A Little Biography, Part II

In Colorado, our family – Jeff’s brothers and their wives and kids – attended a mega-church. It was mega in every possible way, from the big-box-store-sized sanctuary to the personality of the senior pastor. It had a big choir and a rock band with big speakers. It had big screens above the big stage and a big worship service that involved a good deal of dancing in the aisles and occasional speaking in tongues. The church was charismatic, non-denominational, Bible-believing, Holy Spirit-welcoming, and growing like crazy. The energy of the place was just unbelievable. I’m a do-er by nature, and here there was lots and lots to do. Cell groups on topics from mountain biking to spiritual warfare abounded and soon enough I was singing in the big choir and then teaching a women’s Bible study and a children’s Sunday school class.

The truly wonderful Bible study was called “Five Aspects of Woman” and focused on Biblical femininity. It’s not Orthodox, but it is certainly orthodox in its understanding of Scripture and the deep truths that God reveals about women. I loved every minute of the time I spent with the women who went through the study with me. And while looking for more to read on Biblical femininity, I stumbled on Frederica Mathewes-Green’s “Gender”.
What a read! I packed it for a business trip, along with a murder mystery for backup, in case it turned out to be boring. I never got to that murder. Instead, I sat on a plane alternately laughing out loud and sobbing (not so out-loud, I hope) at the life Frederica relates. It was just the kind of writing that hooks me. So I picked up the next one of her books that I could find – “The Illumined Heart” – and found that it synced perfectly with the Five Aspects study.

“The Illumined Heart” asks “What did ancient Christians understand about being transformed by Christ?” The ancient word for that complete transformation is “theosis”, and some form of this idea appears in Christian practice of all sorts. Transformation is what we were looking for in our little Bible study. And it was what drove the church we were all in. We worked hard to be open to the moving of the Spirit, to understand Scripture deeply, to fast, to pray intently, to press into God; we wanted to be more like God – to have more of God -- to be like Jesus. And lo and behold, ancient Christians had settled on a few keys that unlocked the door to that transformation.

Prayer was to be a deeply embedded discipline, and the Jesus Prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.") rightly practiced could train the mind and heart. Fasting was supposed to be a way of life, so that at each meal believers were mindful of the work of God in the earth and adjusted their eating (eschewing certain foods at certain meals) accordingly. Repentance was an absolutely necessary condition of the Christian life, and it had to become a habit of any Christian seeking transformation.

Our mega-church practice looked like a pale imitation of that ancient practice. It was like we knew in our hearts that there was a path that could take us deeper into God, but we just weren’t exactly sure where it was. So we just blazed a new path – one based on a map that we had to work out on our own. We worked really, really hard at chopping our way through the jungle. But we didn’t feel any particular need to call up ancient wisdom (except for those cell groups that were blowing the shofar on Friday nights), and we declared that each one of us could interpret Scripture in a fully truth-revealing way all on our own. But in practice, we listened to our leadership, and hoped they could teach us something, well, transformative.

We fasted hard (no food, 3 days at a time!), but the fasting was all self-defined and self-initiated. It was unconnected to any coherent, proven strategy to “draw near to God”. We prayed a lot – in all-night sessions at times. But Paul’s “pray without ceasing” direction seemed basically impossible. We repented occasionally, but we weren’t supposed to beat ourselves up too much over our completely human failings, and too much repentance indicated a lack of understanding of the all-accepting love of God.

So the transformation we so desperately wanted was very hard to see, at least for me. I wanted to know more about that Ancient Path.