Your church may be killing itself and have no idea what it’s doing. Everything may look fine on the surface, but deep down a cancer could be silently metastasizing in its bones, whose fragility will become painfully clear when put to the test.
In 2004, Robert Louis Wilken reflected in First Things magazine on a sobering trip he had made to Europe that year. Wilken, a leading American historian of early Christianity, said that over the course of his lifetime, he had seen the “collapse of Christian civilization.” In Germany that spring, he observed that even the memory of once having been Christian was fading. It was bad enough that anti-Christian secularists were hard at work to eliminate the faith from public life, but it was still worse that Christians were aiding and abetting their own extinction.
Why? Christians in the West had badly neglected sustaining their own distinct culture. Wilken wrote:
Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture.1
In other words: If you do not change your ways, you are going to die, and so will what’s left of the Christian faith in our civilization.
The Benedict Option is vital to the life of the local church today. Why? Benedictine spirituality is good at creating a Christian culture because it is all about developing and sustaining the Christian cultus, a Latin word meaning “worship.” A culture is the way of life that emerges from the common worship of a people. What we hold most sacred determines the form and content of our culture, which emerges organically from the process of making a faith tangible.
If it is going to bring about a genuine renewal of Christian culture, the Benedict Option will have to be centered on the life of the church. Everything else follows.
In some sense, Christians’ new minority status may help us keep our focus where it ought to be. As Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore says in his book Onward, by losing its cultural respectability, the church is freer to be radically faithful.
“We will engage the culture less like the chaplains of some idyllic Mayberry and more like the apostles in the book of Acts,” writes Moore. “We will be speaking not primarily to baptized pagans on someone’s church roll, but to those who are hearing something new, maybe for the first time. We will hardly be ‘normal,’ but we should never have tried to be.”2
The best witness Christians can offer to post-Christian America is simply to be the church, as fiercely and creatively a minority as we can manage. “By this will all men know that you are my disciples,” the Lord said in the Gospel of John, and if we stand a chance today, we do only because of His love lived out through us—to our brothers and sisters in Christ and then out to the world.
But you cannot give what you do not possess. Too many of our churches function as secular entertainment centers with religious morals slapped on top, when they should be functioning as the living, breathing Body of Christ. Too many churches have succumbed to modernity, rejecting the wisdom of past ages, treating worship as a consumer activity, and allowing parishioners to function as unaccountable, atomized members. The sad truth is, when the world sees us, it often fails to see anything different from nonbelievers. Christians often talk about “reaching the culture” without realizing that, having no distinct Christian culture of their own, they have been co-opted by the secular culture they wish to evangelize. Without a substantial Christian culture, it’s no wonder that our children are forgetting what it means to be Christian, and no surprise that we are not bringing in new converts.
If today’s churches are to survive the new Dark Age, they must stop “being normal.” We will need to commit ourselves more deeply to our faith, and we will need to do that in ways that seem odd to contemporary eyes. By rediscovering the past, recovering liturgical worship and asceticism, centering our lives on the church community, and tightening church discipline, we will, by God’s grace, again become the peculiar people we should always have been. The fruits of this focus on Christian formation will result not only in stronger Christians but in a new evangelism as the salt recovers its savor.
If the monks of Norcia woke up in a new world every day and decided that their direction would be decided by their whims, the community would fall apart, or it would at least cease to be the kind of community that forms Christian monks. Instead, they follow a Rule that has been tested by fifteen hundred years of experience. Tradition not only guides them in how to obey God’s Word and be open to the Holy Spirit’s leading, but it frees them from the burden of having to make things up as they go along.
This is a hard thing for modern Christians to understand. Our imaginations have been colonized by a mentality that holds older, inherited forms of worship to be impediments to authenticity. On the contrary, we need to be instructed in how to pray and worship to train our minds to think in an authentically Christian way. As Paul exhorted the Romans, we must be transformed by the renewing of our minds, by adopting thought patterns and behaviors that are not actually natural to us. This is not bondage but liberty.
When Christians ignore the story of how our fathers and mothers in the faith prayed, lived, and worshiped, we deny the life-giving power of our own roots and cut ourselves off from the wisdom of those whose minds were renewed. As a result, at best, the work of God in our lives is slower and shallower than it might otherwise be. At worst, we lose our children.
