What shapes us? What forms us? What is it that makes us “who we are”? Are we shaped mostly by ideas (our intellectual beliefs) or by our practices and customs?
I grew up Baptist — but I became Reformed because I was convinced by the *ideas.* Did that make me Reformed? Sort of. I was a Reformed Christian *intellectually* — but as my friends noticed at the time, I was still fundamentally a Baptist in my ways of living, as one friend told me as I was grumbling about the problems of individualism in American church culture: “Peter, you’re the biggest individualist I know!”
Looking back, if I had continued to be an *ideas* person, who knows where I’d be today. What was it that formed me as a Reformed pastor?
1) Every Sunday morning and evening for more than two years I sat under the preaching of Lendall Smith at Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, participating in their well-crafted liturgy — and coming to the Lord’s Supper (as I began to grasp intellectually what the Lord’s Supper really was, and trembling as I partook of Christ’s body and blood, as I realized that Paul’s warning really meant something!). And then I spent many Sunday afternoons — and other times — with the Larsons, the Brinks, the DeJongs, and other families — learning and watching their practice of being a Reformed family.
2) Every month for nearly five years (two at Wheaton and three at Westminster) I gathered with other students at the home of Darryl and Ann Hart to talk about what it means to be Reformed. Yes, there was deep theological discussion — but it was embodied in the lived practice of a community.
3) At Westminster I was frequently in the Powlison home (usually on the third floor with David and Sharon Covington). Again, the intellectual found its context in a vibrant fellowship of life together. For two years I lived with Steve and Lynn Igo — and their bouncing boys — participating in their family life and worship (our family worship bears considerable resemblance to theirs!), learning to put into practice the counseling paradigm that we were taught in our relationships with each other.
4) My first year at Notre Dame, I gathered with the Deliyannides and Devlins practically every Sunday in the Allison’s tiny 525 square foot apartment — where we always sang a half dozen Psalms. I had been convinced intellectually for years that we should sing more Psalms — but I had never done it! Ben Allison made sure that it happened. The rituals and practices of those few short months shaped me in ways that my ideas never had.
5) As I was licensed and ordained in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I was enculturated into a particular way of being Reformed — the boundaries and norms of the Midwest Presbytery shaped me both in explicit and implicit ways — some of which were significantly challenged when Glenn Jerrell walked into my life and gave me another way of being an OPC pastor. Two years of sitting under his ministry at Walkerton reshaped me in many ways (some of which I probably do not even realize!).
6) Plainly the content of what I learned and read has been crucial — but also who I learned it from! When you have learned Union with Christ from Dick Gaffin, Judges from Al Groves, Genesis from Doug Green, and when you have heard Sinclair Ferguson pray his lectures every day before he preaches them, you will never be the same again.
But all of this runs into another way of being and knowing and doing — one that is well-articulated by Matthew Vos’s article on the Super Bowl.
http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/3864/prizes-and-consumables-the-super-bowl-as-a-theology-of-women/
[Thanks to Mark Hanson for the link — and to be fair, I should note that I watched most of the Super Bowl.]
Vos points out that the customs and practices encouraged by the Super Bowl embody a fundamentally idolatrous way of being human (an Ezekiel 16 sort of culture — for those who weren’t at MCPC a couple years ago, Ezekiel 16 could be summarized as, ‘Cinderella becomes a porn star’).
So much of the church today is trying to make Christianity more palatable to our culture by trying to put the content of Christianity into the forms and customs of our culture (see Vos’s comments on this). I once spoke to a young man from Muncie, Indiana, who said he was looking for a church down there. I asked him, “What are you looking for in a church?” He answered, “I just want to be entertained.”
I was dumbfounded at his honesty (so I didn’t quite know what to say!), but it got me thinking. There are two things that I do not want to do:
1) I do not want simply to entertain him (it would only cheapen the good news of what Jesus has done);
2) I do not want to bore him (that would also cheapen the good news of what Jesus has done!).
Rather, I want him to see that there is something so much more grand and glorious that God has done in Jesus! And that’s where the customs and practices of our life together are so essential. If what we do on Sunday morning is disconnected from what we do the rest of the week, then yes, it will feel jarring (and so if that young man would ever come to MCPC, I don’t doubt that he will find it strange — but by the Spirit of God he should see a strange and beautiful power revealed there!). But if what we do on Sunday morning begins to shape what we do the rest of the week, then we will begin to find the practices of our culture to be strange and jarring.
The ideas are relevant to all this — but disembodied ideas are a mere fantasy!
