You might have noticed a higher profile on “organic” food and diet in recent years. If not, go ahead and crawl out from under that Big Mac!
Accompanying this trend is the application of nutritional thinking to spiritual life. It’s been a long time coming. Edwin Friedman’s Generation to Generation famously jump-started congregational systems thinking and the “healthy church” movement of the 1990s. Neil Cole’s Organic Church more recently applied the discussion to church planting and growth. Think of the church not as an organization but an organism.
John Chandler
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And I guess Paul had something to say about the church as “body of Christ”!
Today emerging is the conversation about the biology of discipleship. Mike Breen uses the seven classic signs of biological life as a diagnostic checklist for assessing the vibrancy of one’s life in the Spirit. In biology classes, British schoolchildren learn the acronym, “MRS. GREN”. There are spiritual analogies:
• Movement — response to stimuli (going when God speaks)
• Respiration — rhythm of life (abiding and bearing fruit)
• Sensitivity — sensory receptivity (hearing the Holy Spirit)
• Growth — internal development (maturing into the fullness of Christ)
• Reproduction — propagation of the species (making and mentoring disciples)
• Excretion — ridding of waste (eliminating any “root of bitterness”)
• Nutrition — intake of nourishment (input of life-giving disciplines)
Healthy discipleship is a matter of a “systems check” in each area. Rate yourself from one to 10 in each fact and take note of the high and low score. Call it biological spirituality.
Maybe it comes from having raised boys, but I have to admit to being fascinated with the role of excretion in this list. The capacity of a body to discard waste is, in Breen’s metaphor, tied tightly to forgiveness. The ability to get rid of the toxicity of our own sins, the hurts perpetrated against us and relational brokenness through forgiveness is a core task of every disciple. The best followers of Jesus I know are those who receive and dispense forgiveness like it was candy.
That is, the kind of candy that’s good for you.
Trending is written by John Chandler, leader of the Spence Network, www.spencenetwork.org./equip.htm. He is a member at All Souls, a Baptist congregation in Charlottesville, Va.