T.M. Suffield, Author at Refcast

Friendship is a Discipleship Issue

By T.M. Suffield — 1 month ago

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, October 27, 2024
We need thicker communities, but saying that and doing it are very different things. Rebuilding life after it’s been stripped apart by the many arms of cultural change will take a long time, maybe even generations, but the church has all that’s required to do so. If we want to get practical, one of the ways we can thicken our communities is to make sure we have friends. Actively seek them, pray for them, make regular (habitual!) time in your life for them.

The lack of male friendship is nothing short of an epidemic. The rise of therapy and a therapeutic culture for men and women is, not always but more often than we’d like to admit, a substitute for friendship. We’re lonely, we need friends, and you need good friends to live the Christian life.
I’m arguing that there are three shifts we can make to address the discipleship crisis. We can embed habits, we can thicken communities, and we can stretch minds.
I reckon we can thicken our communities by considering friendship, tables, and thresholds. Three topics which I write about a fair bit, so this won’t be super surprising.
To be a follower of Jesus you need friends. We might want to disagree and say instead that we need the familial bonds of the household of the church, but if you do this and don’t gain friends, I’m not convinced that you’re actually doing this (or someone else isn’t). Jesus casts his disciples as friends (John 15). Not slaves, but friends. Friendship is the love of the kingdom. It’s tighter than ‘brotherhood’ because it’s bound not by blood but by choice. God the son became God my brother and then called himself God my friend.
We become companions with God—literally ‘same bread’—as we eat with him. We become companions with others when we break bread with them. But that’s getting ahead of myself. In order to live a Christian life that bleeds out of Sundays and starts to colonise every hour of your life you will need friends to live that life with; friends to challenge and to laugh with. I use that martial language deliberately; Jesus is the rightful Lord of your life and will wage war against your other gods.
The remarkable thing is that the warrior King, here to crush your idols, has decided to make you a friend. He’s invited us into his inner ring. One of the ways we encounter Jesus is in other Christians. While we understand friendship in light of Jesus’ friendship of us, rather than the other way around—much like we learn what a father is in the face of the Father—it is easier to understand Jesus as your friend when you have good friends.
This is an instrumental reason to get friends though, don’t do it to understand Jesus better, do it because friends are great. Friend is a word much said and little understood in our present moment.
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Adam the Head

By T.M. Suffield — 1 month ago

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, October 26, 2024
When we start to run down the roots of removing Adam from the story, what we’re left with isn’t Christianity. I do think this is a hill to die on. If Adam isn’t my head, neither is Christ. Adam is real and Adam’s sin flows to all of us. That one man who knew God was tricked by a snake and brought ruin to everything. There was another man who faced a test in a garden (Mark 14), another man who battled a serpent (Hebrews 4), another man who stood with a woman in a garden at the start of a new creation (John 21). These two men: Adam and the Lord Jesus Christ define history.

Last week I argued that the Bible requires Adam to be the first human and the father of us all. I went through some scriptures that support this, especially Acts 17 and Romans 5.
I argued that the Bible says he is, but also that he has to be to be our federal head. Paul’s argument in Romans 5 (and 1 Corinthians 15) requires it.
To pick up the thread again, I want to argue the other way around: why is it a problem if Adam isn’t my federal head?
The Fall
If Adam is not my representative head, then my fall in Adam becomes a fiction. I’d be on the hook for my own sins, but not born into sin. In which case, presumably I can rescue myself if only I could obey? I pick up this thread below.
If I’ve still fallen in Adam despite not having any connection with him, then instead the fall seems to be applied to me by divine whim with no grounding in reality. It sounds unfair, though I’m wary of that argument as lots of things do that aren’t, but how can I trust my salvation if God is arbitrary and acts on a whim? God is sovereign over all but acts in accordance with his character and the rules of the cosmos. The cosmos is ordered, not wild. Salvation is logical and in accordance with the scriptures.
Instead, my salvation in Christ is real. God is not arbitrary. The fall is not a fiction: I am born with both inherited guilt and inherited pollution and I continue in my father Adam’s footsteps.
Original Sin
If we deny that all are born in Adam, it would, perhaps, be theoretically possible for me to have not sinned and attain righteousness myself. Why then do I need the cross? Perhaps I just need to be good.
This is a strain of what was condemned as Pelagianism in the early church. It doesn’t save but grows our pride. It’s thinking just like Adam’s in the garden. Perhaps I too could be like God. It ends up much the same way.
Instead, I desperately need rescue. I cannot do good without the Spirit as I am turned in on myself. I can be rescued through faith in Christ: his life is purchased for me and I can receive it. In fact, I can’t even fall myself, because all I have is gift.
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Adam the Man

By T.M. Suffield — 1 month ago

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, October 26, 2024
For Adam to be our head he must be our ‘father.’ If he isn’t the father of all he cannot be the head of all. That’s the logic of it, that’s why genealogies matter so much in scripture: we’re bonded to one another. Federal heads are always related by lineage. It’s not divine fiat, it works on ordered rules. God comes to reshape these familial ties by making the Father our father and Christ our brother.

