The church does not lack information, activity, or even theological conviction. What if what it needs most is conversion? The story begins, strangely enough, not with a man, but with a silence. It was the silence that follows catastrophe.

For thirty years, Europe had echoed with cannon fire, marching armies, famine, disease, and prayers offered over fresh graves. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648 ) had consumed much of the continent. Villages were emptied, fields were abandoned, and generations were marked by grief.

When the smoke finally lifted in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, people rejoiced. Bells rang again across the German countryside. Christendom, it seemed, had survived. But beneath those ringing bells there lingered another kind of silence. Europe knew how to rebuild churches. The question was whether it knew how to rekindle hearts.

The theological battles of the Reformation had produced magnificent confessions. Lutheran pastors could defend the faith with precision. Universities trained brilliant theologians. Sermons were preached. Liturgy continued. The machinery of the church turned as it always had. Everything appeared healthy—everything, that is, except the people.

Many knew what Christians were supposed to believe. Far fewer seemed to live as though those beliefs had captured their imaginations. The question was no longer simply whether Christianity was true. A more unsettling question had emerged: Was Christianity still alive? This question would mark the life of Philip Jakob Spener (1635-1705). Born in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, his life and ministry would be shaped by its aftermath.

When Faith Becomes Familiar

Spener was no theological revolutionary. As a young man studying in Strasbourg, he immersed himself in Scripture, the Church Fathers, and the Lutheran confessions. He admired the Reformers and cherished the theological inheritance they had secured.

When he stepped into the pastorate, he encountered something the lecture hall could never quite prepare him to see: people. Not abstract souls, nor theological categories, but church members. People who attended church but seldom opened Scripture in their homes. People who could recite the catechism without allowing its truths to penetrate deeply into their lives. Families whose faith had become something like an old family Bible—deeply respected, carefully preserved, and seldom opened.

The problem was not exactly unbelief. It was familiarity. And familiar things have a curious tendency to become invisible.

When Spener arrived in Frankfurt, he encountered a church that seemed outwardly healthy. The clergy was educated, worship was orderly, theology was orthodox, and there was no spectacular scandal or institutional collapse. There was simply a nagging suspicion that something essential had quietly disappeared. People listened to sermons, nodded in agreement, and returned home much as they had arrived.

Spener began to wonder whether the church had confused theological activity with spiritual vitality. His response was surprisingly modest. He opened his home.

A handful of ordinary Christians gathered around a table and read Scripture together. They were not trying to win arguments or master difficult doctrines. They were asking a much simpler—and perhaps much more dangerous—question: “What is Christ asking of us?”

These gatherings became known as the collegia pietatis, or “assemblies of piety.” In those small rooms, Christianity ceased to be merely something explained from a pulpit. It became something practiced among friends.

Spener increasingly became convinced that the church suffered from a kind of spiritual forgetfulness. Christians could define grace but had forgotten how to receive it. They knew how to defend Scripture but did not necessarily expect Scripture to interrupt their lives. They admired Christ without necessarily resembling him.

A Gentle Proposal

In 1675, Spener published the work for which he would become famous: Pia Desideria— "Pious Desires” or “Pious Longings.” What remains striking about the book is its tone. There is little outrage, nor triumphalism. Spener writes instead with grief, hope, and patience. He sounds like someone who loves the church enough to tell her the truth, believing that true repentance is still possible.

Beneath the entire work lies a deceptively simple question: How might the church become spiritually alive again? Spener answered that question with six proposals. Nearly 350 years later, they remain remarkably relevant.

1. Scripture Must Become the Church’s Daily Bread

Spener wanted a “more extensive use of the Word of God.” The Bible belonged not only in pulpits but around tables, in homes, among friends, and within the ordinary conversations of Christian communities.

That proposal may sound almost quaint in our Bible-saturated culture. We have Bible apps, podcasts, commentaries, reading plans, study Bibles, online sermons, and nearly limitless access to biblical information. Our problem is hardly access. Instead, it may be imagination.

Scripture competes with countless other voices attempting to narrate reality for us. Politics tells us what to fear. Advertising tells us what to desire. Social media tells us whom to envy. Our preferred ideological communities tell us whom to distrust.

Spener asks whether Scripture has become something deeper than another source we consult. Rather than merely asking, “What does the Bible say about this issue?” perhaps we should ask: “Has Scripture become the story through which I understand everything else?” The first question allows us to use the Bible. The second allows the Bible to use us.

2. Every Christian Is Responsible for the church

Spener took the priesthood of all believers seriously. For him, it was not simply a Reformation doctrine, but a vocation. Every Christian possesses gifts to offer the body of Christ, and every Christian bears some responsibility for the spiritual flourishing of others.

This presents a significant challenge to contemporary American Christianity. We have professional preaching, professional music, professional programming, professional counseling, and professional discipleship. None of these things is inherently wrong, but professionalization can quietly teach the congregation to become an audience.

It becomes possible to consume church without ever becoming the church. We ask, “What does this church offer me?” before asking, “How is Christ asking me to offer myself?” Spener reverses the question. You are not an attendee, customer, nor audience member. You are a steward of another person’s faith.

3. Christianity Must Be Practiced

This may be Spener’s most famous conviction: “It is by no means enough to have knowledge of the Christian faith, for Christianity consists rather of practice.” Doctrine exists to create holy people. Truth aims toward obedience. Knowledge reaches its fulfillment in love. The deepest Christian question, therefore, is never, What do we believe? It is also: What kind of people are our beliefs making us?

This is particularly uncomfortable for those of us who live and work in theological environments. We can become remarkably adept at discussing humility without becoming humble. We can analyze forgiveness without forgiving anyone. We can teach hospitality without opening our homes. Theological literacy can quietly become a substitute for spiritual maturity.

Spener will not permit that separation. Orthodoxy must become orthopraxy. Knowledge must take flesh. Perhaps we occasionally need to stop asking ourselves what Christian virtue we understand best and ask a much more difficult question: “Where is that virtue currently costing me something?”

• Where is forgiveness requiring me to forgive?

• Where is hospitality requiring me to make room?

• Where is humility requiring an apology?

• Where is generosity requiring sacrifice?

• Where is love requiring patience with someone I would rather avoid?

Knowledge becomes wisdom only when it takes flesh.

4. Truth Must Wear the Garments of Love

Spener lived in an age of fierce theological controversy. He refused, however, to choose between conviction and charity. He urged Christians engaged in theological dispute to proceed with “moderation and love.” That counsel seems increasingly revolutionary.

Never has it been easier to enter theological controversy. Every disagreement can become public. Every opinion can become immediate. Every conflict can become permanent.

Christians can become known primarily by what we oppose rather than by the manner in which we love. Spener reminds us that charity is not the enemy of conviction. It is one of conviction’s greatest tests.

Anyone can love the people who already agree with them. The gospel becomes visible when disagreement does not erase the image of God in the person sitting across from us. There comes a point when winning every argument can quietly teach us how to lose every relationship. Truth without love eventually ceases to resemble Christ.

5. Ministers Must Be Formed, Not Merely Educated

Spener cared deeply about theological education, but he believed ministers needed more than information. They needed formation. Pastors should be learned, certainly. But they should also be godly.

Our contemporary measures of leadership tend toward visible competencies: communication, vision, innovation, organizational ability, influence. These things matter. Yet Spener asks another question before all of them: “Who is this person becoming?”

Character cannot remain a secondary qualification for Christian leadership because congregations eventually imitate the spiritual temperature of those who lead them. The greatest pastor may not be the most gifted communicator, the builder of the largest congregation, or the person with the greatest public platform. They may be the shepherd whose life quietly resembles Jesus.

6. Preaching Must Aim at Transformation

Finally, Spener believed sermons should strengthen faith and its fruits. Preaching does not ultimately succeed because people admire it. It succeeds because people leave differently than they arrived.

That distinction confronts both preacher and congregation. We can mistake listening for obedience, learning for repentance, and admiration for transformation. Sermons can become another form of religious consumption. Spener leaves those of us who preach with a rather frightening question: If every sermon we preached this year disappeared except for the lives they changed, what would remain?

The Deeper Revolution

Spener’s proposals can easily be reduced to six practical strategies for church renewal, but they are far more radical than that. Together, they challenge the assumption that Christianity consists primarily of attending, consuming, agreeing, and preserving. Spener offers another imagination.

• Scripture becomes a shared way of inhabiting reality.

• Every believer becomes responsible for the flourishing of others.

• Theology becomes embodied virtue.

• Conviction becomes inseparable from charity.

• Leadership becomes measured by holiness before effectiveness.

• Preaching becomes an invitation to conversion rather than merely communication.

And notice where Spener begins: not with structures, branding, institutional strategy, political influence, or even numerical growth. He begins with people.

If people are transformed, communities will be transformed. If communities are transformed, the church’s witness will deepen. And if the church’s witness deepens, the world around it will inevitably feel its presence.

Pietism at its best does not ask us to choose between truth and experience, doctrine and discipleship, personal conversion and communal responsibility. It asks what happens when these things are reunited.

What If the Church Needs to Be Converted?

Spener died in 1705 without witnessing the full reach of what he had begun. His vision influenced August Hermann Francke and Halle, nourished the Moravian movement, and eventually left its mark upon movements like the followers of John Wesley, the Brethren tradition, and the evangelical awakenings that marked the colonies in the New World.

But perhaps his most important legacy cannot be measured by movements. Instead, it appears:

• Whenever Christians become restless with merely inherited faith.

• Whenever believers gather around an open Bible expecting not simply to learn something new but to become someone new.

• Whenever pastors care as much about the formation of souls as the precision of sermons.

• Whenever friendships become schools of holiness.

• Whenever repentance ceases to be an embarrassing interruption and becomes an ordinary rhythm of life with God.

Spener recognized a danger that remains with us: spiritual decline rarely announces itself dramatically. Sometimes everything simply continues. People attend worship. Pastors preach. Students study. Committees meet. Books are published. Conferences are held. Everything continues—except transformation.

Perhaps that is why Pia Desideria remains quietly revolutionary. It confronts every generation of Christians with a question we would rather postpone: What if the church’s greatest need is not to become more successful, more visible, more influential, or more persuasive—but more deeply converted?

For Spener, renewal is never first a matter of strategy. It is a matter of sanctification. Everything else follows.

[A funny aside: in 2021, after Dad (John) died, I returned a call to Dad (David). The voicemail was awkward but comical: “Hey Dad! Sorry I missed your call, but…um…Dad died.” The “um” is the most pregnant word in that voicemail. I recognized the oddness of the message as I was leaving it. If you’re curious, I had dinner with Dad David last week.]

It was good to sit with him. We laughed, told stories, and talked about family history. At one point, I told him that I still think about my great-grandfather, J. D. Barnhart, weekly. Even though he died when I was nine, he holds an almost mythical status in my imagination.

My dad responded simply, “You know what? J.D. was my best friend.” There was something beautiful in that moment—the mingling of our grief over a man we had both loved. Barnhart men aren’t known for being emotional, but there is a way to convey emotions without “being emotional.” My Dad and I conveyed that over our first beer. Later, when we returned to my house, he and I spent time reading old letters from a young J.D. to his father, Gray, while J.D. was at boot camp in the early 1930s.

Over the course of the evening, our conversation turned to something else very important: my Dad’s friends. My father and I struggled to connect when I was growing up. Adulthood has revealed a commonality between us that was largely concealed when I was younger. But I always loved watching him with his friends. Around them, I saw a different side of him. He was funny and carefree. He loved a good joke and especially a battle of comedic wits. And I loved his friends because his friends loved me.

