Take it on the Trail

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”
Philippians 2:5

In previous posts I suggested B.R.E.A.T.H. as a trauma-informed discipleship and church cultivation framework. The next movement in the discipleship journey is taking it on the trail.

Trail: growing in habits that support walking out the life of faith in the daily rhythms, spaces, and relationships of everyday life.

Our discipleship is not just about when we gather for the standard churchy stuff. It includes when we gather with our family around the dinner table, when we are on the job with coworkers, when we are gathering with friends for recreation and play.

Our ongoing growth as disciples includes every dimension of our everyday lives. This has been a major failure of the church in the 20^th century. People equated being a follower of Jesus with going to church, being a member of a denomination, attending Bible studies, Sunday School, and serving on committees. Yet in this scenario, many people saw their religious observance and their daily life as separate and distinct things.

 Just consider the sacred and secular divide. In this construct, there are sacred spaces, designated as holy, often due to their connection with a religion, and there are secular spaces, the normal everyday arena of life. In the secular spaces, we don’t talk about “religion and politics” those concepts are reserved for the sacred space. You do the religious stuff in the religious spaces, and you do the “secular” stuff in the secular spaces (for the former, that is if you are into that kind of weird stuff).

 Modern Christianity inadvertently accepted what Charles Taylor called the “imminent frame.” This refers to modern life taking place in the arena of a disenchanted world where supernatural beings or forces with teleological goals or intentions are deemed close to impossible. The imminent frame dismisses even the possibility that God can break into human history and act.

The enlightenment form of Christianity reduced God to a set of ideas or propositions. If we accepted these propositions, we could become a member of an institutional expression of the church. This gave us access to social benefits, like standing in the community and partnerships in our revenue-generating endeavors, but most of the benefits were otherworldly. Faith involved excepting the propositions of Jesus so we could go to heaven when we die.

Passional forms of church challenge the disenchantment of the immanent frame. We resist the false dichotomy of the sacred and secular divide. We see every space as sacred space. Every activity that binds humans together in authentic relationship is holy. We gather in the normal spaces of life in anticipation that the Risen Jesus will manifest and break into our reality.

We also challenge the norms of a professionalized clergy caste system. In this arrangement, clergy often earn full (but very minimal) salaries to be the on-call spiritual butlers and producers of religious goods and services. Laity live in a state as a kind of second-class citizens. Consider that Paul the Apostle plied his trade as a tentmaker as he planted and pastored churches all over the ancient world (Acts 18:2-4). By today’s definition he was bi- or co-vocational. Many clergy today find this as an ideal scenario. We can financially support the church rather than being financially supported by it. This enables us to work alongside others in the community and build relationships.

The Fresh Expressions movement awakens the possibility of a “priesthood of all believers” (1 Peter 2:9) in which every single follower of Jesus can be equally empowered and activated to be in ministry. It gives focus to our discipleship. The conclusion of the journey is not to serve on a committee at an existing congregation but to cultivate a healing habitation for others where there is no church.

The trail aspect of our journey flows from the interaction of our own unique personhood and gifts, and the context where we live, work, and play. We need to be able to read our community and know our place within it.

This is where we can really key in on our own intrinsic motivations. The church historically has employed extrinsic motivation. “You need to go do this because ____!” You fill in the blank, “God commanded it” or the “Bible says so” or “Your church needs you.” Extrinsic motivation involves an outer authority, with centralized power, activating us to operate within a preconceived range of possibilities.

The church has used extrinsic motivation in harmful ways for two thousand years. For example, scaring people into a relationship with Jesus through fear of hell. That’s a textbook example of extrinsic motivation.

One big problem in the modern church is that there is a mismatch in what the church thinks people should be doing, and what they should actually be doing. It’s a mismatch between providing answers to questions people aren’t asking, and spending the time to learn the questions people are actually asking.

This “trail” part of our discipleship journey relies on our own intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation involves helping us hear the voice of the Holy Spirit in our own lives. A biblical truth that resonates with one’s own unique personality and giftings can motivate us to change the trajectory of our future.

This is another advantage of the Fresh Expressions way, it plugs into intrinsic motivation by inviting people to gather a group of friends to do something together in a time, space, and rhythm that works for them. There we center around Jesus and think about how that can become church in and of itself. Cultivating Christ-centered intrinsic motivation is an essential aspect of our discipleship journey.

So practically we have to start applying the same kinds of spiritual listening skills we have learned in our relationship with God and apply them to listening in our community. We reject the assumptions of the imminent frame. We believe that God is active and alive in every life and every space of our community before we get there.

We start to ask ourselves different questions. What is God calling me specifically to do in this community? Who do I need to form relationships with? What are people doing in everyday life? How do I join them? How am I being a disciple of Jesus at home, work, school, and other everyday spaces?

Just as the “means of grace” gives us a couple of holy habits that we learn to practice over our lifetime, so the trail requires us to develop another set of habits.

Is there a roadmap for how we “hit the trail” in our following of Jesus? There is. We’ve reflected at length about the truth and life of Jesus, but perhaps embedded in Philippians 2, we can discover the way of Jesus. There we discover what Paul calls the “mind of Christ” which provides a framework for the kind of incarnational mission we need for the trail.

The person of Jesus, his journey of incarnation, cross, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Spirit, is the foundation for our trail map.

Jesus’s incarnation is the “way” we should go about embodying our faith. This pathway is the passional journey.