In a recent trip to Virginia Beach, for a Telos Event, Todd Hunter sat down for a live interview at Regent University.  Todd talks about his latest book “Our Favorite Sins”.   In addition, he shares about church planting and answers questions from students in attendance.

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Richard Foster, who I deeply admire as someone who practices working from rest, observes, “In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds.” Because that is surely true, we desperately need quiet time. But, Foster also knows the life is no solitary. Rather, it connects us well to God, to other spiritual practices of Christianity and to the rest of life. It prepares us for the compassionate life (social justice), the virtuous life (holiness), the evangelical life (Word centered), the charismatic life (Spirit centered), and the incarnational life (the sacramental life). Eugene Peterson notes, “All our ancestors agree that without silence and stillness there is no spirituality, no God-attentive God-responsive life.”

Here is an interesting and revealing questions related to the practices of preludes: is quiet time a work or a grace? Do we imagine that God bestows grace in payment for devotional regularity? We often think, “If I read my Bible and pray enough, somehow I will pull the right level with God and he will respond!”

This line of thought leads to a bigger challenge: misunderstanding grace. All of God’s actions and inactions – his patience, his withholding judgments and so forth – are of grace. Creation is an act of grace; all of the ongoing human abilities to live and breathe are acts of grace. Grace does not have to do merely with fixing the problem of sin. Once we see this, we see that quiet times are themselves graces, the means to connect with the mercy and power of God. They are not properly understood as works.

Think of the rhythm of Jesus’ life, who easily and frequently moved from private times of prayer to times of public teaching, healing and confronting. In these routine times of solitude and quiet, was Jesus working to earn something from his Father? Or were all the actions of Jesus’ life, pubic and private, motivated and energized by the grace of God? I think it is the latter.

This understanding has freed me in numerous ways. It never crosses my mind to wonder how many chapters I should read today or how long I should pray. These types of questions have been replaced – repracticed – by a life in which prayer is never far away, never confined to the next morning, and thinking about Scripture is foundational for all of life, not just early mornings.

I experience repracticed quiet time this way: as I pay attention to the people and events of my day, my life is full of divine appointments and divine interruptions. This produces the desire and the need to have daily uninterrupted times of focus on God. But it is important to see this as practical and functional, not an attempt to earn anything from God or to get him to do something for me. It’s all part of one contiguous whole. That whole is my life lived before God in public activity and private contemplation, prayer, and study.

So when sitting quietly in a sanctuary, thinking and praying while beautiful music plays, I know I have only ascended the diving board. Once the benediction has been pronounced, I walk out the door ready to splash into the realities of life. I then experience a life of centered peace, working from a place of rest gained from engaging in the spiritual practice of prelude.

© Todd Hunter, Giving Church Another Chance, Used by Permission, IVP, (link to book)

A big part of my motivation for writing this book is rooted in deep and gnawing intellectual curiosity: Why don’t the various aspects of church life produce better results?  How does it happen that people can follow and experience profound liturgies for their whole lives and not feel connected to Jesus in a personal way?  How can people hear great sermons for dozens of years and yet cheat their customers and cheat on their spouse?

Philip Yancey says, “My deepest doubts about the faith can be summed up in a single question: ‘Why doesn’t it work?’”  In the margin of Yancey’s Soul Survivor, I wrote, “Me too!”  As a leader of pastors, every time I’ve seen one crash and burn with sex, money or pride, I’ve wondered, Why doesn’t our faith work?  And when I’ve watched a parishioner ruin his or her family through foolish behavior, I’ve asked the same troubling question.

This question is not for the faint of heart.   But it demands an answer.  Here is my best shot: The problem has little to do with our liturgy, sermons, Sunday school curricula or any other aspect of church life.  These elements are common means of God’s instruction, power and grace.  Our problem has more to do with two other things: first, we have no place, no story and no context with which to act on anything we might hear or receive; second, in our pseudo-religious society we lack the basic intention to act on what we have heard.  Practical obedience hardly crosses the mind of those who merely want to care for the spiritual side of life by taking in an occasional church service or other religious event.

When Jesus invites us to share his yoke, he is calling us into his story, into the life-shaping orientation provided by his sense of what the Father is doing.  Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29).

A yoke is a wooden beam used between a pair of oxen to allow them to pull a load.  I loved the mental picture of being in a yoke with Jesus.  The friends Debbie and I shared a home with while attending Bible school knew this and took a picture of a yoke on the side of a barn in West Virginia.  Tim and Susie framed it nicely and placed a small bronze plate in the bottom of the frame with an inscription: “Stay in the yoke… Matthew 11:29.”  In the years since, I have moved offices many times, but that picture has always hung prominently on the wall.  A few years ago my wife, knowing my affection for the yoke image, bought an authentic yoke at an antique store and gave it to me as a Christmas present.  It hangs in an important place on our porch.

