Some Additional Thoughts about Rules of Life and Christian Community

Maybe the Critics Are Right?

In which I give some additional thoughts on a recently published essay with Christianity Today. Some candid confessions about the discourse. This is post for supporting members, which you can become here.

The Poverty of Modern Rules of Life

Today, I had a long-simmering piece published over at Christianity Today on the “rule of life” phenomenon. It’s not as if the proliferation of “rules of life” are a new thing: literature on these “rule of life were much more prominent in the 1800s than they are today, even if it feels like they’re everywhere today.

After you read my piece, go check out these pieces by Kirsten Sanders and Jake Meador, both of which illuminate corners of the discussion I mostly gesture toward.

As I say in the piece, what bothers me immensely about the most contemporary iterations of Rules of Life are the way in which they are interchangeable with modern self-help literature. One can easily exchange references to “God” for “disciplines”, and they more or less still work. My angle is that the new versions largely either presume or omit entirely church as the necessary prerequisite for thinking about these rules. It just doesn’t matter if there’s a church or not for the literature to keep right on working.

This presumption, which underlies so much of the recent Christian “rule of life” literature makes sense if two things are true more broadly: