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The Call to Discipline
By Anthony B. Robinson

THE CHALLENGE OF THE DISCIPLINES OF FAITH

Talking recently with my oldest son, a college student, about an oil painting class he had just completed, I asked him how the class had been. "Good," he replied, and yet his response was subdued. Something was left unsaid. I pressed him a bit. He said he had realized during the class, his first applied arts class at the college level, that he was "only a beginner" and that his previous artistic work had "not been very disciplined."

My son had done art work and projects throughout elementary and secondary school, much of it quite interesting and well-recognized. He may even have thought of himself as an "artist." In this class, however, he learned that he was only a beginner and that his work as an artist to this point had not been disciplined-a difficult but useful learning. He discovered that he had not yet learned or mastered basic skills and techniques essential to the art of painting.

This experience may also suggest something of the challenge of speaking of disciplines of faith in society and in the church. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a discipline is "training that is expected to produce a specified character or pattern of behavior." My hunch is there is a parallel between my son's oil painting experience and being a Christian today. Many people in our society and in our churches do not think of being Christian as a discipline, something that requires particular training, skills, or focus. Stanley Hauerwas observes that "we have underwritten a voluntaristic conception of Christian faith, which presup-

Anthony B. Robinson is the pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Seattle, Washington. This article is adapted from an essay published by the Board of Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ.

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poses that one can become a Christian without training." ¹ in part, this reflects an understanding of Christian faith as something almost exclusively individual and personal. Each person's experience and preferences become both primary source and authority in matters of faith.

To speak of "disciplines of faith" is to say there are particular skills and practices that constitute being a Christian and that acquiring these will ask at least as much of us as acquiring the skills of an art form, a craft, or an athletic endeavor. This may be a different and challenging perspective. Not only is Christian faith quite commonly thought of as individual and personal, but the church today seems reluctant or unwilling to mention discipline, frequently placing its greatest stress on acceptance, affirmation, and caring. Often for good reason, the church announces "all are welcome here," "you are accepted," and "this church is open to all." Explicitly or implicitly, the message is that you will not be asked to affirm or to do anything that will make you uncomfortable. ² Such a stance may be understandable as a reaction to the perceived rigidities of fundamentalism, but it makes the development of disciplines of faith especially challenging, if not impossible.

Another possible objection to disciplines of faith, this one more theological, is that this is a new form of works righteousness, a wav of working oneself into God's good graces. Protestants, especially, have taken a stand on the rock of the Reformers' faith: "By grace we are saved, and not by works." It is by grace that we are saved, but if God's grace results in no discernible response, no changed life, then it is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace." What we are talking about is "sanctification" or the continuing action of the Holy Spirit to bring about holy lives. We have allowed to go slack the creative tension between justification ("by grace you are a child of God") and sanctification ("therefore, be who you are").

TO LEARN A CRAFT

I have been influenced on this theme by observing a number of very disciplined groups, particularly a karate school and a Tai-Chi group that practiced on the grounds of the church I once served in Honolulu. As I went about my other duties, I watched their rituals of bowing as they entered or left their school, their carefully enacted postures, the words or sounds uttered at key moments, and the relationship the pupils had to their teacher. Theirs was an exacting discipline, one that demanded focus and rigorous effort. They were participating in training that was expected to produce a specified character (an integration of mind and body, and self-control) or patterns of behavior (a set of movements or postures to

¹ Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church is to Behave if Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), p. 98.
² In this connection, one recalls the scene in the movie "A League of Their Own," in which a player about to leave the team and the game says to her manager, "It's just got too hard." He answers, "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard everyone would do it. It's the hard that makes it great."

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enable agility, flexibility, and the capacity for self-defense). As I watched people of various ages and abilities in the karate school go through their paces, it occurred to me that our society is full of such strivers (rock climbers, quitters, cello players, computer networkers, long distance runners, rowers, soft-ball players). Could it be that there is a hunger for disciplines, for that which asks much of us, for that which challenges us and confers on us a sense of identity and belonging as we become accomplished in practice? Could it be that one factor sapping the strength of mainline churches is a reluctance to offer a meaningful call to discipline?

If we wish to understand disciplines of faith, we will be helped by looking at crafts, art-forms, and athletic endeavors. As analogies to Christian faith and practice, all of these have their limits. Few claim to offer a world-view, although some seem to function that way. ³ Few, if any, have a theistic basis. Yet, by considering a karate school or an oil painting class or baseball or ballet, we may see some of the basic elements of a discipline.

