Executive Director’s Report

“Ora et Labora” (Prayer and Work), the motto of the Benedictine Order

Prayer… (an Introduction)

For nearly a century, the New Orleans Baptist Association (“NOBA”) has been the catalyst behind the launch of many Christian non-profits and ministries, and the redesign of several others. Through its board memberships, NOBA has a direct relationship with other Christian ministries and non-profits, as well as a fraternal relationship with scores more. One of our primary concerns in this cooperative work is to make sure all of our work centers on Christ and his kingdom—his life and work, his death and resurrection. In these efforts, we’ve come again and again to dwell on a question which I’ll take this space to ask and propose the beginnings of an answer. The question is this: what makes an organization Christian?

Answering this question for an individual is easier. If you are to ask, what makes a person Christian, confession of and belief in Christ as Lord is primary. But what about a group of people, an association, ministry, or non-profit—what makes an organization Christian? The more we researched practical models and strategies, the more we returned to this question. We believe we need to answer this question before engaging any notion of strategy, just as you need to know directions before driving off, or you may find all progress, no matter how efficient, to be placing you further from your destination.

The predominant view among American evangelicals is that one’s relationship to God is exclusively an individual, immediate, and private affair, as if “alone” and in one’s head is the only place where spirituality happens. This attitude contributes to a super-spiritualizing of faith in which all that really matters is your vertical relationship with God, and if you get that right, all other relationships (with spouse, children, colleagues, neighbors, and community)—your horizontal relationships—will fall into place and work themselves out.

Christian nonprofits, according to this view, would be merely those nonprofits employing or begun by Christians. Far from the Benedictine ideal of “work and prayer,” a dialectical focus which has guided that order through fifteen hundred years of work with the poor, we too-often content ourselves with work alone, and so our works tend to be personality-driven and brief. Even before the pandemic, over 80% of nonprofits in the U.S. today were closing within ten years of their founding. As the prophet Isaiah warns, those who work without drinking water grow faint.

Most Christian non-profits and ministries don’t see themselves as neglecting the practice of spiritual disciplines, because the thought of communally practicing such disciplines has hardly occurred to them. Approaching God through communal reflection, the habituation of spiritual disciplines, and devotional rhythms is viewed as tedious, superfluous, and irrelevant, if not bordering on irreverent.

As a result, organizational intimacy with Christ is rare, or, at least, rarely practiced. Contemporary Christian non-profits run largely on their own steam. In terms of their internal organization and function, they operate very much like secular non-profits.

Our research has shown that many faith-based nonprofits, even some of the most productive—even many of those we started and operate—are largely undeveloped with respect to their communal spiritual formation. Yet, biblically and historically, prayer and Christian practice are central to the healthy operation and longevity of such works. We are in need of inversion, where strategy is subordinated to Christian practice and understanding. The efficacy of Christian ministries depends upon Christ—not just in a vague, spiritual sort of way, but through shared Christian disciplines.

For these reasons, we’ve placed this discussion of organizational Christian practices at the fore of our report, before any discussion of practical work, we would encourage consideration of what Jesus told Martha was the one needed thing. For Christian non-profits and ministries that choose to join the Great Tradition in sharing life together in Christ, we offer the following recommendations:

Prioritize a shared spiritual discipline that considers and hears the whole community of the church, past and present.

In a sermon entitled Learning in War-Time, C. S. Lewis urged that we not sever ties with our spiritual forebears because past wisdom is a counterbalance to the assumptions of one’s present age.

“A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”

He saw modern biases creating a kind of blindness that only past wisdom could protect against by keeping “the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” Lewis saw the “old books” as imperative, because without them we end up living “in a tiny windowless universe,” or what G. K. Chesterton called, “the clean and well-lit prison of one idea.”

The ancients understood the bodily nature of human personality with its strong desires. Their communal spiritual disciplines trained their desires toward God. Our culture pulsates with inducements toward consumption and gratification of our appetites. We, too, need the spiritual disciplines of the faith if we want to excel at loving God, first and foremost, and our neighbors as ourselves.

So, Christian ministries and non-profit organizations should prioritize a shared spiritual discipline that considers and hears the whole community of the church, both past and present.

