Spiritual Disciplines …. for a Church 2

For more than two decades many churches have focused on personal and private spiritual disciplines, but very few have examined what spiritual disciplines look like in a completely different key: church spiritual disciplines.

How important is hope to your perception of a church’s central attributes? of its spiritual disciplines? How does a church practice “hope”?

James Bryan Smith’s newest book addresses corporate, or “church spiritual disciplines”: The Good and Beautiful Community: Following the Spirit, Extending Grace, Demonstrating Love (The Apprentice Series). Or, put differently, Smith examines formative principles that characterize — or should characterize — churches.

The first one was that the church is to be peculiar — or different. The second is “hopeful.” But Smith approaches hopeful from the angle of a church bearing witness — and individual Christians bearing witness — to our common hope in Christ. So, this chp sets evangelism in a new key.

Notice the emphasis on hope in this passage:

1:3 We always give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 1:4 since we heard about your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints. 1:5 Your faith and love have arisen from the hope laid up for you in heaven, which you have heard about in the message of truth, the gospel 1:6 that has come to you. Just as in the entire world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, so it has also been bearing fruit and growing among you from the first day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.

Hope shapes faith and love. A Christian community, what Smith calls the good and beautiful community, lives in hope and offers hope to others — the hope of redemption and transformation in Christ.

He sees hope in the new story that Christians embrace and in which they dwell, and this story has four parts, and here is how we can learn to practice the discipline of hope:

1. Death

2. Resurrection

3. Ascension

4. Return.

Hope, though, is not just said; hope is embraced and lived in the ordinaries of life. We grieve with one another in hope; we rejoice with one another in common hope.