A big part of the falling away today is that our children don’t know the history of Christianity or grasp why it matters. One Eastern Orthodox friend, raised an Evangelical, said she had no idea what the early church taught, or even who the fathers of the church were, until she became Orthodox—a tradition that emphasizes their writings and teachings. For this friend, the Christian faith amounted to the Bible as interpreted by the most popular Evangelical pastors of the day.
It’s not that Evangelicalism rejects the foundational theological writings of early Christianity, she explained, but that it never mentions them. Nor did the church of her youth dig deeply into the Reformation tradition from which it sprang. In her church and religious school, she was fed nothing but the thin gruel of contemporary Christianity, with its shallow theology and upbeat sloganeering. As writer Walker Percy cracked about vapid contemporary Christian novelists, they’ve sold their birthright for “a pot of message.”
This is not an exclusively Evangelical problem. Many Mainline Protestants and Catholics over the past two or three generations have been raised in near-total ignorance of the roots of their own tradition. No small number of cradle Eastern Orthodox grew up learning more about their ancestors’ ethnic folkways than about the faith of their fathers. To cut a people off from their tradition is to break the chain of historical memory and deprive them of a culture. No wonder Christian culture withers in modernity.
But there are ways for determined Christians to get around this.
Once, during my Catholic days, I was complaining with a Catholic friend about how terrible the teaching was in parish life. A priest listening to us said that everything we griped about was true, but we didn’t have to resign ourselves and our children to this fate.
“You could go online to Amazon.com tonight and have sent to you within a week a theological library that Aquinas would have envied,” he said. “My parents raised me in the seventies, which was the beginning of the catechesis nightmare. They knew that if they were going to raise Catholic kids, they would have to do a lot of it themselves, and they did. So do you.”
If you don’t start something in your local church, who will? Religious liberty activist Lance Kinzer, whom you met in the previous chapter, started a prayer group at his church, in which they use prayers written by Calvin himself. Kinzer is also leading a Sunday school study of Augustine’s writings. It is understandable that Protestants would be wary of pre-Reformation theological works of the second millennium, but the writings of the early church fathers are a gold mine of spiritual and theological wisdom.
Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Athanasius, Augustine, John Chrysostom, the Cappadocians, Jerome, Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, Irenaeus, and so many more: these voices from the first eight centuries of the Christian church still speak to us today. Christians seeking to deepen their connections to historical Christianity should read these men of God. Their writings are straightforward and accessible to the hearts of even contemporary readers. They reveal to us the Christian tradition that gave us our distinctiveness, much of which we have lost in modern times.
The church’s loss of its distinct culture is also a loss for the world, which God intends to bless through the church’s life. Southern Baptist literary critic Ralph Wood contends that the church’s task today is “not to create a counter-culture, so much as a new culture based on one so ancient and nearly forgotten that it looks freshly minted.”3
We Christians today can create that new culture based on returning in creative ways to that very old one. We are called to be a new—and quite different—Saint Polycarp, Saint Irenaeus, Saint Augustine, and so forth. The best way to do that is to immerse ourselves in the words and the world of the old saints.
Just as many contemporary Christians are allergic to the past, many are also wary of liturgy, but they shouldn’t be. Liturgy—from the Greek word leitourgia, meaning “work of the people”—in Christian use means the form of common worship. There is a connection between neglecting to take liturgy seriously, or giving up liturgy altogether, and abandoning Christian orthodoxy. If we are to maintain these truths over time, we must maintain our liturgy.
The media critic Marshall McLuhan could be said to have been writing about liturgies when he said, “The medium is the message.” What he meant was that the concrete form in which information is delivered is itself a message, because it shapes our ability to receive the message.
Here’s an example. When my parents were growing up in Louisiana in the 1940s and ’50s, Europe was so distant in their imagination as to be virtually unreal. When I was growing up in the same place in the 1970s and ’80s, Europe seemed so much closer thanks to television, which beamed sounds and pictures from the continent into our home almost daily. In high school, I had a couple of Dutch pen pals. Once I screwed up the courage to call one of them on our touch-tone phone. It was such a momentous event in my mind that even thirty years later, I can still remember her family’s phone number, which I had memorized like a line of poetry. The sound of her voice coming to me over the phone that first time made me feel that technology enabled me to break through to another dimension. And in a way, it had.
For my children, who are being raised in the same geographical location as both my parents and me, Europe is as real as Texas. Not only do they see Europe on the TV news and on the wide variety of programming that comes to our television over the Internet, but our family likes to speak live over the Internet, with Skype or FaceTime, with our friends in the Netherlands. McLuhan coined the term global village in 1964 to refer to the technology-enabled worldwide sharing of culture. Fifty years later the Internet has made that a reality.
What changed is not the “message” from Europe, in terms of the informational content. The revolutionary change in consciousness came through the electronic media—first television, then the Internet. The truly transformative message is that electronic media make the whole wide world immediately accessible.
Liturgy is like a medium of communication in the McLuhanesque sense. The effect of liturgy is both in the information it conveys and in the way it conveys it. Imagine that you are at a Catholic mass in a dreary 1970s-era suburban church that looks like a converted Pizza Hut. The next Sunday you are at a high Catholic mass in New York City, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Scripture reading is the same in both places, and Jesus is just as present in the Eucharist at Our Lady of Pizza Hut as at St. Patrick’s. Chances are, though, that you had to work harder to conjure a sense of the true holiness of the mass in the suburban church than in the cathedral—though theologically speaking, the “information” conveyed in Word and Sacrament in both places was the same. This is the difference liturgy can make.
James K. A. Smith, an Evangelical Christian philosopher, points out that all of life is liturgical, in the sense that all our actions frame our experiences and train our desires to particular ends. Every day we are living out what he calls “cultural liturgies” of one kind or another.
The secular liturgy of the shopping mall is designed to call forth and cultivate certain desires within those who enter the mall. It promises to deliver personal fulfillment through purchasing. In Smith’s telling, advertising images of beautiful people convey the subliminal message that you could be just as happy and attractive as they are if you would purchase the product. If the mall liturgy does what it is supposed to do, the desire that the images and rituals of shopping evoke will lead the shopper to exchange money for products, then leave the mall fulfilled—until longing for the same experience brings her back.4
The lesson here is that various elements present in the ritual of shopping at a mall activate particular desires and direct them toward certain objects, the purchase of which promises to deliver satisfaction.
Christian liturgies, on the other hand, should lead us to desire communion with God. The basis for our liturgies is the one who unites the medium and the message of the Gospel: Jesus Christ. As scholar Robert Inchausti pithily puts it, McLuhan’s famous slogan is “just another way of saying ‘the Word become flesh.’”5 Our liturgies of worship, diverse as they may be, are oriented toward praising and partaking of Him.
There have been a number of liturgies throughout the history of the Christian church, but most followed a basic pattern derived from Scripture. At its most basic, Sunday liturgy begins with the formal gathering of the worshiping community, the reading of Scripture, the celebration of Communion, and the dispersal of the community to live for Christ. Sunday liturgy, then, is a gathering of the faithful to commune with God in Word and Sacrament, and their sending out into the world.
Many Christians today (including some in liturgical churches) believe that Sunday worship is merely expressive—that is, it’s only about what we the people have to say to God. However, in the Christian tradition, liturgy is primarily, though not exclusively, about what God has to say to us. Liturgy reveals something of the divine, transcendent order, and when we submit to it, it draws us into closer harmony with that order.
All worship is in some sense liturgical, but liturgies that are sacramental both reflect Christ’s presence in the divine order and embody it in a concrete form accessible to worshipers. Liturgy is not magic, of course, but if it is intended and received sacramentally, it awakens the sense that worshipers are communing with the eternal, transcendent realm through the ritual and its elements. The liturgy feeds the sacramental imagination, reweaving the connection between body and spirit.
As we have seen, the Benedictines order their lives around belief that matter matters, and that what we do with our bodies and the material world has concrete spiritual consequences.
The contemporary Reformed theologian Hans Boersma identifies the loss of sacramentality as the key reason why the modern church is falling apart. If there is no real participation in the eternal—that is, if we do not regard matter, and even time itself, as rooted firmly in God’s being—then the life of the church can scarcely withstand the torrents of liquid modernity.
“It seems to me that contemporary Western culture looks at the things we see around us—every created object—as isolated,” Boersma told me. “We typically in our culture also look at every event, whatever it may be, as an isolated event, independent of any other event. Everything in our culture is in flux. Everything is unrelated to everything else. We have no anchor, no stability.”
Liturgy restores the stability we’ve lost by cementing the story of the gospel in our bodies. As MacIntyre has said, if we want to know what to do, we must first determine the story to which we belong. Christian worship, done properly, provides us with regular reminders that we belong to Christ and to the story He is unfolding. It also teaches us, though, that we are not free to improvise the story but are bound to write our own chapters according to what has been revealed to us in the Book, and in continuity with what our fathers and mothers of the faith have written before us.
Even secular sociologists recognize the power of these physical acts to maintain cultural memory. In his book How Societies Remember, social anthropologist Paul Connerton studies practices that various peoples have undertaken to hold fast to their stories in the face of forgetfulness. He says that when a community wants to remember its sacred story, the one that gives it meaning, it must make the story a matter of “habit-memory.” That is, it must absorb the story as something “sedimented into the body.”6
The most powerful rituals involve the body, says Connerton. They make use of all the senses to impress the sacred story upon the individuals gathered. For example, when worshippers kneel or prostrate themselves at a certain point in a ritual, they learn in their very muscles the awe-filled meaning of that sacred moment—and it helps them remember.
Connerton’s study found that the most effective rituals do not vary and stand distinctly apart from daily life in their songs and language. And if a ritual is to be effective in training the hearts and shaping the imaginations of its participants, it has to be something that they are habituated to in their bodies.
Christianity is much more than an effective liturgy, of course. A rich liturgy that is not accompanied by sound teaching and strong practices would be little more than an aesthetic experience for a congregant. But if corporeality is how God created us to function, and if our tradition provides us with biblically based liturgies that cement the cultural memory of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection in our bones, why would we not implement them?
Along with helping us remember Christ, liturgy also reminds us that Christianity isn’t just a philosophy but a way of life that demands everything. When my small congregation of Orthodox Christians started a mission church in our tiny Louisiana town, the Russian Orthodox Church offered to send us a priest. When Father Matthew Harrington came to town, he told us that it was the practice of the Russian church to insist that its members come to vespers (evening prayer) on Saturday night if they want to receive communion on Sunday morning.
This was new to us. All of us (including Father Matthew) were converts, but most of us had not come into Orthodoxy through the Russian tradition. Did we really have to do this? Yes, said Father Matthew. It’s not negotiable.
So we all submitted to the discipline. It was hard, and I resented it. The vespers service was inconvenient. We ended up arriving late at Saturday night barbecues and dinner parties. That was forty-five minutes out of my weekend that I did not want to give up.
After six months of this, I realized that vespers had become . . . normal. And not only normal, I actually looked forward to the service. The simple practice of starting Saturday evening with communal prayer in church taught me (and my children) that God comes first in our lives. More to the point, it helped reinforce the truth that Orthodox Christianity is a way of life, and embracing it means we do things that set us apart from the crowd.
The need for liturgy is becoming clear to more and more Protestant theologians. Perhaps surprisingly for a Pentecostal, Simon Chan, a noted theologian, scholar, and writer based in Singapore, is one of a growing number of Evangelical church leaders who argue that their churches must return to the richness of liturgical worship. Evangelical ecclesiology is inadequate to the task of meeting postmodernity’s challenges, he has written.
This is in part because Evangelicalism has historically been focused not on institution building but on revivalism, making it inherently unstable. It has also taken an individualistic approach to faith that leaves it vulnerable to pop culture trends. Plus, Evangelicalism developed partly in reaction to liberalism within Mainline Protestant denominations, whose more formal worship style led Evangelical dissenters to associate (wrongly, in Chan’s view) liturgy with spiritual deadness.
Chan believes that a worship approach that focuses on seeking spiritual highs—church as pep rally—is unsustainable. If you want to build faith capable of maintaining stability and continuity, you need to regularly attend a church that celebrates a fixed liturgy. That’s how individuals come to be “shaped by the Christian story.”
