego. And ego, as we know too well, is the primary pitfall of leadership. We too quickly choose the easy path, when it is the upward path that builds strength. Water flows naturally downhill. Our disciplines draw us to the ascent.
In The Tangible Kingdom (150) Hugh Halter identifies three barriers to incarnational mission: individualism, consumerism, and materialism. We are readily attracted and distracted to the wrong things. Our market culture is designed to keep us thinking about self and consumption. How do we form faithful communities of Jesus followers in a culture of consumption? How do we sustain the long haul? We need culture forming and character forming disciplines — disciplines of resistance — to keep us focused on a different vision – on a city we have not seen.
And they will have to be shared disciplines, because alone we are weak; alone we quickly tire or grow discouraged. We need the encouragement and support of others when we swim against the stream. And they will have to be shared because as our choices on the spiritual smorgasbord multiply so does our sense of fragmentation, until we no longer make choices or develop the rhythms that root us more deeply in community and in Christ.
The practices that form alternative culture are alternative practices. In Hopeful Imagination Walter Brueggemann reminds us of the need:
“Our problem today: the space for imagination to expand and take shape is inversely proportional to the speed at which we live. Driven hard and fast, we lack the time to allow alternate worlds and possibilities to form, careening past small turnings and exits, bound to follow the obvious straight paths of the present arrangement. Yet if we stop and wait, and close our eyes to the “buy now, take me now†images, we will begin to remember, new worlds will form and new exits will become apparent. Before change.. comes waiting..†(56-57)
So instead of fast, we choose slow. Instead of big, we choose small. Instead of up, we choose down. Instead of self-protection, we choose vulnerability. Instead of hording our time, we choose availability. Instead of rationalism, we choose faith.
Instead of anxiety and drivenness, we choose to wait. We choose to give time to God and to prayer and to study rather than believing the myth that the kingdom is something we build in our own strength. We choose to believe the gospel that the kingdom is a gift that we receive. We confront the lie that Imperial reality offers peace, and that the good life is limitless consumption and limitless growth. We believe Isaiah, whose poetry tilts toward freedom and liberation within the covenant. Brueggemann reminds us that
“This subversive poetry has an unavoidable political realism to it. It knows that the yearned-for liberation will not happen until there is a dismantling of imperial definitions of reality. That is where the missional activity of Israel is called to be — defiantly and buoyantly against every imperial definition of reality. And so he speaks with nerve and authority, believing that his speech is not idle or futile, but that it plays a part in the dismantling.
“We live in a time of domesticated hopes, weary voices and co-opted imaginations. Now is not a good time to join issue with the enslaving structures of the day (cf. Amos 5:13) (Covenant as a Subversive Paradigm)
Increasingly I hear others pursuing this ancient path, a path familiar to marginalized groups like the Mennonites in the last century, who described themselves as a covenant people. Others are hearing a voice calling them to walk forward in faithful response; being led, sometimes, in spite of inner resistance, to a deeper freedom. As Henri Nouwen wrote, a Rule offers “creative boundaries within which God’s loving presence can be recognized and celebrated. It does not prescribe but invite, it does not force but guide, it does not threaten but warn, it does not instill fear but points to love. In this it is a call to freedom, freedom to love.†By analogy, a rule of life is like the glasses we wear. We don’t look at our glasses, but rather they assist us precisely because they are transparent. We look through the lenses so that we can focus and see clearly, paying attention to what is important in everyday life.
A rule will involve three dimensions: God, self and other. It’s most basic form is the triad: groups of three who meet regularly to help one another grow and deepen in covenant faithfulness. God always seems to start with three: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (even among the twelve – Peter, James and John). Andy Crouch argues that all “culture-making” is local, and that every significant shift began with 3 people, who then had 12 around them , who then had 120 people as the third layer of concentric circles, where the impact is spread deeply into nooks and crannies of the surrounding cultural geography (Culture Making, 239 ff). Practices will be defined around inward and outward rhythm, community and mission and devotion: a covenant of prayer, study, and hospitality, available to God and free for His kingdom.
