Join a Christian Community
The first practice is to simply join—and stick with—a local Christian community. Even this can be hard. I have great sympathy for the bumper sticker that reads, "Jesus, save me from your followers!" There may be a part of all of us that wishes to cut to the chase and go straight to Jesus, without the mess of all of the rest of us who wish to be with him too. But that is not the way Jesus set things up. We see this as early as the first New Testament Christians, whom Paul persecuted. When the resurrected Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus, he asked Paul, "Why do you persecute me?" (Acts 9:4) As risky and strange as it may seem, Jesus chooses to associate himself so deeply with his community of followers that we are, mysteriously, his body. If you want to know Jesus, you are stuck with us.
Stability is the key. At the beginning of his Rule, Benedict divides monks into several different types. He reserves his greatest contempt for the type he calls gyrovagues, those who wander from one sacred community to another, never firmly planting themselves (THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 1:10-11). The name is evocative, conjuring a picture of someone who spins like a top or gyroscope and then never comes into sharp focus. Community life makes us clear and sharp. It slows us down, stops us spinning, and forces us to come into focus for others, with all the good and the bad we bring. We can fool some of the people some of the time, but if we stick around long enough, our whole selves will eventually come into view. If we are gyrovagues, we have the luxury of blaming each community we visit for its imperfections, never ourselves. The true image of a gyrovague is never revealed because their restoration work always gets stalled.
There is no perfect Christian community. Every church will eventually disappoint us. All communities have the same fatal flaw, which is that they are filled with people. Eventually any honeymoon experience ends, and then the real work begins. If we want to be part of a community, we first make a decision to show up consistently. The way we express this consistency in Discipleship Groups is the vow that says, "By God's grace, I will praise God, offering myself and receiving God's love and blessings with the rest of my Christian community in weekly 'worship... in the beauty of holiness'" (Psalm 96:9). Further, we have to trust that God has planted us in a particular church community for a reason and then stick with it until we discern very clear signs that it is time to leave. A helpful guideline is to think in terms of seven-year commitments. I was taught by my mentors—and my experience has confirmed—that seven years is often long enough to live through our mistakes and experience the fruit of our good works.
Within the Christian community, some of the most valuable people are those who have been through many of these seven-year cycles and so have inside them the lore and the experience of generations. If they have stayed spiritually alive, they become what in monastic circles are called Living Rules. The foundation of a healthy community resides in these Living Rules, these saints of sacred obedience.
I often think of Ann Hanson, who was one of the Living Rules of my own church. Ann was quiet, devout, and hardworking. Any healthy church has at least a handful of Anns who make the place run and give it its particular texture. At a certain point, Ann began to forget things. Tests eventually showed that the forgetfulness indicated a deeper illness. She was a widow without children, and so it fell to our community to care for her throughout the course of what turned out to be her last illness. In her final months, she received an outpouring of affection as we brought her meals, fixed her house, helped get her financial affairs in order, and arranged for appropriate hospice care.
One Sunday morning, as I was preparing to enter worship, I received the call that Ann had died. After services, about twenty of us went to her house and surrounded the bed where her body lay in her bedroom. In the early afternoon light, we said prayers for a vigil and then fell into silence. After a time, our head usher broke the silence by observing that there were now at least twenty of us who were going to try to fill Ann's shoes. We all laughed in recognition of a beautiful truth. Her spirit was so large that it had profoundly shaped our entire community. Each of us now had the task of continuing her faithful labor and, like her, we could do it with love and joy. Through sacred obedience, practiced through the course of a life, we too can become vessels through whom the goodness of God is passed from one generation to the next.
Befriend the Poor
The second practice is to become friends with the poor and the marginalized in the local community. The Rule of Saint Benedict states that "great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them particularly Christ is received" (THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 53:15). Hospitality for those on the margins ought to be a part of any Christian community. The churches are called to move outside the church walls to seek and serve those whom Jesus especially loves.
In the Discipleship Group vow, we promise to "endeavor to serve others everywhere I can, working toward giving an hour a week in service of the poor, remembering that Jesus said, "just as you did it to one of the least of these... you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40). Jesus is very clear that he means specific actions of clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and visiting the sick and those in prison (Matthew 25:31-46). It does not include writing checks and serving on boards, as important as those actions may also be. To learn about sacred obedience, we must be face to face with the poor and, by grace, to be friends.
Finding a place to serve and befriend the poor may be as simple as volunteering at a local soup kitchen, but taking time to find a better fit can pay off. Some years ago, I spent several months with a parishioner, Beverly, going around to the various service agencies in our county for informational interviews. We wanted to find out what the needs were and discover where a community of our size might make a difference.
