TOKENS PODCAST: S4E15
“Most people are too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually vibrant lives.” In this episode, John Mark Comer, founding pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon and author of the much-talked about book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry discusses the importance of taking seriously the slow, quiet process of spiritual formation in a culture of noise and speed; why willpower cannot do what we want it to do; recovering non-violence as a central Christian practice; theories of change; partisan politics; the quest for the good, the true, and the beautiful; and his most recent book and New York Times best-seller, Live No Lies.
ABOUT THE GUEST
John Mark Comer is the founding pastor at Bridgetown Church, director and teacher of Practicing the Way, and the New York Times bestselling author of Live No Lies.
His growing passion is the intersection of spiritual formation and post-Christian culture. The gnawing questions that get him out of bed in the morning are, How do we experience life with God? And how do we change to become more like Jesus? To that end, he is regularly found reading the desert fathers and mothers, ancient saints and obscure contemplatives, modern psychologists and social scientists, philosophers like Dallas Willard, and op-eds from the New York Times.
When he’s not reading, he can be found around a table with his family and friends, attempting to learn how to cook, drinking Heart coffee, and walking the family dog in the forest. Most important, he is husband to T and father to Jude, Moses, and Sunday.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
John Mark: Historically the priest or the pastor was called the cure annum, the cure of souls, their job was like the healing and the shepherding and the care and the companionship with the soul and its journey to healing and God.
So I guess I'm trying to get back to that more kind of ancient vision of what it means to be a pastor.
Lee: That's today's guest John Mark Comer, founder of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon. Following that ancient vision of being a pastor, John Mark comes at transformation from an angle too little discussed.
John Mark: Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day, you must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.
Lee: Today we discuss John Mark's 2019 book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
John Mark: Most people are too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually vibrant lives. Most people are anxious, burned out. They know that they're addicted to their phone and the internet and Netflix, but they're trying to get off of it. They feel lonely, but yet they struggle in relationships and in actual intimacy and community and church.
Lee: And, we also cover why will-power will not and cannot do what we want it to do; recovering non-violence as a central Christian practice, the quest for happiness, and his most recent book and New York Times best-seller, Live No Lies.
I know, I know you're wondering: how could you possibly do so much in one interview?? Well, stick around and you'll see... it's coming right up.
INTERVIEW
Lee: John Mark Comer is founding pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, which I understand is right next to Powell’s bookstore, which, uh, makes me all, all the more reason to get out there soon. Married to T, has three children, is the author of six books, two of which we'll discuss today, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and his newest book entitled Live No Lies.
Welcome, John Mark.
John Mark: So happy to be along. Thanks for having me.
Lee: Grateful to have you here in middle Tennessee.
John Mark: Actually in, I know. Nashville's growing on me. I see the appeal you know, like we hear all these rumor stories that people leaving the coast for Nashville.
Lee: Yeah, we hope that you will not tell anybody else on the West Coast about the appeal of Nashville.
John Mark: Yeah, I feel like if you wanted to buy a house here or whatever, you missed the window.
Lee: Yes, you should have done it a couple of years ago.
John Mark: Missed the glory days.
Lee: Yeah. Those of us who have been here for a while, we're very thankful we did buy some years ago rather than now.
John Mark: Yes, it is charming, this part. What, do you call this part of the city?
Lee: Oh, we're in Green Hills.
John Mark: Green Hills. Yeah, it is charming. I mean, it feels like the best of the South.
Lee: Yeah, it's a, it's a very wonderful city. We've seen it grow in incredible ways.
John Mark: Yeah, you’ve been here a long time, huh?
Lee: Yeah. I've been back here 23 years and, but the city skyline is completely different than it was 15 years ago, and uh, remarkable, but, uh.
John Mark: Somebody called it the, uh, third coast yesterday when I was with them because so many people moving here from New York and California and Portland. And interesting kind of mix of like coastal more liberal culture, but you're very much in the South. You know what I mean?
Lee: Yes, you're definitely in the South. Yeah. But yeah, Nashville itself. I mean, even in terms of, politics, Nashville is different than a lot of parts of the state but you definitely have the kind of Southern hospitality, Southern charm that's still quite appealing, and.
John Mark: Yeah. I know, coming from there's so much, like such a spirit of contempt in some of the West Coast cities. You really pick up the culture of honor thing here, which is like non-existent where I'm from, you know? So just the way people say hello, sir. The lack of graffiti everywhere is like, it's shocking to me. I'm used to just seeing garbage and graffiti everywhere.
And so it's just so clean. Would, you, know, graffiti is a form of dishonor, intentional dishonor. Honor culture is really fascinating to me because I've never lived in one. So it's very noticeable to an outsider.
Lee: Yeah, that's remarkable because certainly honor culture has its dark side in the sense that it can give, famously to, all sorts of passive aggressive behavior.
John Mark: Yes.
Lee: But that being said, there is something that's beautiful about Southern mores in the sense that you speak to people and you look them in the eye and you treat them with respect. You know, I tell some of my students sometimes who will sometimes joke about that sort of stuff that, they should not take lightly the fact that a kind word spoken may be the only act of love a lot of people receive in a day. And it's no small matter to treat people with that kind of kindness. So, well, hey, I'm really excited about the stuff that we might get to talk about today. It seems to me in thinking about what I know about some of your work, I see you, maybe, taking a lot of historic wisdom traditions or what in moral philosophy we would call virtue traditions as well as kind of findings in neuroscience or social psychology, as well as a third piece laid over that of the Christian tradition and looking at kind of the overlap of those three.
But is that a fair way to kind of summarize some of the stuff that you're up to?
John Mark: Yeah, I mean, I definitely, it’s not an equal parts of Venn diagram, you know. I think I come to all of it through the pathway of discipleship or spiritual formation, but very interested, yes, in the historic wisdom tradition and the contemporary one and in best of the social sciences or psychology. And part of that is just, I feel like in the enlightenment, the soul got kind of split. You would understand better than I, the kind of etymology of academic sub-disciplines. How my understanding is, and correct me here if I'm way off, that prior to kind of some of the modern university system, most public intellectuals were broader in their field of study. And as the university system developed and the enlightenment kind of split the mind from the body, we developed academic sub-disciplines, which I'm sure there’s so many pros to that. But one of the cons is, somehow in that breakup, psychology in the kind of domain of the soul went to Freud in his ilk, who are thoroughly anti-Christian. And, like, their worldview is both scientifically disproven now and deeply at odds with, you know, the wisdom of Jesus, but, you know, whether that's from a psychologist or a, you know, wisdom tradition, or. I'm currently reading a Buddhist right now and I'm like, half of this stuff I think is absolutely errant and the other half I'm like, that's really helpful, you know?
Lee: You've publicly stated your indebtedness to Dallas Willard a lot. What would you say would be the one or two key insights from him that got you taking his work seriously?
John Mark: Honestly much of my work is just an attempt to popularize his teaching. He was kind of my gateway drug into all things, spiritual formation. I think his emphasis on, and his, philosophical or psychological or spiritual kind of understanding of the why behind what some called the spiritual disciplines, what I prefer to call the practices of Jesus, was revolutionary for me. His breadth of understanding, of the Christian tradition, being this deep and wide. You know, he and Richard Foster really tried to reintroduce to evangelicals and Protestants in America, that were a part of a tradition that's much deeper and wider and broader than most of us realize.
Lee: And lots of things that can be appreciated from the traditions…
John Mark: And lots of things. Yes, exactly. And then third, probably his loving but firm engagement with secular culture. So unlike a lot of other people in the formation movement, he was a philosopher of the University of Southern California. So one of the problems with a lot of the spiritual formation writers is most of them are baby boomers who spent their life in conservative church culture.
