Steven Hovater

Words

  • James K.A. Smith on Discipleship, Love, and Worship

    “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.”
    ― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

    We could hardly have a better modern guide to Augustinian spirituality than James K.A. Smith. His entire project orbits the thought and heart of the ancient Bishop of Hippo, and I think he’s talking about St. Augustine even when he’s not talking about St. Augustine.

    One of the things I think he does that is urgently needed in some circles of thought that I swim in is to connect Discipleship with Worship.

    Some thinkers, being rightly compelled to help the church reinvigorate intentional discipleship practices, wrongly dissociate dissociate what happens in worship from discipleship. Smith helps illuminate the formative power of worship—particularly in a world where alternative worship practices relentlessly sculpt us to be people whose capacity to love well and rightly is degraded and corrupted.

    Setting up a dichotomy between “worship churches” and “discipleship churches” takes what must be a “both/and” situation and makes it not just “either/or” but “neither”.

    There is not worship without discipleship. Nor is their discipleship without worship. Both are about love. Loving God and others well is the point of both discipleship and worship.

    Or to put it in Augustinian terms, both worship and discipleship are about a rightly ordered life of love.

  • Lesslie Newbigin on the Missional Leading of the Spirit

    From The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, 1995:

    The reign of God that the church proclaims is indeed present in the life of the church, but it is not the church’s possession. It goes before us, summoning us to follow. The practical implications of this will be discussed in a later chapter. Here it is enough to say that the picture given us in the Acts is one that is constantly being reproduced in the missionary experience of the church. It is the Holy Spirit who leads the way, opening a door here that the church must then obediently enter, kindling a flame there that the church must lovingly tend. (p. 64)

    And just below this, Newbigin goes on:

    My own experience as a missionary has been that the significant advances of the church have not been the result of our own decisions about the mobilizing and allocating of “resources.” This kind of language, appropriate for a military campaign or a commercial enterprise, is not appropriate here. The significant advances in my experience have come through happenings of which the story of Peter and Cornelius is a paradigm, in ways of which we have no advance knowledge. God opens the heart of a man or woman in the gospel. The messenger (the “angel” of Acts 10:3) may be a stranger, a preacher, a piece of Scripture, a dream, an answered prayer, or a deep experience of joy or sorrow, of danger or deliverance. It was not part of any missionary “strategy” devised by the church. It was the free and sovereign deed of God, who goes before his church. And, like Peter, the church can usually find good reasons for being unwilling to follow. But follow it must if it is to be faithful. For the mission is not ours but God’s. (p. 64)

    Yes, this has often been my experience, too. The most surprising avenues of mission open up as we pay attention: often in the most preposterous ways. And yet, there God goes to work, and the church must every time decide again to follow.

  • Moltmann on The Church and the Missio Dei

    What we have to learn from them is not that the church ‘has’ a mission, but the very reverse: that the mission of Christ creates its own church. Mission does not come from the church; it is from mission and in the light of mission that the church has to be understood….

    To grasp the missionary church theologically in a world-wide context means understanding it in the context of the missio dei…If the church sees itself to be sent in the same framework as the Father’s sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit, then it also sees itself in the framework of God’s history with the world and discovers its place and function within this history. Modern Catholic and Protestant missionary theology is therefore right when it talks about the missio dei, a movement from God in which the church has its origin and arrives at its own movement, but which goes beyond the church, finding its goal in the consummation of all creation in God.

    Jürgen Moltmann,

    The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 1975, p. 10-11

  • Time for Grace

    By its very nature, grace exists in time. Grace doesn’t just exist, it occurs, being given in a particular moment.

    God is gracious by eternal nature, but that grace is doled out in time.

    This could be one of those moments, you know. And so, on the chance that you’ve stumbled onto this page in a moment when you need a little grace…it is there for you. It is God’s nature to abound in grace.

    May you receive it. May this be a moment of grace for you.

  • Naming Sources

    Over time, everybody picks up sources—people whose ideas profoundly shape us. Or perhaps for others, it’s something of their way of life that forms us.

    I’m 47 years old now, and many of the threads are so deeply wound through me now that it’s hard to know which particular giant’s shoulders I’m standing on in any given moment. But I feel my debts, nonetheless. And I want to name my sources—even if doing so exhaustively is impossible—I’d have to name every soul I’ve ever met, and each author who penned a word I’ve absorbed, every songwriter whose lyric that ever found its way to my ear; down to every actor who ever tried to sell me Captain Crunch in a 30 second spot between segments of Voltron, Thundercats, G.I. Joe and the others. These are the trillions of cells I’m made of, after all.

