“Why,” you may wonder, “is he starting this article with some self-revealing biography?”  The answer is that I want you to grasp a bit of my history so that you will be able to understand the connection I’ve come to see between belief and practice. These are the things I have finally started writing about the last few years.

Though I have written many magazine articles and contributed chapters to books, for me writing started in earnest during my Doctor of Ministry work at George Fox Seminary in Portland, Oregon.  My thesis was: Re-hearing the Gospel: Toward Improved Practices in Evangelism and Discipleship.It is not a great piece of literature.  I would not run down to your local library to get a copy sent to you—as if any one would actually do that. I guess I am just trying to save myself a little blog-world embarrassment!

But the title does give you a window into my thinking over the past five or so years. I’ve been wondering: what is the connection between belief and practice? The name of this article is the title of my first book published by IVP.  It is due out February 1. I am just now finishing the first draft of a second book with IVP. The working title is: Re-Practicing Christianity: What To You When Your Faith Has Stopped Working For You.

Todd’s Own Christianity Beyond Belief
Okay. Let’s summarize these meanderings so far. I’ve tried over the years to believe as rightly as I can. I’ve got thousands of books in my library that scream: “Todd is telling the truth!” But in recent years I have become aware that I could do better on both elements of the synergy between belief and practice.

For instance, I have been capable of passing a standard theological exam for 30 years. But interacting more deeply regarding the Kingdom of God through people like Willard and Wright, is forcing me to try some new practices that are not natural to me.  This in turn leads me to the spiritual formation people for help in transforming my broken parts into something that is useful for God in his work of love and restoration for the least, the last and left out.

The more I dig into this pattern—and remember I am an end user, so I do it for myself first—the more I see the essential connection between belief –> transformation –> practices… practices that others experience as for their good.  In my experience, this process is like the old analogy about an ancient plow pulled by oxen: on the first pass over the field the plow just barley makes a line in the dirt. But as the ox is carefully steered so that the plow passes over the exact same line, there is after the second pass, a slight rut. After several additional passes there is a clear groove. Finally, after many passes the soil is fully ready for seed that will bear fruit.

The ancient ox and antique plow suggests itself to me as the way things work best. When I learn something fresh, the new thought can be original in one of two ways. One, “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” Or two, “This info/idea/concept is going deeper into my life.” Both are fine, but for veteran Christians like most of the

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readers of Next-Wave, I have a feeling the latter is more our experience. We learn something—either new or deeper—which in search of obedience sends us to our grace-enabled work of spiritual transformation which leads to a life, a way of practicing our faith that is good for others.

I’ve developed a mental outline that I use to keep me on track—in the sense of the ox and plow.  It is the way I conceive of “What it means to be a Christian:”

• I am seeking to be the cooperative friend of Jesus—following Jesus as his apprentice, that I can be an ambassador of the Kingdom
• To live a consistent life of creative goodness—I practice the presence so that I can be alert to the people and events of my life. If I am not present and alert, I cannot be an agent of good.
• Through the power of the Holy Spirit—it is the Spirit that enables all the above. He gives the character to care about others, the gifts, the power and the authority to actually serve others in practical ways.
• For the sake of others: none of this is to be done for the sake of mere personal piety. God created humans, and later Israel and the church to join with him in creative care for his creation.

Those four simple thoughts are my mental framework for daily life. They are the practices associated with thirty years of believing Bible stuff. To live those bullet points out in the rhythms and routines of my actual life, I feel the constant need to apprentice myself to Jesus through the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. To get to a Christianity that is beyond belief, I find myself using this process over and over and over again as a rule for Christian spirituality:

Belief –> Transformation –> Practices –> Deeper Belief That Only Practices Can Bring –> Deeper Needs For Transformation –> More Effective, More Life-Giving Practices.

Can you picture such a rhythm for your life? If you can visualize it, give it try.

And let me know how it goes!

I could put a whole story together around this dirty, smashed mess of diapers.  With two kids in diapers right now, I understand how important they are.  When you go to the store to buy diapers it is because you need diapers.  And they’re not cheap.  When my wife goes to the store, she has four little kids with her.  Each one demands 100% percent of her physical and emotional attention.  Do that math – that keeps moms spread awfully thin.