What does it mean to learn a craft, an art form, or a sport? There are at least five common elements: a set of skills or practices, a language, a history, a master teacher, and a community of those committed to the

"Worship is a kind of weekly dress rehearsal where we take our parts as sons and daughters of God. "

practice. In oil painting, one must learn how to hold a brush, and in baseball how to hold the bat. In karate, it is necessary to learn how to stand and how to hold one's body so that weight is centered. Each of these is a skill. Through instruction and practice, a certain level of proficency is attained. Each of these endeavors involves not only a number of particular skills, but a language specific to it. Different postures and movements in karate have different names. A baseball player must learn what is meant by "sacrifice" and "fielder's choice," by "an inside-out swing" and "good arm extension." Language is one element of a larger history or tradition. One learns the lore of a sport, something about the origins and intentions of karate, or about past masters of painting, or the memorable games and players that define the sport of baseball. Emphasis on tradition communicates to neophytes that they are entering into something with a history that preceded them and will continue after them, something that transcends them as individuals.

Crucial to the acquisition of skills, language, and tradition is a master craftsperson or teacher. For students of karate this is their sensei who was

³ But maybe they do provide a world-view. A friend reported spotting a t-shirt with the slogan, "Baseball is life. The rest is details."

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honored with a bow whenever one entered or left the place of instruction. Baseball has its coaches, oil painting its master painters. To learn any of these forms, it is necessary to accept the guidance of a teacher.

A final element of learning a craft, art form, or sport is a community of present and past practioners who share a devotion to the endeavor and an idea of what constitutes excellence in it. For the painter, this may be the community of artists and art critics, along with some portion of the art-buying public. It may be the karate school gathered to watch the match of a beginning student. A community provides support by its appreciation of current and beginning practitioners. It provides accountability by rendering judgments as to who has attained a degree of excellence in the practice.

When I returned to the church after some years of absence, it was to a small, urban, and historically African American congregation. As I look back on that formative experience, each of the five elements was present, although I was not particularly aware of it at the time. I was learning a certain set of skills-how to read the Bible, how to participate in liturgy, how to bear witness as a participant in a ministry of the church at a city jail. I was hearing a language. "These people talk about Jesus, and all that, and they seem 'Lo mean it," I exclaimed to my wife one day, I heard the language of Christian faith both in formal settings of worship and in informal conversation. There was also a larger history and tradition, both a denominational one (in this case Presbyterian) and that of the wider Christian church. There were master teachers, although none of them would have claimed such status for themselves. Some, the pastor and church musician, were formally designated by the congregation as teachers. Others-Shirley, Rosalee, Green, Maxie, and Ernie-were not formally designated but were, nonetheless, acknowledged in that congregation as, in some sense, master teachers and role models. The congregation itself was a community devoted to the endeavor of being disciples of the master, Jesus, and with some notion of what excellence in that endeavor meant.

This congregation and the years I spent in it began to form me as an adult Christian. I am sure that something similar goes on in many other congregations. My hunch is that, in a society where Christian faith is one option among many, this is the primary work of all congregations. Reflection on disciplines of faith from this perspective may lead us to see that the disciplines are already present among us, that the "word is very near you" (Deut. 30:14) hidden in the daily life of congregations. Their presence may be vestigial. They need development. We need to reframe our thinking about the life of congregations and to be more intentional about the elements that are involved in disciplines, as evidenced in crafts, arts, and sports. It may also be necessary to find the way to say graciously on occasion, or to be prepared to hear, "You are only a beginner at this."

THE PURPOSE OF THE DISCIPLINES OF FAITH

What is the goal or purpose of the disciplines of faith for the church and for Christians? What are we trying to form or produce? If a discipline

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is training expected to produce a specified character or pattern of behavior, what is the character or pattern we seek? What is the goal or aim? What is the telos? It is necessary to have some, at least provisional, understanding of what we are trying to accomplish if we are to discuss disciplines of faith. In his essay, "How We Lay Bricks and Make Disciples," Stanley Hauerwas suggests that "worship, at least for Christians, is the activity to which all our skills are ordered ." ⁴ The telos or goal of the disciplines of faith is the worship of the God of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Jesus.