“Liturgical rhythm is a kind of music by which the truth of the gospel is inculcated over time,” writes Chan in his book Liturgical Theology.7 He adds that the liturgy is a “journey toward an intended end” and constitutes “the living out of our baptismal faith in the body.”8
(Chan’s words bring to mind a coffee shop conversation I had with a Millennial Evangelical in Colorado Springs, in which she explained to me why she left her church to attend a more liturgically focused one. “I just got tired of sitting there,” she said. “I wanted to worship with my body.”)
Scott Aniol, who teaches worship at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, argues that not all liturgies are equally effective. All divine liturgies convey God’s truth in a particular way, but some forms of worship convey those truths and realities better than others. Aniol says this is because liturgy trains us to imagine God in particular ways—ways that make believers better disciples.
Liturgies do more than pass on information about God. They form our imaginations and our hearts. Nothing is more effective at doing so in a way faithful to Scripture than ancient forms of Christian worship, says Aniol. What many Protestants reject as “vain repetition” in liturgical forms of worship is actually the quality of liturgy that makes it so effective at discipleship.
“The issue is not whether people will be formed by liturgy, but which liturgies will form them,” says Aniol. This is where conservative Christians today have much to learn from our ancestors in the faith. In Aniol’s view, we must not reject Christian liturgical tradition for the sake of being “relevant” or anything else—not if we understand worship as primarily formative, not expressive. He teaches both his Baptist seminarians and the congregation at his local church to go deep within the Christian tradition to recover old liturgical forms.
Ryan Martin pastors a rural fundamentalist church in Minnesota, one that does not have a high smells-and-bells liturgy but nevertheless observes a more traditional worship form. They believe this is a biblical mandate.
“We detest entertainment as worship. We believe that God is to be worshipped in a way that communicates his transcendence, as well as the warmth of the Gospel,” Martin says. “Contemporary worship manipulates. God is not a fad or a hipster deity. To attach him to our own little slice of popular culture fails to do justice to him as the transcendent God over all history and cultures.”
Ben Haguewood used to go to mainstream Evangelical churches, where he appreciated the seriousness with which the congregation took Scripture, but he grew to dislike the lack of reverence. “In the name of relevance and welcoming people that associated church with judgment and negativity, they offered worship that looked more like a watered-down version of pop culture to me,” he says.
Haguewood now worships at Redeemer Presbyterian, a conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) congregation in Austin, Texas, that observes a more formal liturgy. He says the worship form is beautiful, the teaching is clear, and there is “never any equivocation” on the church’s first mission: to worship God in Word and Sacrament. “It could not be more ‘irrelevant’ to modern culture,” Haguewood says—and that’s why he loves it.
It is beyond the scope of this book to tell other Christians how they should celebrate their liturgies while still being faithful to their theological tradition. That said, it would do low-church believers well to rethink their dismissal of traditional liturgies as nothing but “smells and bells.” The aroma of incense, the sound of church bells, the glow from candles, and the vivid hues of icons—all these make a powerful, prerational impression on the mind and prepare us for communion with the Lord in Word and Sacrament.
When you enter into an Eastern Orthodox church, for example, you know at once that you are in a sacred space. The burning candles symbolize the Light of Christ. The icons remind us of the communion of saints and the theological truth that we are surrounded by “so great a cloud of witnesses,” as Paul wrote to the Hebrews (12:1). And the incense stands for the presence of the Holy Spirit. All these simple, sensual things work together to integrate our bodies into Christian worship, to put us into a contemplative frame of mind, and to prepare the ground to receive the seed of Scripture and Holy Communion. They are not decorative accoutrements accompanying worship (icons are not mere paintings, for example) but a crucial part of the worship itself.
We are supposed to feel that gathering in a church as a community to offer worship to our God is something set apart from ordinary life. This is what gives rich liturgies their power. Nonliturgical churches are experimenting with adding historic liturgical prayers and other elements from the Christian tradition, including candles and incense, to their services. This is encouraging.