I was chatting with a friend about Genesis 1 and whether the earth is young or old the other day. I don’t find it a particularly interesting question, not because there isn’t an answer (there must be) and not because it’s not important (the truth is always important) but because there are so many more interesting things to say about that chapter of Scripture.
I’ve touched on some of them before, but we could include: creation ‘from the head’, the patterns of seven, the baptism of the land, the third day trees, the constraining of chaos, the ‘dragons’ on the fifth day, the sixth day trees, the ten times God speaks, creation through division, and more besides.
Even most of those are fun details we’re supposed to notice and meditate on in light of the rest of the scriptures, the narrative itself is worthy of much reflection on its own terms. God is the creator. God spoke creation. He didn’t slay a dragon and make creation from her corpse (this is a Babylonian creation myth), he spoke it into being. Creation is ordered. It’s spoken from nothing. It took a ‘week.’ He rested when he was done. It would take us a long time to reach questions that might relate to modern scientific ideas of the age of the earth.
I briefly outlined my own position with my friend, which I don’t hold that strongly, while expressing respect for those with convictions different to mine. I mostly expressed that I don’t find it that interesting a question and pointed to many of the more fun things in the text that I’ve alluded to above. There was one point I wanted to stress as important though, concerning Adam.

It is biblically and theologically necessary for Christians to believe in Adam as first, a historical person who second, fathered the entire human race.
Mike Reeves
I agree. Adam was a real man, now dead (and I assume in the presence of Jesus). More than that though, he was also the first human, and the father of all mankind. I think each of these convictions is important.
What does the Bible say.
This is, in part, a matter of trusting the Bible. We should read according to genre, of course. We should read carefully to see that the text says what we think it says. My argument is that the Bible always assumes Adam was a historical man, and the first man.
We start where we always should, with Jesus. Jesus taught that the first man and woman were made by God and were married. In his discussion of divorce in Matthew 19 he turns to Genesis 1 as clearly answering their question.
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Habitual Communities

By T.M. Suffield — 2 months ago

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, October 13, 2024
I want to argue that there is a sort of Christian community that can be found whenever you gather with Christians and that habitual elements of this also teach us that all of life is meant to be about following Christ. Most British Christians find this concept off-putting. If I were to suggest that the group of mates who’ve gathered to watch a film could maybe pray together before they do, many would scoff. Perhaps you might accuse that of sounding dreadfully American. I’m sorry American readers, but we’ve become culturally allergic to earnestness, and often find those who take their faith seriously a bit kitsch.

If part of recovering from our discipleship doldrums is to embed habits—and I think it is—then we will need to do something beyond thinking individually and thinking about the worship of the church. The church’s worship should be our starting point, and then the church should have a wider habitual life—as they all do, this is what a pattern of prayer meetings is for example—that serves the formation of Christian character.
The trickiest element, that I’m going to try and tease out in this post without having clear answers, is the potential for habitual life in the space between individuals and churches. We could go ‘beyond’ churches and think about cities and nations, and I think that could have some value but is entirely theoretical in the UK’s current moment. Instead, I’d like to look ‘between.’
By this I mean that there are a number of small institutions between the individual and the church. The household is the most obvious, whether that dictates a nuclear family, a much looser collection of housemates, or the explicitly Christian concept, but there are other possible forms of community. I suspect most people jump to those that are organised by churches: small groups and sports clubs and knitting circles and such like. These aren’t out of scope, but I want to include something broader, as the group of mates from your church (or many churches!) that hang out together to do a thing regularly should be included too. I’m talking about any loose form of ‘institution’ or ‘community’ that has a habitual life. That habitual life is then open to being thought about theologically and as a locus for formation.
I can sense that my writing is vaguer than I’d like because I’m searching for terms for a concept that I suspect is easier to draw. I want to argue that there is a sort of Christian community that can be found whenever you gather with Christians and that habitual elements of this also teach us that all of life is meant to be about following Christ.
Most British Christians find this concept off-putting. If I were to suggest that the group of mates who’ve gathered to watch a film could maybe pray together before they do, many would scoff. Perhaps you might accuse that of sounding dreadfully American. I’m sorry American readers, but we’ve become culturally allergic to earnestness, and often find those who take their faith seriously a bit kitsch.
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The Rule of Life

