It was J. I. Packer who made an Anglican out of me.
Although I had attended a student-led Anglican service when I first became a seminarian at Regent College, it wasn’t until I moved to the Anglican church that Dr. Packer attended (and at which he sometimes led liturgy) that I was struck by the beauty and majesty of Anglican worship. It was like having a five-course spiritual meal every Sunday morning, complete with music, preaching, liturgy, Eucharist, and fellowship.
In hindsight, I find it interesting that I was never really taught how to live like an Anglican during the week instead of just on Sunday mornings. Or maybe I was, but I just didn’t pick it up.
The rhythm of the Daily Office
In any event, it was many years later, when I attended the residential portion of a liturgy course at Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Wisconsin, that I encountered the rhythm of the Daily Office. I was immediately drawn to that rhythm and to the Benedictine lifestyle of Ora et Labora (prayer and work) in which it was embedded.
When I got back to my home state of New Mexico, which is blessed with a number of monasteries, I visited every monastery that I knew about in order to perpetuate the same rhythm that I had experienced at Nashotah House. I eventually settled on the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Abiquiu, at which a fellow Anglican priest named Thomas McKenzie (who is no stranger to the pages of Anglican Pastor) had become an oblate—an affiliate of a religious community.
After several visits, I decided to become an oblate as well. I spent a year as an Oblate Novice before making my final vows. Christ in the Desert observes seven Daily Offices as well as daily Eucharist, and all music is notated as Gregorian Chant. As a result, functioning as an oblate at the monastery required a steep learning curve, which can initially detract from the spiritual focus of the Offices.
The Office of Compline became a favorite of mine, and I practiced it frequently at home right before bedtime, even in chant form. Since about half the time the Office of Compline seems to be canceled at the monastery, I began to take the Daily Office Booklet produced by Anglican Pastor to pray Evening Prayer in my guest room before I fell asleep.
The Daily Office is not enough.
Why am I telling you all this?
Because it’s possible to be seminary-trained, ordained (I am a bi-vocational priest in the Anglican Church in North America), and drawn to the Daily Office, and still overlook the voice of God speaking directly and personally. In fact, for too much of my life, I was a poster child for such avoidance of the voice of God. My Regent College experience was wonderful in many ways, but for me, it was largely an academic experience instead of a fundamentally spiritual one.
Even the practice of the Daily Office can become a rushed ritual instead a divine encounter, just like Anglican liturgy itself can become an exercise in Anglican aerobics (when to stand, sit, kneel, read the Bible, read the Prayer Book, read the service bulletin) instead of a deeply personal experience of the mystery and majesty of God.
In my own case, the problem started early.
I was blessed to grow up as a Christian in a Christian home, and I worshiped in a tradition that valued Bible knowledge. I excelled at “Sword Drills” (timed contests in looking up Bible passages) and Scripture memorization. I led Bible studies as a teenager, served as a counselor at a Christian camp during the summer, and attended a Christian liberal arts college.
I was exposed to the practice of a “Quiet Time” both at camp and from a youth pastor with whom I met regularly. Yet any instruction about how to have a Quiet Time was largely ad hoc and anecdotal instead of systematic and procedural. My experience of the Bible remained an opportunity to expand my mind instead of to encounter God, feed my heart, and motivate my hands.
Since I was raised in an academically oriented family, I carried on the family tradition by pursuing several Master’s degrees and eventually a Ph.D. Though I taught classes in a Bible college and helped out with youth groups at various churches, my conception of the Christian life as a largely academic pursuit persisted.
It wasn’t until I experienced a health crisis that turned into a spiritual crisis (ironically, as I was writing my dissertation) that my worldview started to change. In the economy of God, he used that health crisis to call me to preach, to prepare for ordained ministry, and to start a relationship with the woman who is now my wife.
I also had to reconstruct what it meant to study the Bible devotionally and hear the voice of God. I turned my attention first to the Quiet Time, then to Spiritual Journaling, and finally to Lectio Divina. I took a keen interest in such practices because all of a sudden, devotional Bible study meant something to me personally; the Bible wasn’t just for academics and professional clergy anymore.
Eventually, I started looking for ways to pass some insights on to others.
When I contemplated how I might write a book to pass these insights on, the vehicle of story seemed like a natural medium for several reasons.
Our postmodern age is often allergic to proposition or dogma but is disarmed by story; cognitive shields go down instead of up when a story is told. Story can even be subversive and smuggle absolute truth inside the relativistic-sounding Trojan Horse of a compelling narrative.
Humans live in a stream called time and are wired to retain information organized in a temporal sequence. And my time in the business world had exposed me to several so-called “leadership fables” that imparted leadership and organization principles through the medium of story. I am thinking of the leadership books by the Arbinger Institute, such as Leadership and Self-Deception, or the saga of an agile software development team in The Phoenix Project, or the several books by Patrick Lencioni (perhaps most notably The Five Dysfunctions of a Team). An earlier example is Who Moved My Cheese?, which is a parable about how individuals react to change.