As much as the yoke of Jesus has shaped my imagination for life in Jesus, its flame was fanned further the first time I read the same words in Matthew 11 of The Message:

“Are you tired?  Work out?  Burned out on religion?  Come to me.  Get away with me and you’ll recover your life.  I’ll show you how to take a real rest.  Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it.  Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.  I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you.  Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

© Todd Hunter, Giving Church Another Chance, Used by Permission, IVP

I am amazed by the men and women who are society’s first responders to disasters or crisis situations. They don’t stop to think; they instinctively do what has been drilled into them through repeated practice. They don’t panic or fold.

Whenever I see them in action, I think, Wow, they are really living in their story; they are faithfully acting their part. When a crisis is announced, when things are far from routine, the first responders begin their routines, what they are trained to do through years of inner and outward disciplines.

They respond for the sake of others, practicing their disciplines in the worst situations our world has to offer. They are models for how the ambassadors of the kingdom of God should respond to the world.

© Todd Hunter, Christianity Beyond Belief, Used by Permission, IVP

“O Holy Spirit of God, visit now this soul of mine, and tarry within it until eventide. Inspire all my thoughts. Pervade all my imaginations. Suggest all my decisions. Lodge in my will’s most inward citadel and order all my [desires and] doings. Be with me in my silence and in my speech, in my haste and in my leisure, in company and in solitude, in the freshness of the morning and in the weariness of the evening; and give me grace at all times to rejoice in thy mysterious companionship.”

John Baille (1866 – 1960) was a Scottish minister and theologian. In terms of publishing he is best known by his devotional classic, A Diary of Private Prayer (1936). His life’s work was devoted to helping his people better apprentice themselves to Jesus. I find this prayer, an example of his heart and mind, to be gift that leads me to spiritual and moral growth in the Way Of Jesus.

How do we make it perceptible and concrete in the attitudes and actions of our lives such that it could be said that we personify the main plot of the Bible? Isn’t living much more interesting and challenging than merely studying? As interesting as the Bible is, it is not compelling enough to stick with unless it becomes the substance of our life story and basis for a lifelong journey of repentance and alignment to its story as followers of Jesus.

I’ve often commented to friends that the introductions Eugene Peterson wrote for the individual books of the Bible in The Message are worth the price of the whole Bible! This comment from his introduction to James is typical – and spot on for our present topic: “Wisdom is not primarily knowing the truth, although it certainly includes that; it is skill in living. For, what good is truth if we don’t know how to live it? What good is an intention if we can’t sustain it?”

When we read the Bible in this manner, it’s like a prized document that tells us how to participate in something we long to do, but which is still not 100 percent clear to us. For instance, imagine someone trying to learn about baseball but only knowing where three of the bases go for sure because pages are missing from the rule booklet. Or imagine learning a piece of lovely music only to discover the last twenty or thirty bars are missing.

Once we begin to read the Bible with the enthusiasm of athletes and musicians who have discovered secrets to their sport or art and gain their predisposition to act on it, we will no longer be mere readers but will embody the Word of God. Rather than submitting to the Bible against our wills, as it were, we love and value its Author so much that we eagerly seek to know what he is up to in redeeming his creation.

Reading the Bible (or any other spiritual discipline or means of grace, for that matter) was never intended to be abstract or academic. Eugene Peterson is an expert guide to the preferred way of reading the Bible, the proper approach to spiritual formation: “What we often consider to be the concerns of the spiritual life – ideas, truths, prayers, promises, beliefs – are never in the Christian gospel permitted to have a life of their own apart from particular persons and actual places. Biblical spirituality/religion has a low tolerance for ‘great ideas’ or ‘sublime truths’ or ‘inspirational thoughts’ apart from the people and places in which they occur. God’s great love and purposes for us are all worked out in the messes in our kitchen and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, the daily work and dreams of our common lives…” (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 115).

“The opening scene in the resurrection of Jesus occurs in the workplace. Mary Magdalene and the other women were on their way to work when they encountered and embraced the resurrection of Jesus. I’m prepared to contend that the primary location for spiritual formation is in the workplace…” (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 127).

“Story is the most natural way of enlarging and deepening our sense of reality, and then enlisting us as participants in it… They then welcome us in. Stories are verbal acts of hospitality…” (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 13).

