The Lectio Letter - Issue #87 - Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
“Discipleship and spiritual formation are less about erecting an edifice of knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively understands the world in light of the Gospel.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom
“The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.”
— Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
Dear Faithful readers of the Lectio letter,
This issue was written from a predominantly Muslim nation where I was involved in a gathering of people working in the kind of places you go to prison for proclaiming your faith in Jesus.
It's deeply humbling, exciting and inspiring to hear of the kind of work that is seeing God's Kingdom come to earth in places that our news cycles portray as hopeless and broken.
This year, Rachel and I have travelled to support, equip and train young leaders working in just these kinds of places.
It's the kind of work made possible by those of you who generously support our ministry by paying to read the Lectio letter.
The tension, which you may have noticed, is that this kind of travelling creates a problem for the kind of writing I try and do here. I know how to create margin to think and write when I am at home. I have a desk in a lovely room in our house with a small desk, close to books I can reference and a door I can shut to focus on writing and capturing a linear thought.
But my confession is that I haven't figured out how to write 'on the road'.
So, I wanted to start this Lectio with my sincere thanks for your forbearance for the inconsistent publishing schedule this year and to thank you for supporting the lectio letter which, in part, enables the kind of ministry we have been able to be a part of.
For the next week, you can sign up for the year for 30% off -- That's only $3.50 (£2.60) a month, the approximate price of buying me one or two books.
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Welcome to Issue #87 of the Lectio Letter. This members-only newsletter is filled with music, film and food suggestions, links, and an article written by yours truly.
This time around, I’m reflecting on the nature of decision-making. Our tendency is to think the source of a good decision should come from our hearts or our heads. But I’m trying to offer some practical thoughts on how there may be a better way. That way, is inevitably, to become the kind of person who makes good and Godly decisions.
I hope it’s helpful to you!
Whether you become a paid subscriber or not, I’m very grateful to each of you who read and respond to this newsletter.
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You can see at the bottom of the email if it says “message clipped”, then click “View entire message” to see it all.
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Status Board
As I mentioned in my apologetic intro, we have been on the road again.
While it was a delight to see many friends and co-workers, we are honestly even more delighted to be back in South Africa with no near-term trips planned. It’s been a rich but exhausting 6 months. We’ve been on 26 flights, 8 of those being 10 1/2 hours each… I’ve been using a new app Flighty to keep track of the nerdy stats;
Our most recent trip was to take part in some meetings which involved those working in the Middle East. Some of our Teleios participants from Lebanon were with us and so we were tracking with them and praying for their families and teams still in the country. There is heartbreak, resilience and extraordinary mission and service taking place amid everything you read on the news. While I cannot share details here, we also heard of incredible first-hand stories of thousands of people coming to Jesus in some of the most closed nations on earth along with the heartbreak of imprisonment and people having to flee the nations they have called home.
Reading
I’ve begun reading a book by Alan Jacobs “The Year of Our Lord 1943” which is truly an extraordinary book. The book draws on the work and life of five Christian intellectuals working at a time when they knew the Allies would win the war and began imagining what it would mean to form an education system that created people who could thoughtfully and emphatically resist the temptations which led to WWII. It’s a great introduction to Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil if you are not aware of them, woven together in an extremely creative way which, as I suspect is intended, enables us to think about how to form people and culture towards a vision of Christian goodness.
I also began ‘listening’ to the audiobook of Fully Alive by British author Elizabeth Oldfield who used to work with Theos, whose work I admire. It is a very good book which is openly toted as a follow-up to the widely cited book “Unapologetic” by adult convert Francis Spufford.
Both books employ a straight-talking, swear-word-using approach to being “relevant” or “authentic” and convincing non-Christian readers that they are not trying to gloss over the intellectual challenges of following Jesus in the modern age.
While I want to heartily endorse the book because so many of the struggles, history and cultural situatedness of Oldfield’s world mirror my own, I couldn't help but feel the book was more Christian than most atheists I know would be willing to engage but also more crass than many of the Christians I do know would enjoy. I’m disappointed to have to say anything negative about a book whose approach and topic I enthusiastically endorse otherwise.
Eating
On a recent visit with our friends Freddie and Hannah, they made the closest thing I’ve ever tasted to restaurant-quality Dashi. Dashi is the base for Japanese Udon Soup, and despite Japanese cooking being filled with unusual ingredients for most Western home cooks, this soup is deceptively simple…as long as you can get the right ingredients. Our favourite Udon spot in London, Koya, is now making “at home” kits and their fresh udon makes all the difference.
For the below, we found Kombu (dried Japanese seaweed) and Bonito (dried tuna flakes) in an Asian food store, but I’m confident you could find them online in the US/UK too.
Ingredients:
15g Kombu
15g Bonito
24g soy sauce
12g mirin
35g sugar
10g salt
Process
1. Soak 15g kombu overnight (or several hours is fine) in 1.5 litres of water.
2. Then take out the kombu, bring liquid to boil and add 15g bonito, turn off the heat and strain bonito flakes out to make a liquid broth.
