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“How can the church become what it is truly meant to be?”

I first heard this question from a religion professor while I was in college. In four-plus decades since, I have listened to it more times than I can number. The question varies in expression and often rings more sharply than the query I heard long ago.

“My heavens, how can we get some life back into our church?!”

“How can we cease snarling at one another?”

“Can’t we do something for Christ rather than perpetually talk about doing something?”

In whatever form the question comes, it acknowledges something fundamental in Christian understanding: the transformation offered us in Christ is not just personal; it is also corporate. If we are part of the community that bears his name, then we are part of a sacred fellowship that, by any measure, bears something essential for the whole human family. We are to be salt for the earth, light for a darkened world (Matt. 5:13-16).

After seven years of producing Conversations: A Forum for Authentic Transformation, the editors felt it was past time to devote an issue to, well, transformation.

Even after a couple of decades in the limelight, this topic remains relevant and controversial. Just yesterday I was sitting with a friend at a restaurant talking about everything from our families to the Atlanta Falcons. (Perhaps it was the Falcons that made me think about transformation.) When I mentioned how we change in the context of spiritual growth, my friend surprised me by stating flatly, “I don’t think that it [transformation] is possible.”

Now this was not an unplugged friend. He is well trained as a counseling psychologist and a practical theologian. He has pastored several churches, taught in a conservative seminary, and is a gifted teacher in the area of psychotherapy. So I asked him to repeat what he had said.

“I don’t think it is possible for people to transform, to actually become like Jesus. Sorry, but I don’t.”

Hmmm.

As my friend offered evidence for his point, I began to examine my own life. The lyrics to a song from the early days of Christian rock became the background music as he spoke: “If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” After his evidence, my personal examination, and the melody stopped, my left brain began to recount statistics. These statistics detail how Christians and non-Christians look so much alike in categories like divorce rates, domestic violence, charitable contributions, and pornography downloads.

It hit me that this friend and Dallas Willard may be singing a similar song (with slightly different endings). While Dallas strongly believes that real change does happen, they both have been struck by the fact that non-transformation is the elephant in the sanctuary.

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DEAR READER,
Like any group or organization, the staff of Conversations Journal has our own jargon. Some of them are original (like the way we respond to Gary’s jokes during conference calls) and some of them are lifted liberally from respected friends and colleagues. You’ll find one such phrase—“the elephant in the sanctuary”—frequently in the pages of this issue, and we have to admit that we stole it from Dallas Willard.

Both he and we use that phrase to refer to the issue of “non-transformation” in the body of Christ. This issue of Conversations not only aims to make that elephant a little more visible (and a little harder to ignore), we hope that it will provide examples and experiences of transformation that will refuse that elephant reentry. We, like you, desperately want change. We want to be transformed ever increasingly into Christlikeness. We know you do, too.

We extend the invitation, as we do in each issue of the journal, to join in the conversation, this time about how we change. We want to hear your stories. How have you seen change in your life? Where have you been frustrated by its absence? Where are you seeing Christ’s work take root within you? Your family? Your church?

Dallas Willard needs no introduction to the readers of Conversations. After all, he is responsible for the fact that our five sections correspond to his components of the person—and that we try to hear from a representative of each of the six great traditions of Christian faith in each issue. He is also responsible for the fact that I, for one, have come to believe it is actually possible to become like Jesus. I believe it because I see the way Dallas lives his life.

Dallas is an ordained Southern Baptist pastor who left the traditional version of ministry to study philosophy in the early 1960s after God told him, “If you stay in the churches, the university will be closed to you, but if you stay in the university, the churches will be open to you.” After receiving his Ph.D. in 1965, he had two immediate job offers—one from the University of Southern California and one from the University of Georgia. While some (okay, just me) think he made a mistake in picking USC, he has had an amazing academic and ministry career. Some refer to him as America’s C. S. Lewis.

Dallas Willard needs no introduction to the readers of Conversations. After all, he is responsible for the fact that our five sections correspond to his components of the person—and that we try to hear from a representative of each of the six great traditions of Christian faith in each issue. He is also responsible for the fact that I, for one, have come to believe it is actually possible to become like Jesus. I believe it because I see the way Dallas lives his life.

Dallas is an ordained Southern Baptist pastor who left the traditional version of ministry to study philosophy in the early 1960s after God told him, “If you stay in the churches, the university will be closed to you, but if you stay in the university, the churches will be open to you.” After receiving his Ph.D. in 1965, he had two immediate job offers—one from the University of Southern California and one from the University of Georgia. While some (okay, just me) think he made a mistake in picking USC, he has had an amazing academic and ministry career. Some refer to him as America’s C. S. Lewis.

C. S. Lewis once compared world religions to soups—thick soups and clear soups. The “thick” soups bubbled with mystery, matter, and ritual (e.g., ancient mystery religions) while the “clear ” soups blended philosophy, thought, and ethics (e.g., Confucianism). The truest religion, Lewis believed, would be both thick and clear because neither alone could do justice to the fullness of reality. That’s why Lewis sought a religion of sacraments and dogma, body and soul, poetry and proposition.

