Spiritual Fitness - Excerpt 3 (last one!)

So, with a touch of sadness but still great anticipation, here is the third and final installment of Graham Tomlin's fantastic new book, Spiritual Fitness: Christian Character in a Consumer Culture.
You can still view the first one here and the second here.

From Chapter 4
CULTIVATING VIRTUE
How then is virtue cultivated? Meilaender’s solution is to embrace a form of sectarianism. Rather than the liberal agenda of eliding differences between faiths, suppressing the expression of individual beliefs, we should encourage each separate community to do its own job as well as it can in encouraging their own virtues and goodness in their young people, converts and members. Eventually, that process may end up with a new moral vision for the whole of society:

Each should help his children and friends strive for virtue as we fashion our smaller communities of belief and seek to transmit the vision which inspires us... And perhaps out of such sectarianism will arise some smaller communities whose vision is so powerful and persuasive that new moral consensus will be achieved among us.

Perhaps that is the main challenge for the church today – can it become a community capable of holding its identity and vision so clearly, and teach it so effectively to its members that true Christian virtue results? Can it become a community that builds genuine character, enough to forge a new moral vision for the western world as the church did when the great edifice of Greco-Roman culture fell apart on the eve of the Dark Ages in the sixth century? 

Alasdair MacIntyre’s book ‘After Virtue’ ended with a call for a new St Benedict – the monk who founded western monasticism on the eve of the Dark Ages. In other words, in the confusion of contemporary culture, what is needed is a new vision of a way of life that builds the kind of virtue that will build community, not undermine it. Will the contemporary church be capable of forming new communities in which learning, holiness and goodness can be learnt? That is the task to which the church needs to attend with all its strength, not just for the sake of its own survival, but for the sake of our whole society. Brian Appleyard, the British journalist, writes of his hopes for the future:

Perhaps the least interesting thing about the future is the type of technology we shall be using. The most interesting thing is what kind of people we shall be. If we can focus on this, rather than the gadgets, then we might come up with some hopeful, or at least illuminating answers.

What kind of people we shall be? That is the vital question. Our society is desperate to find ways of developing character, integrity and virtue. As our power to create and destroy each other and the planet we live on grows stronger every year, as tensions between rival versions of how life should be lived heightens, the question of how we use such power, and how we relate to each other is crucial. Can we develop the qualities that enable us to use our powers responsibly and build communities? The future may depend on it.

The question is also urgent at a more personal level. People who are unable to forgive when they are slighted face a future of bitterness, anger and frustration. Whether the offence is real or imaginary, an inability to forgive harms the one who has been offended more than the offender. It is a vital skill for life. Similarly, someone who lacks patience will constantly find themselves flying into uncontrollable rages which break friendships, and bring on stress. An inability to trust makes few friends, and makes long-term relationships impossible. People who are full of themselves, dripping with arrogance and with hardly a trace of humility are likely to end up with fewer and fewer friends and family who can bear to be with them. Christian virtue has love for others as its central pillar, and so it is uniquely suited to enabling people to develop good healthy relationships in community. It is not rocket science to work out that all of these basic Christian virtues are vital skills for life. We need to learn how to practice them if we are to survive and live well.

But where can you go to learn such things? There is no requirement for courses on Patience in the National Curriculum. You cannot get degrees in Kindness from reputable universities. I have never seen Further Education Colleges offering classes in Generosity or Faithfulness. If churches were to become places where ordinary people knew they could go to learn some of the basic skills they need to negotiate life well, think what a difference that might make. What if the local church became known as somewhere ordinary people could go to learn such skills? And what if such people began to learn these qualities in such volume that it began to impact our ways of relating to each other in all kinds of interpersonal relations, changing the very social fabric itself?

But would that be to turn the church into a self-help programme, and divert its attention away from the central task of preaching the gospel? Is this turning the church away from its central task? The short answer is the opposite – it is returning it to its central task. But that statement needs some evidence, and that is what the next few chapters are designed to provide.

So now you've had your bookreading tastebuds well and truely tempted, head down to HTB's bookshop and get a copy, or buy it here - Graham needs to feed his family!