I was somewhat surprised that I had not encountered the same genre in the Christian world, at least in the areas of spiritual formation in general and the devotional reading of the Bible in particular.
Discipling through story: Meeting God in the Bible.
So I crafted a story in which the two main characters represent the two primary audiences I anticipated for the book: new Christians and seasoned Christians who had lost the habit of meeting God in the Bible.
The narrative backbone of the book, which is entitled Meeting God in the Bible: How to Read Scripture Devotionally, is the long-term discipleship process between a pastor’s wife named Sharon and a new believer named Victoria. They meet over an extended period of time both in a coffee shop and in Sharon’s home, and Sharon teaches Victoria how to have a Quiet Time, then how to create a Spiritual Journal using the SOAP method (Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer), and finally how to practice Lectio Divina.
But as I was writing the book, it became increasingly apparent that these three devotional Bible study methods do not exist for their own sake. Instead, they are simply part of the lifelong process of spiritual formation, which is ultimately an act of worship as we increasingly reflect God back to himself by life and by lip.
So I integrated other spiritual formation practices into the book as components of the discipleship process, such as Scripture memorization, a theology and practice of prayer, how to handle temptation, how to interpret the Bible, and how to discern God’s voice.
As befits the role of Anglicanism not only as a via media but also as a bridge toward Christian unity, I consciously attempted to include ancient and modern spiritual formation practices that span Christian traditions. The ACTS Prayer and Spiritual Journaling using the SOAP method are relatively recent (at least in those particular forms), while the Jesus Prayer and Lectio Divina have a long history in the Church.
My publisher (Fontes Press) and I attempted to create an entire system both in and around the book to facilitate its use by groups and individuals.
- A Study Guide with at least four questions for each chapter is an integral part of the book.
- Two appendices are included; the first distills the insights of the entire narrative by topic in list form for handy reference. The second provides a theological justification for the medium of story and is subtitled “Toward a Theology of Story.”
- A Further Reading section provides a short annotated bibliography of books that could profitably be read next.
- The Dove-award-winning Gospel recording artist Fernando Ortega graciously provided a beautiful and vulnerable Foreword to the book.
- And the book is supported by a continuously evolving Web site that contains a host of additional resources and related topics by book chapter.
How to integrate the Daily Office with devotional Bible reading.
Given its intended purpose as a mechanism for lifelong spiritual formation, if the voice of God speaking personally is not regularly encountered in the Daily Office, then the Daily Office is not enough.
So how can the disciplines of the Daily Office and devotional Bible reading best be integrated? In the same way, I believe, that a systematic Bible reading plan and devotional Bible reading can best be integrated, by considering them as two separate but related things instead of as the same thing.
Too often, in the press of time and the busyness of life, we rush through our daily Bible reading assignment or the Daily Offices and consider that our “devotions,” even though we haven’t met God personally or heard his voice speaking directly to us during those devotions.
My suggestion is that we treat such practices as complementary but different, and that we select a single passage of Scripture from the lectionary readings for Morning or Evening Prayer to focus on devotionally at another time during the day. That passage can be the basis for a Quiet Time, or Spiritual Journaling, or the steps of Lectio Divina.
If you are an evening person, perhaps you could do so during the Daily Office of Compline, which does not have lectionary readings associated with it. If you are a morning person, perhaps you could do so during the Daily Office of Midday Prayer, or during another time slot or schedule break in the morning.
The ultimate goal is to meet God in his Word and be blessed and transformed in our head, heart, and hands by that encounter. God has made us for himself, and the conscious cultivation of a lifelong habit of devotional Bible reading can deepen your journey toward the intimate communion with God that you were created for.
Amen and Amen. Bless you, Fr. John.
There is much to commend in this article, Fr. John. I agree that the three-fold regula of the Eucharist, daily office, and private devotion represents the best-case scenario of Anglican spiritual practice, as long described by Anglican thinkers like Martin Thornton. And what you are describing is not inconsistent with historical formulations of that rule of life, in that it relies on lectio divina and (apparently) contemplative prayer to supplement the mass and office.
That being noted, I worry about the message and tone of this post on “typical” pastors and parishioners. We cannot all pursue a neo-monastic lifestyle. I am out of the house commuting and working for over 11 hours each day during the work week. With such a schedule (or just trying to raise a family), the Daily Office may be completely “enough.” I worry that writers who encourage/impose an Evangelical-style busy-ness on us are just setting us up for failure when we realize that we cannot do it all. The perfect spiritual life you are suggesting may be the enemy of one that is “good enough” for the overwhelming majority of our parishioners.
