If you don’t actively embed habits into your life then they won’t get there any other way. It takes, depending on who you ask, between three and seven weeks to form a habit. Once they’re formed they last until a strange sequence breaks them, and then they need forming again. Discipline your life, like an athlete or soldier (1 Corinthians 9, 2 Timothy 2), and you will reap rewards. Decide what you’re going to do. Tell someone about it. Make a start. Fail. Keep going even after failing. The rewards are worth reaping. Will Jesus love you more? No. But will you love him more? Yes, I think so.

I’ve argued that we’re in a discipleship crisis in the charismatic church in the UK. Friends from wider spheres of evangelical churches in the UK and elsewhere seem to agree. I’ve tried to plot some sense of what that looks like and why that might be the case. We’ve explored a model of formation, seeing the importance of doctrine, duty, and devotion (or head, hands, heart).

In the charismatic world we do well with the devotion side of things, but less well on the other two. I’m hoping to write slowly through a list of things that might help. None of these are solutions, and I keep emphasising that because we’re prone to machine thinking—if we do x we’ll get y result—and neither people nor the faith are mechanistic. Instead, I hope they are suggestions that could shape a community together over time.

They fall under three headings, which are my real prescription of a way forward in this particular cultural moment: Embedding Habits, Thickening Communities, and Stretching Minds.

Embedding Habits I

There are three kinds of habits we need to embed at the three layers of ‘society’ that the church usually thinks in: individually, in the household (or community), and in the church. I think we could think about what habits of life in cities or nations look like, but I don’t think most readers have access to levers there so I’m not going to touch on them.

We start individually, looking at what someone like John Mark Comer would call ‘a rule of life.’ He’s drawing on the old monastic traditions that would require monks to subscribe to a rule: a set of conditions that the community was formed around with each monk adhering to. Essentially, I’m arguing that each Christian should consider carefully how they can embed particular habits into their life in order to submit all of their life to Christ.

Before we turn to what that could look like, I’d like to address two objections. Firstly, someone might point out that monastic communities were a very small percentage of mediaeval Christians and whether we think that phenomenon good or bad, surely it isn’t for everyone? The thing is, in countries like the UK where evangelical Christianity is a small minority of people, we’re all monks now. I also don’t expect every Christian to do this, or any of my other suggestions. Every way we can shift the temperature of Christian faith in local churches will involve doing so with a small number of those in our congregations whose consciences are in some way pricked by the Spirit. While that could cause division if done badly, a good aim is turning a small number ‘hot’ in order to raise the general temperature a little. Think of them like early adopters on a technology adoption curve.

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