3. Place mirin in microwave for one minute or heat in a pan.
4. Add 15g sugar to mirin and mix until dissolved.
5. Add mirin, soy sauce and half the amount of salt into the dashi and bring to boil.
6. Once almost boiling, taste and see if you’d like more salt and season to your liking, and keep aside.
For the udon, we used the cheap packaged variety we could find in South Africa, although as I mentioned above, the fresh stuff from Koya if you are in the UK, will make this sing.
There are a variety of ways to top this by combining certain recipes. We tried this one from NYTimes Cooking, but the Beef toughened up too quickly in the mixture of liquid.
Listening
British Jazz Quartet Ezra Collective at the German music channel Colors
Moody Indie sounds from Mk.Gee
Background Piano delights from “Mammal Hands”
Still on repeat is Sampha’s Dancing Circles 2.0
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
I recently attended a meeting where a Christian leader was training younger leaders on decision-making within ministry teams. The training was aimed at helping these young leaders approach decisions more thoughtfully and reflectively, rather than reacting impulsively.
While this approach to slowing down decisions to make them more intentionally seems common sense, when you try to put it into practice in real life it suddenly becomes impossible and you can end up paralysed.
Don’t Overthink your decisions
We live in a world overflowing with choices, both big and small, and my contention is that many of these decisions should be happening automatically.
Take driving, for example a novice driver has to think about every action, while a skilled driver operates almost instinctively.
The skill we need flows from the kind of person who through an immersion in the scriptures, an attentiveness to the Holy Spirit and a yielded posture to the will of God can interrupt our intuitive decision-making when it counts.
We need to know when we can operate in everyday freedom but develop an underlying attentiveness when a decision needs more reflection.
Become the kind of person who makes good Godly decisions
So the right question is how do we become this kind of person?
A person who has enough latent biblical wisdom, enough of an ability to abide in the vine and enough self-awareness to know whether or not we are yielded to God’s will above all?
As you might imagine, I don’t think there is a single pathway to becoming this kind of person. The classic disciplines of broad scripture reading, examen and indifference can certainly help. There are good descriptions of those practices available in other places online, so for now I will simply offer three questions which represent each of them;
Do you spend time across the breadth of scripture, not just your favourite verses or books? And have you worked to gain a coherent understanding of the “big story” of scripture?
How often are you attentive to and able to be interrupted by a sense of the Holy Spirit directing, guiding, assuring or convicting you?
How aware are you of the themes in your preferences and personality or the values of your family and national culture and how they could become blockages to hearing God direct and value something different?
Counterintuitively, if we want to speed up our Godly decision-making, there may be a season of radically slowing it down.
At the stage where we are still learning to make decisions in light of our commitment to the ways of Jesus, we may need to overly distrust our gut-level intuitions in order to receive some new ones.
I've heard of people in the early stages of following Jesus seeking guidance about which car park space to take, which colour T-shirt to buy and other such things. While this is an admittedly quirky practice and because of the insignificance of those things, not something I’d recommend long term, they have helped people grow in friendship and attentiveness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Rational or Romantic?
Without growing in an attentiveness to the wisdom contained in the scriptures, an attentiveness to the ongoing guidance of the Holy Spirit and a deep yieldedness to the way of Jesus we will likely fall into one of two tendencies that are baked into our worldview.
These two tendencies run through the current of our modern age because they were developed in our history as two important movements of Western thought. They are Romanticism and Rationalism.
Romanticism promoted the idea that we are disconnected from ourselves, and disconnected from “deep insights of the heart” by the “oppressive” structures of society. In its most extreme forms, it gets expressed through the ethic of "You do you".
Romanticism says to follow your heart and make the decisions which seem mostly deeply true for you disregarding the potentially oppressive opinions of others.
While the most extreme forms of this are easy for Christians to resist, there is a more subtle form that exists and is even encouraged by certain approaches to attempt to discern or decide Christian-ly.
Christians can rely on a sense of 'peace' or a gut intuition that something is right. I've seen Christians trust these senses without really being aware that the Bible has something to say about it which goes in the other direction. Those of us who are from the charismatic movement in Christianity are most in danger of this kind of error.
The other movement is Rationalism. Rationalism emerged through a deep conviction that truth could be known through facts and that very often our affection and emotions lead us astray.
The goal then, is to dispassionately observe the facts and make a decision. This is offered as a 'fix' for the above tendency of romanticism but it is just as wrong. While it distrusts the passions and emotions of human life, it has a faulty view of how humans were made by God to live as I explore above. We are not meant to, and cannot, in fact, be rationally 'on' all the time.
Our intuitions and emotions, our 'loves' as Saint Augustine spoke of them, are always acting on us. The idea that we bypass our hearts with our heads is simply not how God has made humans to function.
