Kirsten Sanders, in an essay ostensibly about the current online discourse around “Rules of Life,” offering some programmatic statements that resonate deeply with me:
Improving people is not the primary work of the church.
People can’t be programmed.
The Church is not a social program.
Rules of Life arise from community, they don’t exist as individual devices, or to form a community.
If we do not stop expecting worship to do something, it will never do the thing it is actually for.
Like Sanders, I’m fairly ignorant of the “Rules of Life” discourse. Which also means I’m uninterested in how well her piece speaks into that conversation. Regardless, I do think she’s putting her finger on something really important—in this essay and in her writing more generally. She says this, almost in passing:
I’ll tell you now that I think sin, and its opposite, grace, is the chief misunderstanding we are having in our technological age. It’s not “the problem of the human” merely; it is how we operate, what kinds of things we are prone to, how we will and don’t and how our desires can so turn us against ourselves that we become hedgehogs, operating at a remove from ourselves, we desire to outsource virtue and vice. This is why things like algorithms and advertising are so so hideous. We consider that man himself might be bought and sold and formed, as an outcome, as a product, as a result.
Thus, she fittingly concludes:
And so I will continue to risk the misunderstanding and say again, you do not need a technique or a strategy or a Rule. The fact that you think you do suggests to me that what you do need is a better understanding of what it is you are. A creature, a vessel, a sinner in need of grace. “Holiness” is not an output.
Holiness is not an output. Let that one sink in for a while.