So, like, one of the first things when you start to take formation seriously that you have to deal with is people's images of God and false images of God, because you become like your image of God for better or for worse. And so, if you imagine God as an angry, kind of Right-wing yelling at all the, like, whatever, then you're going to become like that.
The problem is that, you know, pastoring on the West Coast my whole life and now being in Portland. For every person in my church that has like an image of God who's mad at them, there's probably 250 people that think of God as their like cosmic yoga sex coach. You know? So it's the same problem. People have a false image of God that is distorting their behavior. But, if to stereotype from my parents' generation, it was a God who's mad and so they're screaming at the gay people. For my generation it's, like, God just wants me to be happy. So I'm sleeping with my girlfriend before going to the pride parade.
It's the same problem. It's just expressed differently, generationally, culturally, whether you're in Portland or wherever.
Lee: Yeah, it reminds me of one of my theology seminars at Notre Dame when I was in grad school where one of the professors said, it was probably seven or eight of us. She said, how many of you had this vision, in Christian formation when you were young of fear of going to hell?
And I'm thinking didn't everybody have that, you know, and there were two or three of us out of the seven that raised our hands. And, um, but yet terribly important to realize that the false visions of who God is are multiform.
John Mark: Yes, across the spectrum. Yep. So, he, you know, his proximity to secular narratives by just virtue of being a philosopher at the University of Southern California was really a gift, you know?
One of the last books he wrote that almost nobody's read, it's a weird title, it's Knowing Christ Today, which was the popular kind of, it’s an easy book to read, version of the academic contribution he made that was published after his death The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, is just a fascinating take. So I think probably those three things, like, the concept of spiritual formation, which was language brand new to me a number of years ago. And the role of practices and inner healing in your journey toward Christ-likeness. Secondly, the breadth of the Christian tradition, and, third, engaging with secular culture, because similar to false images of God, we all live from these narrative assumptions about what's good and true, and beautiful. And so, you know, Phillip Rieff, the sociologist, religion, he has that great line about how the best way to critique secular culture is to biopsy it. I really liked that word picture if you think of, you know, if you're a doctor and you suspect that possibly part of somebody's body is cancerous you biopsy it. You take a little section, you cut it out, you put it under a microscope and you hold it up to the light and you just analyze it.
What's there, what's in it, where does it come from, where's it going? So to do that with secular culture, I'll do this a lot in my teaching. And I try to do it in like a kind of dispassionate, almost like a journalist, more than like a fiery preacher. You don't have to yell or scream, cause that'll often activate people's defense mechanisms or identities, but just kind of take a little. It could be on the right.
It could be make America great again, or all lives matter on the left. It could be genders between the ears not the legs or whatever love is love. You can just take a little slogan or something like that and biopsy it. Where does this come from? Like, let's just look at this. Where does this idea come from?
Is there an ideology behind it? Is there a background to it, you know, is there a philosopher that started this, and where does this possibly go? Could we think about the telos of this kind of an ideology? What you're really getting people to do, is, is kind of observe, analyze, and question their assumptions about the good, the true and the beautiful.
Lee: Yeah. That's very helpful, I've not heard that, the biopsy analogy, that's very helpful. So when you think about key practices, what have been key practices that you all have focused upon in your local church life there in Portland?
John Mark: Well, we've spent the last couple of years kind of rebuilding our church around a rule of life and exploring this idea of, what if a rule of life is to churches of the future, what membership was to churches of the past, you know, under Christendom.
Now, if you think about rule of life, when did it really rise to prominence, you know? It’s much older than this, but really the Benedict as the Roman empire is falling into decline and disarray. And as chaos is mounting in the world, the movement was toward kind of order, not order, that word's been politicized in the last couple of years, I don't mean it in that kind of American politics way. But, order, a sense of what the ancients called stabilitas, you know, stability, a peace. A kind of a life based on rhythms of prayer and community together.
So I think we're in a cultural moment of, like, anxiety is through the roof, both a mental illness level and just at an ambient cultural level. There is this sense of like chaos in the culture right now. And so I think part of the impulse of this, the spirit is always kind of ziggy and I think where culture is zagging. You know what I mean? Like, the move of the spirits is almost always a countermove to more nefarious movements of culture. And so I think part of what the spirit is moving toward right now is kind of a rule of life concept. So for us, you know, there's some of the traditional evangelical ones that I grew up with such as church on Sunday, morning prayer, and scripture reading, which we have very much held to though often, you know, we've taken another look at how we read scripture, more slowly and prayerfully and more through the lens of kind of Psalm 1 meditation, whether you call that Lectio Divina, or just call it reading prayerfully, you know, whatever. But then new practices or disciplines that I did not really grow up with such as Sabbath. Fasting has actually played a very key role in my own formation and that of our church, which is a really interesting one.
Most Western people, first off, don't realize that fasting was core to the Christian tradition until very recently. It's one of only three spiritual disciplines that Jesus names for the early church for arguably a thousand years. It was just assumed that you would fast every Friday and every Wednesday. Lent used to be like Ramadan where you'd fast until sunset for 40 days, every single year.
Lee: I didn't know that part. Yeah.
John Mark: Yeah. So like most people don't even realize that, because I think my theory is that we live in such a like Cartesian, I think therefore I am, culture that Western people and Western Christians find it hard to fathom growing in Christ, not through the lens of their mind, but through the lens of their stomach.
So we're used to like, hey, read this book or listen to this podcast, you know, or sit through this lecture, go to church and hear a sermon and you'll grow. We're not used to every Wednesday don’t eat and give that time to prayer and getting in touch with your hunger for God and asking God to purify your body and your soul, like, in order to grow.
Like, we don't even have a fathom for nonintellectual spiritual formation, but we're embodied creatures. And so I think that's again, why the explosion in yoga right now, and you know, body-based step, I think it's because there's this movement where culture is trying to correct that Cartesian kind of we’re brains on legs and trying to get us back into our bodies. And Christians should lead the way in this.
Like, we have an embodied spirituality that is thousands of years old. I just read a fascinating thing, arguing that yoga could possibly have been Christian in origin, that it doesn't exist in India until the sixth century. And that it was possibly Eastern Christians that introduced it to India. I have no idea if that's true, but it makes sense theologically, you know, especially the Eastern tradition where there's the Jesus prayer and contemplative prayer and breathing prayers, so core.
My point is just there's a theology of the body that I think we're trying to walk. people back into.
Lee: I came to taking transformative practices seriously through kind of some brokenness in my own life, in my thirties cause I remember reading Dallas Willard about the same time I would read Romans 7, and Romans 8, and I would get exasperated.
It was Romans 7, you know, describing the powerlessness that we experienced, and then Romans 8 describing this different sort of life. I'd get to the end of Romans 8, and I would be frustrated with Paul because my next question would be okay, tell me how, right? And all I could get from good well-meaning church people was, we'll read your Bible and pray more.
And it's like that doesn't help me.
John Mark: No, then you're down to willpower.
Lee: Right? Exactly.
John Mark: Which people say they don't believe that theologically, but often, my theory is that every Christian pastor and church has a working theory of change, like, how that we grow and mature. Most of the time it's unconscious not conscious, unintentional not intentional, and often haphazard and ineffective, not effective. But if you don't have a robust understanding of practice, community, inner healing, the holy spirit, whatever your working theory of change is, we have one that we've come up with, then often people's assumption is that the working theory is basically Bible study, inspiration and willpower, you know what I mean? Like, hear a good sermon or read a good book, be inspired in your heart and then just go do it.
Lee: Which is like motivation…
John Mark: Yeah. And people don't believe that theologically, but that's the actual working theory that I think a lot of people have, and that's just a recipe for disillusionment.
Lee: And so it seems like even when you describe say something like fasting, you know, for me, I will hear people describe certain practices in an overly spiritualized or politic way that puts me off because it's like, I want to have a way to have these things described so that I can simultaneously hear you talk about fasting on, Friday and Wednesday.