"Worship," as I am using it here, has two meanings, one quite specific, another more general. The specific meaning is the formal, structured action of Christian adoration. The goal is to worship, to be in the presence of God, to be addressed by and to respond to the living God. There is no discipline, of course, that will guarantee this. No human activity controls the living God. God's presence is revealed to us, not manipulated by us. Yet, there are practices that put us in the right place at the right time for this to happen. To carry forward the analogy to athletics, practice of good technique does not guarantee success, but it does put one in a position to experience what athletes call "being in the zone." We may want to say that no particular skills are necessary to worship, but such a view probably says more about us than it does about worship. To worship God well does require a particular set of skills, a language, a tradition, teachers, and a community of those devoted to the practice.

If in the formal, structured worship of the church we remember ourselves as persons who live before and always in the presence of a gracious God, the more general goal of disciplines of faith is to live all of life in this way. The broader goal is to live as "God-worshippers." It is to live centered lives, God-centered lives, in order that all of life may be a sacred dance and a sacrament.

Some have spoken of the structured action of worship in the church as rehearsal. That is, in worship we rehearse who we are and how we are to live as people of faith. It is a kind of weekly dress rehearsal where we take our parts as sons and daughters of God, as brothers and sisters of one another, as the holy church-light to the nations and salt to the earth. Worship is rehearsal for everything that follows, Having practiced in worship, we live out our identity and vision in the world. "We practice the patterns of our life together before God, rehearsing them until they become second nature to US." ⁵

TEN DISCIPLINES OF CHRISTIAN FAITH

If this is the goal of the disciplines of faith, can we also look to the pattern of worship for a set of disciplines or practices or skills? The following brief descriptions of ten disciplines is drawn from the pattern of worship. Others may well come up with different sets of disciplines. This one is an attempt to be evocative, not definitive. But as worship is both the

⁴ Hauerwas, Stanley, After Christendom, p. 108.
⁵ Taylor, Barbara Brown, The Preaching Life (Cambridge: Cowley, 1993), p. 64.

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unique thing the church does and is the part of church life in which most people participate, it may be useful to think of worship as a series of disciplines or practices of faith and, in this sense, not unlike karate or baseball or ballet. We learn the postures of praise, confession, waiting on God, offering, reconciliation, sacrament, and blessing in order to dance the sacred dance all our days.

(1) The Discipline of Sabbath Keeping. At one time, Sabbath observance had a decidedly legalistic quality. "The Sabbath" meant a list of forbidden activities, sanctioned in some parts of the country by "blue laws." This is gone now, replaced by a seven day week, twenty-four hour days of commerce, consumerism, and human activity. Such a change in society affords the church the opportunity to recover and redefine Sabbath.

To keep Sabbath, to observe a day a week for worship and rest, is to be reminded that we have not created the world ourselves nor does the world depend on our activity for its maintenance or survival. Keeping Sabbath involves us in a logic different than the predominate logic of control, manipulation, and activism. Sabbath invites us to participate in a logic of reflection, rest, and receptivity.

(2) The Discipline of Praise. Worship begins by praising an Other, by praising God. Praise of God may take many forms (prayer, hymn. anthem,

"Over time, prayer that may have been 'give me, give me' may gradually become 'make me, make me. ' "

the arrangement of flowers, dance). but , whatever its form, praise challenges one's natural self-centeredness and reminds one that reality and truth lie far beyond, even as they are at work within. The praise of God invites one to cease frequent and restless preoccupation with needs and concerns and to attend to what makes life good and to the generosity one has experienced.

(3) The Discipline of Confession. At its heart, sin is the centering of life around ourselves. It is acting or thinking as if we are the center of the universe and, thus, taking ourselves far too seriously. Or in a different perspective, sin may be taking another person, power, or a menacing possibility far more seriously than it deserves, more seriously than the love and mercy of God. Having rediscovered in our praise that God is God, in confession we acknowledge, as individuals and as the church, that we have forgotten who God is, and who, by the grace of God, we are. The practice of confession teaches us to recognize that we have a part in the evil in the world, and that we too stand in need of mercy and forgiveness.

(4) The Discipline of Forgiveness. Often when we think about forgiveness, we begin by considering those we can possibly forgive. The discipline of forgiveness in worship leads to this but does not start there. It begins by teaching us to receive forgiveness. If confession allows us to recognize our

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sin, guilt, and distortion, forgiveness sets us free from this. "There is more mercy in God than sin in us," we boldly declare as we announce the forgiveness of God. There is new life, new life that is not dependent on our capacities alone, but is given by God.

