Pohl’s Introduction on these “Four Practices That Sustain Community” is both refreshing and convicting. They could easily be summed up in one word: integrity. Even as I look at the wider culture in the Reformedish community, I see that it is very noticeable when we are found wanting in these basic practices.  We are a community that is supposedly passionate about truth, but we need to be careful not to think that only applies to what we think about God. If we are not known as a people who live truthfully and speak truthfully, we are not living by faith in the One who is truth and who deals with us truthfully.

 
On the MoS podcast, Carl and I talk a little about the differences in culture when unbelievers are invited into our households and vice versa. As I’ve just started reading Christine Pohl’s, Living Into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us, I’ve been thinking even more about what unbelievers experience in our family households and in the household of God, should they ever visit. An obvious cultural difference is that we are a people of prayer. And this is something that Carl and I touched on. When an unbeliever is invited into our home, they will be asked to join us in prayers of thanksgiving before sharing a meal.

But what other mores might intrigue a guest invited into the Christian community? Pohl teaches that a Christian community that lives from a framework of particular “practices allows us to see issues in congregational and community life from a different angle and helps us to get at the moral and theological commitments that structure our relationships” (5). While all communities have practices, Pohl asserts that for believers, “practices can also be understood as responses to the grace we have already experienced in Christ, in light of the word and work of God, and for the sake of one another and the world” (5).

What are these practices? Well, they may not be particularly noticeable at first glance. As a matter of fact, Pohl notes that they are most powerful when not noticed. Why is that? Because, practices such as “making and keeping promises, living and speaking truthfully, expressing gratitude, and offering hospitality” should be a natural expression of who we are. And yet, in today’s culture these practices aren’t as common as we’d like to believe, even in the church. Pohl centers on these four practices in the book as she explains there are other important practices, such as discernment and forgiveness, to employ when we come up short in the former ones.

Pohl’s Introduction on these “Four Practices That Sustain Community” is both refreshing and convicting. They could easily be summed up in one word: integrity. Even as I look at the wider culture in the Reformedish community, I see that it is very noticeable when we are found wanting in these basic practices.  We are a community that is supposedly passionate about truth, but we need to be careful not to think that only applies to what we think about God. If we are not known as a people who live truthfully and speak truthfully, we are not living by faith in the One who is truth and who deals with us truthfully. If we are stingy with our promises and don’t value following them through to fruition, we aren’t living as children of He who has promised and is faithful. Likewise, how can we possibly be grateful for a God who has lavished his grace on us if we live uncharitably and selfishly? And if we are busy building our own brand, only welcoming “yes” men to the table, how can we possibly talk about a God who welcomes the stranger at the gate?

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