More Than Spiritual Disciplines

Why Christian practices form congregations for hope, healing, and holy imagination

“I just don’t think I can get my congregation interested in spiritual practices.” So said one pastor of a congregation in a small Texas town. “That is personal.”

For Christians, the phrase “spiritual practices” usually conjures private prayer, daily devotion, Scripture reading. Fundamentals on the food pyramid for the life of faith. Acts of intimacy between you and God. Personal.

What we actually said to the pastor was Christian practices. He heard spiritual practices. In the work of Austin Seminary’s Houses of Hope initiative, we make a distinction between spiritual practices and Christian practices.

When we speak of Christian practices, we are talking about more than private disciplines of devotion. We are talking about a way of being that is concrete and rooted in doing human life together—always sourced by Scripture, prayer and communal worship but worked out into everyday life. Christian practices are things done by Christians, from the beginning of the church until now, that participate with, reveal and amplify who God is in our regular day-to-day experiences. They give witness to God’s presence as the way we are in the world.

Christian practices are about being more than believing, about participation more than assent. They move formation beyond the traditional Protestant privileging of intellect, reason, and doctrine and into the realm of embodied, communal life. That is a big shift for many people who learned that the most important thing about their faith was what they believed.

A long-haired Jewish college student in the late 1950’s was traveling through Spain. One night, he got off a train in a village to find it already closed up for the evening. It was dark. He was in strange surroundings. A little frightened, he spotted one place with a light shining inside. It turned out to be a monastery. The monks gladly received him, fed him and gave him a place to sleep, and wished him well when he left the next morning. Down the road, the young man discovered that they had quietly slipped some coins into his pocket as he slept.

The monks were living Christian practice. This young man traveling alone did not need to be greeted with a sermon on hospitality, he needed welcome and care. It wasn’t one monk who was kind, it was the community who was generous. They were sustained by a way of life together that did what God would do in response to a fundamental human need—that is how and who they were.

Through Christian practices of hospitality, gratitude, household economics, singing together, dying well, testimony, forgiveness, Sabbath, justice-making, care for the earth, honoring our bodies, and discernment, we come to perceive how our daily lives are all tangled up with the things God is doing in the world.

This is why Christian practices stand at the center of Houses of Hope. As we think about Christian practices in the context of small town and rural congregations, we appreciate that they do not conjure a big, new, splashy project as their necessary result. Rather, we understand Christian practices as goods in themselves, practices that transform both individual hearts and congregational life in ways that inevitably find expression in the world. An underused fellowship hall becomes the home of the Senior Citizens Center. An empty gym hosts home-schooled kids basketball; a mom wishes aloud her daughter had a choir to join and now families are in church with kids singing alongside old folks. Every Friday lunch is served for whoever in town can stop in the church on the square.

Every Christian practice unfolds in three movements, cycling over and over and deepening our way of life.

The first movement is awakening. Awakening to the practice includes learning about the practice and actually practicing. It means taking a long, loving look at what is. In Houses of Hope, congregations bring artifacts of the best of times and the worst of times. They tell the story, its highs and lows, listening to different voices from different eras and learning to see clearly what has shaped them. They open their eyes to the gifts they have received, clearing the losses and lament that clouded their vision.

The second movement is empowering. Empowering describes the enlarging of the human heart which makes room for God and love of neighbor. As people become vulnerable in sharing themselves, their empathy grows. They never knew the trauma some people felt. They understand for the first time that the way they show up pushes others away. Their hearts soften. Their capacity for empathy and solidarity deepens, even for their town.

The third movement is healing. Healing is the shorthand way to talk about the kind of action which flows through the practices from the inbreaking of the Spirit for freedom, wholeness, creativity, delight, and the reconciliation of all creation. They write communal prayers of confession and humility. They cannot wait to bring other people into what they have experienced.

This work is not prescriptive program design. It is formation.

We design for challenge in an environment of support. We invite small risk-taking that may develop muscles for greater risk-taking. These practices take investment, choosing to spend time on this instead of other things. Being willing to try something new. Maybe to change.

But this is the work of Christian formation. Not simply learning new ideas, but becoming a people whose common life is reshaped by practices that make the love of God visible in the world.