“Protestant circles need a new pedagogical strategy,” Carl Trueman recently claimed. “It is striking that in the New Testament and in the early second century (see, for example, the Didache) Christians and pagans were differentiated not simply by what they believed but by how they behaved. The Christian community must have a practical, moral distinctiveness.”
One could argue that John Mark Comer has accepted this challenge, popularizing a certain approach to Christian living that offers a “practical, moral distinctiveness.” From my vantage point as a Gen Z Christian, it seems Comer is the most influential figure for evangelicals my age. Of course, this comes with much praise (see Brad East) and criticism (see Tim Challies). But whatever we think of Comer, we should try to understand why he’s so popular.
Comer understands that Christians should be differentiated by how they behave—and he’s good at communicating this point to young audiences who feel the absence of this reality. They feel something’s missing in their faith, and Comer fills the gaps in a bite-size, aesthetically pleasing, and quickly digestible manner.
Corporate Spiritual Formation and a Rule of Life
The reprisal of the “Rule of Life,” advocated by pop-theologians like Comer, positions itself against quick-fix strategies for the Christian life. He defines a Rule as a “schedule and set of practices and relational rhythms that create space for us to be with Jesus, become like him, and do as he did, as we live in alignment with our deepest desires.” This approach can be deeply helpful, and—Comer’s theological issues—notwithstanding, I agreed with much of Practicing the Way.
Still, while Comer argues that creating a Rule is an act of cultural resistance, I’m not sure he anchors his readers in anything firm enough to weather the storm, as the exhortation to create your own Rule of Life is still an individualistic way of practicing Christianity. Comer does say “You can’t follow Jesus alone” and “Community is the incubator for our spiritual formation.” But he explicitly develops this on about four of the book’s nearly three hundred pages.
Noticing this theme, Myles Werntz argues, “You don’t need a rule of life”; rather, you need a local church. He explains that everyone from Benedict to Bonhoeffer cast a moral vision within the Christian community: “To reclaim this older vision,” he argues, “we must begin by unlearning deep habits of solo reading, praying, and planning for isolation.” This is a false dichotomy, but Werntz’s encouragement away from isolation toward community is a needed corrective. What we see in many contemporary Rules of Life isn’t only a newer vision; it’s a different vision.
Kyle Strobel offers a learned explanation of the differences:
Leaving aside the historical inaccuracies that abound, there is a deeper problem. In many ways, what folks mean when they say “a rule of life” today, is actually the opposite of the tradition they are supposedly trying to recover. It isn’t only that small details differ, but the entire purpose, goal, and structure are opposed to the historic vision.
Strobel’s longer analysis goes on to reveal that the new Rules are based on individual desires and governed by the self, while older Rules were based on a singular vision of life submitted to under the authority of another: “There is a kind of package deal between a rule of life, authority, and calling, keeping in mind that the broadest notion of calling is about life in the body of Christ. So to talk about a rule of life we need to talk about ecclesiology.”
If we’re going to reimagine a Rule of Life in modern Christianity, it needs to be ecclesiocentric, with the authority of the church and Scripture above us, not merely beside us.
If we’re going to reimagine a Rule of Life in modern Christianity, it needs to be ecclesiocentric, with the authority of the church and Scripture above us, not merely beside us.
Comer does prefer a community-oriented approach to the Rule of Life, and laments “the grid of Western-style individualism, with individual people writing their Rule of Life,” yet his definition hardly avoids the pitfall: “It’s self-generated from your internal desires, it has a ton of flexibility, it’s relationship based (not morality based), and it’s designed to index you toward your vision of the good life.”
What’s perplexing is how this point undermines other principles Comer lays out.
While he’s obviously inspired by The Rule of Saint Benedict, he doesn’t seem to heed some of that book’s first words, which condemn the ancient “sarabaites”—a contrary monastic order. Benedict describes them by saying,
Two or three gather together, or even alone, without a shepherd, they pen themselves up in their own sheepfolds, not the Lord’s. Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy. Anything they believe in and choose, they call holy; anything they dislike, they consider forbidden.