During communal devotions, include reflection on the truths of the creation and incarnation: how they elevate the dignity of the world and humanity, give meaning to what we do and how we live, and inspire us to value and love our neighbors.

The early church took seriously Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 25 that when we care for the hungry, the imprisoned, and the poor we care for him. It deepened their devotion to Christ and their compassion for their neighbors, motivating the early Roman Christians to care for the sick and dying, inspiring Basil the Great to launch the first leprosarium and hospital, and guiding monastic communities to spread medical care and learning across Christendom.

C. S. Lewis describes what it would mean for our relationship with others were we to regain this incarnational truth and see Christ not just in Jesus but in all people.

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship…There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal…It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit…Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat [truly hides]—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.”

The church never got over the amazing truth that God who created the world now entered and participated in it, and he entered it in the very part that is us! This startling fact changed everything, causing Christians to value highly the precious humanity of Christ, as well as the precious humanity of humanity—themselves, their neighbors, their work, their culture, and their struggles. The incarnation enabled the church to see Jesus in others and to act compassionately toward them.

A fuller appreciation of Christ’s humanity also helps us better value the spiritual significance of our own humanity. Christ came to us in a body and lives today in a resurrected body. What we do in our bodies and with our stuff matters to God.

In our constantly connected, hyper-stimulated, and heavily scheduled lives, we have lost the wonder of the flabbergasting truths of creation and incarnation. We can remind ourselves of the wonder of creation by including devotions into our work weeks, and reflection on the truths of the creation and incarnation: how they elevate the dignity of the world and humanity, give meaning to what we do and how we live, and inspire us to value and love our neighbors.

Because our wonderful embodiment is vulnerable to misplaced desire–to desiring “second things” as “first things,” and to desiring good things in wrong ways, include in a time for confession and assurance of pardon, refocusing on the God who loves us with a furious longing.

Although the incarnation elevates the dignity of creation and humanity, Christ cautions us against misplaced priorities: Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, he urges, and the other stuff—which left to our own devices we would chase after—will be added to us.

Augustine saw that when we treat any created good as lovable for its own sake, we commit idolatry; we elevate that good to a place only God can occupy, and separate it from its source and meaning, which is God.

In God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis speaks to the same principle: “You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”

He provides a poetic illustration of this point in The Weight of Glory:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it is not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipper. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

God both made and sustains the material and social worlds in which we live. We can properly celebrate and enjoy those worlds and engage the maladies of those worlds only if we reassociate them with God. The search for a Christian missiology is not, in the end, a search for a strategy but a search for God. He is the beauty that woos us, the memory that draws us, the country we desire.

Because our wonderful embodiment is vulnerable to misplaced desire–to desiring “second things” as “first things,” and to desiring good things in wrong ways, Christian ministries should include a time for confession and assurance of pardon, refocusing on the God who loves us with a furious longing.

Practice some form of lectio divina , the ancient, communal discipline of reading devotionally and meditative prayer.

Passion for God was one of the tallest spires in the cathedral of the Great Tradition. We hear it in Augustine’s Confessions: “Our hearts are restless till they rest in thee…Come into my heart and inebriate it, enabling me to forget the evils that beset me and embrace you, my only good.”

According to Augustine, the key to happiness is to want the one right thing, which is God himself. He saw man and God through the prism of desire: We have a hole in our hearts only God can fill, and as desiring creatures we run around trying to fill it with other things until we come home to God.

About our desires, Lewis observes: “Our Lord finds our desires are not too strong, but too weak.” Following Augustine, he notes that “we are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea.”

Lectio divina is the ancient community practice of reading the Bible aloud, meditating on what they read or heard until they had memorized it, praying through what they read, and resting in God’s presence, praising him for the privilege of union with him. In short, it was reading and praying devotionally with the expectation of experiencing God.

Commenting on this stream of the Great Tradition, Armstrong writes:

[It] is medicine for a peculiar ailment of many post-modern Christians–the spiritual torpor and indiscipline induced by lives of material gratification and amusing ourselves to death…Our modern spiritual illness involves not just spiritual inaction but also spiritual and emotional distance. By this I mean a sort of “flatlining” of the spirit: We may so easily fall into an attitude that says, “There may be a God, there may be a Jesus who died for our sins. And while I believe these things, they do not touch my heart, [or define my identity].

