One of the very first things we did together as a newly formed group was to go through Dallas Willard‘s Renovation of the Heart with John Ortberg and Larry Crabb.
The frank and intimate discussions between these men set the tone for our own discussions and gave us a common language to frame our understanding of spiritual (trans)formation. The series provided a clear vision for the depth of relational community we wanted to have with one another. We just hadn’t experienced it for ourselves yet. But we knew one thing…
We knew we had to start with the inside.
Willard’s frighteningly relatable confession grounded us, “As a young pastor, I was a danger to myself and anyone who would listen to me.” Similar to our own experiences, we knew all too well the flaws from living within the models of our past.
In attempts to let go of everything else, we began to focus on and follow the lead of a simplified faith. Wherever it would take us, we did not know yet. But we did know we would need to be an entirely different kind of person for this journey.
“…First clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also.”
–Matthew 23:25-28
For those unfamiliar, Dallas Willard and Richard Foster introduced American Evangelicals to the spiritual formation resurgence of the past 30 years. By spiritual formation, we mean the process by which the inner, invisible part of a person is shaped and solidified, inevitably becoming visibly aligned through one’s actions, words, and deeds. Willard writes:
“We often speak of people not living up to their faith. But the cases in which we say this are not really cases of people behaving otherwise than they believe. They are cases in which genuine beliefs are made obvious by what people do. We always live up to our beliefs — or down to them, as the case may be. Nothing else is possible. It is the nature of belief.”
Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to give Willard’s work the detailed attention it deserves in a post like this. But his work is important enough to attempt a brief introduction to two key concepts that kept us moving forward in our early days.
The first is in how Willard interprets Matthew 5 as a template for becoming the kind of person who can routinely bless those anyone who would curse you or wish you harm – where the inner person matches in likeness the inner person of Christ. If you take the order of passages in Matthew 5 as an actual order of steps for transformation, it might look something like this: When you believe you are unconditionally loved by God, you can let go of your own anger when you don’t get your way. Without the threat of anger, it becomes easier to let go of using people through lust and verbal manipulation. Your yes and be your yes and your no can be your no. Firmly rooted in the steps before, returning good for evil actually becomes possible, even when it comes at great cost to oneself.
The availability of this kind of life to everyone who wants it is the Good News of God’s coming kingdom or “the range of God’s effective will,” as Willard defines it.
Willard’s second contribution goes into detail of the how this transformation process works.
Everything begins with the heart.
Willard’s understanding of the heart is the same essence as spirit and will. Heart refers to one’s core, spirit is its nature, and will is the function. If we all have a choice with what to do with the life we’ve been given, then the will is where is starts. The will decides where to focus thoughts within the mind, and our feelings follow the trajectory of those thoughts. Powerful feelings, negative or positive, can reside in the body itself and fuel our behavior and actions. Just outside of the body is the realm of our relationships and all the intangible aspects of ourselves that go far beyond our physical presence. Willard calls this your soul, meaning that which encompasses the totality of who you are.
With Willard’s theology as a foundation, we jumped head first into our new experiment. We had a clear vision to help us start moving forward, one small step at a time. It gave our community a shared language for what we have been dreaming of doing together.
We are a group of families striving to live an authentic faith free from artificial social constructs. We do not go to church, rather, we are the church. For 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, we struggle with and how to grow in this reality. We are Liquid.