“The biblical way is not to present us a moral code and tell us ‘Live up to this,’ nor is it to set out a system of doctrine and say, ‘Think up to this,’ nor is it to set out a system of doctrine and say, ‘Think like this and you will live well.’ The biblical way is to tell a story that takes place on solid ground, is peopled with men and women that we recognize as being much like us, and then to invite us, ‘Live into this. This is what it looks like to be human. This is what is involved in entering and maturing as human beings” (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 140).

Can you see how God and the Bible may have engendered a bad reputation he and his book do not deserve? I am pretty sure that average person on the street thinks that God cares more about our capacity to grasp ideas, thoughts and truths, or our agreement with obscure doctrines – the reverse of what Peterson says. This is how far we have gotten from embodying the simple story line of the Bible.

“The food that keeps me going is that I do the will of the One who sent me” is a statement of priorities. For Jesus, his foremost priority is doing the will of his Father – which may be the best definition of embody… Jesus was sustained and fulfilled by embodying the story of his Father… That is what God planned for us – to work with him to accomplish his purposes, to steward his creation. This was God’s intention for Israel, to be his agents of rescue in a world gone bad, and what he intends for the church, to work with him, as Jesus did, as his agents of forgiveness, healing and deliverance.

© Todd Hunter, Giving Church Another Chance, Used by Permission, IVP

“God did not give the Bible so we could master him or it, God gave the Bible so we could live it, so we could be mastered by it.  The moment we think we have mastered it, we have failed to be readers of the Bible.” – Scot McKnight

The fact is that the amount of Scripture read in most church services is shrinking.  Up until recently, I haven’t attended a church that had multiple Scripture readings as part of its worship.  I come from a tradition in which the only text read is that which the preacher is going to speak on.  I cherish my church background, but I find it interesting that: “the calendars for the public reading of Scripture have resulted in Anglicans hearing more of the Word of God in their services than any other major branch of Christendom… [and that] more of the Bible is read in Anglican churches in one month than is read in two years in most other churches” (The Spirit of Anglicanism by William Wolf, John Booty and Owen Thomas, p. 175).

Why is this important?  Because we are trying to embody the story of the Bible, not simply note or even memorize its propositional statements.  The lectionary of most Western liturgical churches is laid out so that the readings from the Old Testament, Psalms, Epistles and Gospels tell the story of the Bible once a year.  I believe that the more of the story we hear, the better our worldview and lifestyles will be shaped by the story of God.

“We will be spiritually safe in our use of the Bible if we follow a simple rule: Read it with a submissive attitude.  Read with a readiness to surrender all you are – all your plans, opinions, possessions, positions.  Study as intelligently as possible, with all available means, but never study merely to find the truth and especially not just to prove something wrong.  Subordinate your desire to find the truth to your desire to do it, to act it out” (Hearing God by Dallas Willard, p. 161)!

Thus our vision of the best way to read the Bible need not be of ourselves surrounded by a stack of Bible study tools – as helpful as they are.  (I use them all the time.)  Rather than a stack of books, maybe we should envision a stack of papers that contain plans, blueprints, strategies, structures and vows for embodying what we are reading.  For, as N.T. Wright says, “new life in the Spirit, in obedience to the lordship of Jesus Christ, should produce radical transformation of behavior in the present life, anticipating the life to come even though we know we shall never be complete and whole until then” (Surprised by Hope, p. 221).

Christians tend to read the Bible as a book of doctrines, with the occasional well-known story thrown in.  But in this way of reading Scripture we lose the context, a sense of our setting in history and God’s purpose for creating humans, Israel and the church.  When this is lost, missing too is the reason and motivation to work the words of Jesus into our lives… Thus reading the Bible is not merely about correct interpretation but also about continuously returning to it to find a way to live with it… I want to immerse myself in the stories because I want to learn to live in them; I want them to rub off on me so I care more for the sick, the abused and those living under tyranny.  The job of the Bible is not merely to give us an accurate notion of God, though it is the best place to look for such help.  The Bible’s most powerful role is to illumine the practices associated with being a follower of the God we find in the Bible.

© Todd Hunter, Giving Church Another Chance, Used by Permission, IVP

When interacting with Jesus, a stark reality often dawns on us. Jesus is like the working lights in a restaurant. Throughout the dinner hour, the lights are low, providing the atmosphere for quiet conversation in an out-of-the-way booth. But all night, food falls to the carpet: sourdough breadcrumbs, pasta sauce and pieces of lettuce. Though, by the end of the night, there is food everywhere, the low lights disguise this fact.

But when the last group has paid the bill, left the tip, put on their coats and pushed their way out the glass door, the bright working lights go on. Everything is exposed to the light so that the honest and diligent restaurateur can clean up for the next day.

