In 2024, pastors would do well to hold the old paradigm of dispensing religious knowledge with an open hand. Instead, we need to think about what it means to cultivate environments of transformation. By “environments” I’m not referring to high-production services. I’m referring to creating rhythms of spaces where people can learn from one another, grow together, and encounter the presence of the Holy Spirit. You may not be able to give people all of the content they want, but you can give them something we all crave and that you’re in a unique position to help cultivate: healthy, transformational community.
Shift 4: From Behavior Modification to Virtue Formation
In his book Transforming Worldviews (Baker 2008), anthropologist Paul Hiebert addressed how Christianity has often emphasized belief and behavior change in our missional work, at the expense of deep and lasting worldview change. He notes that there is an evaluative layer (referring to our virtues, ethics, and norms) that exists below our beliefs and behavior that, if left untransformed by the gospel, creates dysfunction in Christian discipleship. If beliefs and behavior only are discipled, but the deepest part of who we are remains unchanged, it produces syncretism—a veneer of Christianity with non-Christian core. This lies at the heart of much of the dysfunctions we see in North American Christianity today.
But virtue and ethics formation rested at the very heart of what the church fathers and mothers focused on. We would do well to shift away from an approach to raising people up in the faith that focuses simply checking off the right doctrinal boxes and making sure they don’t “smoke, chew, and run with the ones who do” (as we said in my Pentecostal upbringing). Instead, we should help people be radically changed by the vision of kingdom ethics Jesus presents in the Sermon on the Mount. We should glean from the wisdom of the Great Tradition that has been passed down to us by the apostles. We should get to the very heart of transformation, which lies in shaping our virtues.