Eventually, we discovered a small school for probationary youth. This school is the last step before juvenile detention. At first, we organized a few after-school activities. Once the principal discovered we were trustworthy and serious, she asked us if we would tackle one of her greatest challenges: the health and readiness of the students. Attendance and performance at the school were low, and one of the many reasons for this was that the students showed up hungry. So six years ago, my church started serving hot breakfast several times a week to the youth. We call it the Teen Success Breakfast. Their attendance and performance have increased. By asking questions, listening, and showing up faithfully, we were able to make a difference. Sacred obedience bore fruit in the world.
For the volunteers at our Teen Success Breakfast, listening to the students can be painful. Their language is violent and filled with creative curses and stories of drug abuse. It is as though the volunteers are listening to the teens as they destroy themselves. Yet the students are just as often polite, respectful, and grateful so that the work of serving up made-to-order pancakes can inspire and lead to good-humored connection. The volunteers, the teachers, and the students have told me that the simple act of sharing hot breakfast has taught them about love.
If we dare to go beyond our comfort zone and do as Christ teaches, we are likely to experience reverse mission, particularly as our relationship grows toward genuine friendship.17 We may initially believe we are bringing the compassion of Christ to the poor, that we are the ones going out in mission. But we often discover that the poor will teach us the way of Christ and so become missionaries to us if we only learn to listen.
One of the heaviest burdens many of us bear is that of casting judgment. The tradition of Saint Benedict, going back to the Desert Fathers, offers stern warnings against the temptation of judging the acts of others. Here's one example among many:
Abbot John used to say: We have thrown down a light burden, which is the reprehending of our own selves, and we have chosen the heavy burden, by justifying our own selves and condemning others.18
There are probably many people in our lives we secretly condemn. The poor are often at the top of this list of contempt. The best and perhaps
only way to remove this toxin from our lives is to be with the poor often enough that we finally see clearly our shared human dignity. Face to face relations give restoration.
Starting in my twenties, I felt drawn to be with and serve homeless teens. Growing up I had read many stories about the intertwined depravity and glamour of heroin, particularly with rock stars and jazz musicians. Being with homeless teens, many of whom were addicts, helped me release these preconceptions. Kurt was a young man about my age with dilated eyes and a chipped front tooth. From my conversations with him at a drop-in center in Seattle, I felt the gentle, doomed sadness of the addiction. He was not some other creature but a deeply sympathetic human being.
Later, when I moved to California, I met Stephen who told me that taking heroin was like getting a whole body hug. What kind of life must you have had to need to search for hugs in an addiction that slowly kills both mind and body? I have not been purged of either the judgment against addiction or the sense of its glamour. Both are far too insidious and deeply woven in me for that. But now, judgment and glamour are most often outweighed by a sense of sweetness for our common need for hugs and sadness at our failure to hug. Deep listening to these poor, homeless, addicted teens has slowly given me at least a small taste of Jesus' compassion and forgiveness.
Commit to a Discipleship Group
In most dating relationships there comes a time when a profound question must be answered. "Is this the person with whom I want to spend the rest of my life?" The next steps in the relationship will be deeply affected by our hopes, or lack of them, for a long-term future. Discipleship Groups encapsulate so much of the spiritual dynamic of The Restoration Project that something similar is at stake. If this feels like the path God would have you follow in order to have a deeper loving relationship with God, neighbor, and self, then committing yourself to a Discipleship Group is, in all likelihood, the best next step for you.
Discipleship Groups are part of a strong Christian tradition of small groups. Jesus began the church by drawing to himself a small group of apostles whom he challenged and loved into becoming leaders. In America, among the first churches to rediscover the power of small groups was the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. This ecumenical church founded by Gordon and Mary Cosby inspired much of The Restoration Project. One of Cosby's early discoveries was that unless you deliberately structured your small group to be about mission and spiritual growth, it would always end up as a self-support group. Of course, for any Christian group to be authentic, it must have the capacity to offer care and support. However, unless structures intentionally create means to encourage growth and outreach, the important elements will not happen.
Discipleship Groups are generally composed of five to nine people who meet either every week or every other week for at least an hour. What distinguishes Discipleship Groups from other Christian small groups is the liturgy that begins and ends every meeting. Each gathering begins with a time of silence and a statement of intention read by the leader. Then there are six vows that are read aloud, each in turn by a different member of the group. A seventh, final, vow is read by all. These vows make an explicit commitment to work toward lives with regular prayer, worship, service, generosity, learning, discerning of call, and commitment to the Discipleship Group. The entire liturgy can be found in the back of this book.