This is the result of a Rule self-generated from your internal desires, designed to index you toward your vision of the good life.
Comer appears to want a churchesque community without robust ecclesiology; he claims to be a Protestant while ignoring (and sometimes lamenting) much of traditional Protestantism. He often draws from mystical Christians among the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Quakers. And many evangelicals will find it more than a little suspicious that the book’s opening quote (“May you be covered in the dust of your Rabbi”) is the title of a Rob Bell sermon later cited in the opening chapter. Whatever it means to “practice the Way,” it doesn’t seem to mean prioritizing Word and sacrament, confession and creed. To be sure, Comer doesn’t deny the value of these things. They just aren’t important enough to include.
Perhaps Comer is hedging his bets, trying to appeal to as many people as possible, pitching a flexible, individual Rule to get you started. Fair enough. But the most interesting part of the book comes in a throwaway line: “If at all possible, do this in community—with a few friends, with your small group or table community, or, in a dream world, with your entire church.” The following footnote presents a version of Comer that doesn’t appear elsewhere in the book:
To my fellow pastors: My dream is that the churches of the future (like the churches of the past) will organize around a Rule of Life—a way of being together, contextualized for their time, their place, and their people. It can happen. Would you consider this?
It’s more anachronistic fantasy than historical reality to say “churches of the past” were organized around a Rule of Life. But the churches of the future could do this. Imagine if the whole book expounded this footnote.
There’s nothing wrong with thinking about how to use your time strategically. But first, we need to acknowledge this isn’t merely retrieval work, as it’s a different vision from our monastic forefathers. Second, we must recognize that the way forward is to have interlocking, mutually reinforcing spheres of ecclesial, familial, and individual habits. Call me a dreamer, but this underdeveloped idea gestured toward in Comer’s work could do some real good.
Reckoning with the Church’s Moral Life
The only way for a church to truly practice the Way is under the shepherding of faithful pastors who are able to guide them through the spiritual disciplines. Listening to podcasts or reading books (or articles like this one) simply will not do. We need elders, not gurus. We need the ordinary means of grace. We must return to the communal life of the church. But as Trueman has pointed out, we also need our pastors to take up a new (or perhaps retrieve an old) pedagogical strategy for shaping our moral life.
We should start by acknowledging that we’ve lost a slew of moral battles inside our churches, eroding our ethical credibility due to a gangrenous failure to practice church discipline. To only use the example of sex and marriage, evangelicals have helped pave the way for the wide-scale celebration of sin today. As Matthew Lee Anderson has argued, “On matters of sex and marriage, evangelical churches have long accepted contraception, made their peace with remarriage after divorce, silently acquiesced to the whole gamut of artificial reproductive technologies, and have raised a generation who shrug at cohabitation and premarital sex.”
We might add that the lack of moral guidance about technology and entertainment is perhaps even worse.
We must own up to what we’ve done. There’s no use in blaming evangelical intellectuals and pastors of the last century. They’re our people. We did it. The question is “What will we do now?” We must resolve what it means to practice Christianity today—according to Scripture, faithful to tradition, as the Holy Spirit guides the corporate body of Christ in these new days.
The only way for a church to truly practice the Way is under the shepherding of faithful pastors. We need elders, not gurus.
Most evangelicals would be shocked to read the way premodern pastors spoke about Christian living. New converts to Christianity who sat under pastoral instruction in the ancient church were called “catechumens,” and the old word for Christian teaching is “catechesis,” which included teaching at least the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments.
There’s a startling difference between these catechumens—who left behind their vocations, forms of entertainment, luxury, and, not least of all, sexual practices—and what we see today in most churches. They learned the liturgy and prebaptismal catechism, renouncing sin and the Devil, before entering the covenant community, and only afterward did they begin to practice the Way.