I respectfully suggest that a similar article (and possibly more pastorally sensitive and realistic one) could have been titled “Personal Devotion is not enough.” Quiet time and lectio are actually easier IMHO than the Office well practiced; if you are un-edifyingly zooming through the Office, then slow down rather than add more tasks to the believer’s to-do list. And why do we have to attack our prayer tradition so readily, especially when we are converts to the Anglican Way and the things we import look very much like the tradition in which we grew up? It is a real weakness of some of the writings on this otherwise valuable site that the recently arrived Anglicans seem to have it all sorted out for us. The same sort of thing is going on in the ACNA Daily Office lectionary, with its marathon unrelated readings severed from the church kalendar – the Office is not a substitute for your personal Bible reading plan! It is part of the liturgical structure of the tradition and need not accomplish everything we “enjoyed” in our “read through the Bible in one year” plans. I think that efforts like this may actually reduce the spiritual practices of parishioners because they give up with all the freight we pile on them.
Thank you for your post and the infomercial for your book; I look forward to reading it when I have time.
Hello Sub-deacon Will! Thank you for reading my article. I’m sorry that it came across as Law instead of Grace, especially in the midst of an extremely busy schedule. That was certainly not my intent, and I’m hoping that I might be able to clarify a few things. Though I am personally drawn to Benedictine spirituality, I really did not mean to hold that up as a model for all. I especially did not intend to leave the impression that if one observed the Daily Office, followed a systematic Bible reading plan, AND found the time to have a devotional Quiet Time or Lectio Divina in one of the Daily Office or Bible reading plan passages, then one is truly spiritual. I can easily see how that sounds like piling on, especially in the crush of the responsibilities of everyday life. Besides, the Daily Office–and liturgy in general–is made for man, not man for the Daily Office.
However, I DID intend to communicate that unless we encounter God personally in his Word and are transformed by that experience, then the Daily Office and/or Bible reading plan are simply not enough. Like Samuel, we need the opportunity to say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” and expect God to answer that prayer on a regular basis. In fact, that encounter is the very point of the Daily Office, or of a Bible reading plan, and a vital aspect of corporate worship as well. The title of my article simply reflected the reality that all too often devotions become rushed and rote instead of personal and powerful. My book was simply an attempt, in narrative form, to pass on some devotional Bible reading strategies from someone who has substituted other things for the personal voice of God for too much of his life.
In the hope that you might find it helpful, let me pass on a rhythm that seems to be working for me, from one bivocational family man to another. My nominal work day is 10 hours long, so the daily time footprint door-to-door is generally on the order of 12 hours. During the work week I may only be able to pray about an Office and a half, generally Noonday Prayer because it is an invaluable spiritual synch-up during a hectic work day and Compline because it is such a good preparation for sleep. Morning and Evening Prayer using the Anglican Pastor booklets are generally reserved for the weekends.
But that still begs the question, “When have I allowed space to hear the personal voice of God?” For me, that space generally comes at two times. As soon as I get to work (which is ridiculously early, often between 5:00-5:30am), I break out my Greek New Testament and practice Lectio Divina on a short passage at my desk. I usually focus on an easier passage in Greek, such as something from the Johannine corpus, the Gospel of Mark, or even Revelation (as odd as that might sound). In fact, I even wrote an article that attempted to model such a practice for others.
http://exegeticaltools.com/2018/03/12/meeting-god-in-the-greek-new-testament-the-practice-of-lectio-divina/
My other structural space for hearing the voice of God occurs on the weekends when I am doing sermon preparation. I have finally cultivated the habit of having personal devotions in my sermon passage using Lectio Divina long in advance of the actual delivery of the sermon. If I have not allowed the passage to examine and transform me, how can I expect my sermon to examine and transform my congregation?
Your comment includes other concerns that I am not able to fully address at this time, but which resonate with me as well. Suffice it to say that as someone who became an Anglican in 1987, I am as concerned as you are that the composition of the ACNA seems to be heavily influenced by those who are new to the Anglican Way and wish to transform it to reflect the Reformed rigidity or mainstream Evangelicalism of the traditions they came from. I wrote an article a few years ago about how clergy formation is changing in this Brave New ACNA World, which reflects on this phenomenon.
http://northamanglican.com/quo-vadis-anglican-clergy-formation-and-ministry/
Brother Will, my prayer for you is that in the midst of the deluge of life, you might be able to carve out space to hear God’s still, small voice on a regular basis and be energized and transformed by that encounter. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light. Blessings!
I’m glad that you have your own personal devotions during the weekend before doing a sermon. My father’s belief in Christianity is so strong, and I think that it’s good for him. That being said, I’ll make sure to avail for the best daily Christian devotional services near his area.