Now, low-church Evangelicals are absolutely right to say that liturgy itself won’t save you. Only conversion of the heart will. Liturgy is necessary for worship to do what it must do to fulfill its potential, but liturgy alone is not sufficient, for the same reason a Bach concerto performance means nothing to a deaf man. If a believer’s body is worshipping but his heart and the mind are elsewhere, what good does that do? The goal is to integrate all parts of the Christian person. It takes faith and reason to form and to disciple a Christian.
That said, there can be no doubt that the form worship takes is a powerful weapon, both against modernity (in building a bulwark against its disintegrating forces) and for modernity (by leaving churches without adequate defenses).
Few modern lay Christians outside Eastern Orthodox circles (and too few within them) undertake regular fasting and other tangible forms of asceticism. As we learned in an earlier chapter, asceticism comes from the Greek word askesis, which means “training.” It refers to giving up material pleasures, permanently or periodically, for spiritual strengthening.
Asceticism is a vital part of a Christian life that, in the words of theologians Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, is about “disciplining our wants and needs in congruence with a true story, which gives us the resources to lead truthful lives.”9
Benedictine monks take seriously the New Testament’s teaching that attachment to wealth and earthly things impedes the journey to holiness. Brother Ignatius explains that monks place high value on ascetical discipline. He describes it as spiritual housecleaning—one that can have an evangelical effect, if done with humility.
“You’re so busy cleaning up your own house that you have no time to look at your neighbor’s house,” says the monk. “Perhaps when my neighbor sees that I’m serious in cleaning my house, they might follow me and start to clean their own houses. If I invite them over, they might say, ‘Nice house. How do you take care of it?’”
In a society that values comfort and well-being over anything else, there may be no more essential Christian formative practice than regular fasting. Observant Eastern Orthodox Christians typically eat modestly, avoiding meat, dairy, oil, and wine on Wednesdays (in remembrance of Christ’s betrayal) and on Fridays (in remembrance of His Crucifixion). We similarly fast during prescribed seasons preceding important holy days, like the forty days before Pascha (Easter) known as Great Lent.
Fasting like this is not easy, especially at first. Eastern Orthodox priests ordinarily prescribe light fasts to spiritual beginners. The point is not to abstain from certain foods for legalistic reasons but to break the power our bodily desires have over us. “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” the Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians (2:20). Fasting is a spiritual exercise whose purpose is to subject the body to the liberating yoke of Jesus. As Wendell Berry puts it, denying bodily desire for the sake of spiritual growth is “a refusal to allow the body to serve what is unworthy of it.”10
This is true not only of the individual body but also of the church, the Body of Christ. During Great Lent in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the entire congregation engages in long, demanding penitential prayer services, often involving full bodily prostrations in church. Though no parishioner checks to see who else is fasting as observantly, if at all, there is a strong sense that we are all on this trying journey of repentance together. In this way, the ardors of fasting can build community.
Everyday asceticism may include keeping a regular prayer rule, committing to daily Scripture reading, gathering nightly with the family for dinner, and setting a time each night to turn off the television or the computer—and sticking to it. Over time, these exercises will become effortless. The goal is not only to acquire spiritual discipline but also to have it become second nature, so that one no longer thinks about acquiring it.
A runner could not hope to complete a marathon without preparing for it through hours of training. In the same way, if we don’t train ourselves to give up small things now, we will not be prepared to give up big things when put to the test. Near the end of his life, Saint Paul wrote to Timothy (4:7), “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.” If we hope to say the same thing, we have to practice every day of our lives.
What is true for individual Christian bodies is also true for the Body of Christ, the church. We are not just a group of individuals who come together once a week to share the same worship space. Scripture makes it plain that we are part of one organic system, each with our own role to play. As we discipline our physical bodies to submit them to spiritual truths, so must we discipline our collective church body—and not only by fasting together and engaging in penitential prayers as an assembly.
As Benedict Option Christians build healthier church communities, they’ll also have to tighten church discipline. Gays, lesbians, and their allies are not wrong to question why conservative Christians are quick to condemn their sin but overlook rampant divorce and sexual sin among straights in our own congregations. The early church maintained fairly strict discipline among its congregations. They believed that the Way led somewhere and that those who refused to walk the Way needed to be brought back to it or, if they persisted in sin, be sent away from their own congregations.
