What the Lord Requires: Formation for Global Discipleship

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“What are we trying to do to them?”

Insofar as we are able to influence the ways they:

• think• feel• do

Overall ContoursWhat about “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”?:

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

(Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, Oxford, 2005)

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Our student bodies do not fall easily within this “creedal” camp. We minister to young persons who are more like the “highly devoted” category of American youth in Krista Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of our Teenagers is Telling the American Church, Oxford, 2010.

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• The warning (in Habits of the Heart, 1985) of Robert Bellah and associates:

• “Language” loss: utilitarian individualism, expressive individualism, republican virtues, faith-based language of commitment

• Places of worship have to play a key role in preserving the language of commitment.

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The central importance of worship:

My amateur sociological survey of Christian colleges, on “passing it on”1. small group prayer/Bible study2. “worldview” academics3. worship4. historical narrative

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Mark Schwehn, Exiles From Eden: Religion And The Academic Vocation In America (Oxford, 1992)

Past intellectual communities were undergirded by such “spiritual” virtues as humility, faith, self-denial and love, nurtured by worship practices.

Much of today’s academy is “living off a kind of borrowed fund of moral capital.”

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• “Integration” in Christian higher education is more than a curricular/ course content concern.

• Two significant “fragmentation” cultural challenges:

1. Cognitive/informational fragmentation

Edna St. Vincent MillayUpon this age, that never speaks its mind,This furtive age, this age endowed with

powerTo wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oarInto the rowlocks of the wind, and findWhat swims before his prow, what swirls

behind ---Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,Rains from the sky a meteoric showerOf facts . . . they lie unquestioned,

uncombined.Wisdom enough to leech us of our illIs daily spun; but there exists no loomTo weave it into fabric; Sonnet, 1939

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“The weaver”Colossians 1: 15-18He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in* him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.

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2. Worldview fragmentation

The case of Heather of Glendale

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The end-result of fragmented consciousness:“My name is Legion, for we are many” (Luke 8:

30)

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What Christian colleges/universities can “do to them”:Worldview formation• Not just intellectual• Rod Sawatsky: not just faith and learning, but also

hope and learning and love and learning (Prologue to [ed.] Douglas and Rhonda Jacobsen, Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation (Oxford, 2004)

• Worship as “an alternative pedagogy” (Jamie Smith)

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In embracing a worldview, “[i]t’s not so much that we’re intellectually convinced and then muster the willpower to pursue what we ought; rather, at a precognitive level, we are attracted to a vision of the good life that has been painted for us in stories and myths, images and icons. It is not primarily our minds that are captivated but rather our imaginations that are captured, and whe our imagination is hooked, we’re hooked..”

James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural FormationBaker, 2009

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My self-correction: worldviewing—dynamic seeing

Our task is shaping persons "who see deeply into the reality of things and who love that reality—over time and across circumstances."

Craig Dykstra, "Communities of Conviction and the Liberal Arts," The Council of

Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin (September 1990)

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Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation (Ignatius, 1990):

• Anaxagorous: Q. “Why are you here on earth?” A. “To behold.”

• Beholding is that special kind of “seeing” that is directed to more than “the tangible surface of reality.” This kind of seeing must be “guided by love”—as the ancient mystics put it, ubi amor, ibi oculus (roughly, “where there is love, there is seeing”).

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An Irish-Catholic judge’s worship-inspired “beholding”