And no, the research about the fast diet and that there's profound changes for the good for your health, bodily, and not reducing it to that on that side.
John Mark: Where you're like fasting to like lose some weight and, you know, have a clear mind.
Lee: So not reducing it to, you know, how I look in my jeans, but also not reducing it to some sort of over spiritualized thing and somehow try to hold all that stuff together.
John Mark: Yeah. Theology of the body. So key.
Lee: Yeah. So how, I'm intrigued with this notion of holding before a congregation taking seriously a rule of life. I mean, we do a lot of that in our classes here at the university. I'm not familiar with the church around here that is saying what it means to be a part of this church is we're going to take seriously the rule of life.
John Mark: Yeah, we…
Lee: So how, how how's that resonated with the people there?
John Mark: Well, you know, you're swimming upstream, especially in a city like Portland, where I'm from, that is hyper individualistic, hyper anti-authoritarian.
Lee: We don't know anything about hyper individualism or hyper anti-authoritarianism in the South.
John Mark: Not at all in the South. And, you know, there's, that weird and you would understand this better than me, all the Western ideas that go back to, you know, Rousseau and Freud and all the, all the people that basically perceive any form of external constraint as a form of oppression.
Lee: Right.
John Mark: And that will just sabotage your growth into Christ-likeness like nobody's business. Cause what is the New Testament? What is the Lordship of Jesus, if not some kind of an external history?
Lee: Other than heteronomy, right?
John Mark: Yes, exactly.
So all that to say, it's been a long slow journey for us. And you never lead with the practices or the discipline you lead with the why behind the, with the ache, you know? So if I were just to lay out, hey, to be a part of this church means you do these 10 things on a weekly basis or whatever. I mean, people would be like, I'm out. What the heck? This is a cult. But if you lead with, you know, most people are anxious, burned out. They know that they're addicted to their phone and the internet and Netflix, but they're trying to get off of it.
They feel lonely, but yet they struggle in relationships and in actual intimacy and community and church, so on and so forth. I think you have to lead to that ache. So it's a lot of pastoral care that we've spent about five years cultivating with our church. COVID was actually a gift because it kind of accelerated our work to attempt to pastor our church into a rule of life.
Because the moment it hit, everybody started to freak out. People lost all of their rhythms. You know what I mean? They were like going to work and their pajama pants and there was all the like you know, soft pants, hard pants jokes that were going around, you know? And so people were more open and porous to the idea of a rule of life. So we kind of laid out like a temporary rule of life right at the beginning of COVID for our church.
And some of it was very practical, like limiting how often you read the news, and it was all invitational. Everything we do is just like, we're inviting you into this. It's up to you. And I was shocked at how people just like almost leapt at it, because again, they were in a time of chaos.
So there was actually a desire for order as opposed to the opposite, a number of years before.
So, that was really helpful. We did end up teaching on it. We've done so much teaching on this, over five years. That's the gift of a church. You get to really take people on a journey. And then what it’s building up to, and it'll really start this coming year, will be a official kind of rule of life for our church, that every year there'll be a class for those that are new to the church. This is a city, so it's transient. That are, people that are new to the church to kind of go on a condensed version of our journey into that rule of life, teaching on the practices on the why behind it, on a working theory of change, how we understand that the human soul is formed and grown or shrunk over our lifetime.
And then we'll hopefully have some spiritual directors or kind of spiritual guides that can meet with people to basically take, we'll have like a high level rule of life that won't drill down. It'll have, like, Sabbath or it'll have solitude or it'll have scripture, but it won't have, like, X minutes a day or this time each morning, that'll all be, like, people following the invitations of Jesus, where they're at in their journey, which can be totally different for uh, a new mom who just became a Christian three months ago than it is to an empty-nester has been following Jesus for 50 years.
You know, they're going to have different like expressions, but at the same basic rule. And then people kind of on an annual basis can revisit their rule of life communities that our church will kind of recommit to it. And that'll basically function as our form of membership and then to be a leader in the church, you'll have to basically commit to this.
This will be, like, if you're going to be a leader in our church, this is the rule of life. That from our lead pastor and elders, all the way down, this is just how we follow Jesus in this city.
Lee: Any pushback from leadership about being expected to subscribe to such?
John Mark: You know, only ones that are grandfathered in and that's the pastoral. Yes, all sorts of pushback, but no, it's, actually gone way better than we expected it to and way less pushback than we expected.
So that's the trick. Now, as long as everything's invitational, it's easier. The moment it's like this is required of you to be and dah, dah, dah, dah. But I mean, if you don't have requirements on your leaders, what in the world is a leader in your church or your whatever? So there have to be boundaries.
And the great, you know, myth, I think of the Protestant tradition or the evangelical tradition, is that following Jesus is just about theology and ethics and not about lifestyle. And, you know, it's, I'm the way the truth and the life. And, you know, the attempt to, to have truth without way, and not getting to the life is I think one of the great fallacies of, and there's much in the evangelical tradition, I'm grateful for it, but that's one of the great misses, I think.
Lee: So you're, you're both, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry obviously is one very practical engagement with these sorts of questions.
John Mark: Yeah. It's basically an intro to spiritual formation that's sneaking into the Trojan horse of people's felt need of hurry, and anxiety, and burnout.
Lee: Yeah, yeah. So, um.
John Mark: Let me just show you all my cards right there.
Lee: Yeah. Yeah.
John Mark: You think I'm just trying to make your life more relaxed. Actually. I'm trying to get you to follow Jesus.
Lee: Well, you, you quote, I think it was Dallas Willard saying to John Ortberg. When Ortberg asked him, you know, what, what advice did he have? He said you must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. And you also use Carl Jung, hurry is not of the devil hurry is the devil.
So tell us about what you are trying to describe there. What's it been like for you learning to eliminate hurry?
John Mark: Well, the nice thing is once you write a book, then that is permanently true of you and you never struggle with it again.
That's the great, as you know, right? David Brooks has that great line about how he's always trying to write himself into a better life.
And man do I relate to that. If only spiritual formation was as simple as write a book about a subject and then it will be true of your character, you know? So, I have definitely not arrived. I'm very much still on the journey and in some sense, I'm the worst possible person to write a book about hurry, just cause I am by nature, you know, type a, a little neurotic, OCD, all that kind of stuff, which kind of makes you the best person to write about it. Cause I write out of my weakness, not out of my strength, I'm not a relaxed kind of in the moment, naturally phlegmatic kind of personality.
So that means I have to just work at it a lot harder. And then somebody like my wife who's very, you know, relaxed by nature. When I was first exposed to that line, which was Willard's line to Ortberg and actually there's two sentences there. The second one was you must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.
The first one was hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day, which is similar to Carl Jung, you know, hurry isn't of the devil it is the devil. Or I quote Corrie ten Boom in the book, the devil can't make you sin, he'll make you busy. And when I first heard that it was like a head scratcher for me, you know? On one hand it was like part of my like rational brains said, what are you talking about? Hurry? Like, I mean, I live in Portland, Oregon. We were recently named the least religious city, not just least Christian, least religious city in all of the United States of America. I mean, it is, Lee, it is so far left. Every time I travel, like being here in Nashville, I'm just realized what a bubble I live in.
As far as the level of secularism, progressivism, post Christianity that I just live around, we live right in the city that I'm around all the time. And, if you were to ask me prior to hearing that, like, what's the greatest challenge you face in following Jesus and pastoring people in a city like Portland? I don't know what I would've said, you know, Donald Trump or partisan politics or ideology or sexuality or whatever, but hurry would not have even entered my mind or imagination.
It would not have even made the list. But on the other hand, I had this like, you’re a musician, right?
Lee: Only an amateur musician.
John Mark: Well, we'll take amateur.
Lee: I guess I get to be around a lot of pro musicians.
