I
In Eastern traditions, spiritual devotion is often seen as a kind of “ethereal or celestial” pursuit, a complete and self-sufficient spiritual life.
The Chinese church, influenced by these traditions, views devotion as a private experience separate from community life. Leaders like Watchman Nee and Jia Yuming described devotion as being “alone in the Garden [of Eden],” filled with a kind of Eastern mysticism.
In the Western church, the idea of spiritual discipline over the past 50 years has increasingly shown these same traits: private, Eastern, and mystical.
I of course do not deny the private and mystical aspects of spiritual discipline. It is, by nature, personal and spiritual. And because it involves a relationship with the one true God, it must have an element of mystery or the supernatural.
However, I would like to point out that the church’s current view of spiritual discipline has become overly influenced by Eastern and modern ideas that focus on privacy and mysticism. This has caused a misunderstanding between personal spirituality and the community, creating a gap—or even a conflict—between personal spiritual life and life within the church.
As a result, today’s concept of spiritual discipline in the church has shifted significantly. It has become almost irrelevant to pastoral care, the Lord’s Supper, church discipline, public worship, and even acts of justice and mercy.
But how can we talk about spiritual discipline being renewed daily without a mature understanding of the church and a genuine pastoral context where a flock is being shepherded?
II
The church is a kingdom and a community that has been growing across time and space for thousands of years. It is a historical process that, once started, will never stop. No ruler or power can ever halt this process. All powers outside the church are instead temporary, destined to fall or fade away.
Spiritual discipline exists only within the church’s historical journey and is tied to all the spiritual heritage accumulated along the way. There is no such thing as individual spiritual discipline except for this journey. There is, in fact, no spiritual discipline outside the Church.
All private, spiritual, and mystical experiences outside the church’s history will eventually be just a brief moment in time or even be considered mere sorcery. This is true no matter how unique or profound such experiences may seem.
Spiritual discipline is not only personal but also communal. One of its main purposes and experiences is to integrate personal experiences into the shared beliefs and heritage of the community. Fellowship is a key source of spiritual discipline and the means through which it is expressed.
This means spiritual discipline helps a Christian live more genuinely and fully within the church, becoming part of the church’s historical community and traditions. As the medieval mystic Saint Teresa of Ávila said, spiritual discipline is a way of life that “learns selfless devotion in the daily frictions of communal life.” In this sense, a Christian without spiritual discipline does not fully meet the criteria of being a Christian. They struggle, or have not yet learned, to integrate their personal experience into the shared life of the community. Surprisingly, it is today’s church, not the medieval mystics, that has moved further away from and downplayed spiritual discipline within the context of fellowship.
Only by including a believer’s personal experience do we confront life’s challenges and contradictions. It compels us to embrace the Gospel of Christ as a core part of our daily lives.
This shows the importance of the Gospel, a priority that can only be fully and genuinely displayed within the life of the church. When every part of church life expresses and demands such a Gospel focus, church life itself becomes filled with the deep meaning of spiritual discipline.
The cross, the peak of Christ’s human experience on earth, must also be the peak of certain personal experiences for believers. Therefore, the cross must and will become the center and method of spiritual discipline.
In a path of suffering and apparent defeat, the Cross shows that the coming of the Messiah was marked by sharp conflict. The Holy Spirit’s presence in believers is proof of a new world, even though everything still seems unchanged; the Gospel indeed transforms thoroughly. The only way for the worldly to see this proof is through faith.
Spiritual discipline is the act of participating in this transformation within what seems like an unchanging world, gaining infinite assurance of faith through personal experience and a journey of belief. Spiritual discipline is living in the life of Jesus, who was crucified and resurrected. It is the motivation for trying this unique way of human existence. The resurrected Christ is no longer confined by the historical details of Jesus of Nazareth. He is now exalted above all rule and authority, even beyond time and space. The Father has given Him the Name that is above all Names. Spiritual discipline
goes beyond the limits of personal experience, becoming a shared, public, and human experience in Christ, united with all believers.
The Law is good, but it can only serve as a standard for behavior, not as the foundation for spiritual discipline. Following the Law often means relying on oneself. If the Law were enough for human justification and sanctification, spiritual discipline would not exist. Or rather, it would become a moralistic practice of self-praise and self-admiration.
When believers try to earn God’s grace and love by following the Law or measuring themselves against it, spiritual discipline turns into a form of self-deception. The modern church is filled with this misleading form of spiritual discipline. It has become a false and moralistic pursuit of spirituality that bases our sense of security and our relationship with God on visible, personal spiritual experiences and achievements. As the early church father John of the Cross stated, spiritual discipline can become another way to escape Christ.
Spiritual discipline can only come from the Gospel. Under any incorrect, moralistic view of salvation, there can be no true spiritual discipline. For example, the Catholic church does not fully recognize God’s sovereign grace and justification by faith. Therefore, spiritual discipline, the more devout it appears, the more likely it is to be in enmity against the grace of Christ.
Outside the Gospel, there is no spiritual discipline. This does not exclude some Catholic monks who, in their personal experience, have embraced or come very close to evangelical beliefs. However, the Catholic Church views individuals like Pascal’s Jansenist community as heretics and isolates them. Or for various other reasons, their Christian identity experiences a deep split between their personal experience and the shared beliefs of their community.
This leads to a common occurrence within Catholicism though not unique to it. Believers are in a constant state of conflict, division, and tension between many unofficial, personal spiritual experiences and the doctrines upheld by the community. This results in hypocrisy within Catholic spiritual practice, filled with idolatry and marked by mysticism and individualism. To escape the tension between their personal experiences and official doctrines, Catholic spiritual writers downplay the community aspect of spiritual discipline, leaning toward the Oriental, private, and mystical.
True spiritual discipline, however, lies in a positive feedback loop formed by consistency and ongoing relationships between personal experience and communal doctrine. Long-term commitment to the church and fellowship, along with active participation in the church’s public worship, prayer, service, and discipline, are essential for such spiritual practices to happen. To remove the community aspect of spiritual discipline is to break its alignment with doctrine (the Word), leading to falsehood and self-deception.
III
This book does not, however, discuss the “communal nature of spiritual discipline” as a theological essay. The author of this book, a pastor and church planter, wrote it as a collection of letters to Chinese house churches from 2010 to 2017. In these letters while serving a mission field more akin to a construction site, he shared his belief that “the church is the way of grace.” The letters also offer reflections, applications, and thoughts on the Gospel within the context of real church situations, agendas, and challenges. This book aims to show a picture of “spiritual discipline” as it unfolds within the concrete reality of church life. It seeks to illustrate the “communal nature of spiritual discipline” through the lens of a specific church community. This book also hopes to encourage reflection and skepticism away from any form of “spiritual discipline” that is disconnected from church life and based on self-deception.
In Christ,
June 1, 2018
(Editor’s note: This article is the preface written by Pastor Wang Yi for his collection of Pastoral Letters; Soul Awakening: Letters of Spiritual Discipline from the Front Lines of Pastoral Ministry, to be published in Hong Kong in August 2018.)
