Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

Discipleship and spiritual formation are less about erecting an edifice of knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively understands the world in light of the Gospel.

Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies.

[E]ducation is a holistic endeavor that involves the whole person, including our bodies, in a process of formation that aims our desires, primes our imagination, and orients us to the world -- all before we ever start thinking about it.

It's not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with worship practices that properly "express" these (cognitive) beliefs; rather, we begin with worship, and articulated beliefs bubble up from there. "Doctrines" are the cognitive, theoretical articulation of what we "understand" when we pray.

What if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?

In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love.

A sacramental understanding of the world is simply a shorthand way of describing the psalmist’s claim that "The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it" (Ps. 24:1), echoed in Paul’s claim that in the Creator God "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).

An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices. And this will be true even of the most instrumentalist, pragmatic programs of education (such as those that now tend to dominate public schools and universities bent on churning out “skilled workers”) that see their task primarily as providing information, because behind this is a vision of the good life that understands human flourishing primarily in terms of production and consumption. Behind the veneer of a “value-free” education concerned with providing skills, knowledge, and information is an educational vision that remains formative.

Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it's a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly--who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship--through affective impact, over time, of sights and smell in water and wine.

In short, God’s welcome is a gracious way of reminding us of our utter dependence, cutting against the grain of myths of self-sufficiency that we’ve been immersed in all week long.

When we gather, we are responding to a call to worship; that call is an echo and renewal of the call of creation to be God’s image bearers for the world, and we fulfill the mission of being God’s image bearers by undertaking the work of culture making.

baptismal promises counter such a configuration: love and its obligations traverse the boundaries of “private residences” and “nuclear families” because they initiate us into a household that is bigger than what is under the roof of our house. The promises in baptism indicate a very different theology of the family, which recognizes that “families work well when we do not expect them to give us all we need.

How does that happen? I’m suggesting that Christian education has, for too long, been concerned with information rather than formation; thus Christian colleges have thought it sufficient to provide a Christian perspective, an intellectual framework, because they see themselves as fostering individual “minds in the making.”[6] Hand in hand with that, such an approach reduces Christianity to a denuded intellectual framework that has diminished bite because such an intellectualized rendition of the faith doesn’t touch our core passions. This is because such intellectualization of Christianity allows it to be unhooked from the thick practices of the church. When the Christianity of “Christian education” is reduced to the intellectual elements of a Christian worldview or a Christian perspective, the result is that Christianity is turned “into a belief system available to the individual without mediation by the church.”[

What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect?

Our essential embodiment will keep interrupting our Platonic desire to do away with the body, will keep insinuating itself into our dualistic discourses to remind us that the triune God of creation traffics in ashes and dust, blood and bodies, fish and bread. And he pronounces all of it “very good

The soul therefore needs three things: eyes which it can use aright, looking, and seeing.

baptism is situated in the context of gathered worship because it announces a social and political reality. When we zoom out and consider the reality that baptism signifies, we should be “awed . . . that God can throw down nations and plant new ones with a few drops of water.”[

Augustine confessed, which is precisely why “our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.” The announcement of the law and the reading of God’s will for our lives represents a significant challenge to the desire for autonomy that is impressed upon us by secular liturgies. The reading of the law is a displacement of our own wants and desires, reminding us that we find ourselves in a world not of our own making—which is why all our attempts to remake it as we want (as if we ourselves could be little creators) are not only doomed to failure; they are also doomed to exacerbate suffering. The announcement of the law reminds us that we inhabit not “nature,” but creation, fashioned by a Creator, and that there is a certain grain to the universe—grooves and tracks and norms that are part of the fabric of the world.[

rather than calling into question the gospel of consumption—the sense that acquisition brings happiness and fulfillment. So instead, the evangelical community simply replays the gospel of consumption but with “Jesus” stuff

In short, music and song seem to stand as packed microcosms of what it means to be human.

The we-can-do-it confidence of these liturgies of self-affirmation offers assurance without confession. On the other hand, many of the secular liturgies of marketing play off of our deep knowledge of our faults and failures, but transform them into phenomena that yield shame but not guilt. In response, they promise not forgiveness or pardon, but opportunities to correct the problem via various goods and services.

What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? And what if this had as much to do with our bodies as with our minds?

First, the Apostles’ Creed functions like the church’s pledge of allegiance.

These are not naturally occurring phenomena; they are the fruit of culture, the products of human making. In blessing the bread and giving thanks for it, Jesus not only hallows the stuff of the earth, but he also hallows the stuff of our hands.

All habits and practices are ultimately trying to make us into a certain kind of person. So one of the most important questions we need to ask is: Just what kind of person is this habit or practice trying to produce, and to what end is such a practice aimed?

the Creator in whom we find our “rest” is only all too eager to welcome us into communion.

According to Maximus the Confessor in "One Hundred Chapters of Love", the key to directing and increasing one's desire for God is the acquisition of the virtues-which, you'll recall, we described above as noncognitive "dispositions" acquired through practices. So how does one acquire such virtues, such dispositions of desire? Through participation in concrete Christian practices like confession.

This knitting of song into our bodies is why memorization of Scripture through song is often so effective. Song soaks into the very core of our being, which is why music is an important constitutive element of our identity.

Implicit in Christian worship is a vision not just for spiritual flourishing but also for human flourishing; this is not just practice for eternal bliss; it is training for temporal, embodied human community.

In contrast, right here in Christian worship we see a very different understanding of the good: humanity and all of creation flourish when they are rightly ordered to a telos that is not of their own choosing but rather is stipulated by God.