John Mark: I know you're in Nashville. The best word picture I can think of is like a tuning fork for the soul. You know, like you think of a tuning fork. If you hit one, if you're close to it, like you feel your bone tremor a little bit.
And as I understand, music theory, musical notes are literally like woven into the fabric of creation. It's like gravity or equals MC squared or whatever math theorem, like it's there in the universe that God created. And if you access that reality via your acoustic guitar or your piano or your voice, then you can like harness it and do something beautiful and powerful with it.
So I had this other saying where like my rational brain kind of thought hurry is the great enemy. And then like my soul had this like tuning fork moment, where it's like, I feel like I'm coming into contact with reality right now. It’s like resonating with me deeply you know? And the longer I've sat with that thesis, the more I come to agree with it.
And it's kind of intentionally an overstatement, and provocative in a good way to kind of shock you into thinking about it. But I do think that hurry is kind of the issue underneath so many of the other issues, whether that be political polarization. I'm just shocked at the complexity of the world and the oversimplification of partisan politics. I'm like, do you understand how complex an issue like immigration is, or systemic racism is, or fill in the blank. These are like extraordinarily complex issues that don't often have clear solutions to the problems. But yet people talk about them as it's just this right left binary us versus them simple, good versus evil kind of thing. I'm like, man, this is complex.
But in order to understand that complexity would take a lot of time, it would take humility, it would take compassion to hear another person's perspective. When you're in a hurry, you simply don't have the time. You know, so that's one of a thousand issues right now that plague our society and our soul of which I think hurry is an underlying cause.
Lee: And it seems that increasingly for me, if I really have any interest in making a contribution to my own transformation and the good of my community, I increasingly think of attention along with intention as key, which we simply can't do when we're in a hurry.
John Mark: I think I tell this story in the book, but five years ago, before we basically re-architected or rebuilt our whole church around spiritual formation and practices, and started to walk our church into a rule of life.
I sat down before we started all of this initiative with our church, with my therapist who is also this like PhD, 70-something, like a bit of a legend where I'm from. Just a literal brilliant guru kind of man and deep lover of Jesus, but deeply informed in the best of psychology.
And I ran by him our whole working theory of change and our whole model of church about to embark on. I said, I want you to shred this. I want you to like talk to me as a clinical psychologist, like poke holes in all of this. We had this great conversation. And he mostly affirmed like our theory of change and our model of church, but then he just, basically, he's very much a realist.
He said, the number one problem you will face is time. And he said, most people in your church will never do this because it will take time. And his experience as a therapist after 40 something years or whatever of giving therapy was that most people are too busy to do the things they need to do to become healthy and whole people.
I think he said most people are too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually vibrant lives was his line. The major obstacle to spiritual formation for most people, it's not a hard heart. It's not an obstinate spirit. It's not lack of Bible teaching. It is for most people, just this, whether you want to call it hurry or busy-ness or digital distraction or lack of capacity for attention, it is this just life of speed that is literally incompatible, I think, with a life of prayer, you know? CS Lewis, I forget his name, but his spiritual director called hurry the death of prayer.
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This is our interview with John Mark Comer. Coming up, we'll hear more about what he calls his church's "working theory of change," and how he applies such a theory to spiritual formation in his newest book Live No Lies.
Part two in just a moment.
HALFWAY POINT
Lee: Welcome back to Tokens and our interview with John Mark Comer.
So, summarize for us the theory of change that you…
John Mark: Oh, I don't have a way to do it quick.
Um, so point one: spiritual formation is not a Christian thing or religious thing. It's a human thing. To be human is to be dynamic, not static. We're all being formed. We're all becoming a person. The question is not, are you becoming someone, but who are or what are you becoming? So that's premise one, that you're already being formed. Premise two is, all Christian spiritual formation is counter formation, because we're already being formed by the world. So Romans chapter 12, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
So Paul is saying we don't start with a blank slate. And then through discipleship, to Jesus become more like Jesus, we start with deformation. We are already have been an are being formed in his case, by Rome and our case by the United States of America and the internet, whether that's the right or the left or some amalgamation of the two.
So whatever our formation into the image of Jesus is, it's counter formation. We don't live in the garden of Eden. We live in a post Eden world. You know?
Lee: There's some sort of stream of culture that's occurring that's not the stream towards which we wish to end up.
John Mark: Exactly, exactly.
Lee: And thus, it takes intentionality to go a different...
John Mark: Intentionality, counter formation, offset.
So point three, we basically have two spiritual formation paradigms that we don't have good language for it yet, but one, we just call it unintentional spiritual formation, and the other intentional, meaning unintentional spiritual formation is just our best attempt to understand how we are currently being formed with no intention on our part. No rule of life. No spiritual disciplines.
You just wake up in the morning and you go about your day. Just be an American. Just be a college student, be a mom, be a whatever. This is how we’re being formed. And so if you can imagine, it's hard to say it verbally, but if you imagine a triangle at the top is stories that we believe. So this idea that we all live from narratives, that we're narrative animals.
The human brain is wired at a neuro-biological level to make meaning of our world. And these stories, these narratives about what is good and beautiful and true, they deeply shape how we live. So, you know, if you believe that we're human beings created in the image of God, we're created male and female sexuality is ultimately not about pleasure or even production.
It's about some kind of communion and contribution to increase and fill the earth, breed friendship, to deepen intimacy. That's going to shape how you express your gender and your sexuality. If you believe on the other hand, another narrative, and it is a narrative and interpretation of science and history that we're just animals.
We're just another species. This whole thing is one glorious or not so glorious accident. That sexuality is just about survival of the fittest and propagation of the species. And now that the world is overpopulated we can jettison any intention of biology and it just becomes about pleasure.
Now it's just psychological biological release. That's going to deeply shape how you express your gender and sexuality. You're going to be living into, those are just two options but, one of those narratives that are going to deeply shape what you do with your body, what you do with your sexuality, what you do with romantic relationships.
So, stories we believe. Second would be habits. All this stuff about you know, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, how the things that we do do something to us, that habits, whether it's something as simple as watching the news before bed or doom scrolling on Instagram or going for a run, these all do something to the formation of our inner person, good, bad, or neutral.
They're forming us. Third would be, the other point to the triangle, would be relationships. You know, we're tribal creatures, we’re herd creatures, we become like the people that we are around. Uh, you sound like a southerner. I sound like a West Coast boy. That's because you grew up in the South. I grew up in California.
So that's a simple analogy, but you're going to dress like, think like, vote like live like, express yourself like your tribe. The kind of relationships that people that you're in, whether that's a political tribe, ethnic tribe, your coworker, your city, your demographic, your class or some amalgamation of all of that.
Finally, if you imagine in the middle of the triangle, we're formed by our environment like Nashville, like, just so clear just being here from Portland because Portland and Nashville are so different. There's a stereotype to a Nash. What do you call it? Nashville-light, a Nashvillian? Nashvillian or Portlander, you know, and of course those are caricatures, but you just see the cultural currents that are forming you into a specific kind of person by living here versus, you know, the very similar currents, but that are forming me into a specific kind of person by living where I live, you know? And, finally this happens, if you can imagine below that triangle over time, which is what makes it so incremental and subtle, and through experience, whether that's a tragedy or a trauma, or of course your family of origin would be the primary one or success, or any number of things. Being born one ethnicity or another ethnicity, whatever these experiences are, they deeply shape us. So that's unintentional, spiritual formation.
So if you can, it's hard to do this audio audibly, but if you can imagine, whenever I teach on this, I have the slides up.
