Faith-building Tools - Part 1
We have just completed the first week of the Online Christadelphian Bible School. As a community we treasure Bible schools—they are the spiritual highlight of the year for many. While not the same as being together in person, this Bible school is accomplishing at least some of what all Bible schools strive for: Bible-based instruction, often from people we don’t hear from most of the time; an opportunity to interact with fellow-believers; a sense of a haven or spiritual oasis. If you have not been attending, you can still register: go to https://www.onlinebible.school/. It runs all through July.
Tonight (Saturday) the program was a discussion held in small breakout groups. The topic was faith-building tools, specifically ten tools suggested by the organizer: Scripture, Prayer, Service, Seeking Holiness, Trusting God, Knowing Jesus, Worship, Mentors & Peers, Seeing the Unseen, and Music.
The session was (of course) too short for any of the groups to fully explore their topic. But as was hoped, in each group some key thoughts emerged. I’ve been asked to attempt integrating these thoughts in some way into a “whole”, and post the result on the WCF blog (https://wcfoundation.org/blog). Frankly, I feel daunted. How do you discuss prayer or knowing Jesus or any of the other topics in half an hour? Much less, combine the thoughts from 100+ people, on all ten topics, into anything smaller than textbook size?
The simple fact is there’s no way in the world to do something comprehensive. So it will have to be suggestive. That is, a few suggestions for lines of thought you can follow up yourself. The overall objective is to build faith, the focus is to be practical.
It seemed to me that I should look for a scripture-based framework for all this. Something that conveys “the whole”. Three or four passages occurred to me, but only one seemed like the right framework:
And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. (Mark 12:29-30, quoting Deuteronomy 6:4-5)
Here is Jesus’s version of “the whole”. He says I must love God with all of me, all of my living self. There isn’t a neat matchup of the ten tools with the four aspects of our living self. But I think this sense of “the whole” helps us to integrate the tools.
Here’s what I mean. We have to apply our intellect (what we think and imagine), our emotions (what we feel), our being (our deepest sense of who we are), and our actions (what we do with the strength we have). We have to apply every one of these, to any tool. Whatever tool you are talking about, without mental grasp of the goal, the why, it’s just warm fuzzy. Without investment of soul it’s superficial. Without real feeling, it’s mechanical. Without doing, (as James says) it’s dead—an appearance of a living form, but motionless.
All of me is called for. And also, all the tools are needed. You’ve heard the saying, “To a hammer everything looks like a nail.” How futile, even harmful, it is to be a one-tool or two-tool person. Building something, anything, takes many skills, many tools. Building faith isn’t an exception! The how, when and why of using each tool is the essence of the integration. Improving our skill with the tools is what this exercise is about. If I’m serious about building up my faith (and not-incidentally the faith of those around me!) then I have to learn to use them all, and I have to use them with all of me.
Tools don’t get the job done. Unless they are picked up and used, they just sit in the box. Faith comes under constant challenge, from within and without. Let’s turn that around, and make it into a building project. The materials are there. And we have the tools.
As you can tell from the title, this post is the first of a series. I’m not sure yet how many there will be. Everyone reading this was either in one group or wasn’t with us. So each one of us has at least nine tools to think about, explore how we feel about, see how they fit into our self-identity, and put to use.
Love, looking forward to building together, Paul
If you have any feedback, please contact me at: paul.zilmer@gmail.com