There were many, but a few deserve special mention here. There was Kenny, a man who lived a hard life, battled addictions, but was able to convey an unusual paternal warmth to me. Sadly, Kenny passed away several years ago. My Dad and I acknowledge the sadness of that reality, and raise our glasses to his memory.

Then there was Joe, who helped lead the Boy Scout troop I was part of. I can still see the smirk on his face as he lined us boys up and made known (for the thousandth time) his leadership mantra: “Boys, I’m not here for me, I’m here for you, and you don’t even appreciate it.” Think of Barney Fife trying to act tough in the Mayberry jail, and you’ll capture the moment almost perfectly. Joe’s father was the legendary Lou, who seemed to be the embodiment of wisdom. Joe and Lou were a father-son friendship that stood out to me then, but has taken on deeper meaning as my children have gotten older (especially my son, who is entering his senior year).

But most important to me was my Dad’s friend, Fred. He was a winsome, salt-of-the-earth (as we southerners like to say) kind of man who probably has no idea of the impact he had on my life. People who make great impacts don’t often know they’re doing so. If they did, it would quickly devolve into arrogance that would corrode the container that held it. Fred simply noticed me. He joked with me, not in a condescending way but in a way that made me feel that I could get the joke with him. He made me feel like I belonged somewhere within the circle of my Dad’s friendships.

Now that my own children are getting older, I find myself thinking about those men differently. Parents receive a lot of advice about parenting. Most of it concerns what we do for our children: how much time we spend with them, how we discipline them, how we encourage them, how we attend their activities. All of that matters.

But perhaps one of the things we can do for our children is to have friendships that aren’t even about them. Yet when these friendships take root in our lives, our children benefit from the ecosystem they create. My Dad didn’t have friends to be a better Dad. But because of his friends, I have a valuable memory of my Dad that has shaped my life.

Healthy parents have friends. Indeed, if you’re going to have a healthy marriage with kids, then your spouse cannot (and should not) be your only friend! This seems increasingly important to me. Our culture can make the complete absorption of a parent’s life into a child's life look like a virtue. We sometimes measure good parenting by how completely Mom or Dad has surrendered every other relationship and interest. No wonder divorce can often follow the empty nest. If parents abdicate their identities to their kids, when the kids move away, there’s nothing left.

I wonder what our children lose when they never see us as friends. When children watch their parents maintain deep friendships, they learn something about what a human life can look like. They see adults laughing together, carrying one another through suffering, telling old stories, disagreeing, forgiving, and simply enjoying one another. In another light, they realize that you can grow older and still be something of a kid.

And sometimes those friendships widen enough to include the kids. I think back to my Dad’s friends and remember what it felt like when one of them noticed me. A friend joked with me. Another asked me a question. Yet another invited me into the circle. Those moments seemed insignificant at the time. Decades later, they don’t.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wondered whether friendship, like marriage, should be counted among those relationships that “remain stable.” His friend Eberhard Bethge agreed but observed that friendship rarely receives the public recognition that marriage and family do. However deep a friendship becomes, society tends to treat it as something optional. News flash, friendship isn’t optional!

Perhaps parenting can reinforce the same assumption. Marriage matters. Children matter. Family matters. But friendship matters too! And maybe our children need to see that. They need to know that adulthood doesn’t mean slowly surrendering every friendship until our children become our entire social world. They need to see us remain friends with people who know our stories, make us laugh, challenge us, and walk beside us through life.

Someday our children will leave our homes and begin building adult lives of their own. Among the many things I hope they carry with them is the conviction that friendship is not a luxury added to a full life. Friendship is part of a full life.

I had a good visit with my Dad. I enjoyed the stories and the laughter. But most of all, I was grateful that I finally had the opportunity to thank him for something I didn’t know to thank him for when I was young. He had friends; he let me see them; they invited me in, and within that circle of juvenile humor, strong opinions, and witty banter, I was actually becoming the best part of my Dad. Years later, I friend (verb) as he did. I joke with my friends’ children, and I make sure they know I’m in their corner.

As I offer them sage advice (which is only my opinion, as Allison reminds me), I wait for their reaction. I banter with them, and I hope they feel included in the comedic moment. And as they laugh at me and watch their parents be both a parent and a friend who can take a joke, I take great joy in the moment. And as I walk away, I laugh with squinty eyes, cackling almost like a deranged hyena, just like David Barnhart. (I’m glad you had friends, Dad, but did you need to give me this cackle?)

I have stood in two places of incredible significance to me. One was the site of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin in the woods surrounding Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, now within the orbit of a sprawling, bustling Boston. The second was the homestead of nineteenth-century Brethren elder John Kline in the Shenandoah Valley (not far from where I grew up). Nearby, I stood at the place where he was ambushed and murdered by Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War.

In many ways, I feel that my own life—at least right now—is located somewhere between these two men. And I cannot help imagining that they would have had much to say to one another.

Historically, their lives overlapped (Kline, 1797-1864 and Thoreau, 1817-1862). Both shared a closeness to the land and spoke, in their own ways, of simplicity and peace. Their writings reveal a mutually held dissatisfaction with the status quo of the worlds around them. Thoreau pushed back against the bourgeois cultural Christianity of nineteenth-century New England, himself inhabiting a quasi-naturalism that veered toward agnosticism. Kline and his Brethren inhabited the Shenandoah Valley as religious outsiders, distinct from much of the surrounding Protestant culture.

Yet they moved through the world very differently. Thoreau goes to Walden. Kline seems almost never to stay put. Thoreau builds a cabin and pares his life down. Kline rides from house to house, meeting to meeting, sickbed to sickbed. Thoreau is famous for solitude. Kline’s diary—or, more precisely, the diary pieced together and presented to us through the editorial lens of his friend Benjamin Funk—is crowded with names.

But the more I read of what remains of Kline’s diary alongside Thoreau’s Walden, the less these two men seem like opposites. I believe both were preoccupied with essentially the same question: What would it mean not to squander a human life?

Thoreau gives us his famous answer: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…” Deliberately. What a grounding word. There is something both anchoring and disruptive about it. What does “deliberate living” actually look like? Does it require withdrawal? Or can deliberate living take the form of constant obligation? Is the test of a life how free it becomes—or what that freedom becomes useful for?

Thoreau takes a period of his life and transforms it into a philosophical book. Kline records days, one after another, for decades. Thoreau gives us something like the philosophy of the deliberately lived life. Kline gives us something closer to the ledger. I believe we need both.

What is simplicity for?

Imagine, if you will, these two gentlemen sitting together in a room. It would probably not be an extravagantly decorated room. Both men valued simplicity and austere living. But once they sat down, I think the first question worth putting on the table would be this: What is simplicity for?

Thoreau writes: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…” Throughout “Economy,” he watches people accumulate possessions and obligations until the machinery of living begins to consume life itself. For Thoreau, simplicity is not minimalism as décor. It is an attempt to recover freedom.

Every unnecessary possession, he argues, comes with a claim on your time. Every new luxury may quietly demand another portion of your life to maintain it. Thoreau keeps asking what things actually cost—not simply in dollars, but in life. There is something deeply spiritual about the question. What does it profit us to gain the world and lose our souls?

Kline enters the conversation. In an April 13 diary entry, he encounters a woman whose husband is failing to provide adequately for her and their three children. The children have no shoes. Their clothing is badly patched. Kline asks what food remains in the house. And then he records:

“I gave that patient, uncomplaining sister three dollars out of my own pocket money. ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ There is a day coming when we shall more fully realize this truth than now.”

Suddenly, the direction of the question changes. Thoreau asks: What do I need? Kline finds himself asking: What does she need? This raises a question for Thoreau. Is simplicity only complete if it ends with personal freedom?

What might happen if Thoreau’s freedom from possessions were given Kline’s outward direction? While Thoreau helps Kline explain why giving away three dollars is possible only because it is not necessary to him. Kline may help Thoreau answer the question his simplicity leaves open: Freedom for what? Maybe Kline supplies the missing second half of simplicity. First: need less. To which Thoreau would heartily agree. Then: become more available.

Kline raises another complication from this diary entry. What about poverty that is not chosen? Walden is an experiment in voluntary simplicity. The woman Kline visits is not conducting an experiment. Her children have no shoes. There is a moral difference between choosing to do without and having no choice.

To be fair to Thoreau, I do not believe he is romanticizing destitution. Rather, his target is our unnecessary dependence upon consumption, property, and status. If anything, his argument can help us distinguish poverty from simplicity.

Perhaps each man can offer something to the other. Kline helps Thoreau see that simplicity should create availability to others. Thoreau helps Kline see that possessions become morally useful when we are free enough to release them. But possessions are only one way a life gets spent. The more difficult topic is work.

What labor is worth a life?

Thoreau famously writes: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” It is one of those sentences quoted so often that it becomes easy not to hear it. Thoreau sees people working to maintain houses, property, and social expectations, gradually spending their lives in order to afford the very manner of living they believe they must maintain. His question is simultaneously economic and spiritual: What are you getting in exchange for your finite time? Time is not unlimited.

In September 20 entry, Kline writes:

“I have been exposed to some bad weather, and have passed over some bad roads; but to meet such a dear and kind brother as George Hoke, and be received in such a pleasant way as I have been by the dear brother and family, is more than a compensation for all the exposure and toil it has cost.”

There is a beautiful phrase tucked into this entry: “More than a compensation.” Kline is doing a kind of Thoreauvian accounting. There are bad roads, nasty weather, exposure, and toil. But there is also a return. And the return is relationship.

What if Thoreau and Kline actually agree that labor should justify itself? The difference lies not in whether there should be a return on our investment, but in what counts as adequate compensation. For Thoreau, bad work consumes life without returning enough life. For Kline, strenuous work can be worthwhile when it serves love, communion, faith, and duty. Kline does not answer Thoreau by saying that work is simply good. He answers him by showing that some burdens are worth carrying.

But Thoreau has something to offer Kline as well. Kline is astonishingly busy. His days are full of travel, meetings, baptisms, visits, medical calls, preaching, and farm work. And the danger of such a life should be obvious to anyone who has spent much time in religious communities: Activity can become its own justification. We stay busy because being busy feels godly.

Could Kline’s service become another form of “quiet desperation”—duty pursued simply because there is always another duty? There will always be another fire to put out. I believe Thoreau asks Kline, and us, some important framework questions as we approach each task:

• Must this be done?

• Must it be done by me?

• Must it be done now?

• What is this labor for?

In other words, does the work I am doing deepen my life, or does it merely occupy it? Kline would answer that meaningful obligation is not necessarily bondage. Dependence is not necessarily failure. Sacrifice can be freely chosen.

But Thoreau’s true enemy is not labor. It is labor without an adequate reason. The question quickly shifts to the definition of “sufficient” reasons. While Thoreau may not agree, Kline says those reasons are people loved and made in the image of God (even those we don’t really want to love).

Solitude and Dependence

Thoreau writes: “I have never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” I deeply sympathize with Thoreau here. Solitude matters. And I don't think Thoreau’s solitude means he simply dislikes people. Solitude gave him distance from convention. It offered freedom from social pressure, time for attention, and a vantage point from which to ask whether the values everyone around him accepted were actually true.

