At some point, probably around the time of the Enlightenment, churches became convinced that what you think shapes what you do. The way to lead people to be like Christ became teaching them what to think.
Churches organized to become educational institutions. Sunday mornings (and nights) centered around didactic three (or more) point sermons, along with classes on Sunday morning and Sunday night, workshops, seminars and retreats, all teaching people how to think right.
In the 80s and 90s there was a big push to be more creative, entertaining and relevant in presenting how to think. In the past decade, much was made of creating space in the church to have more space for discussion — discussing what to think.
Thinking is an incredibly important part of being human. Our ability to reason sets us apart from the animals. Who really wants to throw away our advances in medicine and technology and go back to a pre-Enlightenment world? But we make a huge mistake in assuming that thinking alone is the sole force in shaping a person’s life.
The earliest name for Christ’s Church was “The Way.” The early the people of God were not a group that just knew what to think, but a community with a way of life, shaped to look like Jesus, the Way, The Truth and the Life.
The next few posts will explore what would it mean to recapture a peculiarly Christian way of life.
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