Communal Practices for Churches

Discipleship, or our lives as followers of Jesus, can be explained through three distinctive movements (inspired by Luke 6:12-19):

The first movement, which we have called Stay with God, is the foundation of all other movements and is simply about being with God. It asks of us that we, taking the example of Jesus, go onto the mountain to listen and spend time with God and be reminded that we too are God’s beloved children.

The second movement, which we have called Share the Journey, is about the community of people with whom we live out our faith. It includes spending time reflecting on our faith and sharing life together.

The third movement, which we have called Serve our World, is about serving others and doing justice. It naturally flows out of the time we have spent with God and in community and brings healing to our world.

Practices help us connect more deeply with God and connect God with the whole of our lives. They shape our thinking, feeling, behaviours and priorities and help us embody our faith. They enable us to Stay with God, Share the Journey and Serve our World.

There usually is a specific Pattern linked to our practices: e.g., we might commit to practices every day, every week or during specific meetings or activities. A simple example is our weekly Sunday worship or our daily morning prayer.

In all of this, the emphasis is not on what we do, but on who we are becoming – in and through Christ. Practices help shape our Posture or way of being in the world.

Discipleship resources have often been written from an individual perspective or are delivered as a seasonal or one-off course. As a result, it can be a challenge to develop practices that help shape our shared spiritual identity on an ongoing basis. We can easily become isolated in our discipleship and our faith starts feeling like a diet we simply can’t keep up with; we struggle to find enough time, space and resource to develop our faith and integrate it into our everyday lives. Communal practices help us to develop our discipleship together, in community. The hope is that through these shared practices we will also gain confidence in our individual times of prayer and relationship with God.

For the past couple of years, the bishops of our diocese together with the Confident Disciples team have hosted five-week programmes for deepening discipleship and spiritual formation. These programmes are still available for churches to use and not limited to Lent, and include five sessions on Prayer Practices and five sessions on Listening Groups.