Recently I have been using Mark Broadway’s new devotional, Journeying with God in the Wilderness. I purchased it from the Faith Mission Bookshop in the House of VicRyn in Lisburn. It is a 40-day Lent Devotional through the book of Numbers. Immediately as I started this it got me thinking about evangelicals and tradition.
By tradition, I guess I mean ‘traditional’ tradition rather than any kind of tradition that modern evangelicals have themselves created. A classic example of this would be the period of Lent which this devotional focusses on.
Most of us will be familiar with the idea of giving things up for Lent. We pick something we love, but that we know is bad for us, and for the 40 days of Lent, we abstain from it. But that is not the traditional tradition. The tradition would be to have forty days of fasting, with the 6 Sundays across those 40 days being feast days. The aim of this tradition is to bring about the experience of being the wilderness. The aim is to cause Christians to see and feel their full dependence on God.
Tradition – Rejected!
Traditions like this are not really in favour amongst a lot of evangelical Christians. The logic for this is pretty sound in my view but it leaves me with a question that is just sort of … hanging. And unanswered.
The logic is that actually we are fully dependent on God 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and for the whole of our lives. So, to set aside a special time of the year where we seek to experience and express that dependency is not helpful. A tradition designed to be helpful short term reminder of a permanent reality, very quickly will become something that limits and diminishes our understanding of that reality to something that exists only within the 40 days. Worse still, we run the risk of turning it into something to showcase our own holiness to God. Additionally, we could say that actually all the evidence that we need for our dependence on God and His faithfulness to us in this is found in the Bible and God’s works of salvation seen in its history. So we don’t need a reminder of it, like this tradition, to point us to this truth and to look to tradition to do this, actually moves us away from having the Word of God as the primary means by which God communicates to us.
I could go on but suffice to say, traditions of the sort that Lent would be, are often looked down upon amongst many as being ‘not wrong’ but not Biblically required and so unnecessary and potentially unhelpful. This tradition, aimed at helping the people of God recognise their dependency on Him is rejected and ignored.
The unanswered Question
So, we come to the question left hanging and unanswered. James tells us to show him our faith by what we do. In this vein you could also say, show me you consider yourself fully dependent on God by how you live and respond to things. If a tradition like Lent is meant to showcase our full dependence on God and remind us that we are not yet in the promised Kingdom, given we have rejected the tradition, how are these things to be expressed now? Or, more accurately, what are we actually doing to do bring this reality to our minds day to day? Whilst I would agree with the logic that leads to rejecting some of these traditions, I fear that the spiritual realities that go with them, may get rejected too. Throwing the baby out with the bath water. Not intentionally rejected, but we just think about them less and less and so these realities become less ‘real’.
So, when considering what makes a good pastor, we consider more a person’s force of character, or some kind of non-defined skill called ‘leadership’. We factor in their ability to have and cast vision, bringing people along with them. In short, alongside the Biblical qualifications for eldership, or in some cases instead of them, we look at the strength of person in worldly terms and not in terms of their dependence on God and faithfulness to Him. The question then becomes, when we are so obviously strong in our own right, is there a risk that our sense that we depend on God fully is diminished. Maybe this does happen. I know from my experience that prayer is not something that is always at the forefront of our minds and consideration. We are far more concerned with what we can do about something than that we pray for it.
I am not saying any of these are bad. For example, when you are preaching or leading a Bible study, it is 100% right that you give sufficient time for study and preparing for this. But, if we are fully dependent on God in this, then ample time for prayer would also be key. This doesn’t just apply in teaching and ministry.
Traditions are often created to try and reinforce (or sometimes to force!) a good and right spiritual mindset. They aim to provide consistent opportunities for something we know to be true, to be brought to the front of our thinking and therefore reinforce it. That is the aim. Human sinfulness means that this is often twisted and the tradition becomes unhelpful and needs to be rejected.
But, as we do this, how do we ensure we have the right spiritual mindset? How do we keep truths we know at the forefront of our minds and reinforce them? That’s the question that is left hanging for me. Save to say, that day to day, we depend on God fully for this to be done. So, prayer will be key.