The rationale was neither meanness nor self-righteousness but accountability. Besides, the church, as a community of practice and formation, could not do what it was supposed to do if it could not maintain good order. Benedictine monks who refuse to live by the Rule are compelled to leave, for the sake of the community’s integrity.
Denny Burk, a seminary professor and Southern Baptist pastor in Kentucky, says the lack of church discipline in churches across his denomination have left congregations completely unprepared for the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution. When churches are undisciplined, the members will be undisciplined too. It creates a climate conducive to immorality and crumbling marriages. It welcomes congregants who are Christians in name only. The problem became so acute that the Southern Baptist governing body passed a resolution in 2008 calling on the churches to renew “the practice of lovingly correcting wayward church members” and “to recover and implement our Savior’s teachings on church discipline.”
The congregation Burk helps lead today requires members to sign a covenant defining the obligations of their fellowship. “Everyone who joins the church knows what they’re getting into, not just to be a follower of Christ, but to be a follower of Christ within our church,” he told me. “Failure to uphold these things means that the church will call you to repent. Any member who refuses to turn away from sin and to follow Christ will eventually be excommunicated.”
This happened to a couple in Burk’s church who were divorcing after over four decades of marriage. They refused counseling from the pastors to help them put their marriage back together again. They even refused assistance from other friends and church members. After months of intervention aimed at healing their marriage, the pastors reached an impasse with the couple. The couple simply would not cooperate. Eventually, the congregation met and voted to excommunicate them.
“It’s one thing to form a moral majority and lobby politically for public morality, but nobody really cares if the churches themselves have no integrity,” says Burk. “If that doesn’t happen, there will be no difference between the church and the world.”
Fortunately, when churches are properly ordered toward Christ through liturgy, with life maintained through asceticism and discipline, the result is a beauty in sharp contrast to the world. As times get uglier, the church will become brighter and brighter, drawing people to its light. As this happens, we Christians should not be afraid to consider beauty and goodness our best evangelistic tools.
“Art and the saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith,” said Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. Why? Because seeing examples of great beauty and extraordinary goodness bypasses our rational faculties and strikes the heart. We immediately respond to beauty and goodness and desire what they reveal. As philosopher Matthew Crawford puts it, “Only beautiful things lead us out to join the world beyond our heads.”11
Crawford is half right. Observing acts of goodness can change your life too. Watching the way the people of my hometown, a south Louisiana village, loved and cared for my late sister during her cancer fight prompted me to do something I swore I never would: return after nearly three decades away.
Art and the saints—material instantiations of beauty and goodness—prepare the way for propositional truth because they appeal to our inner desire. Not every act that pierces our heart and awakens our desire is truly beautiful or good. Reason helps us to rightly order those desires.
Put more plainly, unbelievers today who cannot make sense of the Gospel’s propositions may yet have a life-changing wordless encounter with the Gospel through Christian art or works of Christian love that pull them outside themselves and confront them with the reality of Christ.
The first Christians gained converts not because their arguments were better than those of the pagans but because people saw in them and their communities something good and beautiful—and they wanted it. This led them to the Truth.
“Apologetics then and now has a limited role,” Robert Louis Wilken, the early church historian, has said. “We must speak what is true, but finally the appeal must be made to the heart, not the mind. We’re really leading people to change their love. To love something different. Love is what draws and holds people.”12
I have been surprised by how few people I have met over the years who were brought to conversion by apologetics alone, whether spoken or through books. It happens, obviously, but it rarely happens on its own. In my own case, my adult conversion to Catholicism was primarily intellectual, but the long road began at seventeen, when I had a road-to-Damascus moment in the medieval cathedral of Chartres. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the beauty of that French cathedral. I walked into it a sniffy teenage agnostic and walked out craving to be part of the church tradition that built such a magnificent temple for God.
Seven fraught and winding years later, my mind was ready, thanks to all the reading I had done, but I was afraid to take the first real steps. What prompted me to act on all the things I was reading was my unlikely friendship with an elderly Catholic priest who was spending the last days of his life in assisted living. Monsignor Carlos Sanchez never tried to evangelize me. He just treated me like a friend and told me stories of his life, including his own dramatic midlife conversion. The peace that that gentle, luminous priest had was a thing of beauty, and I desired to possess it—and soon did.