She’s always carrying at least one – often two and trying to keep tabs on the bigger ones as they navigate the busy parking lot.  Then think about inside the store… everyone grabbing at things and asking for things.  The two year old screaming because he wanted the cart with the plastic truck attached.  The baby chewing on the part where everyone in the universe has placed their sweaty, filthy hands.  Moms are good at managing this stuff through repeated practice.  It takes a lot to really wear down and wear out a mom, but the grocery store provides all the right stressors to do it.

Can’t you imagine that her mind is on a million things at once as she opens the lift gate and fills up the back?  The diaper box goes on the roof while she wrangles the kids and in the chaos, never makes it into the van.

The diapers ride on the roof of the van for a little while.  As she accelerates to get onto the road and get home, the diapers tumble off the roof and hit the pavement behind her.  If she noticed right now, she might be able to pull over, jump out and rescue them but there is too much going on in the van and there is way too much on her mind.  She drives on.

At home the mission of unloading begins.  Think about the mix of painful emotions as she searches the van for the diapers.  Where are the diapers? The most important thing she went to the store for is not here.  I can vividly empathize with the horror and the helplessness of that moment of realization.  All of this flashed upon my heart in the seconds it took me to pass the evidence of this drama, spilled across the road.  I could feel the agony in my own body – my guts churned as compassion for this anonymous person swelled within me.

I prayed as I drove, asking God to put a stop to this kind of senseless loss.  “Intervene,” I pleaded.  As I prayed, helplessness was beginning to wash over me as well.  It’s too late.  I can’t pick up these diapers – I’d never be able to find the person that lost them.  There is nothing for anyone to do to help.

Are you in touch with the pain of others?  Do you notice the evidence of their loss?  Maybe it’s not diapers that would get your attention, but is there something?  I’m trying to become more sensitive to the compassionate heart of Jesus.  I want to see what he sees and I want to feel what he feels when he looks over the people who live where I live.

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This story of the diapers is one of the rare ones in my life because it has a resolution.  It was an amazing revelation of how connected we are and how the Spirit partners with us when we allow ourselves to be moved with compassion and bear the burdens of others.

Seeing these diapers scattered all over the road behind the grocery store launched an entire story in my mind.  I have no way of knowing whether it was a “true story” or not, but that was not the point.  Something was happening on the inside of me and the destroyed diaper box was only the sign pointing the way to the journey that I’m on. Discovering how compassion links us to the work of the Spirit around us and through us.

Compassion for the person who lost their diapers was mixing with the grief of being so incapable to do something about it.  But why do I feel this way?  Why is that I don’t consider praying about things like this as the “something” I’m supposed to do?

Have you ever noticed how most of our prayers (or maybe it’s just most of mine) are totally self-centered?  I can remember several years ago feeling like a girl that I worked with at the time was struggling in some way and being gripped by this same compassion.  I prayed all day but never once for her.  I prayed for myself, asking God to equip me; give me the right words to say; open the right opportunity for me to talk to her; open her heart to receive what I had to say… blah, blah, blah – me, me, me.

This was the trap I was falling in again.  Compassion was churning within me and my reaction was to feel helpless because there was nothing for me to do about it.  This story of the diapers got really interesting almost two months later.  We were at my parents’ house and I overheard my mom talking to my wife about something that had just happened to her that day.  We were living with my parents at the time and the story my mom was telling was one of those no-big-deal-just-sharing-my-day kind of stories.

My mom was telling Sheryl about coming out of a store and seeing a lady in the parking lot pushing her cart back into those outdoor cart stalls.  My mom noticed a big box of diapers still in the bottom of the cart and rushed across the lot to the lady.  She stopped her and asked, “Are those your diapers in the cart?”  Of course they were and this woman was very grateful to the stranger who stopped her from driving off without them.  As I overheard this little story, a quick thought went off in my heart:

“See?  That’s how it works.”

