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It is impossible to live the Christian life alone. Period. And what passes as “shared life” in most western world churches is so weak and tasteless that it’s an insult to the Christ who redeemed us to be his body.

The level of interaction between Christians in many local churches consists of nothing more than a coming to and going from a weekend event at a public building where those who profess Christ, right alongside those who are looking for him, sit together as strangers. If we do have conversations, they’re fleeting, shallow and safe because, after all, it isn’t the time and place and there’s too much to get into and you don’t know who can be trusted. We are alone in the same room (alone together), consuming what is passed out by “religious professionals” and then returning to our fortresses to live in relative isolation, apart from the the church: the body of Christ which is his people. And in this isolation we struggle to sort out family life, marriages, finances, vocations, and the press of daily life. Cloistered we struggle to overcome vice and to put into practice all the things we heard over the weekend.

How are we doing in this respect? Well, statistics say that collectively we’re failing miserably in this task, and that the life we have gained in turning to Christ is virtually indistinguishable from the life of those who have not turned to him. We lie as much, have affairs as often, and are addicted to the same level as the world in which we live. And in the area of divorce we slightly outpace the rest of society.

Many of us know that we’re failing. Deep down we know it but have been afraid to admit it, so we console ourselves with two fictions that help us live with the unease of not being in relationship and not living with much power. The first fiction is that we don’t have to be deeply involved in one another’s lives because “we’re a family linked in our perspectives and attitudes.” Because, then, we’re a “society of spirit,” even when we go our separate ways we’re still “together in our hearts.” This is real fellowship, we say.

But the truth is that no society of hearts is capable of existing only in the realm of the mind. If we’re to hold each other in mind when apart, it will only be because we’ve held each other close when together, which is the way it’s meant to be. If we’re to be saved at all, we will be saved together. Through Jesus, God has penetrated life in a new way in order to create a people who are necessarily linked. They are joined not only in their attitudes but in a type of life so different in kind from the society at large that it stands out sharper than fresh blood on white linen.

The second fiction we console ourselves with says that the profound brokenness we experience is okay, because what really sets us apart from the rest of society is a profession of faith that guarantees us eternal life. In other words, we’ve prayed the “sinner’s prayer” and others haven’t. We have a divine insurance policy and they don’t. But what good is a “sinner’s prayer” if it doesn’t, in communion with others sinners, lead us together from our individualism to become a holy ethnos, the new people, the body of Christ, the temple of God — all biblical images? At its worst it becomes a superstitious formula, some magic key that gives us, we believe, automatic entrance into the kingdom of God. It’s what we speak when God says, “Psst! What’s the password?”

The good news is that we can overcome this deficit of imagination and understanding. At least some of our inability to live in life-transforming relationships with one another is rooted in our ignorance of “the shared life” as it’s presented in the New Testament. We take our cues from present day church life and mistakenly believe it to be the truth. But what if we saw and decided to live the according to our calling? What if we looked at the portrait of the early church as it’s actually presented? And what if we allowed that picture and understanding to reform our current practice? There’s still space for a revolution.

Sometimes I think I don’t need friends. Whenever I’ve gone away for an extended period to be alone, I’ve never really missed anybody, a fact which sometime concerns me more than a little, but what am I to do about it? Manufacture feelings? I love my children when I’m with them, but when they’re gone, sometimes a couple weeks can pass before they even enter my mind. The same goes for my wife who bore these children and to whom I’ve been married for over 30 years. The adage “out of sight, out of mind” applies perfectly in my case.

But there’s more. Not only do I not miss people, but I even enjoy the time alone. Alone I feel entirely at home. My fantasy (an open joke with my wife and friends) is that my ideal vacation would be to live alone in the wilderness (preferably in the mountains) for several months, having only the most basic things available to me, and indoor plumbing doesn’t fall into that category. A rude structure (e.g., a teepee or yurt) to keep me dry and warm, a little food to eat (I’d be happy to hunt & forage for my own), and some durable clothes. And something to write on.

So do I need friends? Contrary to my own personal fiction, yes. They’re a part of sustainable faith. They’ve not only been comfort and joy (in addition to being irritants), but they’ve saved my scrawny butt time and again. The old adage that there’s strength in numbers is in fact true, if for no other reason than finding protection in the pack. Another person with me in the wilderness I often desire (as long as that person’s not a complete idiot) will increase my chance of survival. Now my odds of being the one eaten by a grizzly bear are only 50%. But another friend anywhere is a good thing.

Studies have shown repeatedly that people who have close friends are happier, enjoy better health, and live longer than those who don’t. Even dogs and cats can help in these matters. When elderly people who live alone are given pets as companions, they fare better. What’s that all about? We don’t know all the reasons behind it, but generally speaking we’re hard-wired to thrive as social beings. In America we think of ourselves primarily as a collection of individuals, but it would be a lot more helpful (and healthful) if we could see ourselves as collectives, families, groups, etc. simply because that fits the physical reality.

We demonstrate our knowledge of community’s importance by the way we have and still do punish people: you shun, ostracize or isolate. Exile your enemy to a remote island (like John on the island of Patmos.) Punish someone emotionally by not talking to her. Put the prisoner in solitary confinement. It takes much more poison to kill a rat in community than it does to kill one in isolation. The child standing alone in the corner of the playground at recess is always weak and suspect.

Here’s an excerpt from a New York Times article, “The Lonely American Just Got a Bit Lonelier,” written by Henry Fountain almost two years ago:

There is a new installment in the annals of loneliness. Americans are not only lacking in bowling partners, now they’re lacking in people to tell their deepest, darkest secrets. They’ve hunkered down even more, their inner circle often contracting until it includes only family, only a spouse or, at worst, no one. And that is something the Internet may help ease, but is unlikely to cure.

A recent study by sociologists at Duke and the University of Arizona found that, on average, most adults only have two people they can talk to about the most important subjects in their lives — serious health problems, for example, or issues like who will care for their children should they die. And about one-quarter have no close confidants at all.

This aloneness and isolation is a social experiment of epic proportions. Never before in recorded history have we as humans willingly embarked on such a radical and stupid course. Shouldn’t this make us a little wary? A little nervous? Some of the strongest metaphors for the community of faith are based in this social understanding: we are “the people of God” (an ethnic grouping) or the “family-household of God” or the “assembly-church of God? Daniel Goleman’s book Social Intelligence highlights in wonderful and compelling ways how exquisitely formed we are in our neural hardwiring and chemistry to act socially.

This point was driven home both to me and my wife last night as we met with a younger couple really struggling in their marriage. We began the time with them by telling something of our own story and the great difficulties we faced for the first fifteen or so years. “And what helped you turn the corner,” the wife asked. As we reflected on that and gave answers, it was obvious to us that opening ourselves to others and coming into the experience of community was a key part of our healing. No surprise there. I still remember with crystal clarity one particular turning point from well over a decade ago. My friend Owen walked with me one morning through the streets of Norwood while I keened and wailed over the fact that my wife wasn’t my “soul mate” and didn’t enjoy the things I enjoyed to the degree that I enjoyed them. (Poor me. It all sounds so selfish and melodromatic in retrospect.) At the end of my lament Owen gently and simply said, “Why does it have to be your wife? I like all those things, and so do the other men in our group. Isn’t that enough for you? Why do you want to impose on her a burden of enjoyment she’s not wired or meant to bear?” Ouch. But it was a good ouch, and a tension along a marital faultline eased because I had a friend who acted like a friend.

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.20

There’s a famous line by Blaise Pascal that, loosely translated, goes like this: “All the troubles we experience can be traced to one thing: not knowing how to sit peacefully in a room.”

Monasticism has, for most of its history, recognized the truth of this statement and seen the “cell” (the small room a monk or nun inhabits) as a crucial element of spiritual formation. I’m reminded here of another quotation from Thomas à Kempis: “You’ll grow to love your cell if you learn to stay in it; if you don’t it will only be a drag.” [my translation] Of course a cell doesn’t have to be in a convent or monastery. Any dedicated space will do. The point is to have “a place apart,” to get comfortable being in that place (without the aid of flickering images and sound directly in front of you), and to quiet oneself internally.

