“We are saved to be a
community, not a church of individuals.”
(Brad House)
Perhaps one
of the greatest obstacles to spiritual formation today is busyness. I have
written elsewhere that a basic pathway for spiritual formation, being formed
into the character of Christ, is fourfold: intentional formative practices,
time in solitude with God, time in community of a small group and time sharing
your faith journey with another. Each of these requires that we slow down our
lives. There is a sturdy biblical foundation for this. The second chapter of
Genesis opens with a declaration that God has completed God’s work in six days
and now sets aside the seventh day for rest. As my former teacher, Walter
Brueggemann, once commented, we are not to read quickly past this seventh day as
if it were a footnote. Here, God announces that there is something of infinitely
more value than striving and producing. The remainder of the Bible speaks to
this though Jesus states it succinctly for us, love God and love your neighbor.
Simply, our primary business is to be in relationship with God and one another.
Many in the
church have forgotten this. God’s seventh day has become a footnote, in very
small print, as our lives become marked by ever escalating frantic activity. Lives
are increasingly formed by the six days of the Genesis story and the seventh
day, if considered at all, is regarded as a luxury or worse, that place where
the lazy dwell. Spiritual formation might be the pursuit of some but its
pursuit is largely done from a place of exhaustion and is unmoored from a small
faith community. Without “rest” we imagine ourselves as more than the God who
“rested from all the work that He had done in creation” (Genesis 2:3 NRSV) and
separated from a small group, the pursuit is not Christian. As Brad House
observes, we are saved to be a community, not a church of individuals.
If there is
to be a recovery of a vibrant Christian church it will be with a recovery of a
vibrant experience of Christ by those who comprise the membership of the
church. That simply isn’t possible until the seventh day is lifted from a
footnote at the bottom of our lives and returned to where God intends, as the
capstone to all of our activity. In that seventh day, and I am speaking
figuratively here, we pursue not greater output but greater attention to
relationships, God and neighbor. Attention to neighbor is optimally and
authentically realized through participation in a small group. By planting
ourselves in the community of a small group and recovering this seventh day of
God’s rhythm of creation, we will train our attention toward God and remain in
touch with what really matters in the midst of the busyness and noise of the
other six days.
Joy,
Doug
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