I steward Productive Pastor, a podcast and community of ministry leaders focused on how productivity and strategic ministry in the average church. I write about practical approaches to ministry productivity. I also write emails about church stability/development and my own theological musics in our current social moment.
St. Augustine and staying away from spiritual distraction | Chad Brooks
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Hey Friend, I’ve been reading St. Augustine's classic Confessions lately. I read these classics devotionally, and for this purpose, I like the updated language versions from Paraclete Press. If you haven’t read classic Christian writing, these are an approachable way to start. St. Augustine, outside of the Apostle Paul, probably did more for the theological development of Christianity than anyone else. His book Confessions is a spiritual autobiography in many ways. Raised by a devoted Christian mother, Augustine ran from faith and the church for most of his young life. In Confessions, he processes his own lamentations of his search for meaning. This passage from the section of life when he was 18-25 got me recently. In it, he is thinking through the myriad of ways we try to find wholeness in life. I’ll quote him directly. Do not be foolish, my soul, and do not deaden the ear of your heart with the tumult of your folly. And hear! The Word itself calls you to return to that place of rest where love is not abandoned if it does not first abandon itself. Behold, some things pass away that others may replace them, and so this lower universe is made complete in all its parts. "But do I ever depart?" asks the Word of God. Fix your dwelling there; trust whatsoever you have there, O my soul, for now you are worn out with deceits. Entrust to Truth whatever you have from the Truth, and you will lose nothing; and what is decayed in you will flourish again, and all your diseases will be healed. Your perishable [bodily] parts will be re-formed and renewed, and restored to you again. They will not drag you down to where they themselves are laid, but they will abide with you before God, who continues and abides forever.
Why then, O my soul, be perverse and follow your flesh? Let it turn and follow you instead. Whatever you feel through it is but a part of the whole. Feeling only the parts, you do not know the whole, yet you are delighted by them. But if the senses of the flesh had the capacity for comprehending the whole, and if they had not been justly restricted to parts of the whole, you would wish that all the parts would pass away, so that the whole might better please you. For what we speak, you hear by the same sense of the flesh, and you would not wish each syllable to remain. Rather you want them to fly away so that other syllables may follow and the whole be heard. And so it is ever: when anything is made up of different parts, all of which do not exist together, they would please you more if they could all be perceived at once than they do severally. But far better than these is he who made the whole. He is our God. He does not pass away, and there is no one to take his place.
Here is why I think St. Augustine’s analogy works so well. Wherever we are in the Christian life we are going to have these “partial” things (what St. Augustine calls syllables) floating around us. They will always tempt us to drive us out of focus of life with Jesus. This is the difference between discerning what is good and what is right. When we are new in our faith, we can name these things in a much more global sense. The typical forms of adjusting to the Christian life. Those big-picture issues folks make t-shirts about. But as we progress in our faith…or as the good Wesleyan I hope to be, as we grow in our sanctification, these distractions become more individualized. They might even morph over time. The wholeness we seek in Christ isn’t a sum of many parts. We can try to find this wholeness with a variety of hacks and attempts at goodness. We find wholeness in Jesus Christ by full submission and the realization we have to allow him to reform ALL of us. If I go back to the ones I can name from the last decade, they each might be different, but are the same root cause. • Dealing with the relationship between spiritual significance and secular importance. We might seem to be tangling with the same spiritual dimensions, but as we age as people and mature in our faith, the distractions might be changing. Paul does a good job talking about this sort of focus in 1st Corinthians 9:24-26 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. 25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26 Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. It would be easy to say spiritual distractions might be tiny things, but as St. Augustine tells us, they keep us from the whole. The big life that Christ offers us. The fullness of sanctification. We are offered this life through Jesus into the fullness not just of who God is, but of all he has offered us. So I’m thinking (and journaling) through these distractions this week. You might want to try it out as well. Chad |
Hey. I'm Chad Brooks.
I steward Productive Pastor, a podcast and community of ministry leaders focused on how productivity and strategic ministry in the average church. I write about practical approaches to ministry productivity. I also write emails about church stability/development and my own theological musics in our current social moment.
It’s been a long day. I left the house right after 9 to drive 2 hours. For a 1.5 hour meeting. Then 2 hours back home. (I did get to sneak in a great lunch with a long-time friend who is also in the ministry. That was a highlight of the day). I got home around 5:30 and then spent two hours wrangling the dog while prepping for dinner tomorrow night with a few friends. Made a chicken stock. Cut up all the veggies for a massive gumbo. Now I’m at my desk, and it’s time to do the evening office....
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