Discipleship as Counter-formation
This post is part of a Fall 2020 Training Series done with Community Group and ministry leaders at Holy Trinity Church Downtown. The purpose of this training was to dig deeper into our core values and cultivate a common theological vision across our ministries.
by Malissa Mackey
I remember being in middle school and having the awkward sex conversation with my mom. I remember her talking about the idea of “saving yourself for marriage.” And of course, being a good Christian girl and going to my share of retreats, I heard purity lectures and thought that God Himself was generally against sex unless it was for making babies with your husband.
So when questioned by adults in my life, I would nod my head and say, “Of course, I don’t believe in sex outside of marriage.” But, I very clearly remember thinking: “Well, we’ll see.” We’ll see what happens, maybe in college, when I have a boyfriend that I really love, and if we think we’re going to get married anyway, and he’s a good Christian guy—I mean “Who knows?” We’ll just see what happens.
How can this be? How was it that I could know morally, and intellectually, and maybe to some small degree, theologically, that sex outside of marriage was wrong, yet still harbor secret expectations that if the right situation presented itself, I could throw out mom’s advice, Sunday school, and health class on the spot? It’s pretty simple, really. It’s because most of my friends were having sex my freshman year of high school. Everything in culture, and the community I had surrounded myself with, persuaded me that that would make me happy. I actually thought I was showing restraint when I thought I might wait until college, or just before marriage!
I praise the Lord that I never found myself in a situation to have to make a ‘game-time decision” about something as serious as sex. More than that, I praise the Lord for the community I found in college that didn’t just tell me not to have sex before marriage, they showed me a whole different life. They showed me it was actually possible to deny myself and the things that might offer pleasure in the moment. And not only was it possible, it was actually the way that offered true, abundant, satisfying life.
The reality is that we can stuff our brains with a bunch of knowledge about why to do or not do something, but there are a lot of other factors at work shaping us, forming us to do the opposite. It’s why we know that we should exercise, and eat right, and get 8 hours of sleep, but instead we skip the gym, snack on junk food, and binge Netflix until 2:00 a.m. The author James K.A. Smith has written extensively on this. We have inherited a way of understanding education, and in the church what we think of as discipleship, as merely a cognitive activity. If we can just get enough knowledge and think the right things, we can live the right way. It’s the idea that we are primarily, as Smith calls it, “thinking-things,” or “brains on a stick.” As humans, made in the image of God, we know that we are far more complicated than that.
Scripture acknowledges it. We see it in the way Jesus interacts with people. When he bids Matthew and John to follow him he asks, “What are you seeking?” (John 1:38) and to the blind men, “What do you want?” (Luke 18:41) and to Peter he asks: “Do you love me?” (John 21:16). The things that we want, love, and desire are actually at our very core. Certainly intellectual knowledge and careful study is very important, but not to the exclusion of paying attention to what we desire. As Smith says, we are “loving-things,” “desiring-things,” and our behaviors and actions flow from what we long for deep down. These core desires are aimed at what we perceive to be “the good life”—where we will find joy and happiness and love. So the question must always be, “What do I see as the good life, and what are my desires aimed at?”
In my earlier story, my desires were aimed at being loved in a human relationship that was validated by sexual intimacy. I believed that’s where love, satisfaction, and fulfillment would be found. It’s what I assumed would validate that I was desirable and worth being loved. I doubt I could have articulated that, because it was simply the water I was swimming in as a teenager in our sex-saturated culture. I watched Beverly Hills 90210 and read Glamour Magazine that all told me what sex was for. Except that they didn’t have to tell me; they just immersed me in a story in which sex led to the “good life.”
I’m sure you recognize some version of that. Whether you fantasize about being the sports hero that’s the envy of your peers, or the person at the top of your field with money and power so as not have a care in the world, something is giving us a vision of the good life and everything around us, from advertising to our friends and family, is reinforcing that vision and forming us toward that end. I appreciate Smith’s image of our hearts as a compass, orienting us toward our vision of the good life and pulling us toward it even.
The good news in all of this is that Christian discipleship is a powerful counter-forming measure. Smith says,
Discipleship…is a way to curate your heart, to be attentive to and intentional about what you love.…Jesus’ command to follow him is a command to align our loves and longings with his-to want what God wants, to desire what God desires, to hunger and thirst after God and crave a world where he is all in all—a vision encapsulated by the shorthand “the kingdom of God.” (You Are What You Love, p 2)
I love this picture of discipleship—curating our hearts, aligning our loves to His, craving a world where he is all in all. A heart compass aimed at the Kingdom of God. This is actually the good life we long for. The culture is continually trying to form us to a vision of the good life that’s fulfilled through money, sex, and power. Christian discipleship must counter-form us by showing that it is actually being poor in spirit, sacrificial in giving, and a servant in our leadership that leads to the good life now, and will be fully revealed as such when Jesus returns.
