Most of the Christian life is about the quiet ordinariness of your domestic life. Your Christian duty is to love your spouse if you’re married, to raise your children in the faith if you’re a parent, to be a good friend and neighbour, to look after the poor, and to see the kingdom of God invade your locality. Most of this ‘whole life’ discipleship is ordinary. It’s not exciting. It’s a walk forwards into a new way of living, but it’s also very mundane.

What does our discipleship crisis look like? Our lives look the same as our neighbours and they shouldn’t. We don’t all have to be radical, but we do need a small number of radicals among us to help us see that our lives could be different.

I do think ordinary faithfulness is the goal for most, even then our lives should still be recognisably different to our peers. When I first moved away from home to University, I was struck by the radical nature of the faith I met. I hadn’t encountered this before.

Other students were aware that their faith was their life: I remember spontaneous all night prayer sessions, evangelising on campus, long conversations about the Bible (that were probably more heat than light, honestly). A lot of that was youthful enthusiasm and it is good and right for it to be tempered as life moves into a more typical rhythm.

Yet, the adults I knew were radical too. Most of the families in the church didn’t have a TV. They gave their lives to Jesus and raised their children into the faith in ways that caught me as a fresh-eyed older teenager.

I’m not sure that not having a TV is the thing we all need to do, I feel no impulse to get rid of mine—though Rhys Laverty’s recent description of giving up the TV for the sake of their kids and the transformative effect it’s had on their children is inspiring—but I don’t encounter many people who don’t have one at all. People are shocked we don’t pay for a streaming service (which is about cost rather than ideology, we watch plenty) and we watch plenty of TV. It feels like the bar has shifted.

I’m not sure this example is a universal one. I suspect those families were being deeply counter-cultural in the early 00s. I was impacted by this example because it was shocking. Yet as culture has pulled in entirely the opposite direction, you’d think we’d see more pulling against the tide. If we turned to what should be an easy one, not giving smartphones to children, you’d hope Christians were there but we’re not.

Even if you disagree with my opinion on that, I can’t think of a common against the culture stand that we do see amongst Christians in terms of what we do with our lives. We sometimes talk a good talk but when it comes down to it, we don’t live differently.

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