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What an embarrassment, the body. With all the belching, oozing, pain, and decay, it’s no surprise St. Francis called it “Brother Ass.” And with its unceasing attraction to bacon, beer, and other bodies, it’s enough to make you wonder: What was God thinking?

“But you don’t want to run ahead of yourself. Begin with love.”

–John Cassian

Empower us to carry each other’s burdens.

It’s a prayer I pray each week, along with the rest of my church family as we stand together on Sunday. I attend a liturgical church, and our communal prayers—for hope, for peace, for salvation, for thanksgiving, for forgiveness—are one of my favorite moments during the service. Together, we lift our hearts and our requests to God. We speak aloud the names of those for whom we pray and the circumstances around the world that beg for peace and resolution. We pray for needs we know and needs we don’t know. We give voice in prayer to what we hear God whisper to us. When members of the family can’t pray, struck mute by fear or doubt or pain, the community carries them on a rising tide of petition that washes them up on the shores of grace. I know, because I’ve felt that tide carry me.

But over the past months, I’ve struggled with this, my most cherished moment in worship next to the Eucharist. I’ve struggled and squirmed and felt shameful. Why?

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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“Verbicide,” C. S. Lewis writes in his excellent collection of lectures called Studies in Words, “the murder of a word, happens in many ways.” Lewis goes on to explain that there are a few more common ways that words are murdered: inflation (using “sadism” for “cruelty,” as an example) or verbiage (using a word in a way that implies a promise that will never be kept; for example, describing something as “significant” without any reference to what it might signify). Over the last five years, we’ve been witnessing just such a crime. It has, sadly, been a corruption in parts, a slow death that has gone almost unnoticed by all but the most observant. The victim: the verb “to follow.”

To wit, ask yourself what it means to follow something or someone. Think about the ways you’ve last used that word, whether you were referring to watching your favorite television series, like Lost, or being the dedicated fan of a band, like U2. Do you participate in social network sites, such as Facebook or Twitter?

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