We continued working through Stanley Hauerwas’s essay, “Discipleship as a Craft, Church as Disciplined Community.” (Link to audio) We began with a quick return to the second paragraph which we’d started on last week:

That the church has difficulty being a disciplined community, or even more cannot conceive what it would mean to be a disciplined community, is not surprising given the church’s social position in developed economies. The church exists in a buyer’s or consumer’s market, so any suggestion that in order to be a member of a church you must be transformed by opening your life to certain kinds of discipline is almost impossible to maintain. The called church has become the voluntary church, whose primary characteristic is that the congregation is friendly. Of course, that is a kind of discipline, because you cannot belong to the church unless you are friendly, but it’s very unclear how such friendliness contributes to the growth of God’s church meant to witness to the kingdom of God.

For the church to understand itself as a disciplined community is very difficult in our culture. When he describes us as having a “buyers’ market,” he’s making the claim that churches need to attract people. In order to attract people, we need to give them what they want. Most aren’t looking for transformation or discipline. Now more than ever, people are inclined to look at discipline as “oppression” or a restraint on their “freedom.” They’re looking for occasional help to meet their felt needs. If we are friendly, we can draw in people who are looking for friends, for people who will not only accept them but affirm them unconditionally.

Friendliness, like tolerance, is a good thing, but can easily be a watered-down substitute for love. Jesus commands us to love one another. Jesus demonstrated love for us not just by a pleasant, inoffensive amiability, but by calling people to repent and put their faith in him. He offered (and offers) unconditional love, but that love sets us on the path to become like him.

When we think about the true goods of “friendliness” in combination with Jesus’ love command, we come to friendship, which is a deeper thing than mere friendliness. Friendship pushes beyond the superficial, the veneer of inoffensive niceness. Real friendship acknowledges and works through issues of discomfort. Friendship takes work – even discipline.

In our discussion more points were raised:

First, friendliness may a starting place when we meet new people, at least when that “meeting” is an instance of their “visiting the church.” In such cases friendliness is necessary but not sufficient. We’re praying instead that God will be doing a work in and through us such that our life together – and our life expressed outwardly – is unintelligible to outsiders. That lack of intelligibility (seen in places like Acts 2 and 1 Peter 3) is an occasion for Christians (disciples!) to answer the questions and to point to Jesus.

Second, a question was raised from a presentation at our monthly men’s’ breakfast meeting that morning. Our guest speaker started by saying he’d just finished his doctoral research. In that research he’d discovered that something like 64% of kids raised in church left the church after high school. That statistic was the premise of his presentation of Bible classes being offered to kids in area schools. The question one of our men brought to our class was why the church is doing so poorly. The answer took two main tracks. First, we talked about how kids get so little teaching/formation time in church. If they are in Sunday school every week of the year and have substantive formation for a whole hour each time, that’s only 52 hours a year. But: Most church kids aren’t in Sunday school every week. Most Sunday school classes don’t have a solid hour of substantive formation each week. Also, even on a maximal conception, say the kids are “in church” three hours a week every week, if that is their only discipleship, that short amount of time is overwhelmed by a massive amount of “discipleship” offered by peers, on screens, or by the world. The missing link is parents and families. Churches and classes, whether classes overed by churches or by parachurch organizations like the one we heard about this morning, have much less time and connection with kids than do their parents.

Finally, we turned to a discussion of tradition. Receiving and transmitting tradition well is difficult. Jaroslav Pelikan’s famous comment is a useful starting point.