Our lives look the same as our neighbours. Our habits and the rhythms of our households look the same as everyone else of our social class who lives in our place. When we turn to more structural things, from the shape of the household to the objects we purchase and what we do for a living, we all again look pretty similar. I don’t think we’re supposed to.

We are in a discipleship crisis. Caused, perhaps, by the many other crises in the air, but here in the UK our faith is shallow.

To be more precise: our churches are not forming us into deep and rich faith.

I’ve been writing around this for a while, but I don’t think we’re talking about it enough. There are, of course, wonderful exceptions of individuals with deep and rich faith. You, dear friend, may well be among them. May Jesus continue to draw you towards himself.

There are even exceptions among churches, but in my circles less than we’d like. I don’t think this is for want of trying, and I hope most Pastors would recognise what I’m describing. I do think there are things we can do about this, though many of them aren’t ‘solutions’ because solutions are what got us here, and all of them are long-haul approaches. Perhaps we can change the face of Christianity in this nation by at best an inch or two in our lifetimes, but think of the fruit that could be borne a century or two downstream if we try. That’s a life worth living.

When I say our faith is shallow, what do I mean?

Broadly, that we have problems in three areas. Each I’ve touched on before, but I’ve not knit them together like this.

Life

Our lives look the same as our neighbours. Our habits and the rhythms of our households look the same as everyone else of our social class who lives in our place. When we turn to more structural things, from the shape of the household to the objects we purchase and what we do for a living, we all again look pretty similar.

I don’t think we’re supposed to.

Our churches don’t teach what a household or Christian life looks like in terms of real physical things. Many of us are good at habits of individual devotion—and I suspect if my neighbours knew I rose at six in the morning to read the Bible and pray that would seem strange, and I’m not unusual at all—and many of our churches have been good at teaching them. We’ve been less good at getting people to change how they live.

To take an example: churches have generally been good at teaching people to give their money away to levels that would appal our neighbours—and that explains how they can afford all those nice holidays—we need that for everything else.

Is this overstated? A little. I can name multiple ways that my rhythm of life makes no sense to my neighbours. “But why do you feed 12 people every Wednesday?” I remember when the builder questioned the need for the size of our dining-kitchen and we explained, he asked “are they family?” Sort of.

But we aren’t that radical. Well, I did once change jobs so I could go to a prayer meeting, so maybe I am that radical.

There are examples of radical living all over the place, but they aren’t that widespread. In the last week I watched a video of a church’s 50 anniversary celebration: it extolled the kindness of God to them over those five decades and was glorious.

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