(5) The Discipline of Reconciliation. Several formats for reconciliation are described in the Gospels. One speaks of the victim going to the offender (Matthew 18:15-20) to take up the matter. Another speaks of making peace before offering your gift at the altar (Matthew 5:23). For many congregations, some form of the latter is structured into worship as the "greeting of peace."

Some people resist "the peace," believing that it trivializes worship, that it turns it into a time of chatter, or as one man in my congregation described it, "the clutch and grab." While they may have a point, it is also possible that our resistance is rooted more deeply, that we may rather keep things between God and us and not actually turn to a real human being to reconcile or be reconciled. Often in worship, the person nearest me is a member of my family or of the church staff. The problem is not that this is trivial, but that reconciliation is all too often exactly what is needed.

(6) The Discipline of Listening for the Word of God. Frequently people think of listening as essentially a passive activity, one that requires little of us. That is both unfortunate and untrue. Listening requires a great deal. In one sense, all of worship is listening for God, but, in two particular ways, Christians are taught to listen for God-in the reading of the Scriptures and in the preaching of the sermon.

Both the Scripture reading and the sermon ask of us a certain expectancy and openness, a trust that through these ancient stories and human attempts to listen to them and interpret them in our time, God will speak to us. That is not to say that every word of the Scripture reading or sermon is to be accepted at face value. The practice of listening for the Word of God does not require us to be robots. Quite the contrary, it asks of us the full engagement of our humanity and our free response.

(7) The Discipline of Prayer. Prayer is of many kinds and takes even more forms. In a sense, all of the above disciplines are forms of prayer, requiring a prayerful orientation.

Prayers of intercession invite us to be priests for our neighbors, neighbors who are as well known to us as our dearest friends, and neighbors whom we do not know at all. We are called to lift up the whole world in prayer to a God who is not a tribal deity, to a God "whose ways are not our ways, whose thoughts are not our thoughts" (Isaiah 55). Prayers of petition, prayer for ourselves, like the prayers of intercession, are to be shaped and disciplined by the sermon and Scripture. Over time, prayer that may have been "give me, give me," may be transformed. Our prayer may gradually become "make me, make me. " ⁶

⁶ William H. Willimon, With Glad and Generous Hearts: A Personal Look at Sunday Worship (Nashville: Abington, 1986), p. 123.

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(8) The Discipline of Offering. One of the clear, specific, and perhaps even counter-cultural disciplines to which the church has invited us is significant giving. Without the encouragement of this community and its Lord, it is doubtful that we would have formed a pattern of giving away a significant percentage of our income. In a culture of material affluence, one of the considerable ironies is the steady drumbeat of a chorus of anxiety and greed: "not enough, not enough." We may learn to recognize this as the tempter's voice and to discover that one of the ways we win some measure of victory over these fears is, paradoxically, by giving wealth away. We may also come to see our resources in a different perspective as we practice this discipline.

(9) The Discipline of Sacrament. What are the skills of faith the practice of sacrament would form? Something as mysterious as the sacraments cannot be whittled down to a list, but, perhaps, one of the skills the sacraments would teach us is to look for the holy hidden in ordinary places and in everyday things. After all, the stuff of the sacraments are ordinary, material things: bread, water, and wine. If God can touch us and feed us through these things, perhaps there is no line of demarcation between the secular and the sacred. Over time, life itself may become to us a sacrament.

(10) The Discipline of Bearing Witness. As long ago as the beginning of Abraham and Sarah's journey, this unlikely pair was blessed by God so that they could be a blessing to all the families of the earth (Genesis 12). So we, who have been blessed by the Word, by the community, by all Christ's gifts, and by a vision of a new heaven and a new earth do not simply leave worship. We are sent. We are sent to be witnesses to the truth and love we have seen, heard, touched, and felt.

THE WORD IS NEAR US

In worship, we practice the basic skills of our faith. We practice them over and over again so that they become second nature to us, and, in becoming second nature, they become the way we see the world and live in it.

As we seek to understand and name disciplines of faith, there may be no more important place to look than under our proverbial noses. Look at what we do each week as congregations and as people of faith. Worship instructs us in a set of skills that are expected to produce a specified character or pattern of behavior. We do not need to invent them, nor do we need to look for them in far off places. We need to reframe our thinking in ways that allow us to see what is already present in our midst. Perhaps seeing what is already and always with us is itself a discipline of faith.