If you can imagine that counter, all of that is what we call intentional spiritual formation, which is just a bad way of saying following Jesus on purpose. So counter the stories that we believe is truth, or the role of like the renewal of the mind. The mind of Christ, the role of teaching, why I think Jesus came as a rabbi or a teacher, and why teaching and preaching are still crucial for the future of the church, whether that's a sermon at church on Sunday, or you teach in a class of undergrads, you know? Counter our habits are the practices of Jesus or the spiritual disciplines, where we take on these habits that are based on the life and teachings of Jesus and the gift of habits as they get into us, not just through our, our mind in our, our prefrontal cortex, but through our limbic system. They actually shape like what we love. And Jamie K. Smith's all his stuff on You Are What You Love and the role of habit and how it actually shapes what we love and what we long for. And that is absolutely crucial to understand. Third and counter, our relationships is community where we take intentional steps into relationship with other Christians who call us up into higher levels of holiness and surrender to Jesus. Counter our environment, Nashville or Portland, or the internet, wherever we live, would be the holy spirit, as we are baptizing in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit.
And we attempt to live, like Jesus said, through a biding in such a way that God becomes our predominant environment, that we live in a God saturated universe, where the father is in the air all around us. And we really live from that place. And so we're primarily formed into the kingdom of God atmosphere as opposed to the kingdom of man atmosphere around us.
Same thing. This happens over time, which is double entendre. Time, how much time we put into following Jesus and over years and decades and a lifetime. And finally, not just through experience, but through suffering, which the very thing that we Westerners, and most people in general, avoid like the plague is the primary crucible. All the great ones tell us of how we are formed and forged into Christ-like people of love. So basically a short way of saying that: we're formed through teaching, practice, community, all by the holy spirit. This happens over time and through suffering.
Lee: Remarkable. Fascinating. Thank you.
John Mark: You asked for the short version, I just gave you a bad short sermon is what I gave you.
Lee: No, that will, thank you for that though. That's, uh, immensely helpful and fruitful for thinking about at much more lengths.
John Mark: My point isn't so much that we have the right working theory of change, it's that you probably have one and don't know it.
Lee: Right.
John Mark: So figure out what it is. And then with a lot of humility and curiosity, keep like refining it as you follow Jesus or lead or whatever. Like, I grew up in the evangelical church. They never would have said this.
And if I articulated back, they would say, this is heresy. But what I imbibed was a working theory that if I had to write it up was information plus inspiration plus willpower equals change. And that is a recipe for disillusionment, not for growth and maturity.
Lee: Well, and he also goes back to what you said your psychologist friend said to you in that most people don't ever take any time to allow themselves to consider how may I go about changing, right?
And this reminds me of, you know, one of the lines I love from Alasdair MacIntyre, who he says the, the nature of a good life is a life spent seeking in the nature of a good life. And it's this sort of iterative process where we're taking seriously our lives right? And we're taking seriously what sorts of practices, habits, dispositions, skills, narratives, community, change us and lead us to who we are becoming, you know? And it holds before us, you know, that's one of the big critiques MacIntyre made of the enlightenment was that we've taken away any sort of teleological picture of what it means to be human.
We don't have that picture of the why question that you… for what and for what purpose and why are we trying to do life? Right?
John Mark: So then the default purpose just becomes pleasure.
Lee: Yes. Or whatever the market sells us.
John Mark: Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Lee: And so we're always being captive by something, if we're not paying attention.
John Mark: Yeah. That's I think the great myth of the enlightenment is that we're these autonomous, rational selves, rather than what any scientist or Christian theologian would tell you, which is that you are a beautiful, wonderful image of God person, who is also easily emotionally manipulated. Completely social creature, like, follow the herd mentality, easily capable of self-delusional thinking, you know, which is, science and scripture both align on that point, but it's so against the Western narrative. I'm this rational, autonomous self.
I'll just think for myself, you do you, the voter is always right. You know, people know best, it’s that mindset.
Lee: But like, but like you say, most of us know better than that when you spend much time paying attention.
John Mark: If you're honest.
Lee: If you're honest, you know. I mean, because, it's clearly, the marketers know that even though some of the Milton Friedman's of the world might not think that way.
John Mark: Well, I I think the conspiracy theory read of the founding fathers and and why that persists is because people in power want us to think that so that we're blind to them manipulating us whether it's an advertiser who is trying to get us to buy a new pair of Nike's or a politician who is trying to get us to vote for whatever party or a Guru who is trying to get us to buy their book or whatever. People have a vested interest in us believing the delusion that we're not following anybody, we're just deciding for ourselves. And so it's either follow Jesus or live by my own wisdom when the reality is, if you're not following Jesus, you're following somebody or something else, but we don't want to believe that which makes us easy to manipulate.
Lee: Give us a short list of some of your favorite practices for eliminating hurry.
John Mark: Oh, there's four in the book that I name, not because they're the best per se. They're just the ones that have been the most helpful to me. And they're also. All four are ones that I did not grow up in, and that's not a critique of my family of origin. I'm beyond, I have amazing parents who did a phenomenal job. But they just was not a part of the church tradition I was in. So they are Sabbath,silence and solitude, simplicity, and slowing. So Sabbath, an entire day set aside to stop and rest and delight and worship. Silence and solitude, regular time built in where you are just alone with yourself, and with God, in prayer. And kind of free of any external inputs other than from God himself, and maybe from scripture. Three, simplicity.
Or, you know, some people will call that simple living or minimalism or whatever, but simplifying, not just your possessions and your wardrobe, but even your activities and your commitments down to really live in alignment with your deepest desires and to make discipleship to Jesus. And in particular prayer and community, really the center, the yellow line in the middle, that is the road of your life. And finally slowing, that's language from Richard Foster and John Ortberg, who talk about slowing actually as a spiritual discipline for the modern age. They mean exactly what it sounds like, actually just slowing down, and doing things slower. That they would say this is, a spiritual discipline in theory, is anything that you see in the life of Jesus.
Anything that you see in Matthew. You could argue that mountain climbing is a spiritual discipline because Jesus went up to the top of mountains. So it's anything that you see in the life of Jesus that you're trying to just kind of incorporate into your own life. And the thought that maybe this is some kind of a mechanism for the spirit of Jesus to form you, to become like Jesus.
And, so, you know, if you pay attention to Jesus, he just was not hurried. You know, a Willard was once asked, describe Jesus in one word and thought about it for a minute. And he said relaxed, you know, and if you just think about how Jesus is so present to the moment. If you think about if you just read through the four gospels and take a short tally of how many of the stories in the gospels are unplanned unscheduled interruptions.
So almost all of them. There's very few like 4:00 PM on Thursday, September 28th. You know, spit in a man's eyes and rub blood on him and make for a great story a couple of decades later in this biography. No, it’s just like, that was Jesus responding to an interruption. CS Lewis had that great line, that how you respond to an interruption is who you really are, which is like dagger to the heart for me as a hurried person.
Lee: Say that one more time.
John Mark: How you respond to an interruption is who you really are.
Lee: Yeah, man. That's pretty…
John Mark: You know? Cause you're not performing at that point.
Lee: That’s great and that's awful.
John Mark: That’s awful.
I hate that saying. Darn you, CS Lewis, oh, darn you. Lord have mercy. So slowing is basically, it's almost like gamifying your life where you intentionally kind of live analog and live at a slower pace, in an attempt to kind of reset your nervous system and re-evaluate your body to the pace of Jesus, which is the pace of love. So it can be something as simple as getting into a slow line, you know, driving in the slow lane, or just keeping your phone away from you or not multitasking.
It can be really simple, taking a walk.
Lee: Do you talk in there about, testing about whether you're in the fastest line in the grocery store? Don't you mention that in there?
John Mark: I do. That's maybe, maybe the least popular line in my book.
Lee: I hated you when you mentioned that one, because I thought doesn't everybody? Everyone with a sane mind does that.
John Mark: Oh, well, okay. So I talk about in the book I talk about, this is a secular concept, but hurry sickness is like actually in the psychological literature.