The offer of Christianity, if we let God have his way, is to share in the life of Christ. The Great Tradition accepted that offer and through the regular exercise of spiritual disciplines, such as lectio divina, they shared in the life of Christ, a life which is begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist.

So today, practicing some form of the ancient, communal discipline of reading devotionally and meditative prayer, lectio divina, can bring spiritual vitality to our efforts.

Give careful attention to the modes of devotion by which earlier Christian communities trained themselves for union with God and the balance they achieved between their devotional and vocational life.

Another hallmark of the Great Tradition is its understanding of the earthliness of human beings. To ignore our humanness, our embodiment, is tantamount to unmaking us as creatures of God.

Athanasius staunchly defended the truth that Christ’s divine condescension was to redeem what had been lost, and, in the process, to elevate humanity so we can again reflect the image of God. Christ’s incarnation raises the value and wonder of our humanity, and by his resurrection he has set us free to live and work and create in the power of his new life.

The church has always known that if we are to run well the race of our Christian life and ministry then we must practice disciplines to keep in check our emotional, physical, and spiritual lives. After all, we are vulnerable to the evil enchantments of worldliness and to becoming distracted from our created purpose, which is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever” (Westminster Shorter Confession, 1646). We need, therefore, good, healthy routines and disciplines which redirect our desire toward God and train our humanity toward God.

Training is needful in most areas of life. To master a skill, trade, or profession, one needs passionate commitment to a goal, to study and learn the practical knowledge passed down within a tradition, and to practice a discipline. Choices must be made. When one says “no” to certain good or other things, she is saying “yes” to the person, goal, or object to which she has committed herself. Spiritual disciplines operate along the same principle: the exercise of them is for something, for union with God and sharing the life of Christ.

Far from being a denial of desire, spiritual disciplines require passion because the life into which Christ invites us is a life-long journey. It is what Eugene Peterson has described as “a long obedience in the same direction.”

Another important insight from the Great Tradition is the balancing of the contemplative (prayer) and active (vocational) life. Most contemporary Christian organizations attend to the business of their ministries, but not to the devotional dimension of their life together.

We do well to consider the modes of devotion by which earlier Christian communities trained themselves for union with God and the balance they achieved between their devotional and vocational life, especially as we seek a better balance between organizational work and prayer.

Conclusion

We have long believed that healthcare is good, and Christ makes healthcare better. Early childhood education is good, and Christ makes early childhood education better.
We believe the Church, the body of Christ, should engage community needs, and God has equipped the Church with the human capital and resources needed to do his will here in New Orleans. But what makes a non-profit or ministry organized to meet such needs, Christian?

Our ongoing inquiry has led us back to the Source, back to Christ. Our study of the Great Tradition and our assessment of our present landscape have led us to conclude that through the exercise of spiritual disciplines, people organized to meet community needs may share in the life of Christ.

Non-profits don’t become Christian automatically or by osmosis. The life of Christ must be nurtured, cultivated, and developed into the culture, ethos, and identity of a ministry or non-profit organization through the habituation of spiritual disciplines and practices. This principle stands out in relief as one surveys the literature and history of the church, even as we reflect on the reality of our personal experiences. Personal hygiene, fitness, and good eating habits don’t just happen; they take intentionality and the habituation of good habits. Mastery of skills, art, and professions don’t just happen; they take discipline, sacrifice, and practice.

Christian non-profits and ministries get many things right, but we so often miss the most important thing: our time together with Christ. Our recommendations are intended as suggested practices, not prescriptions. We recognize, however, that individuals don’t start disciplines they don’t value; they don’t stick to practices they don’t prioritize. Our hope is that Christian non-profits and ministries will value their life shared with Christ and will prioritize their time spent with Christ.

Long obedience in the same direction begins with a first step. It’s important to start with a step that isn’t strenuous or overwhelming. Consistency is the key. Spirituality and practicality are not antithetical; it is wise to plan a time when there are few conflicts and to select a place where there are few interruptions.

Soli Deo gloria