We recently spoke with Michael Horton, a man who wears many hats, including radio host, editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation magazine, associate pastor, and author. His most recent book, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World calls for us to examine what it means to have a faith that can last.
1) Your book seems to address the impulse many young people have in wanting to "do big things for Christ." Some might say this desire is motivated by mission and by love for the gospel. What do you find troubling about it, however?
Every generation fancies itself the most important one to come along, that they’re going to change the world—until the vitality of youth succumbs to nursing homes and the annals of dated trends. Movements are short-term, organized campaigns led largely by youthful zeal, opposed to institutions with regular procedures for maturing and acquiring the sorts of knowledge and skills to be a competent member of the community. It’s not the youthful zeal that’s the problem, but the increasing lack of more “grown-ups” around.
Even seasoned pastors often feel the pull to be cool and there’s too much age-segmentation that keeps the generations from pulling each other out of their respective weaknesses.
In other words, ironically, calls to “revolution” or “radical discipleship” actually undercut the long-term and sustainable community at large and specifically the discipleship to which the New Testament calls us, at least in my view.
2) Do you think pastors are pressured today, more than other moments in history, to "make it big"?
Absolutely. One of the many downfalls of the modern internet age is the availability of podcasts and sermon audio, where people can hear “the best of the best,” preventing our satisfaction with the ministers God has placed before us to simply “divide the word of truth.” Sadly, itinerant preaching has a long pedigree of creating disaffection and dissatisfaction wherever it goes. I’ve been around the conference world long enough. On one hand, it’s a great opportunity to be exposed to teaching (and music—don’t forget the music) a lot of people don’t get as their ordinary diet. On the other hand, it can leave you feeling like the revivalist Charles Finney had it right: you need a new “high” each time.
We need a reformation of practice as well as a renewed satisfaction in a God who uses ordinary things to save and shape the people of God for the age to come.
That’s how pastors become gurus instead of servants, and we all become so tragically eager to build up rock stars and then tear them down. What about the idea that pastors die and someone else picks up in the chapter where they left off? Now we have “succession plans” and pastors talk about “my ministry” and we talk about attending (not being members of) “so-and-so’s” church. It mirrors our culture to an alarming degree. People are growing bored with the ordinary means of God’s grace, attending church week in and week out. Doctrines and disciplines that have shaped faithful Christian witness in the past are often marginalized or substituted with newer fashions or methods which many pastors have sadly forced upon congregants. The new and improved may dazzle us for the moment, but soon they have become “so last year.” These fads change with every generation. The burn-out of pastors is equally troubling as it is the result of trying “to make it big.” We desperately need a reformation of practice as well as a renewed satisfaction in a God who uses ordinary things like preaching, teaching, hospitality, the sacraments, and prayer to save and shape the people of God for the age to come.
3) Why is it that we find little spiritual satisfaction in the ordinary, mundane aspects of life in Christ?
Unfortunately, the church has fostered what Thomas Bergler calls “The juvenilization of American Christianity.” Fewer and fewer people outgrow the adolescent Christian spiritualties they have learned in youth groups. Instead, churches have catered to a restlessness with the ordinary life we are called to in Christ. It is nothing new when young people want churches to pander to them. What is new, however, is the extent to which churches have obliged. In previous generations, elders— both officers and simply older wiser members— wouldn’t let that happen. They took young people under their wing and taught them by word and example what it meant to begin to accept the privileges and responsibilities of membership in Christ. Churches saw young people neither as the measure of success nor as “the church of tomorrow,” but as an integral part of the church today. Everyone is tempted by, and often succumb to, an impatience with God’s ordinary means of grace and the disciplines of family worship. Yet, the gospel is polluted when we allow a consumer-oriented culture to provide the paradigm for the Christian’s life and practice. When we are unaware of how Scripture speaks to the method of grace as well as its message, we will unknowingly adopt a method that distorts the gospel and harms the mission of the church. These disciplines and virtues are integrally tied to the ordinary means God uses to preserve his church.
4) And yet, there is also a tendency to laziness in the spiritual life. How do followers of Christ guard against this?
In a culture of buzz and burnout, it is easy to become apathetic and disinterested in life when there seems to be no end to the noise and disturbances. One way we can begin to rise above laziness and apathy is by fostering what is attainable and using the tried, ordinary means God has provided in his Word.
Oddly enough, laziness is the twin vice of ambition. Both are self-centered. One seeks to gain pleasure through restless zeal; the other is disenchanted when life does not prove to feed those same desires. There is little or no desire to act in such a context. The cure for selfish ambition, restless devotion, or laziness is contentment and gratitude. But like happiness and excellence, contentment is not something you can just generate from within. It has to have an object. There must be someone or something that is so satisfying that we can sing, ‘Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also.’ Only the gospel can do this extraordinary work in an ordinary way.
One way we can rise above laziness and apathy is by fostering what is attainable, using the tried, ordinary means God has provided in his Word.
5) How would you encourage pastors or church leaders to lead people to find grace in ordinary faithfulness?
To recover the ordinary is the pressing need of our day if we are going to create a sustainable life for us and our posterity. It is not the values of the market that should pervade our strategy sessions and fill our hearts with concern, but the eternal value of being in Christ. God has always preferred the weak things. God becomes a human being in a feeding trough for livestock. It’s the ordinary means of grace (preaching, sacrament, discipline), not the extraordinary methods we come up with, that God has promised to bless. For centuries, believers were raised with prayer, singing, instruction and Bible reading with the family each morning and evening. The Reformers and their spiritual heirs not only wrote catechisms for this purpose, but books with each day’s readings, prayers, and songs. They knew that the weekly public ministry of the word, as central as it was, needed to be supplemented and supported by daily habits. These public and private disciplines cohered and enabled Christians to persevere in their pagan context. These activities are not merely being described as “a good idea” concerning Christian practice; rather, this is the norm for ordinary churches established by the apostles. While we’re searching for God in all of the high places, he actually comes to us in the low places, where we’d least expect him. That changes everything. Maybe, just maybe, if we discover the opportunities of the ordinary, a fondness for the familiar, and marvel again at the mundane, we will be radical after all and find a God who is near us and doesn’t disappoint.
Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Activist Faith.