Walden itself was not the pure isolation we sometimes imagine. The boundaries between Walden and Concord were far more porous than the caricature suggests. But Kline’s diary is almost the inverse literary experience of Walden. He records whom he visits, where he eats, where he sleeps, whom he preaches to, whom he treats, whom he travels with. His world consists of relationships.

When Kline himself was ill, he declared:

“What a precious thing love is! My dear Brethren have not only staid with me day and night, but they have constantly watched for opportunities to minister to my comfort or necessities.”

Now the caregiver is being cared for. Kline’s world is not merely one in which a virtuous person gives and gives and gives. There is reciprocity. He visits and is visited. He feeds and is fed. He gives shelter and receives shelter. He cares and is cared for. That is what friendship is: mutual giving, receiving, and dependence.

Thoreau says: Learn not to be governed by society. Kline answers: Learn how radically you depend upon others. The land between their two perspectives presents a difficult question for those of us formed by the American imagination: Is independence really the highest form of freedom?

Suppose I find myself in a financial situation from which I cannot escape, and someone who loves me provides what I need to become free of that bondage. Who is freer? (1) The person who refuses to ask for help and remains enslaved to the debt, or (2) the person who admits dependence and receives the help needed to become free? Either way, the autonomy Thoreau champions is not a possibility. Kline could press in and ask: must dependence always be weakness?

I wish we had more from Kline about what he learned when illness made self-sufficiency impossible—what it was like for this great caregiver, this man who helped hold together a scattered Brethren community, to find himself held together by others. Maybe dependence becomes humiliating only if we assume autonomy is the highest good.

But I believe Thoreau remains necessary. Religious communities are not immune to the corrosive effects of conformity and legalism. Communities can enforce conformity while calling it “unity.” They can make inherited opinion seem like truth and call it “biblical.” They can turn belonging into obedience and call it “love.” Thoreau offers a powerful defense against that.

I imagine these two men correcting one another across the table. Thoreau to Kline: Never let belonging substitute for seeing clearly. Kline to Thoreau: Never let independence become an excuse for needing nobody. Thoreau reminds Kline that there are truths we can only hear alone. Kline reminds Thoreau that there are goods we can only receive together.

How Not to Waste a Day

This brings me to what may be the deepest conviction these two men share: Neither believes that time is neutral. Thoreau writes: “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” Thoreau is not describing eternity in the Christian sense. Rather, the essence of his provocation is that we cannot waste an hour without wasting part of our life, and we cannot waste our life without damaging our relationship to what is ultimately real. A “day” is never simply a day.

Similarly, Benjamin Funk remembered Kline saying: “An hour misspent or trifled away is just so much time given to Satan.” There is something sacred about time for both men. Kline’s diary is deceptive in that there is philosophical and theological beauty in its radical plainness. Consider this entry:

“Sunday, January 1, 1843. I and Frederic Kline go to George Fulk’s schoolhouse in the Gap. We have meeting, and I speak on John 15. We dine at George Fulk’s, and in the evening return home.”

That is it. Impressively brief! He went, preached, ate, and came home. Yet something powerful lives in the simplicity with which Kline captures the day. While Thoreau would transform experience into literature. Kline simply records the occurrence. The elegance is not in the prose; it is in the event captured succinctly.

Perhaps Thoreau asks what a day means, while Kline keeps showing us what a day contains. That creates a wonderfully creative tension between the two. Thoreau compresses, interprets, and shapes. He turns his experience into a symbolic year through which we move with him around Walden Pond through the various seasons. Kline accumulates, dates, names, places, and records. Thoreau seeks to record a life worth living. Kline finds worth in the tedious account of life truly lived.

One man saves time by turning it into meaning. The other saves time by refusing to let the day disappear. And together they raise a question I find difficult to shake: Does a meaningful life have to feel meaningful while it is happening? This is perhaps one of the most ordinary, yet meta, questions we can ask about our daily living.

Most of Kline’s days are not dramatic, and that may precisely be the point. Deliberate living often looks remarkably ordinary from the inside. Thoreau’s prose can make the deliberate life sound ecstatic. Kline offers another possibility: deliberate living may consist in doing the next faithful thing, repeatedly, without literary grandeur and without applause.

Yet Thoreau is still necessary because sheer accumulation does not automatically create meaning. We need interpretation. We require moments when we stop and ask why. We are profoundly human in those strange, reflective moments when we realize that we are more than the next task at hand. Kline preserves the day. Thoreau interrogates it. And I believe we need them both.

Wake up. Show up.

When I pull all these threads together, I keep returning to a very simple difference. Thoreau says: Wake up. Kline says: Show up.

Thoreau demands that we wake up from convention, consumer habit, and purposeless labor. We must notice the world around us and discover what actually matters.

Kline answers: Yes. But once we know what matters, go somewhere, visit someone, give something, accept hospitality, endure the road, and allow someone else to care for you. Spend the day on something you can answer for.

Without Thoreau, Kline’s life risks looking like pure busyness. Without Kline, Thoreau’s deliberate life risks terminating in self-cultivation. Maybe the deliberately lived life requires both movements. We need to withdraw far enough to discover what matters. And we need to return to give ourselves to it.

The dominant image from each man’s work is illustrative here. Thoreau gives us a cabin. Kline gives us a road.

The cabin asks: What can I live without? There is only so much room. I cannot fit everything inside. I have to become shrewd about which possessions—and which desires—I permit to possess me.

But the road asks a different question: Who is worth going toward? If life does not remain static—if we really are pilgrims moving continually forward—then what paths am I walking? What trails am I wandering down? Where, exactly, am I going?

Perhaps we need both. Pilgrims need somewhere to lay their heads. But part of being a pilgrim is eventually getting up again. We need the cabin, and we need the road.

And I like to think that Thoreau and Kline, different as they were, might remind us that both are gifts. The places where we stop and the roads we travel require interpretation. And part of that interpretive framework is the life we actually lead. Whether we realize it or not, the cabins we inhabit and the roads we travel are making us more profoundly than we could ever imagine.

In my last blog post, I pushed back on the seemingly insatiable desire to provide greater and greater precision to my thought as a Brethren theologian (admittedly with something of a chip on my shoulder). In this post, I hope to provide a little more rationale from personal experience.

Questions of belief are, at first, somewhat grating to me. And when I say “personal experience,” I’m not talking primarily about anecdotes or stories that animate confusion, although those things are certainly part of it. Rather, I mean Experience with a capital E—what it means for me to do theology as a Brethren-Anabaptist who holds a deeply Pietist, existential, and contemplative posture toward things like doctrine.

I understand the instinct behind the question, “What do you believe?” People understandably want a list. I’m married to a list-taker, so lists in written and spoken form surround me. Similarly, people want a list of the key components: Scripture, God, Christ, salvation, church, last things. But my discontent is that I increasingly find myself wanting to answer questions about belief differently.

I certainly believe that Christianity makes claims about reality. As I’ve already stated in my prior post, doctrine matters. Theology matters. Truth matters. But I have become increasingly interested—perhaps as I get older and become more of an existentialist, or perhaps as I lean more deeply into the Pietist part of my tradition—in the enormous difference between believing that something is true and inhabiting its truth. James tells us that even the demons believe (2:19). Clearly, then, there is more to belief and truth than mentally attaining the rightness of a theological claim.

Christian faith asks something considerably more demanding. And because American Christianity has not attended to this as much as it should, it comes as no surprise that people can claim Christian truth, Christian values, and Christian witness while living lives woefully divorced from the very truths they claim. A central question for me has become: What if doctrine is not merely something Christians believe but a reality we are called to enter?

Three streams intersect here in my thought. The first comes from my Anabaptist roots: truth must become discipleship. It must be lived. The second is the Pietist- existential side of my faith: truth confronts a real person—not a concept, not an unknown entity, but me and you, persons with stories shaped by countless other voices. That truth demands a response. Not merely checking something off a list, but a decisive response involving my entire being. The third is the contemplative stream: truth must descend beneath argument into attention, desire, presence, and prayer.

My Brethren theology asks of every doctrine not simply, Is it true? It also asks:

• What kind of person must I become if this is true?

• What kind of community would exist if we actually lived as though it were true?

• What posture toward God, Scripture, the church, and the world must I assume to receive these things as true?

Scripture: The Word We Hear

Long before Scripture becomes synonymous with a bound Bible that I carry around, Scripture is Word. The Gospel of John opens with the grandest proclamation in all of Scripture: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1). The Logos, Jesus; Jesus is the Word of God. For me as a Brethren theologian, this is where it begins.

The traditional affirmation is that Scripture is authoritative for Christian faith and practice. But I immediately want to ask: What does biblical authority look like existentially? It cannot simply mean possessing the correct doctrine about Scripture. Because long before I possess anything, Scripture addresses me.

I don’t simply stand over Scripture interpreting it (a modern arrogance we need to recognize). Through Scripture, God interrogates me by his Spirit. If Scripture is truly the Word of God, then it exposes my desires, my loyalties, my fears, and my self-deceptions.

Reading therefore becomes an incredible act of radical vulnerability. This is why the Brethren communal instinct matters so much to me: no individual possesses the Word privately. We have to listen together.

That inherently makes interpretation contemplative. We read slowly. We listen. We attend. We receive. We submit. And we discern together.

The Bible is not merely a text to master but a Word before which we learn to become attentive. Long before the Bible is a book in my hands, it is communication from a living God who is free, who has personality, and who is communicating with me (with us).

When I say the Bible is authoritative, there is a lingering question for me: What would happen if every time I opened Scripture my first question was not, “What can I do with this text?” but “What might God be doing with me through this text?” What is being confronted in me? What is being spoken into me?

God: The Mystery Before Whom We Live

From Scripture we move to God, recognizing that God transcends our understanding. God is ultimately mystery made known in Jesus, before whom we always live. Christians confess, in the most mysterious way, that God is one and three: one God made present as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are not masks God wears. They are not merely different ways God accommodates himself to us. This is, as much as we can say, who God is.

But contemplative theology reminds us that knowing God is unlike knowing an object. I can know that a building exists. I can know that if I take a particular route, it will take me to a particular location. God is not something I simply comprehend. God is Someone before whom I stand. And so we hold this paradox in tension: mystery is made known through revelation. Not fully comprehended, but genuinely made known.

My Brethren faith keeps this from becoming abstract mysticism because this mystery is made known in Jesus Christ. But at the same time, God still transcends every arrogant attempt on my part to believe that I have fully comprehended him.

Because if God actually exists, then my entire life is continually lived before him. Not occasionally. Not simply during worship. Every single moment is lived before this God who is a real being, not some concept or collection of theological ideas we have named “God.”

That changes ordinary existence. My meals, conversations, work, conflicts, friendships, suffering, and silence are all lived in the presence of this living God. The doctrine of God is not merely an attempt to define who God is in his Triune nature. The doctrine of God becomes the practice of the presence of God.

What would change if I became conscious that this ordinary Tuesday afternoon, as I write this blog post, is being lived in the presence of God? And what if, long before I write anything about this God, this God has already been communicating to me?

Jesus Christ: The One We Follow

Ultimately, Jesus Christ—the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity—becomes the One we follow. This is the theological center of my faith because the Anabaptist instinct in me is profoundly Christocentric. We do not merely believe things about Jesus. We follow Jesus.

Systematic theology often separates the person of Christ from the work of Christ. While systematic theology is a helpful pedagogical tool for teaching theology, it also has blind spots. We cannot talk about the atonement divorced from who we believe God is as revealed in Jesus. Put more simply: what God accomplishes in the cross and resurrection has to correspond with who Jesus reveals God to be through his posture, his witness, and his life in the Gospel accounts.

