Make every effort . . .

A faith worth living—and dying—for

There are a few more spots for next Friday’s Rule of Life workshop and April 10th’s Rule of Life for Writers workshop. I’d love for you to join!

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Last week, I found myself in the balcony of Edman Chapel on the campus of Wheaton College. The bells rang at 10:40am, and we rose at the invitation of the chaplain, who invited us to pray the Lord’s Prayer together. Our Father, who art in heaven. Not much had changed since my undergraduate days: not the brass chandeliers, not the hinged seats, not the organ or the large stage.

It was Missions in Focus week, and I was visiting my nephew and niece, both Wheaton students. After the worship band played, the chapel speaker, dressed in a suit, took his place behind the large podium. For the first ten minutes of his talk, he narrated in riveting detail the stories of Polycarp and Perpetua, two early Christian martyrs. Then he got quiet, pausing dramatically to put an uncomfortable question to the audience.

Why have people died for a faith we aren’t willing to live for?

His premise–that we are underinvested in our Christian discipleship—made me think of the talk I’d given the previous week to a group of campus ministers. I’d asked these young twenty-somethings to name the primary obstacle for faith formation in college students. Lack of urgency, one man said. Competing priorities, offered another. The challenge, as these ministers understood it, was that without any investment by these students, there would be little growth for these students.

Isn’t that the central paradox of many things in life, that effort breeds effort—and apathy, apathy? The investment of time and money and attention fortifies our commitments, yet our commitments suffer from the neglect of our time and money and attention. It makes the problem incredibly difficult to solve. What moves a college student or ordinary Christian to make the first necessary effort that will inevitably catalyze more effort (and more growth)? This is a work of the Holy Spirit, to be sure—but I also believe there is needed cooperation on our part.

In his book Overcoming Apathy, Uche Anizor writes, “We know what is good, right, and life-giving, but cannot seem to lift a finger to do anything about it. We know that a bit of quiet reflection would do us some good, but we hit ‘Play’ on that fourth consecutive episode of whatever show we’re into. We’re aware that spending some time in worship with other believers might inspire us, but we’d rather sleep in (especially after our previous night’s Netflix marathon). I am calling this the ‘curse of apathy,’ and many of us have been stricken by it. Conversations with friends, youth workers, my students, and colleagues have convinced me that we live in a culture plagued by apathy. For too many of us, life feels like a show about nothing. It feels unworthy of our serious attention. We are citizens of a Seinfeldian society, where only inconsequential things matter,” (Chapter 1). His diagnosis is underappreciated, I think.

One reason, perhaps, is because we feel so overly invested in many other aspects of life, as David Zahl points out in his 2019 book, Seculosity. It’s parenting and politics and even leisure that consumes the bulk of our time and money and attention. Dispensing with big R- religion, Zahl says we are left to anxiously manage other areas of life in order to derive meaning and expiate shame. Seculosity, as Zahl defines it, is “religiosity that’s directed horizontally, rather than vertically, at earthly rather than heavenly objects.”

At first glance, Zahl’s diagnosis might seem to counter Anizor’s. How can we be apathetic and consumed with zeal at the very same time? But this is Anizor’s crucial point about apathy, that it comes disguised as care. Apathy expresses itself as exaggerated commitment to the trivial. And what a luxury triviality proves to be today. Without the panics of war or hunger or famine or—in the case of Polycarp and Perpetua—the possibilities of martyrdom, we can invest our anxious energies in getting kids into the right schools and finishing the kitchen renovation and planning the perfect European vacation. (Guilty on all fronts.)

Crucially, here’s where Anizor and Zahl differ in the solutions they offer. Zahl sees exaggerated effort that mimics religious devotion and says: STOP. Receive the free gift of salvation by grace. His book ends beautifully with the clear and compelling invitation of the gospel, that what God must do is “breathe new life into limbs sunk to the bottom of the ocean. A God who saves those hellbent on stiff-arming his love is all that will do.” To be clear, I disagree with none of this. Dry bones must be made to live if any real life-sustaining effort can be made. And yet, what’s to be said to the college student, the ordinary Christian who can’t rouse themselves to invest time and money and attention in their faith formation? Do they imagine grace will do all the work for them?

Anizor would say that grace saves—and grace empowers. He says, along with Peter, make every effort. He’s comfortable, in other words, to maintain an inevitable tension in Christian discipleship, to say that we are saved and sustained by grace and yet invited to participate in the work God is doing in us. So here’s what I’ve come to think:

Apart from small, regular efforts, we will neither die for nor live for this faith.

Effort is redeemed for the Christ follower. It expresses the dignity and responsibility of being human, this capacity God has given to us—by virtue of his image—for agency and freedom. In a rule of life practice (which I talk about lots around here), one comes to understand that grace invites us into a Spirit-filled life of response and responsibility. Grace catalyzes effort, sustains effort, transforms effort from anxious God-pleasing to free acts of worship.

Maybe we begin—in gracious effort to love God, to love our neighbor, and to properly love ourselves —in the most ordinary ways. We call our mother. We read a Psalm. We visit a friend after surgery. We text a neighbor. We make a meal. We attend church. We speak truth. We ask for forgiveness. We move our body. We change the sheets. We nap. We do it today and tomorrow and next week, all over again. Not to make God proud or to secure an eternal future of divine favor. Jesus did that already, on our behalf.

We do it because this is a faith worth dying for—and living for. We do it—because it won’t be done for us.