I’ve heard lots of messages on Psalm 46.10 (”Be still and know that I am God”), but I don’t know of any instances where the practice of being alone and the skill of quieting oneself internally are presented and taught as part of the basic grammar of discipleship to Jesus. Yes, churches here and there offer seminars and classes that introduce people to more contemplative practices, but these are presented as good ideas to be considered rather than essentials to be mastered.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the sound observation that community is loaded with danger for people who aren’t comfortable being alone (and conversely, that solitude is toxic for people unanchored from community). His point is that learning to be alone teaches us how to be with others. The practice of solitude, then, brings health to the community. In the subtraction of people and words, there’s finally room for addition. We can understand at deeper levels that God is present, that God is sovereign, that God is good.

Not once have I ever come back from a period away for solitude, silence and prayer feeling less capable of being with others. In every instance I’ve returned more aware of who God is, who I am in God, and what my place is among his people and creation. As odd as this may sound, I come back realizing that in the final analysis I don’t need them in order to know who I am or whose I am. If I don’t need them then I’m free to love them. But if I need them I’m likely to manipulate them.

This thing is a beast, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. Its construction has taken years, cost into the billions, and involved an international consortium of physicists and engineers; its deployment will give scientists an unprecedented look into the particles of which our universe consists. I’m personally jazzed about how it might speak into string theory, but what I was thinking about this morning was the absolutely staggering amount of human life, energy and money that went into its creation in order to squeeze out a little more energy so that scientists could peer behind the curtain, so to speak, just a little deeper. Without a doubt the next advance on the LHC will require unimaginably larger expenditures to go even just infinitesimally deeper. You can only have a handful of these “big deals” in a lifetime because of the high cost attached to them, yet many leaders within the church have, I think, believed or hoped it would be the norm. In moments of unfaithfulness we’ve lusted after a church version of the LHC. But few are asked to wear the ring, because few can wear it. (And here it’s worth noting that a few people probably can wear the ring.)

So this was part of my morning reverie, but I promised we’d go down a different path, so let’s talk about sustainable faith and holism. Many authors, too numerous to name, have spoken incisively of the way western Christians has been entrenched in a very strong dualism: there’s spiritual life and then there’s everything else. Spiritual life has been seen as non-material, non-corporeal, and “the flesh” as that poverty-stricken thing from which we’ll some day escape. But even within the so-called spiritual life we sometimes speak of separate lives. Richard’s Foster’s wonderful book Streams of Living Water gives evidence to that compartmentalization, as my friend Jeff Cannell pointed out to me. So we have the incarnational life, the disciplined life, the word-centered life, the compassionate life, etc. Now, I know that Foster sees all of these “lives” are mere tributaries of the one life flowing from Christ (The Really Big River). For him it was simply a convenient way of grouping and talking about the various ways the church has expressed herself throughout history. Nevertheless, it still reflects the way our minds — his, mine, yours — have been trained to operate: this, not that; that, not this. It’s a language of distinction and quantification and compartmentalization, and we’ve been heading down this road ever since the ancient Greeks, so we have about 2,500 years of practice in the west. But things are changing. Synthesis is becoming all the rage.

We’ll still make distinctions. After all, it’s hardwired into us and useful for our existence: this mushroom (which can kill me) is different from that mushroom (which I can sautée). That’s a difference i want to know. But the emerging church, thank God, is more interested in connections and synthesis than in disjunctions and analysis. Einstein showed us that space and time are connected. Quantum mechanics showed us the connection between the observer and the observed. People now understand that hurricanes and butterfly wings are connected thanks to Chaos Theory. The current generation is completely familiar with six degrees of separation. In short, the world for them has become more fluid and plastic and connected. Consequently, they’re looking for a radically holistic faith, one that embraces the body as much as the mind . . . which is the body as well. The current renaissance of experiential worship didn’t arise in a vacuum. It’s a natural push toward a very physical, multi-sensory, eyes-wide-open experience. Personally, I rejoice in its arrival and believe this holism is an essential part of vibrant, sustainable faith. The radical dualism that has permeated western Christian thought creates an interior dissonance that the emerging church finds not only repulsive but unsustainable.