Long before his self-sacrifice on the cross, Jesus lived a life of self-sacrifice—to his disciples, to religious leaders, before Roman authorities. And this Jesus calls us to take up our cross and follow him. So when the Creed says Christ was crucified, I also ask: What does the cross mean for the way I respond when somebody wounds me? When we confess the resurrection: Where am I living as though death still has the final word?

When we confess Jesus as Lord, we simultaneously allow the Spirit to interrogate us about what rival lordships actually organize our lives: career, nation, political party, money, reputation, security, ego. Christology becomes discipleship when “Jesus is Lord” moves from doctrinal confession to existential reordering.

And then the contemplative dimension begins. I must behold Christ before I can imitate him. Attention precedes imitation. Prayer creates the interior space in which Christ’s life becomes imaginable. To behave differently, I first have to imagine differently. And imagining differently begins through the sacred act of prayer.

Salvation: The Life We Receive

This is why salvation becomes more than counting blood drops. It is about a life we receive through the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, followed by the gifting of the Holy Spirit.

The familiar evangelical language, stretching back through the Reformation, is that we are saved by grace through faith. I affirm this strongly. It all begins with God. God awakens me by the power of the Spirit so that I can respond—to give God myself, just as Jesus freely gave himself to the Father.

While I strongly affirm that we are saved by grace through faith, I also ask: Saved from what? And saved for what? Without those questions, salvation becomes a transaction exclusively, and we front-load the entire conversation around conversion and justification.

But Scripture shows us that salvation includes more than justification. Salvation includes reconciliation, liberation, healing, forgiveness, transformation, communion, even participation in Christ. We need all of these images to capture the Brethren language of following Jesus.

Existentially, if I say that I have been saved, I must also ask: Where is salvation presently happening in me? Rather than merely a prayer I may have prayed at an altar, salvation becomes the daily conversation of asking: Where is Christ freeing me from resentment? Fear? Vanity? Violence? Self-protection? The need to be right? Salvation appears in three tenses through the pages of Scripture. I was saved. I am being saved. I will be saved. We know the blueprint because we know how the story ends.

The contemplative movement transforms salvation from merely a prayer prayed or a doctrine assented to into a life marked by surrender. We cease attempting to manufacture ourselves, and receive our true selves from God. Grace means I no longer have to construct a self worthy of being loved. I can receive my life as a gift and learn to give it away. And it is actually in giving it away that I discover the freedom Christ promises—not in preservation and certainly not in the anxiety that marks so much of our theology of salvation.

The Church: Where Truth Becomes Visible

But if I am going to give my life away, I need a laboratory in which to practice. That laboratory is the church. The church becomes the community in which truth becomes visible. This may be the most distinctively Anabaptist part of my faith.

Doctrine can become radically individualistic. In the West, and especially in America, our individualism has become a triumphing ideology within which the beauty and wildness of Christian doctrine has been contained.

Jesus is not a zoo animal. He calls us into a radical trust that breaks us out of the cages we so often construct for ourselves and others. Jesus forms a people. And the church becomes the social embodiment of theological claims.

• If we believe reconciliation, there should be reconciled relationships.

• If we believe forgiveness, there should be forgiven enemies.

• If we believe communion, lonely people should find tables.

• If we believe every person bears God’s image, power should be exercised differently.

• If we believe Jesus is Lord, then the church cannot belong to another kingdom.

The church belongs to the kingdom of God. We become ambassadors, an outpost of that kingdom, regardless of the country in which we happen to live (2 Cor. 5:20). The governing question for me becomes: If our doctrine is true, what should become visible when someone encounters our community?

Think about a Brethren fellowship and its central practices: baptism, love feast, feetwashing, communion, mutual discernment, simplicity, service. Brethren sometimes describe these merely as “ordinances,” which is about as lackluster an expression as we could give them. I would rather interpret them existentially.

• In feetwashing: What happens to our understanding of power when we kneel before one another?

• At the love feast: What happens to strangers when Christ places them around the same table?

• In baptism: What identity is dying, and what identity is being received?

• In communion: What happens when people who did not choose one another discover that Christ has nevertheless made them one?

Brethren ordinances are doctrines made bodily. I would even argue that Brethren ordinances are among the most sacramental of expressions because they invite us bodily to manifest what is occurring mystically through the presence of the Spirit.

Humanity: The Neighbor Before Me

This has enormous ramifications for how we understand humanity. Theological anthropology becomes the neighbor before me. It is about encounter. If we say that every human being bears God’s image, then existentially I have to ask: Can I recognize that image in the person standing before me?

What if that person is irritating? A political opponent? A stranger? Someone who is poor? An immigrant? An enemy? Maybe even a person whose theology I think is wrong? What does it mean truly to see another person—to slow down long enough to stop reducing them to categories?

This is precisely why I have written so extensively about friendship and hospitality. The doctrine of the image of God becomes Christian attention. We learn to behold another person without immediately turning them into an argument, an obstacle, a category, or a threat. And then comes the uncomfortable question: What does my treatment of actual human beings reveal about what I really believe about humanity?

Sin: The Truth We Confess About Ourselves

In our world, the doctrine of sin too easily becomes a weapon against others when it is actually a truth we must first confess about ourselves. We quickly reduce sin to rule-breaking because it makes the world easier to categorize. But sin is more than that.

Throughout Scripture and church history, sin includes larger understandings: being curved inward, disordered desire, domination, self-deception, alienation, violence, and the refusal of communion. Here I find existentialism particularly useful because human beings are extraordinarily skilled at hiding from themselves.

Christian confession interrupts that hiding. This is where the Brethren emphasis on mutuality matters again. I need others because I cannot see myself completely. This invites practices, both individually and corporately, of examination, silence, and confession.

The doctrine of sin means I should be suspicious of every theology that makes me exceptionally good at identifying everyone else’s sins and not my own. It should invite me to turn inward first and ask:

• Where am I hiding?

• What truth about myself am I avoiding?

• What am I protecting?

• What would become possible if I no longer needed to defend myself?

Peace: Refusing to Hate Our Enemies

If I recognize that God has sought communion and peace with me, then it follows naturally that I refuse to hate my enemies. Peace theology is more than a position on warfare. I lament that it has sometimes become just that, and I don’t think Anabaptists have always done a great job here. The Anabaptist peace witness begins in Jesus.

But existentially, peace is first about what happens inside me—my feelings, thoughts, and volition—when I encounter an enemy. Peace begins long before we talk about public policy. It begins with anger, contempt, retaliation, caricature, and resentment.

There is a contemplative formation essential to peacemaking. A person who cannot sit peacefully before God will struggle to remain peacefully present to an enemy. Nonviolence begins in the imagination long before it appears in our politics. Can I imagine my enemy as someone Christ loves? And then the harder question: Can I imagine Christ asking me to love them too? Now we have suddenly moved from the theoretical to the practical.

The Kingdom: The Allegiance That Reorders Everything

This shift happens because the doctrine of the kingdom of God reminds me that my allegiance to that kingdom reorders everything. It is not simply where Christians go after death. It is God’s reign announced and embodied in Jesus—and still called to be embodied through us. Jesus is Lord.

That means every other allegiance becomes secondary: nation, political party, ideology, market, tribe, institution, even denomination. Our public theology should therefore be neither withdrawal nor capture. Instead, it is faithful presence and alternative witness. What would it mean for us to participate seriously in society without allowing society’s rival liturgies to determine who we become?

The contemplative contribution here is discernment. We pause long enough and become quiet enough to distinguish the voice of Christ from the many voices demanding our allegiance. And there are many.

Last Things: Learning to Live Without Panic

The doctrine of last things reminds us that we know how the story ends. We know the future toward which we live. We know the great telos of history. Christ will come again. God will make all things new. But Christian hope is not speculation about timelines, no matter what popular books may tell us. Hope creates a particular kind of person now.

• Because resurrection is coming, we can risk love now.

• Because God will judge then, we do not have to judge now.

• Because God will reconcile creation, our work toward reconciliation is neither meaningless nor foolish.

• Because death does not win, we need not organize our lives around fear.

Eschatology is the doctrine that teaches Christians how to live without panic. Contemplation becomes waiting. The Anabaptist side of me bears faithful witness. And the Pietist-existentialist stream embodies the courage to be different.

So, What Do the Brethren Believe?

We return to that simple question: What do you believe? But I invite you to move from doctrinal statements to a way of life. When someone asks, “What do the Brethren believe?” I want to offer a slightly different answer—one that invites inhabitation as much as information.

• We believe Scripture is God’s Word. So we listen.

• We believe God is present. So we attend.

• We believe Jesus is Lord. So we follow.

• We believe salvation is grace. So we receive.

• We believe the church is Christ’s body. So we belong.

• We believe our neighbor bears God’s image. So we behold.

• We believe sin deceives us. So we confess.

• We believe Jesus is our peace. So we refuse hatred.

• We believe God’s kingdom is coming. So our allegiances are reordered.

• We believe in resurrection. So we hope.

This isn’t less doctrinal Christianity. It actually demands more from doctrine. We aren’t promised safety. We are promised that ultimately Jesus has—and will—win. For every Christian doctrine, I would invite you to ask three questions:

• The existential question: If this is true, how must I live?

• The contemplative question: What must I learn to notice, receive, surrender, or behold?

• The Anabaptist question: What kind of community and witness should this truth create?

And perhaps there is a fourth: The embodied question. What practice, individually and corporately, allows us to enact this truth together?

When Truth Takes a Body

I think about being at a Brethren love feast. There is a basin, a towel, a table, bread, and a cup. Brothers and sisters sit across from one another. Someone kneels. Another removes a shoe. And one person washes another person’s feet.

Here is theology, friends. Incarnation. Humility. Christology. Ecclesiology. Reconciliation. Grace. Service. Love. All compressed into an ordinary human body kneeling before another ordinary human body.

Perhaps this is what Brethren theology has always understood at its best (and it is why I remain faithful to this tradition). I believe wholeheartedly that truth wants a body. The Incarnation shows us that. Doctrine wants disciples. Jesus shows us that. And Christ does not simply ask us to explain the kingdom; he invites us to enter it.

The task of theology is not merely to help us think correctly about God but to help us become sufficiently attentive to God, sufficiently honest about ourselves, and sufficiently available to one another that the truths we confess can finally become visible in the lives we live.

The question is not only whether our doctrine is right (though that is important). The question is whether we have allowed that truth to become flesh among us. Because until it becomes flesh among us, it may be right, but it won’t be truth.

“But what do the Brethren actually believe?” I get this question so many times about so many different topics. The irony is that sometimes the places where I feel Brethren identity should be a given are the places where I sense the greatest need to defend it.

Maybe defend is the wrong word. I always grow a little uneasy with defending. I just don’t feel that defensiveness is a posture God models—especially the God I meet in Jesus, who forgives from the cross.

Sometimes the question is quite meaningful. It all depends upon which word you emphasize. “But what do the Brethren actually believe?” can be a tradition-specific question. Usually there is curiosity behind it. Someone is leaning in. They want to hear my story and the story of this people of which I am a part.

But more often the emphasis lands somewhere else: “But what do the Brethren actually believe?” Actually is such a loaded word and can become the hinge of the entire question. It can communicate a dismissal of everything I have said before because I did not provide the level of precision the questioner was looking for. Sometimes there is even a suggestion that the Brethren don’t really believe anything. We just care about how people live together and behave.

