Earlier this year, I reviewed the book Practicing the Way and said it was the best book I read in 2024.
And earlier this summer, as a church we completed the 8 week Practicing the Way course. In many ways the course has been even more significant experience as I have travelled on this journey with my wife and around 60-odd others from our church. Its been a transformative experience for many of us.
Formation
The book and the course are about spiritual formation: how we become more like Jesus. And the word ‘practising’ is critical.
We have to be careful with books and courses, because reading or learning about God can be a seductive distraction from living for God. When it comes to matters of faith, our culture easily centralises cogitation and marginalises application.
We can fill our heads with theological knowledge, but it’s what we do that counts. We are called to practice the Way, not just think about the Way.
1. It gives a fresh challenge
The course delivers a fresh and energising challenge to take Jesus seriously as a spiritual teacher, a guide in how to practice a different way of life.
Discipleship should be thought of more like an apprenticeship rather than just something we believe:
“Sadly very few people – including many Christians – take Jesus seriously as a spiritual teacher…to a large number of Western Christians, he is a delivery mechanism for a particular theory of atonement, as if the only reason he came was to die, not to live…for Jesus, salvation is less about getting you into heaven and more about getting heaven into you.”
And Comer pulls no punches about the demands involved in following Jesus:
“It will require you to reorder your entire life around following Jesus as your undisputed top priority, over your job, over your money, your reputation – over everything. Yet all these things will find their rightful place once integrated into a life of apprenticeship.”
2. It’s straightforward
Practising the Way is deep but not complex. There is a straight-forwardness which I found really helpful. The course has a simple structure: watching the video, discuss in a small group and commit to some homework, and is shaped around three key ‘goals’:
Be with Jesus. Doing the basic but hard task of spending time with Jesus in prayer, reflection, solitude and scripture. How do we resist the toxicity of busyness, including religious activity, and the numbing bingeing on food, booze and entertainment.
Become like him. “The single most important question is: Are we becoming more loving? Not, Are we becoming more biblically educated? Or practicing more spiritual disciplines? Or more involved in church?..Love is the acid test of spiritual formation.”
Do as he did. Comer suggests three priorities: Make room for the gospel, preach the gospel and demonstrate the gospel. In each, he gives practical pointers and challenges the common ways we duck the uncomfortable elements: “I think I’ll just mow my neighbour’s lawn and hope they figure out Jesus rose from the dead.”
3. It’s practical
The course is ultimately about transforming our practices. It encourages participants to develop their own ‘Rule of Life’ based around nine practices: Sabbath, Solitude, Prayer, Fasting, Scripture, Community, Generosity, Service and Witness.
Comer believes a Rule can do for our life what a trellis does for a vine: helps it grow and be fruitful. Our lives require resistance to those things which harm us and we need ‘the constraint of commitment’ to that which bring health and life:
“I hate to break it to you but you are being controlled, by your addiction to your phone, the appetites of your body for pleasure…Choose your own constraints, or they will be chosen for you, not by the Spirit of God stirring your own heart toward love, but by a programmer in Silicon Valley working to steal your time and shape your behaviour.”
The best recommendation
The best thing I can say about the Practicing the Way course is that it has helped me make concrete changes to how I live. It has not filled my head with learning but helped me take steps of practical action.
I want to avoid any sense of ‘boasting’ but I think its worth sharing the specific changes the course has helped me make:
- I have grown closer in relationships with people in my church who I have known for many years but have never talked to deeply.
- I manage my mobile phone differently. I no longer have it in my bedroom and I don’t look at it until after I have done my morning prayers. This has made a big difference to the focus of my prayer times.
- I have taken steps to be far more intentional about how I mark a weekly Sabbath. We have committed to a weekly meal to offer hospitality to local people and to mark the start of this period of rest.
Taking these steps in the last few months has been great for me and for my wife. We feel more energised, focussed and disciplined in our efforts to follow the way of Jesus. No other course has had this kind of practical effect on me.
As I am learning, discipleship doesn’t just happen. It takes Practice.
See the Practicing the Way website to see the course and other resources. All are free.
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Grace + Truth 
Thank you for this, Jon. Can I testify to a different way? I have never found spiritual disciplines and the spiritual director path changes me very much. I may be weird because so many testify positively about those ways. Yet “Wisdom is justified by all her children” (Luke 7:35). The Jesus of the Gospels gives no teaching on prayer times, Sabbaths and all that stuff. He is a leader but not a director. He commands love. The people who have helped an oddball like me have been Kierkegaard, Ellul and Forsyth and less famous walkers on the Way.
The above paragraph reads like a rebuttal but it is only a testimony. Christ is the leader on the way. That way is not narrow in a prescriptive sense but narrow in that each person must walk it in their own way. As you often emphasise, we must walk in fellowship with the church. Still, we need to work out our own salvation. No aid takes away the element of fear and trembling.
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Thanks Semper – its really helpful to have your testimony and I agree with the priority of ‘outcome’ – what is the fruit of such things? This is their test. Jesus often uses harvest as an analogy for judgement – and what counts at harvest – the fruit!
I found your experiences true when it comes to silent prayer – I found it profoundly unhelpful but beat myself up about it a bit as I wanted to be like Thomas Merton or someone and have these deep mystical experiences. But I have had to find my own way. Thanks for reading and sharing.
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I agree Practicing The Way is an excellent book and the course is very helpful but I continue to lament that ‘making disciples’ is not included as a practice that every Christian should routinely engage in.
Why is disciple-making not seen as a fundamental Christian practice?!
Failing to include disciple-making in the list of Christian practices is yet another example of the ‘Great Omission’ that churches routinely overlook, despite this being Jesus’s command as highlighted in Matthew 28v19-20.
Christians must include intentionally making disciples who make disciples (i.e. not just converts) if they want to truly practice The Way.
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