Young, Rested, Reformed

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In 2012 I was a student at ReTrain. 21 years old, I’d just graduated from Arizona State University (#1 in Innovation!) and was simultaneously enrolling at Phoenix Seminary (because I live in Phoenix). I wanted to be a pastor, but more than that, I wanted to be a preacher and a church planter.

ReTrain, also known as, The Resurgence Training Center was a one-year, intensive, cohort-based program designed to train leaders practically and theologically. It was hosted at Mars Hill Church and accredited by Reformed Theological Seminary. It was the Very Cool place to be (at least in my eyes) if you were young, restless, and reformed and an aspiring Acts 29 church planter.

We all made our pilgrimage to Seattle for the first day of classes where we were called to worship by Dustin Kensrue, who led us in singing “My Lord I Did Not Choose You.” Arminians and pansies beware.

At Phoenix Seminary we were students, but at ReTrain we were Tribesman. All 200 of us. I was all in.

We were taught by an incredible lineup: discipleship by Bill Clem, preaching by Brian Chappell, hermeneutics by Justin Holcomb, biblical theology by Ray Ortlund, and counseling by Ed Welch. My cohort mentor was a sage and a saint: Dave Kraft.

It didn’t take long to experience cracks in the armor, though. The “restless” in young, restless, and reformed wasn’t lurking far beneath the surface. We were told to “sleep like a Calvinist, but work like an Arminian” and many, it seemed, took that to heart.

One man’s story was held up as an example. He was working 40 hours a week at a bank and was volunteering an additional 40 hours a week at the church. He was also in our ReTrain class. His wife and kids missed him and he’d gotten shingles multiple times. One of the pastors at Mars Hill pointed him out: “This man understands the Kingdom of God. He knows what is at stake here. There are hills we must take or people will go to Hell.”

Another pastor on staff at Mars Hill shared how he never worked less than 60 hours a week (and because when he was in the marketplace he worked 70 hours a week it felt like vacation). Another pastor on staff shared about how he worked so much that the church hired a nanny to help his wife with the kids because he wasn’t as available as she wanted him to be.

After a lecture from a Mars Hill staffer about how to do ministry sustainably, Dave Kraft pulled a few of us aside and said, “that advice wasn’t bad, but be careful: do as he said, but never do as he does and, please, if you love your families do not work here.” I felt like the Elder of Elders in my midst gave me, as a mere 21 year old, permission to break from the herd. I texted a few of my fellow pastors at my home church in Tempe: “if I ever am considering taking a job out here, please talk me out of it or punch me in the face.”

Back in Phoenix, I was receiving different messaging than I heard in Seattle. My professors John DelHousay and Ted Wueste were forming the Spiritual Formation Society of AZ and encouraging us to learn from the Desert Fathers and Adele Calhoune. John Meade was encouraging us to read Ordinary by Horton instead of Radical by Platt. Wayne Grudem was rebuking students for violating the Sabbath in order to do their homework. My pastor from high school, Michael Parker, was annoyingly more interested in how my marriage was doing than in how my ministry was going.

I was drawn to the triumphalistic zeal of The Resurgence. Go big or go home. But I was also simultaneously drawn to what Paul Miller calls the “lowness and slowness” of life with Jesus. Seek not great things for yourself. I couldn’t make sense of or resolve the tension. That was until I read Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition by Craig Bartholomew.

The last chapter of the book is aptly titled “The Need for Spiritual Formation” and it’s the shortest chapter, by far, in the work. He highlights the general lack of emphasis on the inner life in the neocalvinist traditions. He writes, 

“The power of the Kuyperian vision is that it easily becomes cerebral in an unhelpful way. So too, it sometimes manifests as a kind of messianic activism and triumphalism…the problem is that neither the Reformed nor the evangelical nor the Kuyperian tradition has deep resources for the ongoing practice of prayer. I have in mind the sort of practices that over years profoundly form the individual into the likeness of Christ.”

