Introducing "Slow Faith"
Or, the patient practice of following Christ in our unique contexts.
Burnand, Eugène. The Disciples Peter and John Running to the Sepulchre on the Morning of the Resurrection. 1898, Salon de de la Société nationale des beaux-arts, France.
“However far a person advances upon the Way, all that he (or she) discovers is nothing else than the revelation or making manifest of baptismal grace.”
-Bishop Kallistos Ware (The Orthodox Way, 109) (“or she” is my addition)
A Personal Introduction
I officially accepted Christ at the age of six in my bunkbed with my parents. I was baptized at the age of nine in a red-carpeted church of eighty people. I knew it was a big decision, but it seemed simple: Jesus loved me, and I wanted Jesus and my church to know that I loved him.
However, I’m now twenty-seven and often feel unbelievably frustrated and confused with my own spiritual growth. Sometimes the clarity of that baptism decision feels foggy; news updates and brash headlines and polarized Christians disavowing and shouting down each other online seemingly muddy the baptismal waters. The speed of life and the need to always be on is suffocating. Everything just feels so much more confounded and complex than my bunk bed with my parents or the baptismal in that red-carpeted church.
But, like Bishop Kallistos Ware writes in the quote above, my baptism doesn’t change with my news feed. It doesn’t change the mystery of the Trinity swirling and whirring and acting inside me as a nine-year-old or as a twenty-seven-year-old. No matter how far I mature or to what far corners of the earth I may journey, all my learning will point back to standing in that baptismal and saying “Yes” to God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the divine relationship of three-in-one. It was a wonder too mysterious to be understood then, and it is a wonder too mysterious for me to understand now. It is a wonder I am growing into.
It’s a wonder we can grow into together. This is Slow Faith, the patient practice of following Christ in our unique contexts.
“I have no patience with a truth that cannot be lived, and I don’t want you to have any patience with it either.”
-Eugene Peterson (As Kingfishers Catch Fire, 24)
The Goal of Slow Faith: Congruence
We were each created with a body that God deemed “very good,” but sin brought that goodness into disunity. The Christian life—through the patient presence of the Spirit—is about re-integrating into that God-goodness. It is about reconnecting what became compartmentalized and bringing back together what was torn apart. It’s the emotional, the physical, and the spiritual rejoining hip to hip to hip and relearning the beautiful syncopation of a Divine dance, of imago dei.
Congruence is a life spent in the Spirit, seeing everything as everything—whole.
“There is a garden in the void in the desert of space,
A speck of blue dust in the vacuum of heat.
We drive to work,
We walk our dogs,
We make babies,
We sing songs,
And all along, are we asleep inside the miracle of it all?”-John Mark McMillan (“Christ Jesus”)
The Values of Slow Faith
There are a lot of values that matter (I’m looking at you, Fruit of the Spirit), so this is by no means an exhaustive list. However, these are the values that I’ve grown to appreciate and see as central to the acting out of Slow Faith in 21st Century America.
An appreciation of relationship.
We were made to be in relationship with God and with others. Slow Faith without relationship is basketball without the ball.
An appreciation of focus.
Wendell Berry called it “a lively suspicion of anything new.” The bells and whistles of “newness”—whether phones, gaming platforms, apps, social networks, or even ideas—promise us a bevy of life-changing features, but they often rob us of space, focus, solitude, and rest—the very values needed to grow and understand the world.
Slow Faith guards these essentials through a willingness to interrogate new products and ideas by asking one question, “Does this lead towards congruence?” Why gain the world only to lose our sanity, our selves, and our souls?
An appreciation of context.
I am writing from a coffee shop in the Arts District of Los Angeles right now. I am from Oklahoma. I am a male. I am white. I have degrees in theology and English and have never been to Alaska. My context is different than yours—to pretend otherwise would be to overestimate my view of the world.
But we share the Bible and we share the Spirit. So we get to work together in applying God’s Truth within the specific contexts in which we live and move and have our being—whether that’s Oklahoma, Idaho, Europe, or Chile.
An appreciation of justice.
Because we each have physical bodies and specific contexts in the world, we have a duty to recognize the systems and inequalities affecting other people. Cornel West said in a speech once that, "Justice is what love looks like in public. Tenderness is what love feels like in private."
Just as we show those closest to us our love through our actions, so to do we show the public our love through standing in solidarity with those hurting and abused.
An appreciation of simplicity.
G.K. Chesterton wrote once that “the long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard” (Orthodoxy, 130). Simplicity is refusing to hide behind big words, fancy labels, or empty promises. (It’s also about having the humility to seek forgiveness when we do hide behind those words, labels, or promises.)
Simplicity is the desire to mean what we say and say what we mean.
Finally, an appreciation of nuance.
Nuance doesn’t fit in a breaking news world. Social media has a way of making us feel like we always have to have a take, even if we don’t have anything to say. We’re conditioned to speak and not to listen.
Nuance is the beautiful recognition that silence can be golden, and waiting until we have all the information can be freeing. We don’t have to know everything, and we don’t have to react immediately. We can breathe.
“No, I’d never been to this country
before. No, I didn’t know where the roads
would lead me. No, I didn’t intend to
turn back.”
-Mary Oliver (“No, I’d Never Been to This Country”)
And—Finally—the Practicalities
In being true to practicing slowness, this newsletter will only appear in your inbox monthly—maybe every two weeks now-and-again with an artist interview or whatnot. For each edition, I will be writing on a specific subject and its interaction with the Faith—after spending significant time reading about it, mulling over it, praying about it, and (attempting to) practice it in my own life. Next month the topic will be technology and minimalism.
I will include key quotes, book reviews, a Spotify playlist, and the difficulties and joys of trying to pursue a congruent life.
At this moment, I do not have a plan to promote this on social media, so I’m hoping that what I produce will be beneficial enough to make you interested in sharing with a friend or two. Look! There’s a button for that!
More than anything, know I am grateful to have the privilege to write on here and have people engage with the specificities of life and the pursuit of Jesus together. I pray your weeks are wonderful and you are loved in the exact ways you need it.
Cheering for you,
Drew