The other day while I was waiting for my wife to finish up some grocery shopping, I went into the McDonald’s fast food shop nearby to try their “new and improved coffee.” As a habit I avoid all fast-food chains, but my curiosity got the better of me, so I ordered my small cup and simultaneously handed my mug (which I carry with me) to the employee, asking him if he could rinse it with some hot water because it was dirty and cold. He looked puzzled but did it. Then he put the mug down, pulled out a large styrofoam cup and walked to the coffee pot. “Excuse me,” I said, “but is that for my coffee?” “Yes,” he answered. “But I don’t want my coffee in that. That’s why I gave you my mug.” He paused and said, “I’ll do it this time, but we’re not allowed to use your mug. It’s against company policy.” I was really exhausted that day and very much on the cranky side. If I could have a re-do, I’d say “I understand. Don’t bother, then. I’m happier to go without.” But what I said (with thinly veiled sarcasm) was, “So McDonald’s would rather I take their styrofoam needlessly and then clutter up some landfill with it for next gazillion years?” And then the hammer fell. Handing me the mug he said, “Well, it doesn’t really matter because God’s going to give us a new heaven and earth anyway.” A wire tripped in me, and my reptilian, emotional response came gushing out: “So it really doesn’t matter if we piss all over the earth — yes, I’m afraid I said the word piss — and pollute God’s gift to us, because, you know, God’s going to give us a new one after we’ve mismanaged this one!” He backpedaled and stammered, “That’s not really what I meant,” but I ended the conversation with a crisp, “You know what, you need to get yourself a new theology.”

So he had a theology that made no connection between stewarding creation and loving God. And I, in my fatigue and “righteous indignation” showed a theology that, in the moment at least, made no connection between loving God and showing respect for another human being. May we close the gaps, Lord, wherever they exist.

* * * * * * * * * *

Fourteen divided by seventy-four — a life span.
Multiply the quotient by one hundred.
Nineteen percent.
About one-fifth of your life (if you’re average, of course).

Sever one leg completely from your body.
Take it from the hip down.
Now run fast.

Take your house and board up a room
(without first removing anything from it).
How cramped do you feel?

Are there five in your family?
Shoot one.
How long will you grieve?

Drop your salary from forty to thirty-two thousand.
Burn eight thousand one-dollar bills, on by one.
Cover yourself with their ashes.

What is twenty percent of our vision?
When gone, are we legally blind?

Lose ten points from your IQ:
Slam your head against a brick wall
repeatedly.
Can you still understand this?

And if all this is too daunting, go down easy:
watch others live their lives.
Disregard your own,
the real one,
the one slipping away.

Now back to the topic of “big church” and sustainable faith. First of all, by big I mean anything over 150. Some of you recognize this instantly as Dunbar’s Number (which was really 148), the upper limit of a social group wherein all the members can know the names and roles and mutual relationships of all the other members. As you go above that number the church (or any group for that matter) is experienced less as family and more impersonally. I’ll say more about familial loss in a subsequent post. Right now I’d like to focus on the energy requirements of bigness, which are a function of size.

With a modest amount of strength training each week (which doesn’t even have to be at a gym and might even be a natural part of our daily work) and with a sensible diet, we can have a pretty decent physique. But to achieve the freakishly large and unnatural proportions of professional bodybuilders, you have to have to devote hours on end not just to heavy lifting but to a very regimented kind of lifting that isolates certain muscles, entails a specific number of reps and sets, has precisely defined days of rest and progressions. It’s all very detailed and demanding. And then there’s the food. I saw a short web story on a bodybuilder whose daily breakfast was 10 egg whites and a head of broccoli, and this was only one a many meals he needed each day in order to compensate for the tremendous number of calories expended in workouts and in carrying around all that extra muscle on his body. Just to maintain that body of his he needed each day to consume approximately three times what a normal person would need. That’s the cost of size. But that’s just the pure caloric cost. It says nothing of the cost of time or relationships or mental space. For pro bodybuilders, there is only lifting. And we haven’t even touched on the use of HGH (human growth hormone) and anabolic steroids, both of which are rampant in that culture and “needed” in order to speed recovery of damaged tissue after workouts and create additional muscle mass. The long-term cost to ones health from the regular use of steroids and HGH can be devastating, but bodybuiders, gripped by their pursuit, usually ignore the long-term cost for their short-term gain.