In Stephen O. Presley’s recent book Cultural Sanctification, he recovers the early church’s moral vision (see my review). In a chapter on the church’s public life, he explains that in their occupations, Christians refused to work in environments that involved idol distribution, sexual immorality (e.g., prostitution and theater), or murder (e.g., gladiatorial games). Craftsmen could only continue their work so long as they promoted beauty instead of idolatry, and there was a similar approach to teachers and public officials. In a Roman culture dominated by leisure and entertainment—yet filled with vices and countless temptations—Christians abstained from their festivals, circuses, and games. In all things, they were concerned with preserving virtue over financial, professional, or social gains.
There were moral boundaries in all aspects of life. Instructions about marriage and family were a regular aspect of Christian catechesis. These included duties for each spouse, expectations of affection, exhortations toward contentment, and prohibitions against fornication. Overall, the purpose of marriage, as with all other social matters, was the cultivation of virtue. This was necessary to distinguish Christians from pagans, but it was equally important for the church to encourage human flourishing in all aspects of public life.
The early church’s decisions aren’t prescriptive for our times, but they’re still instructive. We need to return to a focus on virtue formation and moral catechesis, which begins with teaching and practicing the Ten Commandments, alongside the spiritual disciplines, not merely to reveal sin but to present the way to human flourishing.
What’s encouraging about the popularity of Comer—or even someone like Jordan Peterson—is that there seems to be a growing hunger for virtue formation, self-discipline, and “rules” for better living. Sometimes this hunger gets channeled in negative directions (e.g., Andrew Tate), but the hunger itself is an opportunity for the church.
Ask Pastor So-and-So
The creation and distribution of the New City Catechism is a great example of a way to reinstitute Christian doctrine and morality into the church’s lifeblood. Or consider John Piper’s Ask Pastor John podcast, which was recently turned into a book of 750 pastoral answers.
I’m not implying all pastors can or should write massive tomes about various moral dilemmas, but the laborious work of moral guidance must be shouldered one way or another, whether during one-on-one discipleship, regular in-home family visits, or church-wide Q and A sessions. If it isn’t, this responsibility will simply be outsourced to friends, therapists, social media influencers, or podcasters.
Younger generations are hungry for spiritual disciplines and moral guidance. The local church, under qualified shepherds, is the only place where this can happen in a balanced, healthy, biblical, and sustainable way.
Younger generations are hungry for spiritual disciplines and moral guidance.
Congregants, we do well to remember that preaching, Scripture reading, praying, singing, and all those things we do in a worship service are corporate practices. The accessibility of Bible and prayer apps, podcast sermons, and streamed worship music can easily turn important Christian practices into exclusively personal, privatized means of grace. That doesn’t make them bad, but it does make them incomplete.
Ask your pastors hard questions, trust them, and submit to the moral boundaries and patterns of the church. Christianity is, indeed, a narrow way, but it isn’t an empty way. We get to walk with our brothers and sisters in faith, hope, and love, and we have shepherds to lead us into Christ’s presence.
Pastors, consider implementing corporate spiritual disciplines into your local church, along with creating regular avenues for congregants to seek you for moral guidance. I’ll give a couple examples. Instead of fasting as a way to challenge yourself and control your appetites (as needed as that may be), consider denying your appetites corporately as a church, praying and fasting as we wait for the Messiah’s return, perhaps even along with the church calendar or like the early church: every Wednesday (the day of Jesus’s betrayal) and Friday (the day of his crucifixion).
Or practice the Sabbath together, but not merely with the goal of personal regulation, self-care, or “digital detox”; instead, participate in the eschatological rest of God with the saints, feasting at the Lord’s Table, singing in festal gathering, and delighting in the goodness of the created order together.
The massive success and appeal of Comer’s Practicing the Way shouldn’t be a cause for alarm. Rather, it showcases a hunger in our cultural moment, as well as an exciting opportunity for local churches to prioritize an old ecclesial emphasis—spiritual theology—in a new way.