That word believe has always rubbed me the wrong way. I am very much shaped by Stanley Hauerwas, who has often suggested that Protestants “don’t need to believe in God because we believe in belief.” Doctrine can become a warfare of words rather than a call to worship.

Do Brethren believe things? Absolutely. But Brethren have also held fast to the reality that what you truly believe will shape how you behave. Tell me that God is loving while your posture toward others is defensive, anxious, militant, or attacking, and you have created an incoherence that the Brethren imagination has always struggled to accept.

I encounter this on a multitude of fronts. Take conversations around sexuality. I hold to a conservative sexual ethic, but I also want to plumb the depths of our language about intimacy and attraction so that when we say no to something, there is a compelling yes that overshadows the no. I am not interested in building fences merely for the sake of building fences.

I would rather ask first: What is the yard supposed to look like before I put a fence around it? What does the fence communicate to those who look over it and see into my yard? Are there gates through which people can enter?

Usually, I can give an “official Brethren position.” And in probably 99 percent of cases, it will agree substantially with larger Protestant thought. But when it comes to the application of those convictions—how we discern them, what truth really is, how we know that truth—the Brethren tend to provide a more embodied picture.

By embodied, I don’t simply mean behaviors. But an important corrective to a cerebral faith that fails to recognize that we are more than brains on sticks. Ultimately, Christianity is not merely about ascertaining correct truth statements or propositions, though those are important. It is also about embodying the Truth, who is Jesus Christ himself, and whether my life takes on the sacrificial love he models on the cross.

But for my questioner, the usual follow-up: “Yes, but what is your official position?” Ah, another loaded phrase! When I attempt to respond with stories, or invite someone into the necessary nuancing of an issue—not because I don’t believe truth can be arrived at, but because truth must be compassionate—I sometimes receive the dismissal: “So you don’t really know what you believe.” That drives me crazy.

Frankly, that is when my Appalachian comes out, I think dead to me, and I move on—which is equally uncompassionate. But underneath the humor is something more painful. I feel the dagger of dismissal, like a stab to the heart. It’s as if what I have given my life to, what I am trying to steward, is childish or naïve. Maybe I will eventually outgrow it once I discover a sufficiently sophisticated theological system.

I don’t think all people asking these questions intend that kind of harm. But there can be very little sense of sensitivity and stewardship—not simply stewardship of truth, but stewardship of the person to whom we are speaking. And yes, I become defensive.

I don’t think I am a dumb person. But put me into certain conversations with more Reformed thinkers and I sometimes get confused about what the conversation is even about. It is like someone asking you a question when you know the question is not really the question. My mind starts spinning: What is the question behind the question? Alas, I never seem to find it. So I leave defensive, perplexed, and probably a little deflated.

I understand the concern. We should know what we believe. Belief is important. I teach historical theology, after all. I care deeply about doctrine. I have spent much of my life studying what Christians have believed and why those beliefs matter.

The church has learned painfully over the centuries that ideas matter. Arius mattered. Pelagius mattered. Christology matters because who we say Jesus is makes all the difference in the world for how we live and whom we claim to worship. The Trinity matters because in stewarding the biblical witness about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we discover something about the very life of God that shapes what it means for us to bear God’s image.

Furthermore, bad theology can wound people. And bad theology exists at both extremes. There is bad theology that becomes so abrasive and militant that it continually makes the Christian yard smaller and smaller. And there is bad theology that baptizes whatever people happen to feel, think, and say in the name of being loving. Both can fail to steward the deposit of faith. Both use modern, human ways of thinking to control Christian theology.

Likewise, creeds and confessions can preserve hard-won wisdom. But when they become litmus tests—when we are no longer permitted to ask questions, debate, discuss, wrestle, and inhabit them—they can become hollow signifiers representing more about the anxiety we carry than the God we are trying to meet.

As a historical theologian, I have no interest in pretending doctrine is unimportant. But I think there is a deeper attraction to doctrinal precision. Precision gives us clarity, institutional identity, protection against error, confidence about who we are, and a way of knowing who belongs. I do not disagree with those things.

The problem begins when our pursuit of precision starts not in love, but in fear and anxiety. Something changes when precision ceases to serve faithfulness and becomes our primary definition of faithfulness. A confession can become not simply a witness to Christ, but a fence around Christ. And that distinction matters enormously for understanding the Brethren.

My Brethren ancestors were not trying to build a better confession. In Schwarzenau, Germany, in 1708, they wrestled with what it meant not simply to believe correctly but to live as though those beliefs were true.

There was enormous angst in breaking away from the established church. Church and civic identity were intertwined. To step outside one was to jeopardize the other. And so to enter the cold waters of the Eder River and be baptized was a decisive break from many of the comforts the world offered for a more unfettered devotion to Jesus Christ. Eight people entered that river.

And they were surrounded by traditions possessing extraordinarily sophisticated doctrinal systems. The Lutherans had their confessions. The Reformed had their confessions and catechisms. Roman Catholics possessed centuries of dogmatic tradition.

Remember, too, that the Brethren emerged on the other side of the Thirty Years’ War, which had carved up the European continent and caused massive social, spiritual, and political destruction. The Brethren problem was never that Christianity lacked theological precision. Their question was more like this: What would happen if we actually tried to obey Jesus together?

Alexander Mack and the early Brethren did not reject theology. What they distrusted was a Christianity reduced to theological propositions without corresponding discipleship. Their Radical Pietist inheritance emphasized an experiential faith that transformed the believer from the inside out. Their Anabaptist inheritance emphasized a collective, communal obedience to Jesus. If the church really is the body of Christ, what would happen if a group of people gathered and actually believed it—and then tried to live like it?

Through all of this ran a strong communal instinct; the Brethren hive mind, if you will. Brethren did not look to a single individual to tell them everything from on high. They discerned the work of the Spirit together. And they realized, perhaps most importantly, that they needed one another to do it. This created a very different theological posture. The fundamental question became less: Have you signed the correct statement? And more: Are we following Jesus together?

Please don’t caricature this as doctrine versus discipleship. Brethren then and now would not understand the two that way. They are two legs of the Christian life. For the Brethren, doctrine was supposed to describe and guide the life of discipleship—not replace it. Conceptually, this resembles the sociological distinction between a bounded set and a centered set.

Imagine a circle. In a bounded-set approach, Christian identity is established primarily by boundaries. You are inside the circle if you hold the beliefs we all hold, accept the correct doctrinal formulations, and affirm the approved positions. You are outside if you hold unacceptable beliefs, theological errors, or perhaps even ask prohibited questions.

Again, I am not against boundaries. But for all the security we think a bounded set offers, there is often anxiety hardwired into it: Where is the line and who draws it? And if there is no robust center pulling us toward something greater than ourselves, we become very busy minding the boundaries. We mind them ad nauseam and bureaucratically. And, by the way, I know of no revival in Christian history that occurred because people got really good at building fences.

Now imagine something different. Put Jesus Christ at the center. Perhaps there is no circle (yet), just a cross. Now the primary question changes from: Are you inside the boundary? to: Toward whom are you moving?

At its best, this is much closer to the Brethren instinct. Jesus is not merely one doctrine among all the other doctrines. Remember, Jesus existed long before we had Christology. Jesus is the center by which every doctrine is judged. Discipleship means continually moving toward him.

My Brethren faith is not less doctrinal because it has a center instead of an elaborate circumference. It simply asks other questions: Is your life becoming more Christlike? Do I see the fruit of the Spirit evident in you? Are the commands and institutions God has given being stewarded as gifts for human flourishing rather than weapons for cracking down on perceived rule-breakers?

Because here is the irony: if I spend all my time determining which lines hem people in or out, I can very quickly take my eyes off Jesus. You can become a warrior for God and miss Christ entirely.

This is where people sometimes mistake Brethren humility for vagueness. Brethren sometimes hear:

• “You don’t have a theology.”

• “You need a clearer position.”

• “You need stronger doctrinal guardrails.”

• “You cannot simply say you are following Jesus.”

And sometimes those criticisms are justified. There have been moments when someone has asked me one of these questions, and I have had to step back and say, Okay, I need to think more carefully about that. Those are important moments of self-criticism.

A centered-set approach can deteriorate into theological laziness, conflict avoidance, historical amnesia, unwillingness to make difficult judgments, and “Jesus” becoming a vague placeholder for whatever we already think.

There are moments when Brethren appeals to “no creed but the New Testament” have functioned less like theological humility and more like an excuse not to do our theological homework. This is a critique my denomination needs to receive.

But hear me clearly: Centered does not mean centerless. If Jesus is the Son of God, the fullest expression of God, the visible image of the invisible God, then he makes for a remarkably demanding center. Christianity is not about finding myself. It is about discovering who I am when I am awakened from the slumber of sin to the loving and demanding call of discipleship.

But Brethren theology is not simply centered; it is relationally discerned. Doctrine does not belong merely to the individual theologian. I can represent the Brethren, but I do not speak for the Brethren. We speak collectively.

Brethren gather around Scripture, listen, testify, disagree, break bread, wash feet, and remain at the table. At our best, we ask together: What does faithfulness to Jesus require of us here? Which means that if you want a quick answer to a controversial question, perhaps you should not expect the Brethren to respond quickly. We need time.

The work of discerning the Spirit—the work of embodying collectively the mind of Christ—does not happen overnight. Consensus becomes an expression of relational commitment. Consensus means I am willing to say something different from you because I know you will still love me on the other side. It means I may not agree with every conclusion the community reaches, but I recognize that there is a larger work of the Spirit occurring among us, and I trust the community enough to yield when necessary.

A confessional model can sometimes say: We remain together because we agree. The Brethren instinct is closer to: We remain together because Christ has called us together, and therefore we must continue discerning even when we disagree. Similarly, you cannot discern if everyone feigns agreement. This does not make truth relative. It makes relationship part of the process by which truth is faithfully discerned.

Perhaps one of the strangest Brethren convictions is that the person with whom I disagree may not be an obstacle to discovering truth. They may be one of the means Christ uses to lead me toward it, lovingly forcing me to clarify what I think, holding me accountable when my life falls short of the things I say I believe. They may even drive me back to Scripture and help me discern what the Spirit is saying.

Acts 15 gives us a beautiful picture of this. The early church encountered a genuinely doctrinal crisis. What were they to do about Jews and Gentiles? Questions of salvation, Scripture, covenant, holiness, and ecclesiology were all at stake. Notice what they did. They gathered, argued, testified, interpreted Scripture, recounted what God had done, and discerned together. And then comes that remarkable sentence: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (v.28).

The Holy Spirit and to us. This isn’t relativism. If it were relativism, there would be no Holy Spirit, and there would be no us. There would simply be me, and what I say I believe. This is actually communal pneumatology. Truth is discerned by a people gathered around the activity of God.

Sometimes I wonder whether the core anxiety behind our endless debates about doctrinal precision stems from something deeper: Have we forgotten how to hear from God together?

I still feel defensive when I get asked the question. It really comes down to that word “actually.” It can feel like an unknowing dismissal of ancestors who gave extensively—even their lives—for this deposit of faith I have received.

And I am defensive because, yes, sometimes we Brethren have not stewarded that deposit well. We need a theological vocabulary capable of articulating what earlier generations sometimes intuitively knew.