Most significantly, neither the romantic nor rational impulse includes God Himself in decision-making. Christians are called to follow a person, not a principle. Rationalism in Christianity devolves into rule-following and romanticism devolves into following feelings rather than following Jesus.
The person leading the training I mentioned in the introduction asked us to write down how we make decisions.
In the spirit of “showing your work,” here’s what I wrote down. While the nature of the decision might change what I’ve written significantly, so I make so claim for this to be exhaustive, I believe it captures some important elements.
How I Make a Decision
Am I aware of my bias? Am I truly yielded to whatever God wants in this situation or do I have a strong preference rooted in my culture’s values or personality preference?
Is there clear biblical guidance? Consider if there are any Scriptural stories which provide insight into this decision.
Assess your biblical literacy. Recognize your strengths and involve others who may fill any gaps in your understanding.
If Scripture is clear, discern how and when to be faithful to that. Even when the scriptures are clear, in every decision, context matters. Consult with others and the Holy Spirit about how and when to act.
Stay connected to God. Ensure you remain open to His guidance not just in the decision but in the ‘living out’ of that decision, relying on your relationship with Him rather than a set of principles.
Consider others affected by the decision. Even if you have the authority to decide alone, aim to foster loving relationships and ideally input with those who will be impacted by the decision.
If there's no clear biblical precedent, wait for direction. Spend time in prayer, seeking the Holy Spirit’s leading.
Examine your desires. Reflect on the motivations behind your preferences and involve others who can help clarify them.
Think implications through. Consider whether you can accept the outcomes and how they may impact those you love or your existing commitments.
I’d love to hear from you what has helped you make decisions and what you think is missing from the above in the comments.
Miscellaneous Links
Sociology of Religion? What is it good for?
I was interested to read this review from Scot McKnight about the “Sociology of Religion”. Too often, as Christians, we have half-baked defensive caricatures of the disciplines which have investigated religion from the outside. But I think listening to critics or at least observers can offer us something.
Very often these observations are not the reductionist dismissals we are anticipating, but a partial truth about something happening “under the hood” of religious communities that we are too close to observe objectively OR a way in which our in-house language or activities are being misunderstood by someone uninitiated into our ‘tribe’. When we approach with curiosity instead of defensiveness we are offered a view back on ourselves that we may not like, agree with or endorse but we receive some kind of truth about ourselves from it.
In the book by Perry which McKnight is reviewing (which I should be clear is the extent of my engagement with it), he is quoted as saying;
the scientific study of religion helps us understand that humans are in greater part driven by the more fundamentally cognitive ‘deep culture’ of social norms, identities, and loyalties; societies are transformed less by moral ideas or doctrines than by discernible transitions in human populations
Put more simply, we are driven much more by who we want to be associated with than we are by objective ideas, beliefs or doctrine. I have found this to be true in my experience teaching “professional Christians” to think theologically. Many people know the right theological idea that needs to be defended, but cannot coherently articulate why, apart from some form of “That’s what we need to believe because thats what the people I love believe ”.
Once we discover this, the temptation is to advise robust intellectual individualism, throwing off the yoke of being a ‘social creature’ and becoming committed to truth no matter the cost. The reality is that there is no way to do this which maps to the New Testament vision of being God’s people. We have to accept that our loves shape what we rationally affirm and as Jesus reminds us; “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”. Then we are formed to believe and live out a faith that is integrated into the whole human life which includes our social relationships.
Top 10 Pet Names (in the US)
Luna
Bella
Milo
Charlie
Max
Daisy
Coco
Lucy
Leo
Nala
So.. don’t pick those - Found here
This dog sat in a road until a car stopped, then led man into woods to save injured human
Keith Johnson, 84, could not move after he fell and broke his hip. But his faithful dog Gita sat in the road until a car stopped and she led a deputy deep in the woods to help her injured human
How the “Dark Ages” shaped the World
TLDR: Monks saved civilisation and founded educational, intellectual and scientific progress.
The Church: Essentials
I’ve been a fan of the Lexham Essentials Series that has slowly been produced, especially Ben Myer’s opener on the Apostles Creed which I have used in curriculum again and again. The latest addition is from Brad East on the Church, whose writings I have also enjoyed. Here’s a review from TGC.
A Perspective on Productivity from Nuns
Theos just released a report on Productivity and as a part of it, ingeneiously in my opinion, asked Nuns for their perspective. It’s a refreshing insight into a literally cloistered life.
“All our work has love at the core. That is really important in terms of overwork in my life. When I lose my capacity to love because I’m working 16 hour days, that’s where things start to go wrong. Simplicity isn’t about avoiding all good things. It’s about providing for our dependents and enjoying life, but avoiding luxury and waste. That frees us up from that sense of needing to earn more and more and be more and more productive.”
Perseid's Meteor shower over Stonehenge
That’s all for now…
I still pray for a parking space 😂😂. And God still answers 🙌🙌