Building Up the Church

Live Experiments in Faith, Hope, and Love

Ewell, Wilson-Hartgrove

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781498275347
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Building Up the Church: Live Experiments in Faith, Hope, and Love, the companion volume to Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's book, New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today's Church (2008), is a practical study guide to invite the church to imagine that "another ways is possible" as it lives into its identity as "God's peculiar people" (Titus 2:14). Its stories, reflection questions, and suggested exercises are designed to catalyze local churches and Christian communities into becoming "laboratories for the gospel kingdom"--that is, communities that serve the living God and their neighbors by carrying out experiments in faith, hope, and love.

Part one

Setting the Stage

This is the study guide for School for Conversion’s (SFC) 103 course: “Building Up the Church: (Live) Experiments in Faith, Hope, and Love”—the companion volume to Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s book, New Monasticism: What it Has to Say to Today’s Church.1 As a study guide (and not a workbook per se), it is designed as a commentary on the book and as a resource for group study, rather than as a series of ready-made lesson plans to be worked through in a linear way.

This is particularly true of Part 2, which is organized as a collection of resources—stories, reflection questions, suggested exercises—that will be arranged by and adapted for each group of participants. While Part 2 directly engages the “textbook” of the course and functions as the platform for the group session, Part 1 does the work of vision-casting for participation in the course and answers some basic questions in relation to the course and how it fits into the School for Conversion’s vision for theological education. So, before you get started with your group sessions, please read Part 1 carefully.

In the introduction to SFC’s 101 course: “Introduction to Christianity as a Way of Life,” Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove writes that “new monasticism” has emerged within the fragmentation of contemporary American Christianity “to experiment with new forms of faithfulness”—as an attempt to embody an answer to the question faced by the whole church: “how do we live the gospel of God’s kingdom that Jesus taught and practiced at this moment?”

While the 101 course functions as a kind of “movable seminary” that circulates among new monastic communities—both catalyzing and learning from their witness—this course has a different focus. It seeks to catalyze and learn with/from the (local) church about its identity as “God’s peculiar people” (Titus 2:14). To do that, we will return to the question mentioned above about the gospel of God’s kingdom, sharing some of the results of new monasticism’s experiments in order to extend the conversation to the whole church.

So, if we think of this course as an extended conversation, it will be helpful to keep in mind the basic direction of the conversation. Here’s a little road map—a sketch of where this conversation is going:

Through the signs, roots, and stories set forth in chapters 2–4 of New Monasticism, and through the practices elaborated in chapters 5–9, the stage is set for a conversation about how “life together in new monastic communities . . . could be adopted by congregations as a way of living into the story of the people of God.” Wilson-Hartgrove continues, “The stories that I tell about what these practices look like in communities are not meant as prescriptions for churches, but as catalysts for imagination. My point is not that churches ought to imitate new monastic communities, but that another way is possible.” 2

The book and this course, then—signs, roots, stories, practices and all—are basically about how we participate in God’s work of building up the church (Eph. 2:22; 4:12; 1 Pet. 2:5). It is an invitation and a summons to carry out collective experiments in faith, hope, and love. Keep in mind that these experiments were not designed for heroes; so they do not come with a warning: “Do not try these at home!” In fact, they have been tried and tested by so many quite unheroic people that these experiments actually come with a permission slip: “If you want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, go ahead and try these. And, yes, these must be tried at home!”

What Kind of School?

It’s worth pointing out that School for Conversion is not a “school” in any traditional sense. There are no classrooms, no set curricula, no grades, and no diplomas for those who “pass.” (There is homework, however!) In the introduction to the 101 course, Wilson-Hartgrove contrasts the typical “schooling” process with how SFC is trying to do education. Whereas this common understanding of “schooling” tends to focus on transmitting or “passing on” a body of knowledge/information that is not yet known by the student but considered to be essential for successful training, the author casts a quite different vision for education:

if God really wants to make us into a holy people, it makes sense that we need a school for holiness. And if God really wants every part of our lives to be holy, then education in this school will have to cover everything. So this course, like any course, is about learning some stuff you might not have known before. But it’s also about how you eat and where you live and what you buy when you go to the store. It’s about how you spend your money and who you spend your time with and what you think about when you’re walking down the street. This is an introduction to Christianity as a way of life. We believe true education is about learning to live together the way God made us to live.3

This description echoes something that the late Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, used to say: “No one educates anyone else” and “No one gets educated alone.” His point is that education is really about leading one another to learn from one another. And, if this is the case, a more important question than, What is being taught?, is the question, What are we learning? Or, even better, the question we ought to be asking ourselves constantly is this: How are we learning to live together the way God made us to live?

Remember: the goal is not primarily to know more, but rather to learn from what we are already doing and to know what to do with what we already know. Getting “schooled” then is the process of learning together how to becomes apprentices of Jesus in order to know and live in the truth: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31–32).

Conversion and/as Learning New Roles

Whatever understanding of “conversion” our various church traditions have passed on to us, one thing should remain clear: conversion has to do with the changes that we must undergo as we respond to the grace of Jesus’ proclamation: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt. 4:17). This course is part of a School for Conversion because we believe that God wants to change us—to shape us by turning us toward the way that leads to life.

In order to fill out what conversion entails, consider the following quote from Brad Kallenberg, which lays out three aspects to conversion:

First, conversion involves a change in social identity. Second, in large measure, this new social identity is accomplished by the acquisition of new language skills. Finally, conversion is constituted by a paradigm shift that results in bringing the the world into focus in a whole new way. Notice that in all three cases, conversion involves enculturation into community and into a community of a particular sort. The tracks for being a Christ-follower have already been laid by those who faithfully followed him before us. The conceptual language that the new believer learns to speak has been in circulation for two millennia. Moreover, to say that I have shifted paradigms is but an imprecise way of saying that I have changed allegiance from one community to another.4

One way to begin to understand how these three aspects of conversion fit together is to think about conversion in the early church. Wilson-Hartgrove describes it this way:

When the Holy Spirit came on the early church in Antioch, Jews and Gentiles alike trusted Jesus to give them access to God. United in worship, they shared life with one another like a family. No one knew what to make of this at first. They knew what a group of Jews was supposed to be, and they knew what Gentiles looked like, but they weren’t sure what to call Jews and Gentiles living and worshiping together in Jesus’ name. So they decided to make up a new name. They called them ‘Christians,’ Acts says (11:26).5

These three aspects or dynamics of conversion each correspond to a role that we need to learn how to play as participants in this course. These three roles are: (1) storytellers, (2) language-learners, and (3) pilgrims.

1) Storyteller

As storytellers we have to learn to retell our autobiographies in light of the gospel. Who am I? Who are “my people”? Who’s in my family? To whom do we owe ultimate allegiance? We have to go throug...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Part One
• Part Two
• Works Cited