And there's a, Stanford professor, Phillips and Bardo who wrote this book on hurry sickness. And he has three signs to self-diagnosis and it's one, you get into the shortest line at the checkout line. Two, you're at a red light, you’re coming up to a red light and you change lanes to get into like, you know, three cars in one lane, two cars in another you change lane. Three, you multitask to the point that you forget one of the tasks. Like, not to play armchair psychologist, but I'm pretty sure we all have hurry sickness. That, you're like, if I was like, wait, isn't that just living?
Lee: And I shouldn't even tell this one on the podcast, but one of the things that I do, to be able to tell whether or not I'm going to get through the green light is I learned years ago that you can watch the crossing sign, the count down over there.
John Mark: Oh, yeah. Oh, heck yeah.
Lee: And you know how much you have to punch it to get to through the yellow light.
John Mark: And then you go to the hand. Hundred and ten percent.
Lee: Yeah. So, I.
John Mark: Everyone is like, that's normal. But it's actually not normal. It's a recent…
Lee: Well it may be normal statistically in our hurried sick world.
John Mark: It's not normal historically.
Lee: Yeah.
For me, I mean, I remember one time, years ago I was doing some therapy work and this therapist said to me, at probably like the third or fourth visit, he said, you're pretty obsessed with productivity. Aren't you? And I said, how did you know that? And he said, because you always show up just about two minutes late to your appointment. And it was like, yeah. I mean, this is what I do is I've got every moment kinda planned out and in a hurry. And so, you know, for me, just you're thinking about being slow.
I've noticed a lot of this stuff can be done in very simple ways, as one would hope, right? In that, if I will find myself literally slowing down my pace just 20%, you know, it allows me to pay more attention to what I'm doing. Getting rid of a cell phone has been huge for me in this regard, because it requires me to not get in a hurry to tell people by text message or to, if I'm going to engage with somebody, I get to plan to engage with them. And then when I'm with them, I'm with them and I'm not distracted by the phone, but that's been a huge practice for me and learning to slow down.
John Mark: That’s unbelievable. May your tribe increase.
Lee: Well, I mean, I didn't do it by any virtuous ends. I broke my phone and I tried three times to get it fixed.
And by that point I decided, well, I think I'll try this a bit. And it's been wonderful. I think I'm three years in, but one thing that, that made me realize how powerful it is, I was a year into it and I had my last phantom buzz in my pocket a year out from not having a cell phone. And I just realized that how powerful that thing is psychologically for me.
John Mark: You know, I mean, my book is not about like work productivity it's about formation and following Jesus, but I did a lot of reading and research and I have a lot of thoughts about work productivity and I…
Lee: Because you like Cal Newport, right?
John Mark: I love Cal Newport.
Lee: I love Cal Newport as well. One of these days, I want to interview Cal Newport.
John Mark: Yeah. He's a great interview by the way, I've listened to a podcast or two by him.
But, the myths that I think type A, career-minded, people believe is that activity equals productivity.
Lee: And he just debunks that.
John Mark: I think he, I think he in his own way, not through the angle of formation or becoming a person of love, just through the angle of making, you know, a lot of impact in your job would argue the exact opposite.
That if you slow down, if you focus, if you eliminate distraction, if you say no, if you kind of simplify and really you'll actually have more of an impact. There’s the, um, Greg McKeown has written about this too, he has the book Essentialism, he has a new one out. He writes about, I think it's called The Pareto Principle, that 20% of your work gives 80% of your impact. And so we just waste all of our energies, doing all this stuff that actually doesn't really move the ball forward on our career, per se.
Lee: No, I mean, when I read Cal Newport 5, 6, 7 years ago, whenever it was the first time and I revamped my work, according to his deep work stuff, my life is much more simple and yet I'm being immensely more productive and I'm less stressed at it.
And then two or three years ago, I re-read it along with a book called Rest. And Rest is about doing case studies of famous people, intellectuals like Charles Darwin. You know, Darwin, if you looked at Darwin's daily schedule, he would get up in the morning and he would work in a focused way for 90 minutes or so. Then he’d go for a long walk and he'd do a little bit of correspondence, and then he’d go have lunch and then he’d do another long walk and then attend to his farm animals or something.
And then he'd come back and work another hour and a half late afternoon. The dude wrote 33 books in his life. And one of which was the most important book in the 19th century, right? And so you look at it, I mean, you think he's not doing anything, he's a lazy, he's lazy, but it's like, no, he's immensely productive by not being distracted and by learning these rhythms of rest and simplicity.
So changing gears, just a touch, grazed evangelical, but you and I have had at least enough conversation offline about your interest in the Anabaptists.
A quick church history intrusion here: if you're not familiar with the Anabaptists: they were the "radical" version of the 16th century Protestant Reformation. "Radical" in that they took some of the emphases on reform to what some thought an extreme, but which they thought central to Christian discipleship. For example, practices like non-violence and a refusal to take oaths, both grounded in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, were trademark teachings for many of the Anabaptists.
Why called "Anabaptists"? "Ana" simply means "again," and so the name Anabaptist was a label given them by their detractors. They rejected the practice of infant baptism, believing that Christian discipleship ought to entail a voluntary adult choice, because the stakes were high. But this practice threatened the nominally Christian identity of all of society that was propagated through infant baptism. If "everyone" is "Christian," and "everyone" is "Christian" through the mechanism of infant baptism, then any suggestion to discard the practice --alongside practices of non-violence and love of enemies--these were all seen as a radical threat to the socio-political-religious status quo.
Consequently, the Anabaptists were literally hunted down, and executed in cruel and dehumanizing ways by both mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic authorities.
How do you see that tradition as being potentially much needed at this juncture in American church history?
John Mark: Well, I mean, disclaimer would be, I probably have a romanticized division of the Anabaptists.
Lee: All, church traditions are screwed up in some way or the other, right.
John Mark: And it's easy to look back at them and just talk about the great you know, that they gave. But a couple of things that I think broad strokes were definitive about the Anabaptist movement. I'm not sure they still are, but we're, and I think we need to recapture for our moment. One would be, it's commitment to obey the teachings of Jesus.
I don't think it was intentional, but something about the reformation kind of separated theology of the atonement from the Sermon on the Mount and that is a bad decision. That is like a game of would you rather, I have no interest in playing. So the Anabaptists focus on the teachings of Jesus, the four gospels, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus as a teacher, not just as the atonement for, which I think is a very limited understanding of what atonement even is, but as actually making space for us to live a whole new way in a new community in the kingdom of God. I mean, I just never grew up really hearing much of anything about the Sermon on the Mount. When I would hear it taught on it was basically, this is Jesus showing you that you can never possibly measure up to God's high standards. So you have to just trust in his death on the cross.
I mean, what a gross misreading of Jesus rather than this is the most precious gift in all of human history. This is the way this is the path to life, you know, so that I'm really grateful for. Secondly, its emphasis on recapturing communal life together, community life around a table in some of the Anabaptist tradition, Lords supper as a meal, you know, not as a sacrament. Well, maybe theologically as a sacrament, but expressed as a meal, around a community around a table, which is how we practice the Lord’s supper at our church as a full meal in our community. So that's been revolutionary for me. Third would be I think it's refusal to marry political power with the gospel of Jesus.
It's just absolute refusal to participate in political power plays or military violence. That is still revolutionary, whether you're on the right or the left. I mean, it's just as revolutionary on the left, because the statism is even stronger, I think in some ways on the left, it's just different expression. So I think that, you know, I just finished reading Tom Holland's book Dominion. Have you been hearing about that?
Lee: Yeah. It's on my list to read and also hopeful interview.
