What's Right with a "Rule of Life"

A response to "What's Wrong with a 'Rule of Life?'"

Today I’m sharing an article I wrote for Mere Orthodoxy responding to a piece they recently ran called What's Wrong with a "Rule of Life"?. I’d highly recommend you give it a read to understand the context. I’ve included the intro to my response below and a button to click through to finish on Mere Orthodoxy.

I have no personal beef with the author of the original article. But I think this highlights the point of my Cage-Stage Comerism article. These camps tend to be skeptical of each other. I want them to be more careful readers of each other, understand where the other is coming from, and work to find places of commonality. That’s why I spend most of this article quoting Augustine and Calvin.

I hope this is helpful. Let me know your thoughts.

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In a recent article, Phoenix pastor Erik Coonce critiqued the idea of a rule of life, with particular attention paid to John Mark Comer’s articulation of the idea. Unfortunately, his article is an excellent example of why the Gospel-centered movement actually needs concepts like a rule of life as articulated by someone like Comer. As I said in a previous piece,

You need the gospel-centered movement to preserve the gospel and you need the spiritual formation movement to apply the gospel to your life. These camps should be building relationships and working together, not side-eyeing, jabbing, and ignoring each other.

This article is full of side-eyeing and jabbing, trying to discredit the use of a rule of life in favor of obeying God’s law in the Ten Commandments. It describes subscribing to a rule of life in terms such as a “hyper-focus on individuality,” “bespoke lifestyle,” “choose your own adventure,” “your best life,” and concludes by saying that “[obeying God’s law] commands the heart while [a rule of life] thinks only of the hands.”

This is a serious misreading of Comer and other spiritual formation literature. The framing of a rule of life, spiritual disciplines, and spiritual formation as an individualized bespoke journey for your best life that doesn’t care about the heart is as far from the reality of what spiritual formation is as I can imagine.

There are three ways we can substantiate and legitimize this approach to spiritual formation: with scripture, with tradition, and with spiritual formation literature. I’ll provide a sampling of all three and I believe all three present an entirely different vision of formation than what is argued by Coonce in his article.

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I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church; to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.