He later ads:

“Unformed persons do immense damage… shouting about sovereignty and grace while failing to manifest grace and humility in their lives.”

Vision and mission are compelling, energizing, and clarifying. The sense of urgency and significance is attractive, especially to young men. And, that aspect of the YRR energy is simply biblical: “How are they to hear without someone preaching and how are they to preach unless they are sent?”

The other movement I was drawn to at the time was CrossFit. CrossFit’s definition of fitness is work capacity across broad time and modal domains. My first CrossFit “box” was led by an Army Ranger. Our hands bled and our backs ached after every class. We were doing something not like those losers on elliptical machines at the highly-commercialized Globo Gyms with mirrors.

The spirit of exceptionalism, of elitism, is what the two cultures had in common. The seeker sensitive churches and the seeker sensitive gyms weren’t like us; Acts 29 was the Navy Seals of Pastors. Thank God I’m Not Like Other Pastors and Thank God I’m Not Like The Sheep at LA Fitness. Do you want to be something? Then you must do something.

In 2014 I met with another local pastor named Riccardo. He listened to me complain about my home church for about 15 minutes before he interrupted me and told me I had “Young Man’s Disease”: overestimation of self, lots of “you” and not enough “we” in my preaching. Lack of humility. Incongruence with the Spirit of Christ.

My triumphalist self accepted his diagnosis as simply another obstacle I’d have to overcome. “How do I cure it?” I asked, “what tips or strategies do you have?” He laughed and answered, “You don’t cure it. This isn’t a hill to take. You just have to believe that at this point in your life you’re a liability and act accordingly. At some point you’ll come to the end of yourself.” I didn’t take it to heart.

I asked another mentor what I could do. He said Humility by Andrew Murray was pretty good. So I read it and memorized Philippians 2 that week. I reported back to him at the end of the week. He laughed. “It didn’t work,” he said.

Frustrated and increasingly living into the “restless” in YRR, I was working 60 hour weeks despite vowing to be different from what I’d seen at ReTrain. Another mentor at Phoenix, Darryl DelHousaye, told me I was being stupid and self-important for working that much.

What was I supposed to do? Stop caring about the lost? Make fewer disciples? Equip the saints less? Counsel and coach fewer college students? Become a lame-duck hireling pastor who just worked a gig and then went home at 5pm as though the church was a bank?

A group of leaders in my city I’d connected to through the Surge Network were reading Spirit of the Disciplines by Willard. “Fantastic,” I thought “another way to take control of my inner life.” “Discipline” is how you bench 300 pounds and run a six minute mile. Discipline and ambition were allies.

That was until I got to chapter nine in Willard’s book. He has two lists of the disciplines: Disciplines of Engagement and Disciplines of Abstinence. In my mind, abstinence was what you did before marriage and a fancy way of talking about ditching class in high school. His list had chastity (the only one I was familiar with on purpose), solitude, silence, fasting, frugality (the one I was familiar with by necessity), secrecy, and sacrifice.

So, I thought I’d experiment with the discipline of secrecy where “we abstain from causing our good deeds and qualities to be known.” I invited a homeless man to lunch and we talked for 90 minutes about his life, history, and beliefs. That was easy; I was good at doing things. Then came the hard part: tell nobody about it (I guess, until this essay ten years later). It eroded at my soul like rust on a bumper. Every person I saw for months I wanted, more than anything else, to tell them about what I had done. It sat just beneath the surface in every conversation like I was being haunted by a ghost only I could see. I said less in conversations and meetings than ever before as I sought to keep at bay the desire to share about myself. The single, simple practice of secrecy was a mirror to me; I had not been doing great things in purity for God. I had been doing them 50% for God and 50% as a means of justifying myself before men.

Sometimes you don’t know you’re anemic until you faint or that you’re spiritually anemic until you suffer. The difficulty of life is often the Lord taking us into “the wilderness” to learn to trust in him. The disciplines of abstinence are a way of artificially taking yourself into the wilderness. Do you want to be something? Perhaps, you must not do something.