And, yes, sometimes I wish the Brethren cared more about beauty—about articulating the beauty of our story—rather than budgets and bottom lines, which seem like the only forms of transcendence we know.

But sometimes I defend the Brethren by trying to prove that we possess the very kind of doctrinal precision our tradition intentionally relativized. And that is the trap. I find myself trying to prove that the Brethren are respectable by the standards of traditions whose theological instincts are fundamentally different from ours.

The irony is not lost on me that sometimes I am trying to defend my faith according to standards developed by traditions whose ancestors persecuted mine because they believed my ancestors lacked the doctrinal and ecclesial precision necessary to warrant their existence. Maybe I don’t need to do that anymore.

I grow tired of debate because I don’t necessarily believe debate works. But I do believe charitable conversation across traditions works. We can strengthen one another without bulldozing traditions we do not understand.

Maybe the answer for the Brethren is not less theology. Maybe it is better Brethren theology. Too often Brethren simply go wherever the evangelical market opens. If the available resources are Reformed, we start to take on a Reformed smell. People from more liturgical Lutheran or Catholic backgrounds enter our churches, and we become more sacramental. We accommodate because somewhere deep down we suspect that we lack something. So we add.

But sometimes we subtract by our addition. We fail to realize that Brethren theology already possesses a grammar we need to rediscover and retell:

• We are Christ-centered. Jesus—his life, death, resurrection, and the Spirit given to us through his ascension—is our interpretive center. We don’t merely ask what Jesus thought or said. We ask how Jesus walked, how Jesus talked, whom Jesus walked toward, and what he said to them.

• We are biblical. Not in the sense of proof-texting or pulling little verses from their contexts to attach to beliefs we already possess. Scripture forms the community. We discern it together, and in many ways the community becomes a living commentary on the text.

• We are communal. When someone puts me on the spot and asks, “What do Brethren believe?” part of my brain feels absent because the question is never simply What do I believe? The question is What do we believe?

• We are Pietist. Truth must become lived experience. It is not enough, for example, to say what marriage is if our marriages do not reveal the joy and fruit that make that union sacred and beautiful.

• We are Anabaptist. Discipleship and obedience are indispensable to knowing Christ. You live out what you truly believe. The stories we tell ourselves eventually become the scripts from which we live.

• We are relational. At our best, disagreement does not automatically dissolve fellowship. We sometimes devolve into familial (with inside jokes and family stories), but our desire is to be relational.

• And we are humble. Sometimes, admittedly, that humility becomes apathy, laziness, or insecurity. We simply don’t insist upon saying what we believe or why we believe it.

But at our finest, our theological humility is not theological uncertainty. This is the crux of the issue for me. We have bought the lie that theological certainty necessitates theological precision—as though sufficient precision will finally produce certainty. It doesn’t. We can hold convictions deeply without pretending our formulations exhaust the mystery of God.

So let me return to that imaginary conversation. My interlocutors are sitting around a large table. Someone across from me asks: “But what do the Brethren actually believe?” I hope I don’t evade the question. We believe things. We have convictions. We have theological boundaries. But I cannot answer that question unless you allow me to hold it in tension with another: What kind of people are these beliefs forming us to become?

• Does our Christology make us more like Christ?

• Does our doctrine of Scripture make us more obedient to Scripture?

• Does our ecclesiology make us capable of loving the church?

• Does our doctrine of holiness produce holiness?

• Does our doctrine of truth make us truthful?

• Does our doctrine of grace make us gracious?

This, I would argue, is a deeply Brethren theological examination. Who are we becoming because of the things we say we believe?

Perhaps my real spiritual challenge is to stop being embarrassed by the Brethren refusal to provide the kind of certainty others expect. Not because precision is bad nor because truth doesn’t matter.

Instead, I think the Brethren are trying to protect another truth: Christianity is finally not a system we master, but a Person we follow. And we follow him with other people. Some of those people frustrate us. Some interpret Scripture differently. Some force us to reconsider our convictions. Some require patience. Some require correction. And some—if we are open to it—even correct us.

I am not interested in being a theological precision warrior. My deep desire is to become a disciple who is lovingly obedient to Jesus Christ. I still believe doctrine matters. I have devoted much of my life to studying it and teaching it. I want the church to speak carefully about God because words about God matter. We have been given the gift of language, and we need to steward it well.

But my Brethren ancestors have given me something equally important: The suspicion that possessing the right words about Jesus is not quite the same thing as following him. And so I am learning to stop apologizing for a tradition that wants Christ to remain larger than its formulations of Christ.

The Brethren tradition at its best does not ask me to eschew belief. It asks me to hold what I believe within a community gathered around Jesus, Scripture open before us, feet ready to be washed, trusting that the Holy Spirit may still have something to say through the brother or sister sitting across the table. My brother or sister may not have a theological degree, but they have the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.

Maybe I don’t need to defend that kind of faith. Maybe I need to inhabit it more faithfully.

There is a quiet tragedy that has settled over much of modern Christianity. We have learned to worship on Sunday, but we have forgotten how to work on Monday. For many believers, the week is divided into sacred hours and ordinary hours, holy places and secular places. Church is where God is encountered. Work is where we earn a living until we can return to church again.

The Brethren never understood life this way. Long before theologians began speaking of faith and work or vocational theology, the Brethren were quietly cultivating a different imagination. They did not ask how faith might influence one’s occupation. They assumed that every honest occupation was already a place where Christ desired to be present.

They possessed no elaborate theology of business, economics, or labor. They refused to divide the world into sacred and secular. Perhaps no family embodied this vision more completely than the Sauers.

If you had wandered the roads of colonial Pennsylvania, you likely would have encountered Christopher Sauer long before you ever knew his name. His newspaper interpreted the events of the day. His almanac ordered the seasons of planting and harvest. His Bible rested on countless family tables. Through ink pressed onto rough paper, an entire people quietly learned how to see the world.

The Sauers were successful printers, publishers, and entrepreneurs. Yet none of those identities existed apart from discipleship. Above their printshop hung a simple sentence: “For the glory of God and my neighbor’s good.” It was not advertising; it was liturgy.

Today we tend to think of liturgy as something that happens inside a sanctuary—a carefully ordered service of hymns, prayers, Scripture, and sacrament. The ancient church, however, understood leitourgia quite differently. It meant “the work of the people.” Worship was not merely spoken. It was enacted. A gathered community learned together how to inhabit the kingdom of God before scattering again into the ordinary rhythms of life.

The Brethren instinctively extended that rhythm beyond the meetinghouse. Gathering and scattering became one continuous act of worship. The farmer carried the liturgy into the field. The teacher carried it into the classroom. The craftsman carried it into the workshop. The printer carried it into the pressroom. The church gathered to remember Christ. Then it scattered to embody him.

This is why the Sauers never asked whether printing was a Christian profession. The deeper question was whether they could print as Christians. Every page became an act of moral formation. What they published mattered, and what they refused to publish mattered just as much.

Christopher Sauer I reportedly remarked that he would rather starve than earn his bread by printing what dishonored God. Such words sound almost impossible to modern ears because we have become accustomed to allowing profit to answer questions that only faithfulness can answer.

The Sauers (father and son: Christoph Sauer I, 1695-1758, and Christoph Sauer II, 1721-1784) understood something we are still struggling to recover. Work is never merely economic; it is always spiritual. Every occupation is quietly asking us what kind of people we are becoming.

This explains why the Brethren have historically insisted upon the dignity of ordinary labor. Their ministers were often farmers. Their elders knew both the Scriptures and the soil. They preached with dirt beneath their fingernails. The hand that served the bread at Love Feast might be the same hand that harvested wheat earlier that week.

There was no contradiction. The church did not exist to rescue people from their work. It existed to teach them how to receive their work as participation in God's care for creation.

Today, many Christians experience vocational anxiety. We ask whether we have found the right career. The Brethren asked whether they were becoming faithful people. We wonder if our work is significant enough. They wondered whether it was truthful enough. We search for fulfillment. They sought faithfulness.

There is profound freedom in that shift. A faithfully made table, a carefully tended field, a truthfully printed newspaper, a patiently taught classroom. Each becomes an offering. Not because the work itself is extraordinary, but because Christ has chosen to meet us there.

The Sauers remind us that vocation is not ultimately about self-expression or personal achievement. It is about witness. The work of our hands (and minds) becomes the liturgy of our lives. What we pay attention to shapes us. What shapes us becomes a central part of our identity. Perhaps this is why Brethren conversation around social issues has become so charged. We have forgotten how to have conversations about actual people, real work, and the love of neighbor that should animate them all. If work is not shaped by the gaze of Christ, our spiritual life will soon follow. If love of God and our neighbor's good is supplanted by fearful ideology, then no matter how conservative the outlook, the compassion of Christ will always be strangely absent.

That is why the Sauers’ simple motto (not originally theirs) still speaks across the centuries. Not because it belongs to the eighteenth century, but because it reminds us of something the church is always in danger of forgetting: That worship never ends with the benediction. It simply leaves the sanctuary.

The liturgy continues in offices and orchards, hospitals and classrooms, kitchens and workshops, wherever ordinary people quietly labor for the glory of God and for their neighbor’s good.

For an interesting article on the Sauer press, check out this article (published today) by The Chestnut Hill Local in Philadelphia.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
—John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII

There are certain truths that every generation believes it has discovered for itself. One of ours is the illusion of independence. We speak constantly of autonomy, self-expression, and personal freedom. We imagine ourselves as self-made individuals, capable of determining our own destinies with little need for one another. Yet every crisis eventually reminds us of something older and wiser: we rise or sink together.

John Donne understood this long before our age of social media, political polarization, and institutional distrust. Writing from the weakness of illness, he realized that human life is fundamentally shared. The death of one diminishes another because every life is bound to countless others. We do not simply inhabit the same world; we belong to one another. That ancient observation has lingered in my mind as I have reflected upon what some political scientists have described as the Tuvalu Effect.

The phrase comes from the island nation of Tuvalu, whose shared life was threatened by the slow advance of rising seas. The power of the metaphor is not primarily environmental. It is existential. Catastrophe often arrives quietly. Shorelines disappear a few inches at a time. Habits of adaptation slowly replace habits of alarm. By the time everyone recognizes what has been lost, the landscape has already changed. Human communities erode in much the same way.

Rarely does a society fracture because of one dramatic event. More often, the deterioration comes through thousands of seemingly insignificant choices. We become slightly less charitable. Slightly more suspicious. Slightly quicker to caricature those with whom we disagree. We withdraw from difficult conversations. We surround ourselves with people who reassure us that we are right. None of these decisions appears decisive by itself. Together they reshape the moral landscape.

The greatest dangers rarely announce themselves. They accumulate. Malcolm Gladwell’s recent Revisionist History series, “The Staten Island Problem,” offers a fascinating illustration of this reality. The subject is, at first hearing, simply a borough of New York City. Yet beneath the historical details lies a much older observation about the human condition. We instinctively form tribes. Geography shapes identity. Culture creates belonging. Distance—whether physical, social, or ideological—gradually becomes misunderstanding.

None of this is surprising. Communities have always possessed distinctive identities. The problem begins when those identities become so complete that they eclipse every larger loyalty. We begin to think first as members of our own tribe and only secondarily as participants in a common life. Our neighbors become abstractions. Institutions become enemies. Disagreement becomes evidence of bad faith rather than an opportunity for mutual understanding.

At that point we have forgotten Donne. We may inhabit different islands, but we remain part of the same continent. The deeper question, then, is not political but moral.