Lewis found all this in Christianity. What’s more, Lewis saw Christian transformation in “thick” and “clear” terms too. To “be saved” was something more than just an external pardon by God or an intellectual consent to an idea—what he might call a “clear” approach to this crucial reality. For Lewis, salvation was an inward process involving the transformation of the whole person by the Holy Spirit and leading to nothing less than mystical union with God. In other words, Lewis embraced the ancient Christian doctrine of deification (or theosis) much as it was taught by the likes of St. Basil the Great, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, and St. Maximus the Confessor, and which is still taught today in the Eastern Orthodox Church. This doctrine was neatly expressed by St. Basil in the fourth century when he said that man is nothing less than a creature who has received the order to become god (note the lowercase “g”). Similarly, Lewis asserts in Mere Christianity that the whole purpose of Christianity is to turn people into “new men,” “little Christs,” “sons of God”—even “gods and goddesses.”[1]

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For a few moments I drove alone in the car, heading south from the Benedictine monastery just outside of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where I was leading a retreat. I was on my way to purchase bread and wine for the next day’s Communion service while the retreatants were back at the monastery observing an afternoon of quiet reflection. Some were engaged in prayer walks while others were drawn to the chapel’s embracing silence, and a few strolled along the banks of the gently flowing river bordering the monastery grounds. In the quiet of the car, I began to reflect on what had brought us to this place four times over the past two years.

In part, we were here because of something I read by Sue Monk Kidd many years ago. “We seem to have focused so much on exuberant beginnings and victorious endings that we’ve forgotten about the slow, sometimes tortuous unraveling of God’s grace that takes place in the ‘middle places.’”[1] Those words were embedded in my memory from the first time I read them, yet it would be years before they would ring in my ears once again.

Several years ago, I began to feel a subtle dissatisfaction with the retreats I was leading. Dissatisfaction identified itself in questions: Had participants been able to integrate their spiritual practices with their daily lives? How had their experience affected their way of being with others? Were they aware of the Spirit’s part in life changing moments? Then Kidd’s words returned and gave new focus to my concern. I realized that a retreat leader must be careful not to play to a participant’s desire for exuberant beginnings and victorious endings. Such desire is insufficient at best and escapist at worst. I concluded that spiritual retreat must evoke a maturing spirituality that enables God’s people to live confidently in those “sometimes tortuous middle places,” but to do so means retreat leaders must be prepared to journey along with persons who have sought out the retreat experience.

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I’m rediscovering an old conviction. What I’ve believed for a long time is coming alive with fresh passion; it’s stirring a low-burning flame into a healthy fire. Paul told Timothy to “continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of…” (2 Tim. 3: 14; italics added).

I’ve been continuing, at times unsteadily, in what I learned as a child and have believed to be true for five decades. But only recently has a sincerely accepted belief become a meaningfully sustaining conviction.

From my earliest days, I’ve sensed that the book Søren Kierkegaard once referred to as sixty-six love letters from God is in a class by itself. More than once, my father would skip watching his favorite comedian, Red Skelton, on his weekly television show and spend the evening reading Leviticus. That made no sense to me as a ten-year old kid.

It does now. After 40 years of exploring the insides of people (including myself) to understand what’s going on that deforms us into self-centered, self-protective, self-enhancing bearers of God’s image, I’m coming to look at the Bible with passionately renewed interest. Here’s why. Here’s the old conviction that has recently come alive. Here’s what I see more clearly than ever before: God speaks into our deformed souls more deeply, with more transforming power, and with more lasting impact through the Bible than through any other means.

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Over the years, I’ve discovered something. Maybe you have too. It’s relatively easy (and somewhat enticing) to talk about spiritual formation—the hope of becoming more attuned to God’s work in and around us, the hope of shedding bad habits and self-serving attitudes like so many pounds after the holidays, the hope of experiencing even just a smidge of God’s ever-present, never-failing, nonstop love for us. Yes, it’s easy to talk about it. Just like it’s easy to talk about diets and exercise regimens, New Year’s resolutions, and the like. The hope of becoming something new—something better—is usually the silent driver behind marketing and advertising. Better abs, better hair, better tires, better life, better wife (yes, that’s what my husband asks for). It’s pretty easy to get us imagining our “better selves.” It’s easy to talk about spiritual formation, but it’s so much harder—so much more confusing, requiring so
much more hope—actually to hold myself open to change.

When we’re talking about the possibilities, especially if it relates to what other people should be doing—how they should be transforming—we can talk all day long.

But hope is the most dangerous thing in the world. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but here’s what I mean. I believe most people eventually give up hope. Somewhere along the way they resign themselves to “life as they know it.” Hoping for a better life, a better relationship, a better job, a better retirement, a better church, a better relationship with God has all fallen flat. The striving has stopped; the surviving has begun. Like a drowning victim exhausted from effort, they give up. They stop trying. They stop hoping. It’s just too painful. It never works. If their soul-injuries happened early enough in life, they stopped hoping long before they reached adulthood. They’ve learned better. They may be dutiful soldiers, hard workers, devoted spouses and parents and employees, but inside they do not hope. Their souls ache with the haunting words offered to an incognito Jesus on the road to Emmaus: “But we had hoped…”