Elite distance runners have the same kind of obsession. I’m not elite, but I’ve run competitively, so I’ll speak here out of a fresh personal experience. I can run 20-30 miles a week mindlessly and with great enjoyment, and with that amount I can race reasonably well for my age class in local 5Ks and 10Ks. But to be in the top 10, I have to do at least 40 miles per week. Fifty will put me in the top 5. But to gain two more places I’d have to do 60 miles per week. And once I get above 40 and start toward 50, it’s like I’ve entered a vastly different universe: I wake up thinking about running, I check my pulse to see how rested I am. If it’s a little above my normal basal pulse rate, I think about how I need to alter my day’s training. I constantly monitor how I’m feeling, what my energy level is. I think about my progress and evaluate my workouts. I’m constantly hungry, always checking my weight, reading more about training theory, meticulously recording my workouts and poring over them. I find that thoughts of running slowly and insidiously encroach upon whatever mental space I have, gobbling up the RAM so to speak.

That’s what it was often like in my 20s, but I experienced this again recently in the last few months of a 2-year training buildup for the 2007 Berlin Marathon. For the first year things were fine at an even 40 miles per week, but by early summer of the following year I was up to 60 miles, and somewhere in August I got greedy and figured that three weeks of 70+ miles would be infinitely better and probably allow me to dip under three hours. But frankly, at that point I had lost perspective and was now acting irrationally. I was no longer running for pleasure, and “my” running was no long mine. It was now running me. So at the end of my first 75 mile week, when I should have quit, I idiotically pushed on and incurred a severe stress fracture that not only put to rest any hope of running in the marathon I’d trained for for two years, but even jeopardized the possibility of ever running again. I’m more than a little embarrassed to speak publicly about this, but the walkaway from that experience was personally sobering and instructive. Plus it’s germane to this topic. Running, you see, went from being a pleasurable and appropriately mindless way of recreating to being a mechanistic, all-consuming and depleting activity that would, if everything played out perfectly, reward me with me with something trivial: an elite level time. But even if I had made it to the starting line healthy and ready to go, I could never have kept up that volume of training following the race. In the end it was just too much.

And “it’s just too much” is what many leaders in their second half of life, and smarter leaders in their first half of life, are saying. On the heels of the concession is the natural question, “What then is sustainable?” The other day I told the story of my marathon debacle to a pastor, who said, “You know, that’s really interesting, because the number of hours I work during a week corresponds roughly to your mileage experience. When I work about 40 hours a week, I do really well, but when I get into 50 and 60 hours, it dominates my thinking, I get sick more often, I have less to give to others, it’s no longer pleasurable, and my family suffers.” There you go.

The cost of bigness isn’t simple and linear. If you have 150 people and the total energy cost is x, then the total energy cost for 300 people to be together in any meaningful way isn’t simply 2x. It’s always 2x + something, and the something gets larger and larger as you go down the pike. Which leads me to my last question. If being big has an inherent wastefulness to it, then why in the world do so many leaders want to go down that path rather than hive off smaller clusters? If Richard Schwartz (Natural Church Development) has documented that 10 solid churches of 200 each will together always “outperform” one church of 2,000, why would we want to subject ourselves to the costs attached to bigness? Having said this, I want to state again that I find it entirely possible that a few people are genuinely called by God to lead very big churches. I don’t see size as an argument for or against faithfulness.

We have a long ways to go, but we’ll continue to wend our way toward a definition of sustainable faith in subsequent posts, because it’s about so much more than manageable sizes and sane schedules and family atmosphere. [Caveat emptor: if you're looking for a tidy and linear path to the answer, I'm guaranteed to disappoint you.]

