Sustainability
We are coming to the end of our 5 weeks series on how The Gospel Changes Everything. We have been talking and wrestling through how our core values are shaped by the reality that Jesus lived the life we could not live and died the death that should have been ours. How then do we live together in community, in our worship, and as those who call themselves Christians?
One of the most influential ideas that has shaped me is that God calls us to faith— to follow Him; then He puts us in vocational contexts to do something in us (character) and through us (culture). Faith leads to vocation leads to culture. It captures the influence our church and the Global Church wants to have on this world that that we share.
Steve Garber is often the voice I hear when I think about these things. He has written well about them in his book The Fabric of Faithfulness. Here are some thoughts he gave in a recent interview. They capture what we are trying to do in our common life together:
There are habits of heart that sustain people over time, so that the question of ‘forming moral meaning’ is not rocket-science. People who keep on keeping on are men and women who:
- develop a worldview that can make sense of life, giving us the possibility of living with ‘the grain of the universe,’ the truth about God, the human condition, and history– against the challenge of a pluralizing, secularizing world;
- find a mentor, a teacher, who embodies the worldview we are beginning to call our own, with grace and hospitality allowing the truest learning to take place, the over-the-shoulder, through-the-heart kind; and
- commit to a community of like-minded, like-hearted people who together, over the course of years, are an incarnation of that worldview– even as we stumble along clay-footed as we necessarily will be.
The question of us is finally: can we sustain our beliefs– or will time and circumstance wear them out, causing us to become worn out?
I have always longed for that which is sustainable– in life and fiath, in politics and marriage, in all that I am and do, really. Less than that is unsatisfying– profoundly, even painfully so.
Steven Garber
Read the whole interview at:
Steve is a good friend and will join us at Restoration this Sunday (Feb 22) as we wrestle through these ideas of coherence, sustainability, and living out what we believe. In some ways, finding practical, tangible means to the question of how we live with integrity between what we profess and the way we act is the most important question we can answer.
February 17, 2009 @ 2:52 pm
David –
Reflecting on coherence (or “sustainability”), and on being the same person in all parts of our lives, reminded me of one of the most convicting things I have ever read. It’s from C.S. Lewis in the Screwtape Letters. Screwtape, the senior devil, is writing to Wormwood, the junior devil, offering advice on tempting Wormwood’s “patient.” Screwtape is advising Wormwood on how to make the best use of his patient’s new friends, who are “rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and brightly sceptical about everything in the world.” This passage describes the exact inverse of the type of coherence we’ve been talking about:
“Sooner or later, however, the real nature of his new friends must become clear to him, and then your tactics must depend on the patient’s intelligence. If he is a big enough fool you can get him to realise the character of the friends only while they are absent; their presence can be made to sweep away all criticism. If this succeeds, he can be induced to live, as I have known many humans live, for quite long periods, two parallel lives; he will not only appear to be, but will actually be, a different man in each of the circles he frequents. Failing this, there is a subtler and more entertaining method. He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent. This is done by exploiting his vanity. He can be taught to enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a “deeper,” “spiritual” world within him which they cannot understand. You see the idea–the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of shame, a continual undercurrent of self-satisfaction.”
Lewis really nails it, I think. He paints the perfect picture of what we are struggling against. –Anthony
February 17, 2009 @ 5:16 pm
Here I connect the ideas of Steve Garber to college students: http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/332/