At my first vestry meeting at Christ Church, I introduced myself as a person defined and ordered by vows:
baptism, marriage, and ordination. In my baptism as an infant, God constituted my identity to be his beloved son and ordered my life around the vows of following Jesus. Even though I don’t remember my baptism, it defined my fundamental identity as a disciple of Jesus. In the covenant of marriage, God reconstituted Becca and me as “one flesh,” and ordered our lives around the vows of honoring and cherishing each other until we are parted by death. In ordination, God set me apart to serve as priest, calling me to help shepherd His people and steward His sacred mysteries.
When you read the pages of scripture, especially the Old Testament, it becomes quickly apparent that God’s people struggle to keep their vows. In Hosea, for example, God compares Israel to an unfaithful prostitute, who perpetually commits adultery against Him with idol worship. When we look at the church and the many forms of hypocrisy and fallen leaders… when we examine our own lives and see the gap between what Christ commands and our lack of obedience, a question emerges: How are we to become the kind of people who live faithfully to their vows?
Jesus, towards the end of his Sermon on the Mount, offers an insightful window into God’s way of answering this question. He warns his disciples against false prophets, saying: “They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them” (Mt. 7:15-16). Then he prophesied about the day of judgment and speaks to such fraudulent priests, “depart from me I never knew you” (Mt. 7:23).
Interestingly, God’s view of the unfaithful prophet is that they are not “known.” One can hear echoes of God’s first question in scripture: “Adam, where are you?” Seemingly, human beings have a way of hiding from God and one another, projecting a better vision than what exists.
During my final semester of seminary, while Becca was pregnant with our first child and I was preparing for ordination exams, I became acutely haunted by my own propensity to hide behind a religious mask. I saw scandal after scandal in the church in which smart and talented Christian leaders either abused their power or led a secret life hidden from their community. Driven by a fear of the worst version of myself and a desire to be faithful to my vows, I began to assemble a group of men who wanted something different.
What emerged in the coming months was a covenant group of spiritual friendship. Ten seminarians began to gather regularly, sharing our stories, reading scripture, and praying for one another. In a very ordinary sense, we became a small group. As a group of seminarians, we wrote a nerdy theological manifesto defining the goal of our group: to become a people of true wisdom through spiritual friendship.
We recognized that true wisdom is not the capacity to make thought-provoking statements. It is not about being the quickest to make a theological hot take or take a side on a particular issue. It’s not even, primarily, “biblical knowledge” in the sense of facts collected. True wisdom is deeper than mere knowledge and it is always worked out in our relational habits – with God, ourselves and others.
John Calvin opens his theological tome, Institutes of the Christian Religion, defining wisdom this way: “Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.”
Two knowledges, inseparably joined
Calvin’s insight is that these two kinds of knowledge are not separate projects. You cannot truly know yourself without knowing God, nor can you know God without knowing yourself. Such knowledge is not mere abstract knowledge such that we could possess at a distance, but it is a relational knowledge akin to friendship or marriage. It is the kind of knowledge that is developed through the habit of listening, speaking, and attuning to the other. When we grow in our knowledge of God, we begin to see reality clearly. That is, when we see God, we begin to properly see ourselves – our beauty as image-bearers and our brokenness as sinners. When we see ourselves – our desires, fear, and guilt, we are driven more clearly to God.
Taking this idea to its natural conclusion, it is foolish to seek to know God without reflecting on the self. Knowledge of God without knowledge of self is depicted in the pharisees. It leads to pride and hypocrisy. Knowledge of self without knowledge of God also is problematic; it collapses inward to our capricious and fickle wills, leading to despair or futile self-improvement projects. True wisdom, however, emerges in holding these together.