We can’t think our way into living that different story. We need to be saturated in liturgies and engaged with a community that shows us a different story that molds our hearts and aims our loves. How can we do this? What does it take to push back on the powerful forces at work around us? I want to suggest three things we can do as the church:
Rehearse the story in corporate worship. Scripture tells us the true story of the world. God has revealed to us the beginning, middle, and end of the story, climaxing in Jesus Christ. It is imperative that we receive our understanding of the good life, from the author and source of life itself. For our own discipleship, and as we disciples others, we must be continually immersed in the grand meta-narrative of Scripture, from Creation to Restoration, from the Fall to Redemption in Christ. It’s how we understand who we are and where we are going.
Reading and memorizing Scripture is certainly one way to do that, but there is no space comparable to the gathered church to help show us this story and to help shape us into people who desire and live for the Kingdom of God. The worship service itself—from the call to worship that reminds us that God initiates with us, to the benediction that sends us out to love and serve the world, and everything in between—immerses us in the true story of the world every Sunday morning.
We have to understand that church is not just a place where we go to sing together and hear a message about Jesus and how to live, but it’s a community that’s meant to shape us into a people who live out an alternative story and love a beautiful Christ.
Show and tell the story in community. As I said earlier, the community of Christians I met in college showed me a better story than the one I saw on TV or read in magazines. A handful of women who were a few years older, lived in a house and covenanted with one another around how they wanted to live. I watched how they interacted with the opposite sex, what they did with their free time, and how they supported one another. They knew Scripture, talked about it, woke up early to read it, and studied it with colored pencils and Greek dictionaries. They told stories of talking about Jesus in class and with unbelieving family members. And they shared vulnerably, their struggles with things like dating and sexual purity. And I soaked it in. And I wanted to be like them. More than any book I read or lecture I heard those years in college, I was shaped by this community of Christ-followers. I was counter-formed in radical ways because I had a new picture of what it meant to press into the good life that was upheld and embodied by these women.
That is what we get to do in any of the communities in which we are a part. The only way I can hold on to the countercultural truth that being a 40-something-year-old virgin is not something to laugh at, but something to celebrate, is that I live in a community that believes this is true. I am grateful for the men and women in my life who push me, encourage me, remind me, and pray for me to hold on to the truth that obedience to Christ, and hope in the Coming Kingdom as a single woman, is far greater than giving into momentary pleasures of the flesh.
We need to learn to celebrate with one another when we see signs of the Kingdom breaking forth in our lives, when we see growth in living into the true story of the world. We need to do much more to normalize conversations about our struggles to believe what the gospel says more than what the culture tells us. We need to make space for confession, repentance, and the extension of Christ’s forgiveness to one another. And we need to learn how to encourage one another, not with platitudes or license for sinful behavior, but by pointing each other to the true story of the world—the victory of Christ through suffering and the hope of the new heavens and earth.
Engage in spiritual disciplines personally and corporately. Lastly, as we seek to engage in rhythms of counter-formation, we can look to disciplines in which the ancient and modern church have taken part for centuries. Things like Scripture memorization, kneeling prayer, fasting, and practicing sabbath rest are incredible paths of embodied counter-formation.
We need to think specifically about how we are being shaped by the culture and then intentionally steep ourselves in practices of counter-formation. Fasting from things like our cell phones, video games, or social media quickly shows us something concrete and powerful about where our love has been aimed, as we recognize our need for the Spirit’s power in order to go without. We can begin to see that even seemingly benign habits, like immediately putting on headphones when we get on the train for our morning commute, are liturgies that are forming us into people who are unaware of, and numb to, the needs of our neighbor. I cannot recommend Justin Whitmel Earley’s book, The Common Rule, enough as an incredibly helpful guide to cultivating habits that shape us toward the Kingdom of God.
We will not be counter-formed if these things simply become a checklist to earn our righteousness or satisfy our conscience. Engaging in liturgies and forming habits is best done in community, where there is encouragement to keep going and extensions of grace when we fail. It’s in community that we remind one another why we do these things and that the Christian life is not just about “me and Jesus.” It’s in community that we help each other see the ways that we are being conformed to our culture and find help and accountability in being counter-formed.
We long to be men and women with our hearts aimed toward the telos of the Coming Kingdom. To do so, we must recognize that rightly calibrated hearts don’t just happen and that simply “knowing” the right things won’t form us into mature disciples, able to withstand the pressures of culture’s shaping power. It’s my prayer that as followers of Christ, we would embody the true story of the world, and share vulnerably with those around us—helping form each person in our sphere of influence into more and more of Christ’s likeness. And together reflecting a more beautiful, more satisfying, and more compelling vision of the good life found in Jesus Christ to the city and to the world around us.
Malissa Mackey has been on staff with the ministry Cru for 23 years and has served with the HTC|DT Central Team since 2017. She is the director of Faith & Work Chicago.