Politics inevitably reflects character before it reflects policy. Laws require trust. Constitutions presume virtue. Self-government depends upon habits of self-restraint that no legal document can manufacture. Institutions can preserve a civilization for a time, but they cannot permanently compensate for the erosion of the virtues that first gave them life.

The same principle extends far beyond politics. Families depend upon forgiveness. Friendships require truthfulness. Churches survive only through charity. Universities flourish when intellectual humility accompanies conviction. Every enduring community rests upon moral habits that precede organizational structures.

When those habits disappear, institutions slowly become hollow. What is needed, therefore, is something older than strategy. It is spiritual fortitude.

By spiritual fortitude I do not mean sectarian certainty or religious triumphalism. I mean the quiet courage to pursue truth wherever it leads. The humility to admit when we have been mistaken. The patience to remain in conversations that would be easier to abandon. The charity to see opponents as neighbors rather than threats. The perseverance to continue repairing relationships long after the excitement of conflict has faded.

Remarkably, this conviction appears across many traditions. Christianity commands us to love our neighbors. Jewish thought speaks of participating in the repair of a fractured world. The Stoics taught endurance amid circumstances beyond our control. The classical republics understood that liberty could survive only among a virtuous people.

Their vocabularies differ. Their insight is remarkably similar. Healthy societies depend upon the formation of healthy souls. This also helps us recover the older meaning of the common good.

Today we often confuse the common good with majority preference. But the common good has never meant that everyone receives exactly what they want. It describes those conditions that allow every person to flourish together. Such flourishing requires, indeed demands, trustworthy institutions, truthful public discourse, strong families, vibrant local communities, friendships that cross social and ideological boundaries, and a respect for the dignity of every human being.

These are not merely political achievements. They are moral accomplishments. And they are almost always built quietly. Which means they are also repaired quietly.

Perhaps this is where hope begins. The habits that weaken a civilization accumulate slowly. So do the habits that strengthen one. A few questions to diagnose our spiritual fortitude might be:

• Do we listen before speaking?

• Are we seeking understanding or mere victory?

• Am I cultivating friendships that cross differences?

• What is our collective diet for outrage?

• Is there any silence in my daily life?

• Are we reading deeply (or reading at all)?

• What does my prayer life look/feel like (individually and corporately)?

• Are we serving neighbors whose lives bear little resemblance to our own?

None of these practices will trend on social media. Most appear painfully ordinary. Yet these ordinary habits have always shaped extraordinary cultures. The tide rises one wave at a time. So does restoration.

The Tuvalu Effect reminds us that gradual change reshapes entire landscapes. That is true of coastlines. It is equally true of souls.

John Donne’s enduring wisdom was never simply that we belong to one another. We already do. The deeper question is whether we will live as though that is true. Every act of humility, every restored friendship, every honest conversation, and every refusal to reduce another person to an ideology becomes a quiet act of resistance against the slow erosion of our common life.

Like the tide itself, these modest acts gather strength over time—not by drawing us into isolated islands, but by reminding us that we have always been part of the same continent. Only after we remember that truth can we begin, together, to reclaim the common good.

I have come to believe that one can know a person’s theology simply by watching how they mow. Anybody who knows me knows the joy I find in cutting grass.

Years ago, while I was serving in pastoral ministry, a wise friend—himself a fellow pastor—confessed that he loved mowing for the same reason I did. We belonged to a profession where nothing is ever truly finished. Sermons can always be revised. Meetings multiply. Pastoral care never ends. Books remain unwritten. Emails reproduce overnight. But when you mow a lawn, you finish. You can step back, look over the yard, and see what your hands have accomplished. At least, that is what we tell ourselves.

My late father worked for John Deere. Every time I climb into the seat, memory rides with me. It is impossible to separate the machine from the man. The smell of gasoline, the vibration of the engine, the familiar green paint—all of it quietly recalls him. The mower has become a kind of inheritance.

As I circle the two acres God has entrusted to my care, I pray without trying to pray. Thoughts drift into conversation with God. Scripture surfaces unexpectedly. Problems that seemed tangled indoors begin to untie themselves beneath an open sky. There is something almost sacramental about mowing.

Many people speak of it as drudgery. They gladly hire someone else to do it. To each their own. Yet I have never quite understood the desire to surrender what has become, for me, one of life’s quiet graces. Perhaps it is because my days are so full of noise that the gentle roar of the mower creates the very silence my soul longs for.

As the blades turn, the fragrance of fresh-cut grass fills the air. Trees sway overhead. A breeze moves across the field. Robins descend almost immediately, discovering insects suddenly exposed beneath the clipped canopy. Bluebirds flash against the green. Rabbits wait patiently at the edge of the brush. Butterflies drift as though the air itself were carrying them. Life slows to the speed of the mower.

I am not escaping civilization. There has always been a little of that temptation in my spirit, but this is something different. It is the discovery of grace within ordinary labor. Some people run to become free. I mow to remember.

Grass possesses a remarkable humility. It grows whether I notice it or not. The lines left behind by the mower reveal something that had been invisible only moments before. They are not simply patterns. They are time made visible. Rain, sunlight, patient seasons, and quiet growth suddenly become tangible. The lawn tells the story of providence.

While I may cultivate this small piece of ground, mowing continually reminds me that I belong to something much larger than myself. I am not standing over creation. I am participating within it.

Jesus repeatedly directed our attention toward creation—not because nature is divine, but because creation patiently bears witness to the faithfulness of its Creator. Consider the lilies. Watch the sparrows. Look at the fields.

Nature is not God, but it is God’s patient testimony. In a hurried world that constantly demands urgency, mowing whispers a different invitation: Be still. Pay attention. Ponder.

After years of mowing the same property, you begin to know the land. You remember which hill is too steep. You know where the ground softens after rain. You avoid holes hidden by the uncut grass. You anticipate the patch that browns first beneath August’s heat. You discover where clover thrives, where birds nest, where water settles, where weeds quietly find their way beside foundations.

You begin loving a place because you have cared for it. Or perhaps you care for a place because you love it. Eventually you cannot tell which comes first. We attend to what we love. Yet love also follows attention. We steward what we love. And we come to love what we faithfully steward.

Every person who mows eventually learns a simple lesson. You never look immediately in front of the mower. You choose a point on the horizon—a tree, a fence post, the corner of the property—and you keep your eyes fixed there. If you constantly stare at the grass beneath your front wheels, your lines begin to wander. But if your eyes remain fixed ahead, everything behind falls beautifully into order.

The writer of Hebrews understood something similar: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus...” Before discipleship becomes behavior, it is orientation. Christ is our point on the horizon. One cannot mow faithfully while continually looking backward.

And to that my pastor friend who told me that mowing brought satisfaction because the task could finally “be completed.” The longer I have mowed, however, the more I have realized that this isn’t true at all. It’s a farce! The grass always grows back. It never remains finished.

Oddly enough, I have found this comforting. Creation was never designed for completion. It was designed for rhythm. We breathe. We pray. We rest. We forgive. We return. The Sabbath itself reminds us that life is lived through recurring faithfulness rather than final accomplishment. Perhaps sanctification works the same way.

Herein is how mowing has taught me humility. You cannot mow wet grass. You cannot rush the seasons. You cannot bargain with the rain. Nature quietly refuses our attempts at mastery. We imagine ourselves as owners. Creation patiently reminds us we are receivers.

This may be one of the deepest lessons of stewardship. We do not dominate creation. We cooperate with it. What the Anabaptists have long called Gelassenheit—yieldedness—is not passivity. It is learning to work with God’s created order rather than attempting to conquer it.

Even edging the sidewalk has begun to teach me. We notice neglected edges long before we notice neglected centers. Perhaps sanctification often happens there as well—not merely in the great creeds we profess but in the margins where impatience grows, relationships fray, and seemingly insignificant details reveal who we are becoming. God often works at the edges of souls.

When I finish mowing, I often stop for a moment before putting everything away. The robins continue searching for worms. Bluebirds still dart through the yard. Killdeer call from nests hidden among the stones. Hawks circle overhead. Birds return to the feeder. From the nearby Hawthorn, a cardinal sounds the “all clear” notice.

Only then does it occur to me: Perhaps I wasn’t simply mowing my lawn. Perhaps I was feeding my neighbors. Neighbors with feathers. Neighbors with fur. The mower had quietly become part of an ecology much larger than my own concerns.

I enjoy mowing because it is something I do alone. No music. No podcast. No audiobook. Just the steady hum of my John Deere and my own thoughts. Not because solitude is the goal. Silence simply allows creation to speak. It allows my own heart to speak. And, somehow, it allows God to speak. The earth is not holy because we escape into it. The earth becomes holy because Christ meets us within ordinary obedience.

The scent of fresh-cut grass carries memory: Summer evenings. Lightning bugs. Church picnics. Family reunions. Grandparents. My parents. My father. Memory itself becomes theological. The fragrance reminds me that death often gives way to life. The grass falls beneath the blade. Yet greener growth follows. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies... Even the lawn quietly rehearses resurrection.

Henry David Thoreau taught America to walk deliberately. In Walden, he invited us to live deliberately. Perhaps my small invitation is simpler still: We should learn to mow deliberately. The kingdom of God often arrives not through dramatic adventures but through repeated acts of humble care.

Every straight line across a field. Every careful turn beneath an old oak. Every pause to let a frightened rabbit escape the mower. Each becomes a quiet participation in God’s patient love for the world. The earth has never needed more masters. It has always needed more caretakers.

So I finish. I blow the grass from the sidewalks, driveway, and the mower itself. I put it away. I brush myself off. I walk inside for a shower.

And just before I close the garage door, another thought quietly arrives. Don’t worry, Jason. The grass is already growing. There will be another Sabbath waiting for you next week.

Apparently, mowing is an important spiritual discipline for me. For more in this vein, check out my post from October 3 of last year.

Every generation of the church must answer a simple question: Who are we? The answer is rarely found in doctrinal statements alone. More often, it is discovered in the stories we tell, the songs we sing, and the memories we refuse to forget. For the early Brethren, that answer was remarkably consistent. We are pilgrims.

No one captured that identity more beautifully than Alexander Mack Jr. (1712–1803). While his father, Alexander Mack Sr., gave the Brethren movement its theological beginnings in Schwarzenau in 1708, his son gave the movement something equally important—a poetic imagination capable of helping a persecuted people understand who they were before God.

His poetry reminds us that the Brethren were never merely immigrants to America. They were pilgrims on their way to another country altogether.

The Journey Was Always Larger Than America

When the Brethren crossed the Atlantic during the eighteenth century, they certainly sought religious freedom. Europe had become increasingly inhospitable to those whose allegiance to Christ exceeded their allegiance to the state.

Yet Alexander Mack Jr. never allows the journey to end in Pennsylvania. For him, America was never the destination. Christ was.

Writing after the death of his beloved friend Christopher Sauer II, Mack reflects on death itself as the completion of a pilgrimage:

“The pilgrimage is now over;
now will my spirit recover...
Now I will enter into Jesus who died for me.
He has prepared for me a better house in Heaven.”

What a remarkable way to speak of death. Not defeat. Not escape. But homecoming. The Brethren crossed an ocean only because they already believed they belonged somewhere else. Their deepest citizenship was never European or American. It was Christ’s.