So I write with a bias, I suppose, but I also write (I think) from the perspective of a generation (not the boomers, whom, strangely, I’ve never ever felt a part of) that finds it increasingly difficult to connect to the normal mode of evangelical church life. There’s a push for something other. As Phyllis Tickle has said repeatedly — and please know that I’m paraphrasing her comments — this yet-to-be-defined group, an blend of desires for (1) social justice; (2) stewardship of earth; (3) a meaningful liturgy that speaks to the present while honoring the past; (4) mystery; (5) participation in the power of the Spirit; (6) and a bracing engagement of scripture that’s thoroughly christocentric is currently very messy in its expression. It’s an inchoate soul in search of a beautiful body. It’s like galaxy starting to form, the dust collecting and swirling around some core that’s gaining mass and density.

But galaxies and stars don’t coalesce unless there’s a amply strong gravitational core, and I think it remains to be seen whether there’s enough “matter” to unify these many voices. I used to think there was, but a comment that appeared recently in a New York Times article regarding Pattern and Decoration (P&D), thoroughly arrested my attention. P&D was the last significant, fine art movement in western culture. It has been the only art movement of the post-modern era, and maybe the last art movement ever:

“We don’t do art movements anymore.” Mr. Cotter continues, “We do brand names (Neo-Geo); we do promotional drives (’Painting is Back!’); we do industry trends (art fairs … etc.). But now the market is too large, its mechanism too corporate, its dependence on instant stars and products too strong to support the kind of collective thinking and sustained application of thought that have defined movements as such.” [italics mine]

Think long and hard about this quotation, because what may be true of the art world may also, unfortunately, be true of the thing awaiting birth. I now wonder if the new reformation we long to see will be stillborn (i.e., thoroughly fragmented) for some of the same reasons. In a world that spawns iPods and i-This and i-That, how possible is collective thinking and sustained application of thought? Not very. But we can pray: may your kingdom come. After all, with God all things are possible. A broken and contrite heart God will not despise. With many others, I’m looking for The Rose.

But what do we mean when we use the phrase? I’m wondering if so far it’s partially, if not primarily, a critique of “big church” as it has been practiced (or imagined to be practiced) in evangelical circles: a churning, goal-driven, program-based, weekend-centered, top-down ideated, bottom-line attentive, corporate-glitzy, professional-feeling life, one in which those who minister are swept along in a powerful current that eventually leaves them depleted, exhausted, spent and spit up on the shore.

I’ve spent lots of time with people who live or have lived in that current. Take, for instance, this young person who was on the paid staff of a growing church: “I’ve had a few conversations with my pastor regarding rest, work, solitude and prayer, and how these simultaneously work together to [increase love for God and people]. I guess you can say we still don’t see eye to eye. I’m responsible for leading the worship team, training worship leaders, leading a home group, trying to grow a coffee shop, stumbling through VLI (a 2-year, practical/academic training program), and taking care of the entire administrative side of the church. I’d like to have a day off [Monday], but in order to obtain this, I should in his opinion be taking on more work [italics mine]. I’ve made it clear that, while I believe in the mission and method of the Alpha Course, I don’t have the time to do it and I am drawing my boundaries there; I simply won’t be filling up another night each week. We’ve also disagreed on this, as he believes it’s God’s intention that I do Alpha. So though he hears what I’m saying, [he] doesn’t think I’m willing to ’step up to the plate and swing the bat.’ “He was married at the time and, thankfully, still is. And I’m happy that he removed himself from that work.

Maybe you think I’ve used an egregious and atypical example, that I’ve set up a straw man. No, and the problem is more common than we’d like to admit. Much of my work over the last few years has put me in touch with these people, and I’ve known senior leaders who have expected their associates to put in at least 70 hours of work per week. But we know not only the trajectory of this course but it’s outcome as well, and it’s not a good one. You can sustain it — at great cost — in your 20s and 30s and maybe into your early 40s, but it doesn’t carry you through the second half of life, and maybe it’s not such a good idea to churn through the young and naive as if they were commodities.

So perhaps the emergence of the term “sustainable faith” is in part a reaction to a mode of ministry that’s difficult over a lifetime.