John Mark: Oh, that'd be amazing. It's I mean, it's, it's extraordinary belong, and it's hard to read. You're both like inspired by the Christian tradition and like thoroughly humiliated, at the same time, but my take it just deepened my convictions around non-violence. Nine out of 10 of the cringe-worthy moments in the history of the church are when the church decided to get in bed with military violence, and political power, like nine out of 10 of the times. You're like, what, what in the world? You just ruined this move of God, you just sabotaged this move of the spirit. You just decimated the image of Jesus and the reputation, and the witness of the church, almost always it was to do with political and military compromise, I think is the best word for it.
So those three things I think I find deeply inspiring, and those are pretty broad strokes. You know, I don't know many people that would say no, we shouldn't get back to the teachings of Jesus discipleship to Jesus life and community, eating meals together and not compromising with the world. Most people would agree with that, but I think the Anabaptist tradition, at least for its heyday, did a really good job holding to that.
Lee: I wonder if it's easier for you to say those kinds of things to Christians in Portland than it is to say them to Christians in Nashville.
John Mark: I think It depends on the example. I think it's just as hard. It just depends. Like I could talk about militarism and not that many people in my church would be offended, but if I dared to suggest that the best way to do justice might not be through a socialist vision of America, I would get crucified because it’s still, the state is the solution to all of our problems. Now that might be a large, expensive state welfare system. I'm pretty agnostic politically. I'm probably to a fault don't have strong opinions, but I'm always trying to help Christians understand that if you're a follower of Jesus, you have a responsibility that if you neglect it, will literally be sabotaging the move in the spirit in your own and in your own community to care for the poor. To be a Christian is to care for the poor. So where we can disagree is what's the best way to care for the poor? Is it through a federal government that mails a check to the poor? Is it through high accountability, local community where you're bringing the poor into your home community around your table? Is it a local neighborhood based kind of organization that's a partnership between the faith based community and the government or whatever? We can disagree about how. And really that's a question about whether or not the government is the best vehicle to do justice or whether or not the church is, or whether or not as most moderates would agree some combination of the two is, you know. But I'm trying to help people understand the disagreement is about the how it's not about the what.
So, as far as the, how, like, I just let people much smarter than me, to help us figure out the best way to do justice. But my point is, I think the statism the idolatry of the state as the future, as the source of our security, our safety and the future of human prosperity. I think it's just as strong, if not stronger on the left as on the right.
It's just going to be different examples. So if if I'm down here and I were preaching against military violence or Christian nationalism, or talking about racial justice, that you get all this pushback. In Portland, if you're talking about all sorts of other things, you'd get massive pushback.
It's just different issues. But I think it's the same psychology.
Lee: So talk to us about some, about your new book Live No Lies.
John Mark: The whole reason I'm on this show an hour in. Buy my book Live No Lies.
Lee: So give us, give us overview of the sorts of lies that you're particularly concerned with.
John Mark: Yeah. Well, let me, let me back up a bit of this way. So I wrote this book called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry that we've been talking about. And then I have this new book that is, at some level, like a radical departure. You know, it's not about like slowing down and becoming a person of love. It's about the world, the flesh and the devil, this ancient Christian paradigm or the three enemies of the soul. So a large chunk of it is about Satan. And so I'm like, I'm so like on pins and needles kind of dreading the release, like wait, what happened to the guy that was all about like Sabbath and slowing down and becoming a person of compassion.
Now he's just writing about Satan, and like the culture wars and the sex revolution and Christian nationalism. What what happened to that poor guy? But actually the two very much go together because my pastoral heart, I don't think there's a right way to be a pastor or right theory of pastor. I think we need all sorts of different gifts in the church. There's all different aspects of pastoring that are really important.
Social justice, community organization, catalyzing new visions are all really important things. What I get out of bed in the morning for is not putting on another Sunday gathering or starting a new initiative, it's really formation. It's like, I'm just really interested. I think that's why I read so much psychology and social science.
I'm really interested in the growth and the expansion and the healing of the soul. And I think ultimately Jesus is the ultimate source of that. And that is my driving passion and it comes out of my own pain. Like, you know, what's the saying in writing, we study what pains us. By personality I am not a naturally nice and happy person.
So, you know, if you ever do the Myers Briggs, have you ever seen this where you put in your Myers-Briggs type, which if you're not familiar, with that, it's a theory of personality, based on Carl Jung's work. There's 16 personality types based on letters. If you put yours in, mine is INTJ, and you can like Google that and a famous movie, and it will show you like, what character you are in the movie. I never do it anymore because I'm always like the evil genius, always. Like in Star Wars. I'm not even Darth Vader because he comes around in the end. I'm like the emperor Palpatine. In Harry Potter I'm he who must not be named. I am like, in all the famous ones I'm like stolen Lenin, all the utopian, communist genocidal maniacs, like that's my personality type. So I'm just not naturally nice or happy by personality.
And I am so captivated by Jesus of Nazareth by the father and the son and the holy spirit and by the best of the Christian tradition and by Jesus's centering of love as at the heart of God, himself. The nature of who God is and at the telos of the human condition is not happiness, it's not survival. It's not political utopianism. It's becoming people of love and forming communities of Agape. That to me, I got, you have to live from a worldview. I literally do not know of a better worldview to live by or a more captivating one.
So I'm really interested in that. I'm really interested in formation and I'm really interested as a pastor and not just my own formation but the formation of other Christians in Western culture. What does this look like when you have an iPhone and you live in, Portland or Nashville or whatever. And the reason I wrote both of these books, which at a surface level feel totally different are because the two major obstacles that I see that keep people from even going on the journey of formation or discipleship or the growth of the soul, whatever you want to call it are, one, hurry, busy-ness, overload. People literally just do not have the time to follow Jesus. And, two, people living with secular assumptions from the right or from the left or both about the telos of life, the good, the beautiful, and the true that keep them from even wanting to habituate the teachings of Jesus into their life. Why would you want to become the kind of person? Jesus at the end said, teach people to obey what I have commanded you.
Why would you want to learn to obey what Jesus commanded around, say sexuality, if you are living with a secular assumption that sexual self-expression and sexual hedonism is key to living a happy and satisfying life. That is a secular assumption about life that is contrary to the life of Jesus who never had sex and the teachings of Jesus.
So unless, if we come to agree with Jesus' vision of what will lead us to the good life, we will never even go on the journey of how to habituate that into our own life. You know, Ignatius of Loyola line, who I quote in the book, founder of the Jesuit order, who defines sin as unwillingness to trust that what God wants for me is only my deepest happiness.
And he didn't mean that in like a modern Christian self-help way. He meant that all temptation at its root is a temptation to believe a lie, to believe an illusion about reality, it’s the garden of Eden story. This is the serpent personified there, whether that's history or myth or some amalgamation of the two saying basically, if you want to be happy, don't do what God is saying to do.
Don't accept his definition of good and evil. Listen to the voice in your own, head and your own heart and follow you what you want that will lead you to happiness. And in the end, it leads to death not to life, and that's still happening today.
Lee: Yeah. Yeah. I typically tell my students that, I kind of surprise them and suggest that maybe happiness is the point of life, but it's a rightfully defined happiness.
John Mark: Exactly.
Lee: And it's the happiness of Irenaeus, the glory of God, the human being fully alive, or it's the happiness of Aquinas, the happiness that we experienced in the beatific vision and friendship with God and can get a foretaste of now and friendship with others and practicing the virtues and so forth.
John Mark: It's not the dopamine hit of pleasure. Happiness, which is actually addiction in the early stages.
Lee: Yeah. But even the rightfully defined happiness can even still give us a rightfully defined way even of enjoying the dopamine hits, too, right?
John Mark: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I completely agree.
Lee: Yeah. So I, I tell them that, you know, our problem is not desire.
Our problem in the great Christian tradition is disordered desire or inordinate desire. And it's having the desired rightly ordered, which only comes through the kind of practices you're talking about, that we can began to have to lean into what it might be to experience this rightfully defined happiness.