Even recently, the disciplines of solitude and silence elude and torture me. Last year I did a five day fasting and silence retreat. The physical hunger subsided after 36 hours; the solitude tore me apart. My five day retreat turned into a three day retreat and I came home early.

This brings me to what Trevin Wax has called the “fourth wave” of evangelicalism: spiritual formation. Why the renewed emphasis? Why does a Rule of Life have a coolness factor among those with whom ten years ago it would have been dismissed as soft, monastic withdrawal?

First, in Reformed circles, there’s been an overemphasis on what the clergy does. I agree with Ian Harber that the primary context for Spiritual formation is the local church. Preaching, sacraments, and church discipline inhabited by and led by the Spirit of God are ground zero for the people of God. But, when this is emphasized to the exclusion of the priesthood of all believers, you’ll not get a Sunday-Centric Christian life, but a Sunday-Only Christian life.

Second, many of those who promote practices like the Rule of Life overcorrect the clergy-centric perspective on formation end up disparaging the Sunday gathering as ineffective; minimizing preaching and neglecting the sacraments. It’s not a coincidence that the Lord’s Supper, baptism, and sitting under preaching are close to absent from Willard’s work, as they are in Practicing The Way. So much so, some have claimed, that in order to practice some of what folks like John Mark Comer are advocating, “you will need to reject much of what you believe and practice in order to embrace new beliefs, new priorities, new convictions.” Is that true?

That some who promote the disciplines or a Rule of Life are not thoroughly Reformed can be disappointing, but shouldn’t be surprising. Perhaps, the restlessness that is so common in our tradition is the result of a real deficiency in our tradition? Do we have the stomach to entertain that possibility? For the young, restless, and reformed, it's easy to ascribe the restlessness to youthfulness, but perhaps it also stems from reformedness. Perhaps “best practice theft” would serve us well. People can be seriously wrong about important things and be helpful guides on other important things. Bartholomew comments on this dynamic:

"Sometimes in the name of sphere sovereignty Kuyperians have delegated spirituality to the church [leadership] while [the congregation] focuses on the tasks of the other spheres."

No pastor wants the congregants to delegate the whole of their spiritual wellbeing to the church as organization. Recovering the church as organism without the neglect of it as organization has been a theme in modern church history. It’s been said that the Reformation gave the people their Bibles back (instead of leaving them in the hands of the professional preachers) and the missional movement gave the people their mission back (instead of leaving it in the hands of professional missionaries). Perhaps it’s simply the case that the spiritual formation movement is giving people agency in their piety back.

To walk the fine line here is not difficult. Pastors rightly dividing the word and administering the sacraments matter for the health and wellbeing of the church. Congregants taking responsibility for their own spiritual growth matters for the health and wellbeing of the church.

If we “rule of life” ourselves to the neglect of robust engagement with the local church, we will end up with a baptized version of the hyper-focus on individuality and a “bespoke” lifestyle that is already popular with Americans. If we dismiss the need for personalized, situation-dependent reflection on how to build a life with God, we’ll end up with either a clergy-centric spirituality that nobody wants or a one-size-fits-all yolk that won’t serve the actual needs of persons. Mothers of toddlers and teens need something different than single, young professionals. Retired people need something different than a pastor in his 20s.

At this point, ten years after having “discovered” Willard and the disciplines of abstinence for myself, I’m more at ease in my walk with Jesus than I’ve ever been. And it isn’t because I “really get the gospel of grace” more than I did before; it’s because I’ve met with the giver of grace in practices. Julie Canlis observed the tendency of the Augustinian tribe to depersonalize the Spirit into “grace.” I was there, for sure. I still tend to be there. I’m still young and still reformed, but, my restlessness is turning into restedness precisely because I’ve practiced a personalized form of a Rule of Life for a number of years.