Steven Hovater

Category: Uncategorized

  • Church Verbs: What do we do?

    The Church receives the many-faceted grace (gifts) of God.

    The Church follows the way of Jesus.

    The Church loves God in response to the love God lavishes on us.

    The Church loves each other, our neighbors, and our enemies in the name of the God of love.

    The Church celebrates, expressing joy in the gifts of God each other. Put another way, we delight in the Lord and in each other.

    The Church laments, crying out against the pain of the broken world.

    The Church goes where the Father, Son, and Spirit send us.

    The Church represents the kingdom of God as community living under the reign of God.

    The Church baptizes people into the story of Jesus.

    The Church teaches the way of Jesus, passing on what we’ve learned from him to others.

    The Church serves neighbors in the name of God, thus living out our baptismal commitment to the servant-story of Jesus.

    The Church proclaims the gospel of Jesus in the world, bearing witness to his love, presence, and Lordship.

    The Church gathers in Jesus’s name, to habitually submit ourselves before his word and testify to each other of his love and presence. (This is what our worship gatherings are.)

    The Church watches for God’s activity in the world among ourselves and our neighbors.

    The Church waits.

    What other verbs describe the life of the church?

  • My Psalms: Developing a Personal Repertoire of Prayer

    An important step in tightening your relationship to the Psalms and engaging them as a spiritual practice is coming to think of them not in terms of the vast collection that they are as a whole, but in terms of a collection from which you collect a smaller repertoire. By repertoire, I mean a smaller, curated collection of the psalms that you know more intimately, that you mediate on with regularity.

    I don’t mean to suggest that you write off the larger collection—indeed, I hope my own personal repertoire of Psalms grows over time, particularly as I pray through the book month by month. But I suggest that it will do that slowly; psalm by psalm, as I give attention to nurturing my relationship with a few psalms before expanding to others. Here are three simple steps for that process:

    1. Evaluate

    The first step is to evaluate what your current repertoire of Psalms is. An easy way to do that is to think about what psalms you can easily match to a concept, remembering at least some of what is there. For example, if given Psalm 23, you can match it to the idea of the “shepherd”, or maybe if you’re given Psalm 1, you can match it to the image of a tree bearing fruit.

    Take some time to take an inventory…running through the psalms numbers 1-150, which can you more or less identify with a concept? Which are the most important to you, or contain something important to you? Make a list of the ones that make up your current repertoire.

    A final piece of evaluation: How intimately do you know the psalms in your current repertoire? Consider investing a season in nurturing your relationship with these psalms.

    2. Curate

    The second step is to be on the lookout for a few to add to your repertoire. This is where having a regular practice of praying through the psalms can be very helpful, because you’re constantly enchanting the breadth of the psalms. As you do, you will likely find that there are psalms that call for fuller attention. Take notice, and begin cataloging a list of psalms that you want to spend more time meditating on. What is next on the list of psalms to add to your repertoire?

    As you curate, be aware of the different kinds of psalms that make up your personal stockpile. No doubt you’ll see common affinities between them—it’s natural for us to be more attracted to certain types of psalms than others. So be on the lookout for ways to diversify your repertoire, adding some that are a little different than what you’ve already found useful.

    3. Meditate

    Finally, be intentional about spending time meditating on both the psalms that already make up the core of your repertoire, and those that are right on the edge of being included, psalms where you notice the Spirit luring you into a fuller depth.

    Developing Depth

    The ongoing prayer practice—whether on single or double-month terms—will expose us to the breadth of the psalms. This practice of developing a curated repertoire is about leaning into depth. Both are transformative!

  • Soul Work—for Communities

    “Pay attention to your soul” is good counsel for individuals. It’s evergreen advice, but perhaps even more acutely needed in our distracted, recklessly paced epoch.

    But perhaps it’s also important for communities as a whole. Not that communities have a should per se, but they do have a communal spirit, something that registers just under the typically tangible. It takes discernment to consider the soul of something like a church. It’s not easy work—but worthy, important work.

    It’s worth attention.

  • James K.A. Smith on How Our Loves, Longings, and Habits Drive Behavior

    A Christian education cannot be content to produce thinkers; it should aim to produce agents. Such formation not only offers content for minds; it also impinges on the nexus of habits and desires that functions as the activity center of the human person. The driving center of human action and behavior is a nexus of loves, longings, and habits that hums along under the hood, so to speak, without needing to be thought about. These loves, longings, and habits orient and propel our being-in-the-world. The focus on formation is holistic because its end is Christian action: what’s at stake here is not just how we think about the world but how we inhabit the world—how we act. We are what we love precisely because we do what we love.

    – James K.A. Smith1

    What Smith gets right here is the moving of education—whether we’re thinking of the University, seminary, or Bible classes or sermons at church—from something we think of as strictly intellectual, or also candidly affective, training our desires so that we will act in a certain way in the world. Thus, education is not just about the head, but about the heart and the body as well.

    That’s a really important corrective for much of what happens in all of those spaces where “teaching” happens.

    1. James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 2013, p 12. ↩︎

  • Graduation Weekend!

    A huge milestone weekend for our oldest daughters as Micah and Izzy are set to graduate on Sunday!

    Looking forward to celebrating these two!

  • David Bosch on Mission, Theology, and the Church

    “Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God…There is church because there is a mission, and not vice versa.”
    – David J. Bosch1

    Missional theology starts with God.

    Church movements sometimes struggle navigating the relationship between practice and theology. The missional movement that’s developed over the last 40 years is not immune to that, and sometimes devolves into an instrumentalist praxis that makes it a defense technique against the institutional failures of church. (See Andrew Root’s critique.2)

    However, I do think that at the heat of the movement has been a marriage of the practical and the theological. For example, there’s been a lot of thought on how the ecclesiology of the movement is grows out of a robust trinitarian theology.

    David Bosch, the South African missiologist whose work, particularly Transforming Mission, is an important part of the missional family tree, articulates one of the key principles in the quote above. “Mission” for the church originates in how we conceive of God—”mission” is simply another expression for God’s desires or intentions. God wants something.God’s actions are not random, but come from God’s nature, God’s desires. How we understand what God wants—how we interpret the actions of the Father, Son, and Spirit revealed in scripture—give us a framework for how we can see God’s activity in our own contexts.

    That’s the heart of missional.

    1. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 390. ↩︎
    2. In, for instance, Evangelism in an Age of Despair, 2025. ↩︎

  • The Importance of Perhaps

    “Perhaps” turns out to be a remarkably important word for any church seeking to join in the work of God.

    “Perhaps” is what enables discernment to begin. It lets you speak the beginnings of what you see God doing, holding it up for the rest of the community to join in discerning how what you see and sense fits into the missio dei, the great mission of God in the world. “Perhaps” lets you test the waters, holding up the possibility without having to defend it as certainty.

    Not sure where to begin speaking of God’s work in the world? Let “perhaps” be your on-ramp. Speak the word, and see what follows.

  • 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