This is the fourth post in a series that will highlight five ways the contemporary evangelical church can learn from church history about spiritual formation. This post focuses on communal rhythms.
The individualized regimen of solo Scripture-reading and personal prayer is a modern invention. Unfortunately, it is the predominant spiritual growth plan in the twenty-first century evangelical church.
Dancing alone is not the same as dancing together – so it is with spiritual training, practices, and growth.
We need to learn how to dance together again.
Communal Practices Throughout Church History
Monasticism provided the post-apostolic church with an example of shared life that the desert fathers and others of their time had lacked.
The church of Acts had shared daily life, meals, and even finances (Acts 2:44-47). However, beginning in the third century the desert fathers, in their pursuit of purity and devotion, overemphasized isolation from the world and, in many cases, isolation from one another.
Saint Benedict corrected this extreme by organizing the first monastic order in 529 AD, bringing together men to work and pray in community with one another.[1] The three pillars of Benedictine spirituality were stability (i.e., staying in one community for the rest of one’s life), faithfulness, and obedience.[2] Their seven daily times for community prayer, Scripture readings at meal times, manual labor, and private reading (though never alone), established formative rhythms in which every monk would live and grow.[3]
A communal rhythm for prayer and worship was not original to monasticism.
The Didache in the second century prescribed prayer for every believer three times daily, and in the fourth century, Christians celebrated public gatherings for morning and evening prayer.[4] The Didache also “directed Christians not to fast on Mondays and Thursdays (the regular Jewish fast days) but on Wednesdays and Fridays, and their custom continued to be widely observed in later centuries, with regular services of the word also taking place at the ninth hour (about 3 p.m.) on these days.”[5]
Modern Examples, Bonhoeffer & Life Together
Centuries after the Reformation, rhythms of prayer and Scripture still play a role in the spiritual formation of believers in like communities. Thanks to Thomas Cramner (1489-1556), much of the English-speaking world has adopted the Book of Common Prayer as a daily office, uniting in shared reading and prayers all across the Western world.[6] Similarly, certain denominations provide members with devotional materials and have selected readings suggested for each day.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer provides a modern example for spiritually formative communal rhythms in his Finkenwalde seminary in an abandoned schoolhouse during Nazi Germany.
The students “began their day in silence…rose at 6 a.m.…The first words they heard were those of the morning devotions.”[7] The rest of their day consisted of silent meditation, classes, singing, study, meals, and time for relaxation and recreation; the evening devotions were “structured much like the morning prayers, as in Benedictine monasticism, with added elements of confession, forgiveness, and petition for God’s protection during the coming night.”[8]
Wanting them to practice weekly confession to one another but finding them reluctant to do so, Bonhoeffer initiated the communal rhythm by confessing his own sins to one of the seminary students, who, though taken aback, soon followed his example.[9] Their faith and formation took place in the midst of their shared life together. Bonhoeffer wrote his Life Together during this time; it continues to serve as an inspiring and practical resource for community spiritual formation.
The Antidote to Individualized Spiritual Formation: A Shared Rule of Life
Although the modern understanding of personal faith serves a helpful purpose in believers owning their own faith (rather than being Christian by mere church attendance or family association), it needs a reorientation toward community. Evangelicalism today suffers from a hyper-individualism that would benefit from the balance of some shared communal rhythms. One of the leading evangelical voices on spiritual formation today, John Mark Comer, observes,
“The current micro-resurgence of Rule of Life in the Western church is a joy to my heart. Unfortunately, it’s mostly being run through the grid of Western-style individualism, with individual people writing their Rule of Life… But you should know this: Historically, a Rule of Life was for a community. It was designed by early adopters, like Saint Augustine and Saint Benedict, to hold a community together around shared rhythms of spiritual formation. To center a community on Jesus. And like most things in life, it just plain works better in community. We need one another to help us stay on the path and, when we fall, to help us back up.”[10]
Such reform, however, would probably take place best on a smaller scale, possibly even around a dinner table, as with Comer’s small group, which eats together weekly as a part of their shared Rule of Life.
The ideal context for a reformation in our corporate sanctification is not an institution or a denominational association.
Spiritual formation must take place in the context of real relationships.
Let’s relearn to do life together.
[1] Sten-Erik Armitage, “Lecture –Benedictine Spirituality”. Dallas Theological Seminary, September 2024.
[2] Armitage, “Lecture – Benedictine Spirituality”.
[3] John P. Burgess, Jerry Andrews, and Jospeh D. Small, A Pastoral Rule for Today: Reviving and Ancient Practice (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2019) 44.
[4] Bradshaw, Early Christian Worship, 77-79.
[5] Bradshaw, Early Christian Worship, 86.
[6] Armitage, “Lecture – The English Reformation”.
[7] Burgess, Andrews, and Small, A Pastoral Rule for Today,152.
[8] Burgess, Andrews, and Small, A Pastoral Rule for Today, 154-155
[9] Burgess, Andrews, and Small, A Pastoral Rule for Today, 156.
[10] John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become like Him, Do as He Did (Colorado Springs, CO: Waterbrook, 2024) 199.