By T.M. Suffield — 2 months ago

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, October 6, 2024
If you don’t actively embed habits into your life then they won’t get there any other way. It takes, depending on who you ask, between three and seven weeks to form a habit. Once they’re formed they last until a strange sequence breaks them, and then they need forming again. Discipline your life, like an athlete or soldier (1 Corinthians 9, 2 Timothy 2), and you will reap rewards. Decide what you’re going to do. Tell someone about it. Make a start. Fail. Keep going even after failing. The rewards are worth reaping. Will Jesus love you more? No. But will you love him more? Yes, I think so.

I’ve argued that we’re in a discipleship crisis in the charismatic church in the UK. Friends from wider spheres of evangelical churches in the UK and elsewhere seem to agree. I’ve tried to plot some sense of what that looks like and why that might be the case. We’ve explored a model of formation, seeing the importance of doctrine, duty, and devotion (or head, hands, heart).
In the charismatic world we do well with the devotion side of things, but less well on the other two. I’m hoping to write slowly through a list of things that might help. None of these are solutions, and I keep emphasising that because we’re prone to machine thinking—if we do x we’ll get y result—and neither people nor the faith are mechanistic. Instead, I hope they are suggestions that could shape a community together over time.
They fall under three headings, which are my real prescription of a way forward in this particular cultural moment: Embedding Habits, Thickening Communities, and Stretching Minds.
Embedding Habits I
There are three kinds of habits we need to embed at the three layers of ‘society’ that the church usually thinks in: individually, in the household (or community), and in the church. I think we could think about what habits of life in cities or nations look like, but I don’t think most readers have access to levers there so I’m not going to touch on them.
We start individually, looking at what someone like John Mark Comer would call ‘a rule of life.’ He’s drawing on the old monastic traditions that would require monks to subscribe to a rule: a set of conditions that the community was formed around with each monk adhering to. Essentially, I’m arguing that each Christian should consider carefully how they can embed particular habits into their life in order to submit all of their life to Christ.
Before we turn to what that could look like, I’d like to address two objections. Firstly, someone might point out that monastic communities were a very small percentage of mediaeval Christians and whether we think that phenomenon good or bad, surely it isn’t for everyone? The thing is, in countries like the UK where evangelical Christianity is a small minority of people, we’re all monks now. I also don’t expect every Christian to do this, or any of my other suggestions. Every way we can shift the temperature of Christian faith in local churches will involve doing so with a small number of those in our congregations whose consciences are in some way pricked by the Spirit. While that could cause division if done badly, a good aim is turning a small number ‘hot’ in order to raise the general temperature a little. Think of them like early adopters on a technology adoption curve.
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Bearing Fruit

By T.M. Suffield — 2 months ago

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, October 5, 2024
We know that everything, everything, that dies in Christ comes to life. That includes all that ‘wasted’ effort on self-denial that didn’t bear fruit we could see. We need new creation eyes to learn that nothing done for God is wasted, no seed dies without bearing fruit, even if it isn’t the fruit that we were aiming for.

The seed that dies is the one that bears fruit. That’s what Jesus said in John 12,

Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
John 12.24
A biologist might take issue with us saying a seed has to die before it grows, but they shouldn’t. That’s exactly what happens. It we take a seed and bury it in the earth, something that was once part of a living plant and is now pushed under the earth, what are we to call this but death? Quibbling here is, I think, a symptom of a brain that doesn’t read enough poetry. We could call it a kind of ‘modernist madness’ where everything is defined in the precise mechanistic categories of the natural sciences.
A grain of wheat—a seed—must fall into the earth and die. If it doesn’t it remains alone. If it does it bears fruit, it multiplies. In other words, when we look at the natural world, we learn a principle of the cosmos: things that keep on living die, things that die will live in multiplied life. That one seed grows into a plant that is full of seeds. If those seeds are planted, even if only a quarter of them grow as in Jesus’ parable of the soils (Matthew 13—often called the Sower, but it’s the Soils and the Seed that are in view), the number of seeds grows exponentially. It doesn’t take that long to go from one apple to an orchard, or from an orchard to a world dominated by apple trees, but each step requires the death of that seed.
Jesus was, of course, talking about himself. The seed (think Genesis 3) that dies bears much fruit. After death comes life, if you can be brave enough to submit to it. Jesus continued:

Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
John 12.25
We have to be willing to lose our lives in order to gain them. Not just in martyrdom, which seems an unlikely prospect in the west.
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You Become What You Do, and Who You Do It With

By T.M. Suffield — 3 months ago

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, September 6, 2024
Christians need to go to church. We grow to be more like Jesus as we repeat the actions of a Sunday: hear the word read and preached, say the creed, pray, sing, take the Supper, speak in tongues, hear and receive prophetic words. We grow to be more like Jesus as we eat with other Christians in their homes and they in ours; as we serve with them to help the poor in our church community and in the wider place that we live; as we speak the gospel to each other whenever we encounter each other.

Christian Formation II
If we’re formed by what we think, what we feel, and what we do—as I’ve argued we are—how does being formed by what we do work? I think there are two components to this: community and habit.
We become what we do. James K. A. Smith’s famous ‘pedagogy of desire’ argues that rather than doing what we love, instead we love what we do. If you want to train yourself to love something, then do it. Part of the Christian life is repetition. If you want to become a person who prays, then you need to start by praying. Obviously, there must be more to it than this—and there is, all three angles of formation are present all the time—but you won’t become a person of prayer unless you actually carve out time to pray in, and then pray at those times.
Of course, the early steps are faltering; of course it’s hard; and of course you can’t do it without the Spirit’s help. Charismatics sometimes make it sound like all you need to do is wait on the Spirit to change you. While a good thing we also need to ask him to change us (please teach me to pray is a powerful prayer) and then start doing it in our lives. This is partly because of the way the Lord has made us as creatures, but it’s also because the Christian life is one of actions: as I’ve argued before hope is an action, as are love, faith, and perseverance (1 Thessalonians 1).
Sometimes we can be down on the idea of daily devotions. You won’t find a direct reference to them in the Bible, which is understandable because they largely assume that you can both read and have the Bible in your native tongue. Devotions also have an individualised sense of how to pray; assuming it’s something we do on our own. The early Christians would have gathered to pray in the mornings. The common practice of morning and evening prayer arose from this. We could probably discuss the benefits of different types of daily prayer, but practice does make perfect in the Biblical sense: it makes us mature. Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s good to do it habitually.
Note the second feature rising up in that discussion, you often see Christians praying together. If you want to love to pray, then pray with people who love to pray. Do it a lot. Habitual actions are easier, and easier to sustain, when done with others. That’s because that’s the kind of creatures we are; firstly, for the love of marriage and the immediate family, and then secondly for the love of the kingdom, for friendship.
If you keep doing something you will grow to love it. If people in your church don’t like the Lord’s Supper and seem confused by it, just start doing it weekly. You’ll find a love for it will grow.
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A Crisis of Attention

By T.M. Suffield — 3 months ago

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, August 25, 2024
We need to understand the unique challenges to following Jesus here and now. Inevitably the way to live among those challenges will be found in the scriptures and the Christian past. Our faith is shallow because our lives are shallow, because our cultural moment is shallow. Many like it that way as it makes it easier to sell us stuff. Jesus is calling us to depth, further up and further in forevermore.

Matthew Lee Anderson says that our culture is in a crisis of attention. I think we all know this, even if we haven’t used this language. Have you noticed that it’s increasingly difficult for you to read books with sustained or difficult arguments? Or to read a physical book at all? Have you noticed how you want to skip from app to app as you scroll and tap? Have you noticed how you can’t even queue for the bus or watch the adverts without needing to pick up your phone?
Our capacity for attention has been eroded. Though, for all the smartphone has been a culprit here, Neil Postman was decrying a similar problem caused by television in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr said similar things about the internet in The Shallows. This isn’t a new problem, but it’s an accelerating problem, I fear. We see this play out in many directions, not least in our politics, but I’m trying to explore the causes of our shallow faith.
My concern is that this inability to give sustained attention to one thing is a cause of our shallowing faith. To put it another way, along with the shift in our Sundays and preaching; the loss of community and catechism, we have a fifth problem: the rise of entertainment.
Is entertainment bad? No. But the modern entertainment systems—and I think particularly of the physical technologies, but it would also be true of the content of what we ‘consume’—have shifted us in some ways that are counter to Christian formation.
There are two aspects of this, the first one could be overstated, but essentially we spend an inordinate amount of time consuming entertainment. If the aspects of Christian discipleship that we’ve touched on take time—and most do in one way or another—we don’t have much time. Sometimes because we’re living lives that are too busy, and this is often what people blame, but I suspect that for most people it has more to do with the amount of entertainment we watch.
I can’t remember the last time I met a Christian who didn’t have a TV. 20 years ago I knew several. I have a TV. I probably watch too much of it. I also use social media a fair bit, maybe too much. If you’re in a young enough generation that you’d never watch TV, assume that I mean YouTube. People find it strange that we don’t pay for a streaming service, which has been an economic decision rather than a moral one and we have access to some from family members. People seem surprised that we only have some of them.
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The Application Cart