These seven vows emerged gradually, as a range of Discipleship Groups came into being across the country. Together, we were striving to find a limited set of vows that would express a genuine desire to follow the teachings of Jesus. Each of the vows as we now have them are expressed gently. In each, we say we are working toward the desired rhythm or goal, whether it is twenty minutes a day of prayer, giving away ten percent of our income, or learning all of the Bible. I do not believe anyone, including me, joined a Discipleship Group already fulfilling the expectations of all seven vows. The point of the vows is to encourage us to grow into the regular practice of classic Christian disciplines.
Three elements of Discipleship Groups are particularly helpful when it comes to nurturing the virtue of sacred obedience. These are commitment, confidentiality, and sense of call.
Obedience begins with commitment. Most days, in my morning prayer, there are a limited number of people I can focus on with individual attention. I always pray for my wife and two boys, and I have developed the habit of thinking about the people I am likely to encounter that day and praying for them. For the last two years, part of my commitment is also to regularly pray for Vladimir, Jerry, John, and Jacob, the members of my Discipleship Group. It is a simple act. I say their names in my mind and then let my general impressions and thoughts emerge. I remember what they told me about their lives in our group meetings, and if they asked for prayer for anything, I do it.
It may not seem like much, but the very act of carrying around someone else in our hearts is a fundamental Christian act. It signifies that we are not concerned solely with ourselves, but understand that by our baptism we have been adopted into a much larger, more diverse family than we could ever have conceived or created by ourselves. By committing to a Discipleship Group, we are turning the abstract commitments of baptism into reality. Jerry, John, Jacob, and Vladimir are my brothers in Christ because I carry them in my heart and they carry me in theirs. We are bound to each other.
This commitment is expressed in the final vow of the Discipleship Group's opening liturgy: "By God's grace, we have joined ourselves to one another as this Discipleship Group, and we commit to meeting regularly for this season of our lives, believing that 'if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us' (I John 4:12)."
I sometimes go to our weekly meetings reluctantly. Maybe I feel tired or would simply prefer to stay home with my family eating dinner. But I never leave with regrets. After the opening liturgy, we almost always spend time checking in with each other. For that period of just under an hour, I am sharply attuned to the reality of these people's lives. Through a slow accumulation of stories and details, I have gotten some insight into their struggles and successes, into their dreams and disappointments. Obedience is the practice of listening well to my friends, without judgment or feeling that I need to solve a problem or inspire a solution. Likewise, their careful and good-humored listening to me inspires me to be honest and even daring in what I confess and tell. Commitment breeds good listening.
The second essential feature is confidentiality. At both the beginning and the end of each Discipleship Group meeting, there is a reminder that these converations are to be held in confidence. The value of a small group is completely dependent on how honest and vulnerable we are willing to be. If we show up every week anxious and protective, we are unlikely to get at the truth of who we are, what God intends for us, and how others can help us get there. In our groups, we are gradually invited, as we build trust, to lay aside all the masks and other protective habits and be our whole real selves. One of my favorite emails of all time was one sent to a listserv I ran when I served in Los Angeles as the leader of a Christian 20s/30s group. A longtime member, out of the blue, posted a note where he thanked us for letting him be his "weird self." Like so many in that group, and indeed like so many of us around the country, he spent a lot of time trying to fool people into thinking he was better, more charming, more intelligent, more everything than he actually was or felt. At least in one Christian group, this man felt he could set all that aside and just be himself, including his wonderful, charming, and engaging weirdness.
Discipleship Groups should be places of great safety and invitation. They should be places where we can admit the depth of our fears and anxieties. They should be places where we can finally speak aloud that great, wild, daring dream we have had since childhood. They should even be places where the occasional tacky, poorly conceived rage attack can come and go without permanent damage. The truth will set us free. But most of us need to know we are safe on our way to embracing the truth. Confidentiality is one of the key elements in the s
afety—and the genuine listening—of a small group.
The final key to nurturing the virtue of sacred obedience in the Discipleship Group is an ongoing focus on call. The sixth vow is "By God's grace, I will listen for God's call on my life, confident that I have been given 'a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good' (1 Corinthians 12:7), entrusting my Discipleship Group to test and support that call." Each of us has a unique piece of work in the world we are invited to complete in each era of our lives. The joy and challenge of being Christian is listening for that work and doing it. Following our call is one of the highest forms of Christian obedience. Discipleship Groups can be an essential component in discovering our unique call because, if we have been honest and vulnerable, it is a community of people who know us well. They are people who can speak the truth to us in love.
A call can take a variety of forms in relationship to a Discipleship Group. One mark of a call is that, through it, we serve others. And so at my church, I can see a direct connection between the depth and reliability of the Teen Success Breakfast and our Discipleship Groups. The backbone of our volunteer team is people in Discipleship Groups. These volunteers are not only reliable and cheerful, but they also are great storytellers. Their small groups give them the support and encouragement they need to follow their call to serve.
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