Pilgrims Learn to Read the World Differently

One of the gifts of pilgrimage is perspective. Pilgrims refuse to confuse temporary realities with eternal ones. They live in the world without letting it define them. Mack understood this deeply. In one poem, he writes,

“A soul which loves God
Finds anguish in this world...
Therefore Jesus calls to it,
‘Come, in me is joy and peace.’
‘I have overcome the world.’”

Notice the movement. Anguish is not denied. Neither is it ultimate.

This is classic Brethren theology. The cross is not avoided; it is interpreted in light of resurrection. Suffering remains real, but hope becomes even more real. This helps explain why the early Brethren could remain committed to peace even in an age of revolution and violence. Their confidence rested in a kingdom that could not be shaken.

The Pilgrimage of Love

If one word summarizes Mack’s poetry, it is love. Not sentimental affection. Christlike obedience. In one of his journal poems, he reflects upon Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13:

“Faith, love, hope,
Reach the goal...
What God’s word bids us love,
That I will daily practice
Through my pilgrim’s time.”

That single phrase gets me every time I read it: “Through my pilgrim’s time.” Love is not simply an emotion. It is the daily practice of a traveler.

For Mack, the journey toward Christ is measured not in miles but in increasingly embodied love. Every day becomes another opportunity to become more like the One toward whom we are traveling.

A Different Kind of Wealth

America has always tempted Christians with the promise that security can be found in prosperity. Mack knew better. Reflecting on the Beatitudes, he writes:

“Blessed are they that are poor in spirit...
Riches do not endure...
The half-way kind of man
Finds nowhere any peace...
For Heaven is hers!”

What strikes me is that Mack is not romanticizing poverty. Nor is he celebrating wealth. He is exposing the illusion that either can provide lasting peace. Only Christ can. The pilgrim possesses many things lightly because she already possesses the kingdom.

Hospitality Belongs to Pilgrims

Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of Mack’s theology is its hospitality. Reflecting on Matthew 25, he paraphrases Christ’s words:

“I was a stranger in the world and you entertained me...
I was sick and I was in prison and you visited me.”

These are not abstract words. Mack watched his close friend, Christopher Sauer II, imprisoned for refusing to violate his conscience during the American Revolution.

The Brethren remembered what it meant to be strangers. That memory shaped how they treated strangers. They cared for Native Americans. They resisted violence. They refused to allow fear to determine their posture toward others. Pilgrims recognize fellow pilgrims.

Remember Lot’s Wife

Toward the end of his life, Mack offers one final warning. Borrowing from Genesis 19, he writes:

“If doubt seeks to seduce us,
Let us be mindful of Lot’s wife...
For disobedience has the effect
Of making the heart as hard as stone.”

Lot’s wife looked backward. Pilgrims always look forward.

This may be Mack’s greatest challenge to the contemporary church. We are often tempted either to idolize the past or to become captive to the present. Pilgrims do neither. They remember faithfully as they walk expectantly toward the kingdom of God.

We Are Still Pilgrims

I wonder whether the greatest contribution Alexander Mack Jr. can make to the twenty-first-century Brethren is simply this: he reminds us who we are.

Before we were institutions, we were a people. Before we had buildings, we had songs. Before we had denominational structures, we had a shared imagination shaped by Scripture, worship, and hope.

The early Brethren understood that their identity was not grounded in nationality, politics, ethnicity, or even persecution. Those realities mattered, but none of them finally defined them. Jesus did.

Perhaps that is why Mack’s final words about his departed friend continue to resonate more than two centuries later:

“Now I will enter into Jesus who died for me...
He has prepared for me a better house in Heaven
that I may praise Him in it forever and ever.”

That is the language of a pilgrim. And perhaps it is the language the Brethren most need to recover today. Not because we are trying to return to the eighteenth century. But because we are still journeying toward the same kingdom.

There is hardly a week that passes in which I do not have a conversation with someone who feels they are falling short of the person they believe they ought to be.

Sometimes it is a father who is convinced he is not spending enough time with his children. Sometimes it is a mother who believes she is failing her family. Others lament that they are not praying enough, reading enough Scripture, accomplishing enough at work, or living with enough purpose. The details vary, but the underlying sentiment remains remarkably consistent: I am not enough.

These are not usually careless or indifferent people. Quite the opposite. They are people who genuinely desire to love well, serve faithfully, and contribute to the common good. Yet they carry an exhausting burden of shame. They often describe it as “conviction,” but as I listen, it sounds less like the loving conviction of the Holy Spirit and more like guilt, self-condemnation, and quiet despair. So I listen.

People entrust me with some of the most vulnerable parts of their lives. Beneath their words is an honest desire to become the kind of person they believe God is calling them to be. What fascinates me is how often these conversations revolve around hypocrisy.

Perhaps that is because hypocrisy is everywhere. We watch public figures abandon principles they once loudly defended. We witness moral inconsistency in politics, churches, institutions, and even within our own families. Standards that once seemed self-evident now appear negotiable.

Yet there is something profoundly hopeful about our ability to recognize hypocrisy. To identify something as hypocritical already assumes the existence of a standard by which it can be judged. The very act of recognizing the gap between what is and what ought to be suggests that our moral imagination has not disappeared. There remains within us an ember that still knows the good.

Thomas Merton once offered a prayer that has stayed with me for years:

“Lord, I have no idea where I am going... But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.”

Those words have become increasingly meaningful to me.

What if the father who worries about being a better father has already revealed something beautiful? Before there is failure, there is desire. Before there is guilt, there is love. The concern stems from his desire to become the kind of father his children deserve.

Likewise, when we grieve the moral failures of our leaders, it reveals that something within us still knows leadership ought to be marked by integrity. Perhaps that ember is grace.

I wonder if we have become too quick to assume that every feeling of inadequacy is evidence that something is wrong with us. Sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes what we call guilt is simply the soul awakening to the distance between the life we are living and the life we long to live.

C. S. Lewis understood this remarkably well in Till We Have Faces. The novel is built around one haunting question: What must die within us before we can truly love another person?

Orual believes she loves Psyche. She sacrifices for her, protects her, even suffers because of her. Yet Lewis slowly reveals that much of what she calls love is actually possession, fear, insecurity, and the inability to let another person belong to God rather than herself.

How often do we make the same mistake? We confuse longing with failure. Need with love. Control with care. Shame with holiness. We wear poorly designed masks to hide the natural expressions of the human face.

Lewis exposes the frightening ambiguity of the human heart. Even our noblest desires become tangled with self-protection and fear. We cling rather than bless.

Maybe that is why feeling like a hypocrite is such a complicated experience. Feeling like a hypocrite does not necessarily mean we are hypocrites. Sometimes it simply means an alarm has sounded within the soul. The alarm itself is evidence that something alive still resides there.

The decisive moment comes immediately afterward. We can indulge the inner voice of condemnation. We can replay the endless monologue that insists we are failures, baptizing self-hatred with religious language until we mistake it for the voice of God.

Or we can receive the alarm as a gift. The recognition that I could become a better parent is already movement toward becoming one. The longing to know God more deeply is itself evidence that God has already begun to draw me. The desire for holiness is not proof that grace has abandoned me; it may well be proof that grace has already arrived.

The question, then, is not whether these desires exist. The question is whether I will steward them.

Legalism has rarely brought anyone closer to God. Forcing ourselves through spiritual disciplines out of fear often hardens the heart more than it softens it. Silence becomes another failure. Prayer becomes another obligation. Scripture becomes another measuring stick.

But what if these desires were received differently? What if the longing to pray, to love more faithfully, to become more patient, more generous, more Christlike were themselves gifts entrusted to us by the Spirit? Then the invitation changes. Instead of asking, "How can I stop failing?" we begin by asking, "How can I steward this desire for the glory of God and the good of my neighbor?"

The late Calvin Miller compared the spiritual life to driving a car. Too many Christians spend their lives pressing the brake pedal. They become experts at stopping, resisting, and saying no. The result is a life that lurches forward in fits and starts. Far less attention is given to the steering wheel.

The Christian life is not simply about avoiding the wrong roads. It is about learning to steer toward the good. Lewis’s Orual eventually discovers that genuine love releases rather than possesses. That realization lies near the heart of the gospel itself. Grace does not merely forgive our distorted loves; it patiently reorders them. It teaches us to move from grasping to giving, from fear to trust, from possession to blessing.

The reality for all of us is that we will always contend with the hypocrisy that marks our lives. None of us lives perfectly according to what we know to be true. That dissonance can become suffocating if we allow shame to narrate our lives.

I have often remembered something Tony Campolo once said to a room full of pastors. Our task, he suggested, is to manage the boundaries of our hypocrisy. We need not pretend it does not exist, but neither should we allow it to overflow its banks and define us.

Perhaps one way we manage those boundaries is by paying close attention to the alarm itself. Not because the alarm condemns us, but because it invites us.

It invites us beneath the shame to the deeper desire that existed before fear distorted it. Before guilt amplified it. Before comparison weaponized it. Before forgetfulness convinced us that grace had somehow withdrawn.

Grace does not simply overlook our disordered loves. Grace patiently teaches us how to love rightly.

So to those who carry discouragement, shame, or the quiet fear that they are never enough, I offer this possibility. The places where you most acutely sense hypocrisy may also be the places where your deepest renewal is waiting to begin.

I do not always know what it means to become a better parent, a more faithful Christian, or a more attentive neighbor. But I do know this: desiring those things is not something to be despised. It is something to steward. And perhaps that desire itself is already evidence that grace has begun its quiet work within us.

As the United States commemorates its 250th anniversary, Christians throughout the nation find themselves asking what faithful patriotism ought to look like. Public celebrations naturally invite gratitude for the blessings of the American experiment: constitutional…

Read more

Read more

There is an obscure paragraph tucked away about a quarter of the way through Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. It has become one of the most famous passages in American literature:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately...”

The words have endured because they awaken something most of us already suspect: we are often alive without truly liv…

Read more

We pay very little attention to where our eyes go. Most of us move through life looking in one of three directions. We look forward, toward wherever we think we are going. We look down, making sure we do not stumble over obstacles or searching for something we have lost. Or we look backward, trying to understand where we have been or what still haunts u…

Read more

I’ve grown somewhat accustomed to strange noises coming from the woods that surround my house at night. There is always that initial surge of adrenaline when an unfamiliar sound emerges from the darkness. The fight-or-flight instinct rises immediately. But once the source reveals itself, fear often gives way to fascination.

Sometimes it is the shrill cry…

Read more

Read more

Every few years, it seems, someone announces that we are living through another Reformation. The argument is understandable. The center of Christianity has shifted dramatically away from Europe and North America toward Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia. Long-standing institutions appear increasingly fragile. New technologies a…

Read more

Every Tuesday, I listen to the podcast Not Dead Yet, hosted by Ben Sasse and Chris Stirewalt. Sasse, recently diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer, and Stirewalt have turned the podcast into something surprisingly profound and beautiful: an ongoing meditation on what it means to live the good life.

This week’s episode lingered on…

Read more

There are questions that sit beneath the surface of our lives for years before we finally learn how to ask them honestly. For me, one of those questions is simple: Why do I write? Or perhaps more truthfully: Why do I write the things I write? The deeper question is, what is my voice? Writing has become the medium for discerning th…

Read more

This is a letter I wrote to my son, Miles, as he ends his junior year of high school and looks ahead to his senior year. It follows a conversation we had about college, calling, career, and change. I will give him this letter (probably with changes to be discerned in the next year) at his high school graduation next year.

Read more