John Mark: Yeah. And if you think about that's where even this Anabaptist non-violent guy Augustine is still so helpful there. The problem isn't that we don't love, it's that we either love the wrong things or the right things in the wrong order. It's disordered desire that's at the root of our problems.
Lee: And he also helps us, going back to what we were saying earlier, about the myth of the autonomous individual who's not whipped and tossed about by desires. Augustine would have looked at that and say, that's crazy, but there's always power at play, right?
John Mark: Oh, I don't like what people have done with Augustine. But as a general rule, I loveAugustine.
Lee: There's much much much to learn there.
John Mark: Yeah, there's so much more good than bad. And unfortunately we got just word there in theological determinism that came out of that.
Lee: And probably some obsessiveness about sex that also didn't help us maybe in certain ways. But anyway.
John Mark: But man…
Lee: I look forward to getting to read your new book and I'm grateful for that as well.
John Mark: Thanks, Lee.
Lee: Um, so on the way out here, and you're talking, let's say to people who generally speaking have been much more interested in the good Protestant obsession with knowing things more, as key to living a good life for transformation. Give us three simple practices of simplicity or leaning into what you're pointing us to that you would say start here.
John Mark: Well, I don't want to keep it at too theoretical of a level, but one way to frame it on the way out is just to think that whatever the knowing is that you want to get into your life and your body, it has to be habituated in community and by the spirit. So, Willard, you know, his very shorthand, this is much simpler than the long complex convoluted thing I gave you on a working theory of change. He had a very simple when he called VIM, I'm sure you're familiar with it, which is an acronym for vision, intention, means. And he said for any human change, from something as simple as losing five pounds after Christmas to, you know, overcoming an addiction to sex or, you know, whatever, it requires, three things.
First, it requires vision. You have to have a vision of a different way to be human. You know, it could be something as a vision of yourself, five pounds skinnier, or your vision of yourself able to run five miles or a vision of yourself as a loving person and not an angry person. Then you have to have a moment of intention.
You have to decide in your heart that you will do whatever it takes to become that kind of a person. I have visions through advertising. I have visions of myself in a different way of life, constantly myself wearing this outfit, myself, driving this car, myself, you know, with a six pack abs or whatever, myself on the paleo diet, all sorts of visions of the theoretical me out there that I look at and shrug.
And because that would cost too much money. That would take too much time. That would be too much effort. That's not really my style. Because I had never had a moment of intention where I decide, okay, I will do whatever it takes, to become that kind of a person, but you're still not done. And this is where most Christian thinking and most pastoral preaching falls flat. Vision and intention are enough. If all you have is like, I want to do this and I really, I desire it, I say yes, then you're back to the information plus inspiration plus willpower equals change, which does not work except on very small changes in your life. Tiny changes. Willpower works great when it works, it just doesn't work very often. So you need what he called means, which are just like small practical habits or practices or spiritual disciplines to get something like that into your life. So, and they need to be doable, you know, what's the smart goal? You know what I mean? Like they need to be things that are accessible, that are spiritually realistic for where you're at. If you're a single mom with a three-year-old kid, you probably shouldn't start with like a 40 day fast.
You know what I mean? You should probably start with, I'm going to read a Psalm every morning, you know what I mean? Just start there, you know, where you're at without the spiritual idealism or spiritual utopianism. So vision intention means whether you're trying to lose five pounds or become a person of love and Jesus. And think a new paradigm would be whenever we have some kind of a vision, maybe it's we read a book, maybe it’s you listen to a podcast like this.
Maybe you have a moment in church. And then you have this moment of intention where like, I want that. Always be thinking of what small, practical steps could I take to move from theory to practice, to habituate this into my body. So maybe you hear uh, a sermon on Philippians 4 about rejoicing in the Lord and becoming a joyful person, not an anxious person.
That's great. But if that's just stays at an aspirational, willpower level it'll never transform your life. So you need vision, intention, you need means. And so maybe this coming week, every single morning when you get up, first thing, write down three things that you're grateful for. Like that's a very, anybody can do that.
That is within the capacity of almost all of our willpower. And if we do that, maybe if we do it in the right way with the right intention, it could open us up to the Spirit's power. And that's what spiritual disciplines do, Willard was so helpful there. They are habits or practices that we can do with our own willpower that set the deepest part of us before God that let him do by the Spirit's power, but we could never accomplish through direct effort.
John Mark: So my willpower is not. I'm at the point in my discipleship to Jesus in my marriage in my parenting, where my problem is not lack of information or wisdom. Like I was joking with some friends about parenting a couple of hours ago where, like, I know all the things now that I'm supposed to do as a dad for the most, not all of them, but most of them. My problem is I'm just not godly or mature emotionally regulated enough to do them.
So my problem is not that I know it's wrong to shame my son and act controlling toward him when he does something that I think is dangerous. I know that's terrible. I know that has the opposite effect on him I want him to have. My problem is I'm not emotionally or spiritually mature enough to discipline myself when I hear some crazy thing.
When he comes home with, you know, black nail polish, all over his nails. And I'm like ah, you know, and like slip into like a horrible dad mode or whatever. My problem isn't knowledge. My problem is actually my body. And, so what are practices that we could move? Otherwise, I'm just going to be willpower. Try to be less controlling with my son. Flip that, how could I form some kind of a spiritual discipline or practice that is inside my capacity?
So maybe that's every Friday afternoon, I'll take my son out for coffee, you know, we'll have nice conversation together. I can do that. That's in my willpower. That then creates space for the spirit of God to do something in our relationship in me. Let me listen, let me attend. So, willpower is great for forming a rule of life and practices.
It's horrible for actually like living the Sermon on the Mount, but if you can set yourself before God in community over a long time, you can let the spirit of God transform you into the kind of person who naturally lives Matthew 5:6-7.
Lee: Yeah. Yeah. That's a lovely way to end. And I think too, I was thinking how that fits so well with, for example, the agrarian metaphor of something like the fruit of the spirit, and you've got two things being held together there, right?
You have, it’s the work of God. But it's also us participating in the cultivation of, you know, and so it's, it's both of those being held together that's so crucial in all of what you just described.
John Mark: And you, you know, all the history there that, you know, Galatians 5, fruit of the spirit, is Paul's take on John 15 abide in the vine.
And that's where rule of life language comes from. You know that word ruled, regula in Latin, means, literally means a straight piece of wood. It's where we get the English words, ruler, or regular or regulation, and a lot of linguists, not all, but think it was the word used for a trellis and a vineyard. And that was just a word picture.
They said, all right. If the way we bear the fruit of the spirit is through abiding in the vine. Well, think about a vine, a vine in order to bear the fruit that it's capable of, needs to have a trellis underneath it, to lift it up off the ground and get it away from wild animals, predators, disease, damage, to get it more light and air and rain and to index the growth in the right direction.
Otherwise it will bear a fraction of the fruit that it's capable of. So ancient Christians said, we need a regula, we need a trellis. If abiding in Jesus is how we grow to bear much fruit, we need some kind of a support structure to build our life off of that really makes abiding in Jesus the center of that.
And so they made that a rule of life, just this set of practices and habits and relational rhythms that create space for God to grow us into people of love.
Lee: We’ve been talking to John Mark Comer, founding pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon on his new book, Live No Lies and former book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and all manner of good things of life and living and pastoring.
Thanks so much, John Mark. It's been a delight to be with you.
John Mark: Thanks for having me on.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
Loads of overlap between some of the material in this interview with John Mark and other episodes you might want to check out: like Prof. Mark McMinn on "What Hath Christianity to do with Psychology?"; Diana Oestreich, on her experience as a combat veteran coming to practice and advocate non-violence; or Eugene Cho, on the dangerous combination of Christian faith and the quest for socio-political coercive power.
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Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Ashley Bayne, Tom Anderson, and Brad Perry. Engineer Cariad Harmon. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White and Blue Dot Sessions.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
The Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
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