Marginal Christianity

Theological Journal – January 11 Here’s a recently developed rule of life by Chris Woznicki. He’s a Christian, and an academic. That is clearly reflected in his rule. Remember, this rule is not your rule! It is an instance of one particular person’s effort to order his life in ways that will bring glory to God and growth in his own faith. Yours may be more or less detailed than his. That is not the point. The point is that your rule encompass your life in its particularity and in as much detail as you believe it needs. Your rule is revisable. You will rework it regularly as your circumstances and seasons in life change. You won’t get it right the first time. Experiment with it and tweak it as much as necessary to get to place where you feel the rule helps to seamlessly integrate your faith and life into one organic whole. Blessings! My Rule of Life – 2020 Instead of a New Year’s Resolution I have decided to share my Rule of Life with you. Recall,  a “Rule of Life”...

I decided to add one more piece to these reflections on a rule of faith to the example of a recently crafted one I promised yesterday. It’s about habits and draws on Wendy Wood's book Good Habits, Bad Habits . Habits, not feelings, grit, good intentions, or even prayer, are the key components in forming a durable rule of life. We for, our habits and, then, they form us. A well-known saying usually attributed to Aristotle captures this well: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence , then, is not an act, but a habit.” Wendy Wood’s research on decades of studies of highly effective people and neuroscience shows that it is not self-discipline, willpower, determination, or willpower that make them who they are, nor determination, intention, willpower, but habits, good habit. What are some keys to forming good habits? Friction: Our brains avoid things that are difficult or that cause too much friction. Find ways to make the habit you want to form easier, and the habi...

We’ve explored our desires a bit in relation to crafting a rule of life. Today we’ll look at our roles and gifts in that process. In the final post on a rule of life I will provide an actual rule of life recently crafted for you to gain a sense of how one person has done it. Again, there are no formulas, templates, or one-size-fits-all form for this rule. They are unique as you and I are. And they will change as our lives change. So be flexible. Use the example I’ll provide as inspiration to spur your imaginative reflection on what kind of rule might best suit you. Roles Your personal rule of life is discerned and framed within the context of your primary relationships and your spiritual community, lived out in service to others. List all your key relationships (names) and the role you play in each (father or mother, brother or sister, boss, colleague, student, friend). Five to seven such roles or key relationships seem to be about as many as most of us can reasonably...

January 8 The following is wise counsel from Matt Tebbe on the matter of desire https://gravityleadership.com/desire-in-discipleship/ ). Desire in Discipleship -“What do you want?” he asks two disciples who are following him right after his baptism. -“Do you love me?” he asks Peter three times after his resurrection. These questions aren’t rhetorical for Jesus. They are sincere questions meant to help the listener own and name their desire. What Do You Want? What do you want? is the core question for every disciple of Jesus. But desire makes us nervous. We are anxious that we won’t get what we want or perhaps we shouldn’t want what we want, and so we have two dominant strategies in the church for dealing with desire: 1.        Kill it, or 2.        Fulfill it. Killing Desire Some Christian traditions are scared to death of desire, because desire leads us into sin (the devil is pr...

Ruth Haley Barton’s Sacred Rhythms has some pertinent and helpful thoughts on a “Rule of Life” we might well consider before looking at some specifics. “A rule of life seeks to respond to two questions: who do I want to be? How do I want to live? Actually it might be more accurate to say that a rule of life seeks to address the interplay between these two questions: How do I want to live so I can be who I want to be?” (147) “Our rhythm of spiritual practices also needs to be ruthlessly realistic in view of our stage of life… If we do not take into account a realistic assessment of our stage of life we are doomed to fail.” (149) “One of the great temptations of the spiritual life is to believe that if I were in another season of life, I could be more spiritual. The truth is that spiritual transformation takes place as we embrace the challenges and opportunities associated with each season of our life…” (149) “The process of beginning to cultivate our own rhyt...

Theological Journal – January 6 A Central Rule of Life Text: Romans 12:1-2 The Message So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. Observations: -Familiar foundational Pauline emphasis on human action responding to divine action -ordering of daily life as sacrifice, not a religious event or sphere of life (what Bonhoeffer calls “religionless Christianity”) -inertial dra...

January 4 A “rule of life” is a way of life ordered to maximize our experience of God and facilitate our growth toward maturity in faith. Or in the words of the answer to the first question of The Westminster Shorter Catechism about the main goal of human life: “to glorify and enjoy God forever.” If we cannot honestly say that we are experiencing and progressing toward that goal, our lives are not shaped or ordered to that end. Yesterday I asked you to try and identify some the “rules” that give shape to your life. That was in order for you to have a sense of the influence they have in the character of our experience. And to get an idea of the kinds of things we might want to change to change our experience. But what might it mean to “glorify” and “enjoy” God forever? Let me suggest two simple images. -to glorify God is to reflect something of him to others and the world we live in, like a mirror -to enjoy God is to live in the awareness that our lives are not about u...

Do you know what a “rule of life” is? It’s a way of life ordered to maximize our experience of God and facilitate our growth toward maturity in faith. Everybody has one, you know. A “rule of life,” that is. We all order our lives to maximize what we believe we wasn’t out of it. Some are more intentional about this than others. Some would even claim they don’t have any such thing. But whether we think through the shape we want our lives to have or simply fall into it by “going with the flow,” our lives inevitably assume some ordered form. It’s easiest to see the shape we give to at least certain parts of our lives by reflecting on the things we do regularly. Eating, getting up and going to bed, setting aside certain times for doing our laundry and doing it in a certain way, and many other things we regularly do we tend to do in regular ways, that is, ordered. The monastic movement in the early church was a way of life the church ordered for those willing to undertak...

Posted on August 13, 2013 by scottemery The other day a few of my friends and I were discussing the realities of life. Rootedness, patience, and attending to the ordinary rhythms of life were at the core of our dialogue. For us, life doesn’t make a whole lot sense unless we’re pursuing the actualization of these words. The call to move into our neighborhoods is one we’ve taken seriously and are becoming more and more aware of the postures and practices needed to follow through with this. In a world where the extraordinary and flashy are sought after and valued, we believe faithfully pursuing the mundane of the everyday is where we will see actual growth. We firmly believe in things like rootedness, patience, and attending to the ordinary rhythms of life because these are some of the things Jesus firmly believed in . And by “believe in” I don’t mean mental assent alone. Belief is something that is manifested through action. Therefore, if you say you believe something, I s...