It’s a malady of too many in the [American] Church today, suggests Eugene Peterson in Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ – the last installment in a series of five “conversations in spiritual theology.”
Like a lot of Peterson’s writings, it is a sharp critique of how too many church-attendees, pastors, and congregations have become so comfortable and complacent in their Christian beginnings that they’ve “fallen asleep too close to where they got in.” The messages of Holy Week and Easter have been reduced to “waste management” (forgiveness) and “fire insurance” (a ticket to Heaven) – a glass of warm milk that is more than enough for most folks today.
But, too, like a lot of Peterson’s writings, it is a prescription for what is needed to restore the Gospel in the life of individuals and the Church. Read for yourself… and see if you do not agree with me: that “practicing resurrection” (living in the dynamic and ever-present reality of new life unleashed in Christ) is nothing more than a new way of defining “spiritual formation,” or what Wesley called “sanctification”. And, it’s exactly what is needed to turn church-goers into disciples, gatherings into transformative communities, life in this world into the Kingdom (or, better, “Reign”) of God.
We cannot overemphasize bringing men and women to new birth in Christ. Evangelism is essential, critically essential.
But is it not obvious that growth in Christ is equally essential?
Americans in general have little tolerance for a centering way of life that is submissive to the conditions in which growth takes place: quiet, obscure, patient, not subject to human control and management. The American church is uneasy in these conditions. Typically, in the name of “relevance,” it adapts itself to the prevailing American culture and is soon indistinguishable from that culture: talkative, noisy, busy, controlling, image-conscious.
Meanwhile, what has in previous centuries and other cultures been a major preoccupation of the Christian community, becoming men and women who live to “the praise of God’s glory,” has become a mere footnote within a church that has taken on the agenda of the secular society— its educational goals, its activity goals, its psychological goals. By delegating character formation, the life of prayer, the beauty of holiness — growing up in Christ — to specialized ministries or groups, we remove it from the center of the church’s life. We disconnect growth from birth and, in effect, place it on a bench at the margins of the church’s life. Wendell Berry, one of our most perceptive prophets of contemporary culture and spirituality, wrote, “We think it ordinary to spend twelve or sixteen or twenty years of a person’s life and many thousands of public dollars on ‘education’ — and not one dime or a thought on character.” (pp. 5-6)
It’s a rather gloomy read, to be sure. This diagnosis and prescription are hard to hear and receive.
Still, the prognosis is clear and hopeful for those who, caught up in Grace, are moved to practice resurrection.