Jesus had something like this in mind when he said to Nicodemus:

“This is the crisis we’re in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God. Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won’t come near it, faring a painful exposure. But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is.” (John 3:21)

It’s true, isn’t it? Why do we so often resonate with darkness and fear the light? Darkness is a place to hide, like Adam and Eve hiding from God in the Garden of Eden. In response, God called out: “Adam, where are you?” This question implies God has always wanted to be with and interact with his in-trouble and thus embarrassed, children. But since God is light, being around him brings out life into bright clearness. It takes guts – what the Bible call faith or belief – to trust, to have confidence that God will do good to us when we come into the light with sticky evidence on our lips and fingers, showing with certainty that we have been playing in the cookie jar God told us to stay away from.

Here is a thought from Dallas Willard about radiating the nature of God, which glows with powerful self-evident truth:

“The people to whom we minister and speak will not recall 99 percept of what we say to them, but they will never forget the kind of persons we are. This is certainly true of influential ministers in my own past. The quality of our souls will indelibly touch others for good or for ill. So we must never forget that the most important thing happening at any moment, in the midst of all our ministerial, is the kind of person we are becoming.”

When I read something like this, I immediately feel like I go a year without reading another sentence and just focus on the kind of person I am becoming. Focusing on that thought for a good while would enable us to repractice doxology in such a way that our actual lives would emit the goodness and glory of God.

© Todd Hunter, Giving Church Another Chance, Used by Permission, IVP

In the summer of 2008 I discovered and read Thrilled to Death by Archibald Hart. I was surprised to find within the context of his book a reasonable critique and challenge to the way many of us do church. ‘To my Christian readers, I would also like to add that modern worship styles and spiritual practices, when not balanced with contemplative or reflective practices, can also contribute to the hijacking of the brain’s pleasure system.’

Reading that quote for the first time, I had an epiphany. Now I know why I feel drawn to those quiet preludes in the local Episcopal church. I am like a person whose body is short on potassium and thus craves the relief a banana can bring, or a person craving vitamin D who feels the warmth of the sun on her neck and things, ‘Wow, I need to do this more often.’ Preludes and what they stand for – quiet, peace, centeredness and the like – are necessary ingredients to a healthy spiritual life. They are among the means – the vitamins – necessary for a life of centered peace.

Unfortunately, reflective times in corporate worship have not been a priority in most contemporary worship services, which are dominated by high stimulation designed to keep the attention of people who are often not otherwise interested in worship. Fortunately, though, there is a renaissance happening across the country that is bringing corporate forms of contemplative practices back into our churches.

Hart helps us create a well-rounded way of seeing all the constituent parts of our lives as a seamless and connected whole. In the midst of all the variety in our life, including work, family, social activities, hobbies and so forth, he teaches us we also need to balance our lives with private mediation and corporate worship. Hart recommends Christian meditation and times of quiet contemplation and concentration focusing on the presence of God. He says too many of us are addicted to extreme forms of stimulation, bored with the ordinary, and developing widespread cases of anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure from the typical events of life). Hart says we are being thrilled to death by our endless pursuit of pleasure, and that in so doing we are becoming incapable of experiencing the very pleasure we seek.

Hart says anhedonia is true of the church too. Contrary to more liturgical traditions, many evangelicals prefer a worship style that is full of intensity and is stimulation driven. They want an elevating fix at church. But, Hart says, “I need to point out that a stimulation-driven spirituality is not conducive to lowered stress and tension or deeper transformation. In fact, many seek a fix when they go to church precisely because they are so stressed out all week that they cannot stand any lowering of their arousal on the weekend. It just puts them into a post-adrenaline bad humor. Unfortunately, many churches don’t teach and allow for contemplative practices, so Christians aren’t integrating them into their life. A highly stressed lifestyle finds low arousal discomforting, so our evangelical mantra has become ‘Bring on the excitement, and I’ll go to church.’

Our overemphasis on stimulation and excitement may come from a desire to connect with our present culture. We who care about evangelism know that we catch fish on their terms, not ours. But this can be a genius bit of missiology or the road to compromise. All evangelism is contextual. The challenge for the church is to be simultaneously geared to our times while being anchored to the Rock, Jesus, and the narrative and trajectory of Scripture. Speaking only for myself, I have to admit that I have erred on the side of trying desperately to provide enough excitement to get people to come to church. I now regret that I may have been inadvertently working against my own passionately stated mission: to make followers of Jesus.

We need to find ways to authentically connect contemplative practices into a life of centered peace, which is a powerful form of salt, light and evangelism in our day.

From: Giving Church Another Chance – Chapter 2

© Todd Hunter, Giving Church Another Chance, Used by Permission, IVP