    And yet, the proportions aren’t all the same, and I’ve felt particularly grateful lately for mentors like Paul Beavers and Keene Steadman, Mike Shepherd and Keith Jones, Laurie Mitchell and Kenny Barfield. At Harding, Daniel Stockstill, Paul Pollard and John Fortner wove their own threads into the way I think about life and God. As a grad student, Allen Black, Dave Bland, Rick Oster, Anna Carter Florence, Jeffery Tribble and Brennan Breed all found me at just the right time.

    What got me started thinking about all this were the myriad authors who have influenced me deeply. It’s really too much to enumerate, but here’s a shortlist of thinkers whose work has shaped me as a theologian and minister:

    Brennan Manning
    Henri Nouwen
    Walter Brueggemann
    N.T. Wright
    Darrell Guder
    James K.A. Smith
    Charles Taylor
    John of the Cross
    Augustine
    Barbara Brown Taylor
    Fredrick Buechner
    Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    Annie Dillard
    Jürgen Moltmann
    Stanley Hauerwas
    Thomas Merton
    Anne Lamott

  • How to Make a Fool

    • Cripple reflection.
    • Busy the mind.
    • Teach the relentless pursuit of shortcuts.
    • Create the illusion of immortality.
    • Create generational silos.
    • Encourage a preoccupation with the present without concern for the future or past.
    • Degrade friendship to minimal co-entertainment. (Or perhaps more descriptive: co-consumers.)
    • Restrict the capacity to own mistakes.

  • Rejected

    “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” -Mark 8:31

    That the Messiah suffered is something that we grasp—Jesus’s suffering, as brutal as it was, could perhaps be comprehensible or even regarded as noble. Bonhoeffer notes the possibility that it could be celebrated as that tragic form of suffering we sometimes regard as having its own honor and dignity.

    But the cross was not just suffering alone, not just a physical attack, but was suffering accompanied by vicious rejection. Christ is not only physically victimized, but it comes at the hands of those who reject him. They reject his messiahship. They mock his authority as a king. They humiliate him, stripping away not only his clothes, but also his human dignity.

    The great irony of the cross is that Jesus, who had already acted in humility in taking human likeness, is then dehumanized through cruel humiliation. They seek not to just pierce his body with nails, but his soul with insults. They not only ravage his back with the flail, but they ravage his humanity with shame. He’s not only beaten, but spat upon.

    Spat upon!

    The Lord of the cosmos is spat upon!

    It is this mockery, more than the physical brutality, that Mark takes great pains to emphasize. It first shows up in the account of Jesus before the high priest. The trial there, full of false witnesses who can’t get on the same page finally builds to this conclusion (14:60-65)

    Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, “Have you no answer? What is it that they testify against you?” But he was silent and did not answer. Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” 62 Jesus said, “I am; and ‘you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,’ and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven.’” 63 Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “Why do we still need witnesses? 64 You have heard his blasphemy! What is your decision?” All of them condemned him as deserving death. 65 Some began to spit on him, to blindfold him, and to strike him, saying to him, “Prophesy!” The guards also took him over and beat him.

    Jesus is taken to another trial, this time before the Roman Governor Pilate. The trial deadlocks, and Pilate seems ready to release Jesus. He’s even given a chance to release him when the crowd calls on him to practice his custom of granting mercy to someone at the time of passover.

    • Jesus us calls us into rejection.
    • just like death ives way to resurrection, so does rejection lead to new community.

  • Thanks, Seth

    Every once in a while I drift away from the masterpiece that is Seth Godin’s blog. (https://seths.blog/)

    When I come back to it, I marvel. Seth’s disciple as a thinker and writer provokes me. He knows that thinking is work, and that thinking better through brevity is art.

  • Avoid Grandiosity

    Whenever you feel the need to reboot your spiritual life, or reignite some spiritual practice such as prayer, it’s best to consciously avoid grandiosity. You may feel the need to compensate for your previous lapses or failures by pledging some extraordinary practice, either in intensity or scale. (I’ll pray an hour every day, fast twice a week, etc.) This urge toward grandiosity should be noticed, named, and resisted. The simple practice is to be preferred.

    Grandiosity is problematic if you fail, because you’ve set yourself up for disappointment and frustration when your new practice doesn’t come through. Further, there’s a great chance it will fail if it is coming out of nowhere without first building the maturity needed to sustain it. And all of our journeys will have seasons of lapse along the way.

    Grandiosity is equally problematic if you’re successful, anyway! Success in a grandiose practice makes us prone to developing arrogance, or imagining that our relationship to God is due to our practice rather than God’s grace.

    Take the simple, humble path. Simply choose to begin your spiritual practice again. lean back into the simple things. Just begin walking again, with one foot in front of the other.

  • A Prayer Before Serving