So I was initially drawn out of my head and toward Christianity by the form of love called eros. My desire to know Christ more intimately was sparked and deepened by my sudden passionate desire to stand in relationship to the God who revealed Himself through the beauty of the cathedral and to the Christ who revealed Himself through the friendship of a ninety-nine-year-old Guatemalan immigrant priest.
The lesson here is that in an era in which logical reason is doubted and even dismissed, and the heart’s desire is glorified by popular culture, the most effective way to evangelize is by helping people experience beauty and goodness. From that starting point, we help them to grasp the truth that all goodness and beauty emanate from the eternal God, who loves us and wants to be in relationship with us. For Christians, this might mean witnessing to others through music, theater, or some other form of art. Mostly, though, it will mean showing love to others through building and sustaining genuine friendships and through the example of service to the poor, the weak, and the hungry. As Brother Ignatius of Norcia reminds us, everything is evangelical.
Just as beauty and charity stand as witnesses to the Gospel, so martyrdom has traditionally been the seed of the church. In the early church, the willingness to suffer, even to the point of laying down one’s life, for Christ was seen as the most powerful testimony to the truth of Christ. Today’s churches will not be equipped if we do not keep this in mind and live lives prepared to suffer severe hardship, even death, for our faith.
Rarely do American Christians think of the martyrs of church history, those who gave their lives in witness to the faith. Stories of brave men and women who suffered physical torment and death rather than betray Christ don’t fit easily into the upbeat vibe in many American churches. But these are our people, too, and they have important lessons for us—lessons that we desperately need to hear.
They embody heroic faith, and a love of Christ so profound they were willing to give their own lives. Their number includes the forty-eight believers tortured publicly and massacred in the Gallic city of Lyon in the year 177, and Polycarp, ordained a bishop by the Apostle John, and burned at the stake at age eighty-six for refusing to burn a pinch of incense to Caesar.
Closer to our own time, Christians like Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to resist Hitler and was hanged by the Nazis. In 1996, seven Trappist monks were kidnapped in Algeria by Islamic rebels and murdered. They had refused to leave the country and the service of Muslim villagers among whom they lived.
In the Christian tradition, a confessor is a believer who suffered greatly for the faith but was not put to death. The Orthodox priest Gheorghe Calciu and the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand both survived unspeakable torture in Communist Romania. Their testimonies after release from prison and exile testify not only to their courage to speak the truth despite fear of arrest, and to the strength of their endurance in prison, but also and even more powerfully to their ability to love those who tortured them.
Once he was free, Wurmbrand wrote that there are two kinds of Christians: “those who sincerely believe in God and those who, just as sincerely, believe that they believe. You can tell them apart by their actions in decisive moments.”13
We should stop trying to meet the world on its own terms and focus on building up fidelity in distinct community. Instead of being seeker-friendly, we should be finder-friendly, offering those who come to us a new and different way of life. It must be a way of life shaped by the biblical story and practices that keep us firmly focused on the truths of that story in a world that wants to obscure them and make us forget. It must be a way of life marked by stability and order and achieved through the steady work, both communal and individual, of prayer, asceticism, and service to others—exactly what liquid modernity cannot provide.
A church that looks and talks and sounds just like the world has no reason to exist. A church that does not emphasize asceticism and discipleship is as pointless as a football coaching staff that doesn’t care if its players show up for practice. And though liturgy by itself is not enough, a church that neglects to involve the body in worship is going to find it increasingly difficult to get bodies into services on Sunday morning as America moves further into post-Christianity.
Benedict Option churches will find ways within their own traditions to take on practices, liturgical and otherwise, for the sake of deepening their commitment to Christ by building a thick Christian culture. And Benedict Option believers will break down the conceptual walls that keep God safely confined in a church-shaped compartment. That’s because a church that is a church only on Sunday and at other formal gatherings of the congregation is not only failing to be the church Christ calls us all to be; it is also not going to be a church with the strength and the focus to endure the trials ahead.