By T.M. Suffield — 4 months ago

Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, August 21, 2024
I’ve known preachers to scratch their heads at more “theological” sections of scripture wondering how they’re going to “apply” the text. Show us Jesus, that is application. If people leave seeing and savouring Christ more than they came in, you have achieved very practical application for their lives. Don’t let the need for application rob you of the riches of the text.

If people agree with my concerns about what I’m calling the discipleship crisis, it’s fairly common that they finger our preaching as the culprit. I think there’s something to this, which is what this post is about, but I also think it’s an easy mark. Not only is there some great preaching out there, but I don’t think it directly correlates to more fulsome Christian formation.
I have a high view of preaching, it is encountering the living Christ in the pages of the texts as your Pastors expound the words to you. Preaching is not primarily about instruction in the faith, though that is one of its secondary purposes. I also think we’re naïve if we think half an hour of instruction every week will cut through a bombardment of messages. That’s not how formation works (more on that in the future).
But we can accuse our preaching as a culprit. I’ve sat through preaching that was ‘thin’ or essentially a TED talk, or more of a testimony. That’s not great, but my concern today is with the way we think about application: we both over and under apply the text, because we get application in the wrong position. If application is the cart we place it before the horse.
Overapplying
I don’t mean in the wrong position within a message, but in our thinking. Essentially, I mean this: preaching is not about application, it’s about seeing Jesus. Our preaching should show people Jesus in the text—and I won’t get into it here, but we should find Jesus where the text intends us to find him rather than pasting on a turn at the end—but I think we often are thinking about how to apply this to people in front of us.
“There wasn’t much practical application,” we might critique. That can be a problem as I’ll turn to in a moment, but my biggest concern is this: if you make Christ look glorious that is practical application.
We need preaching to open our eyes to the truths of the world, the most central of which is the beauty of King Jesus. Don’t just tell people he’s wonderful, show them he is. Wonder teaches us to see, and our ability to see the truth will grow and be shaped by seeing Jesus.
I’ve known preachers to scratch their heads at more ‘theological’ sections of scripture wondering how they’re going to ‘apply’ the text. Show us Jesus, that is application. If people leave seeing and savouring Christ more than they came in, you have achieved very practical application for their lives. Don’t let the need for application rob you of the riches of the text.
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We have Shallow Communities

By T.M. Suffield — 4 months ago

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, August 11, 2024
In the modern west the sort of thick community, that which would allow us to witness each others’ Christians lives lived up close, is often unattractive to us. It requires us to give up some of our rights for the benefits of others. It requires us to privilege particular individuals (rather than a vague ‘everyone’ which is much easier but not what Jesus demands of us) over ourselves.

In the last post on the causes of the discipleship crisis, I explored why Sundays are shallow. The gathered worship of the church is supposed to be the pattern of life for the church scattered and for the life of the world. However, it’s not supposed to be the training pitch of that culture.
Because our communities have narrowed and atrophied our opportunities to encounter and catch what the life of faith and faith formation look like have narrowed to just an hour and a half on a Sunday morning. If you’ll forgive the machinespeak: it’s unsurprising that if you reduce the inputs, the output lowers too. Except that isn’t how it works, but it is how it looks.
There was day, now long past, when we would have all been involved in webs of community within our localities, reinforced through many different associations, of which the church would have been the keystone. For an array of reasons those days are long gone; and while we can lament, they won’t naturally arise again in our lifetimes.
What does that mean that we’ve lost? Previously you would have seen people live their Christian lives in front of you, their foibles and sin visible as you all looked to Christ to redeem you. Their patterns and rhythms of life would have been open to you. The opportunities to express your frustrations and challenges, as well as to see how Christ applies to all of life, would have been myriad.
This is probably a little rose-tinted. I’m sure plenty of ordinary Christians didn’t muse about the faith down the coal mine or bring Christ into everything that they did. However, they would have prayed together and sung together. Those sorts of communal habits are forming to our hearts and our households.
I don’t think we can simply recover those patterns—not in our lifetimes anyway, though working for the long haul two generations hence would be worth a lot—
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