In the journey of wisdom, spiritual friendship enables us to bridge our knowledge of God and knowledge of self. Spiritual friendship is the jointly held friendship with God and friendship with the friends of God. It is prioritizing the relationship with God at the center of your friendship and the habits of your shared life. We all have shared interest friends (e.g. exercise friends, book club friends, sports fandom friends, etc.), but spiritual friendship is a human relationship transparent to one’s relationship to God. This is the kind of friendship that transcends sociological connections and makes it possible for vastly different people to love and cherish one another as siblings in Christ. This is that “cord of three strands [which] is not quickly broken” from Ecclesiastes 4:12.
The path of wisdom for spiritual friendship presses towards a common hope. In 2 Corinthians, St. Paul gives us a vision of where we are going: unveiled faces. In a rather complex text, speaking to the difference between the Old and New Covenants, Paul makes the point that we no longer see God with veiled faces like the people looking at Moses under Mount Sinai. In the New Covenant we begin to gaze upon the glory of the Lord through the Spirit with unveiled faces. The veil is removed in both directions at once. We are beginning to see God’s glory unveiled — no longer dimly through the shadow of the law, but through the Holy Spirit. And in that same moment, we take off our veils, or masks, and become uncovered. We stop hiding. We stop curating our image. We become known.
This is what I believe our lives are ultimately moving toward. The Great Tradition of Christian faith calls this the beatific vision; the day we collectively behold God face to face without shame, fully known and yet fully loved. As Christians, we order our current lives in view of our future hope. We cultivate the kind of relational habits that prepare us for our final home.
It has been over 10 years since my small group of guys started to gather. All of us are married and serve as leaders in our respective churches. We live all over the country, serve in different denominations, and have varied views on matters that are central to our life and work. What holds us together is our commitment to being known by God and one another. Each year in February, we retreat together to share the good, the bad, and the ugly. We listen to each other, read scripture, sing, pray, play, and eat together. We remind each other of our vows and call each other by our proper name: beloved child of God. Other than my family, these men are the most significant relationships in my life.
This fall, Christ Church is launching small groups. At the time I am writing this, we have over 190 people signed up and 14 groups organized. While I recognize these groups will differ in kind from the covenant group I established with nine of my seminary friends, I pray these groups will nurture a shared fruit: true wisdom through spiritual friendship. Small groups, at their best, are places where masks start coming off — where people can be known by God and one another, in both their beauty and brokenness to become people of wisdom.
As we have promoted small groups, I’ve heard several questions about what these groups will look like and how they will be organized. We are functionally organizing them in view of Calvin’s understanding of wisdom: knowledge of God and knowledge of the self.
Toward the knowledge of God:
We are going to order our time together around God’s Word. This is not a Bible Study in the proper sense, but we will provide a selection of scripture to read and reflect upon with the intention of listening attentively to God’s self-disclosure. We don’t rush past hard passages or sand down God’s holiness, justice, or mercy to make Him more palatable. We want our groups to simply behold God for who he is revealed to be in Scripture.
Toward the knowledge of self:
We want to cultivate space for honest and vulnerable self-disclosure. A group that only discusses ideas at arm’s length will produce people who know a lot and have changed very little. We will provide a set of questions that move a conversation from “what does this passage mean?” to “what does this passage mean for me, this week, in the actual shape of my life?” We believe scripture doesn’t merely reveal God but reveals our true selves – our dignity and depravity, our beauty and brokenness. Such sharing requires humble leadership and safe community. We have worked hard with our leaders to build this kind of culture within their respective groups.
These kinds of groups can be messy and fraught with high hopes only to be met with great disappointment. As much as we wish it were so, we cannot seem to check our sin and selfishness at the door of Christian community. If you join a group, you should probably expect to experience someone to say something offensive, do something stupid, or believe something heretical. After all, you and I are in this community … and just like them, we need God’s mercy.
Ultimately, I believe God is in control and is shepherding his people. He uses these relational habits of gathering twice a month in someone’s home, opening scripture, and sharing life to grow His people. The Holy Spirit takes our feeble faith and ordinary gatherings to slowly transform His people “from one degree of glory to another.” (2 Cor. 3:18) The best thing we can do is trust the Lord – that He will use these groups to make us faithful to keep the vows we have made.