At the end of Matthew 9, Jesus tries to get his disciples seeing things through the same compassionate lens as he was.  He tells the disciples to look upon the people as weary and scattered, like sheep that don’t have anyone to watch over them.  Just after calling upon their compassion, he directs them to, “pray to the Lord of the harvest, asking him to send out laborers into the field.”  If you speak Christianese, “harvest” means sinners who need to be saved – “the world” – “the lost.”  But let’s stop limiting Jesus’ words by that meaning.  Jesus was just talking about people, specifically the people around him at the time.

I was moved with compassion by the diapers in the road because he was moved with compassion.  The response that Jesus wants from that exchange of compassion is to pray that laborers – other people – be sent to care for that need and watch over those involved.  Hopefully, I’m communicating the significance of this realization because it has truly changed my ideals about making disciples and starting a church in Northwest Indiana.  I’m not interested in starting a bunch of “ministries” in an attempt to make shotgun blasts at the needs in this area.  I want to equip people to get engaged in the mission Jesus has them on.  But how?  What does that mean?

It is certainly a growing and evolving thing, but the disciple making process really begins by helping people spot the diapers that are scattered across the roads they travel.  There are ways in which we can increase our sensitivity to the signs all around us.  We can become better listeners to the voice of Jesus, urging us to see through his compassionate lens.  Then, we just ask him to put laborers in place to watch over those needs and care for those people.  In many cases, we’ll never even get to know how he answers those prayers, but my mom stopping a lady from driving home without her diapers give me the faith that he does answer them.

This is certainly not the end of anything.  I think it’s just the beginning of the beginning, but it is something I’m very excited to be part of.  Can you imagine how much things can change when we stop trying to manage and maintain the work of the Spirit?  Just let him go, Scott!  He’s good at this stuff and he’s been doing it a lot longer than you have.

I love reading blogs and enjoy interacting on this blog and reading people’s comments. I just read that my blog made the list of Top 60 Church Blogs which was interesting, as I rarely check the stats of this blog. So reading how they determined the top 60 blogs by traffic, links etc. was quite interesting and I am glad it is read or linked to by people if it encourages them. The list of the 60 blogs had some wonderful blogs that I didn’t know existed and ended up scanning and reading several of them. I ended up spending 30 minutes of time doing so. Which brings me to the question I’ve been asking recently…

Could blogging, twittering, Facebook etc. be addictive – and if so, can it actually get in the way of mission? The answer may be obvious, but when we spend time doing something, it takes away from time we could be spending doing something else. So do the hours we can spend on blogs, twitter, Facebook and even reading about missional things on blogs take away too much from the time that we could actually be on mission and spending with people in real life?

I am not planning on stopping my reading of blogs, as they help me in mission. I love being encouraged and learn so much from other blogs. I love connecting with people on Facebook as well. But can it become such a part of our lives and even addictive to where the time spent reading about mission grows proportionally out of balance with the time we actually spend on mission? 30 minutes here. And hour there. it adds up. Am I spending proportional time on mission with people and not just reading about it? I think I have been guilty of this at times.

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My top StrengthsFinder strength is “Learner” – which means I get energized by taking in information. In StrengthsFinder the top five all build on each other.  So what I like as a “Learner” is not just random information as it needs to serve a purpose and tie into my other strengths. But what this means as a “Learner” is that I easily can get absorbed into reading blogs, twitter etc. primarily about mission, leadership and what other church leaders are learning and doing. I have found that I can easily sit and spend 30 minutes browsing and reading blogs.

Last week I was about to head home after a meeting, and I was looking forward to reading the comments of the thread going on Scot McKnight’s blog. However, I got a text message from a friend who told me that another friend’s band was playing in town that night. I initially was thinking I wouldn’t go, as I was looking forward to being home and catching up on blogs and this comment thread. But then I thought, “What the heck? I need to be out on mission, not just reading about mission or blogging about it.” So I went to the show and spent a couple of hours in great conversations.

Then I started thinking… over the course of a week when I spend hour… or two…. or four being on-line reading blogs or Facebook. I could have used part of that time – even an hour of it, to be having lunch or hang out with someone outside the church world.

As I am processing this I wonder:

- Do others struggle or think about this?

- How much time/hours per week would you estimate you spend on blogs, Facebook?

- How much time/hours per week spent with people outside church in comparison?