Writing in Mockingbird, Simeon Zahl surveys competing “theories of change” in Christian ministry and offers his pitch for an “Augustinian” approach. As he explains at the outset,
Every ministry makes basic theological assumptions about human nature and about how God works in people’s lives. In more theological terms, you could say that every form of ministry has an implicit theological anthropology and an implicit theology of grace. These assumptions are not always conscious or clearly articulated, but they have huge effects on pastoral practice — and on Christian experience.
He looks at the implicit anthropologies of a “sacramental participation” approach to ministry and a “Christian information” approach. (I trust you can envision the broad contours of these approaches.) While acknowledging that these various approaches are not mutually exclusive, Zahl argues that typically a person has a primary theory of change that informs their overall approach to ministry.
In the second half of the essay, Zahl outlines his Augustinian approach, which (obviously following Augustine) gives priority to the heart and its desires as the key to change. He lists three theological assumptions of this approach:
First, as I’ve already said, human beings are driven not by knowledge or will but by desire. We are creatures of the heart, creatures of love.
Second, the human heart is very hard to change. It strongly resists direct efforts to change it. The truth of this point is easy to demonstrate. Have you ever tried to change someone’s mind about politics through rational argument? Have you ever tried to talk someone out of loving the person they have fallen in love with? I rest my case.
Third, human beings are wired in such a way that judgment kills love. When we feel judged, we hide our love away, we put up our walls, we resist. If your theory of change depends in any way on the idea that telling someone what is wrong with them will lead to them changing what is wrong with them, you will be sorely ineffective. Augustine says it beautifully in his treatise On the Spirit and the Letter: “[The law] commands, after all, rather than helps; it teaches us that there is a disease without healing it. In fact, it increases what it does not heal so that we seek the medicine of grace with greater attention and care.”
He then provides four implications that this theory of change—this Augustinian approach—has for ministry practice:
First, it means that the heart of Christian ministry is the facilitation of an emotional encounter with the God revealed in Jesus. I say this without condition or reservation. If you are not successfully engaging with people’s feelings and desires, with their anxieties, their loves, and their pain, then you are just playing a game with Christian words; you are not doing ministry. The intransigence of the human heart is the fundamental problem of Christian ministry. The Spirit of God traffics in emotion and desire. […]
Second, the Augustinian approach assumes that effective ministry always must deal with the fact of human resistance to judgment and law. It means that you won’t end a sermon or a church service with a moral exhortation or a set of behavioral guidelines. And it means that you are likely to deploy the great preaching paradigm, the distinction between the law and the gospel. Law-Gospel preaching is one of the most powerful technologies of the heart that we have available to us as Christians.
Third, if the Augustinian approach is true, it means that certain other approaches are not going to work very well. If you think you can change people by preaching sermons whose purpose is just extracting practical advice for Christian living from Scripture, you are not going to make much of a dent in that brick wall, I assure you.
This perspective is also important for thinking about spiritual practices. Yes, habitual prayer, service, contemplation, justice work, and Bible reading can have powerful shaping effects on people, including on their emotional experience. But — and this is an important but — the Augustinian perspective tells us that we can do all this only once our hearts have already changed enough that we desire to engage in the practice. No one will develop a transformative and durable new practice of prayer unless they fundamentally want to and want to enough to carry them through life’s inevitable obstacles. As Jesus told us, you must change the tree first, then the right fruit will follow (Mt 12:33-35). Focus on the heart, and the practices will follow; focus on the practices alone, and we’re back to the brick wall.
Finally, an Augustinian theory of change means that technologies of the heart are important in ministry. Novels, stories, movies, illustrations — these are powerful technologies of the heart, much more powerful than mere words and ideas. The reason we love stories, the reason we love art and music, and the reason such things can be so transformative when we draw on them in ministry, is that they know how to speak the strange electric language of the heart.
The whole piece is absolute gold. The first implication in particular (“the heart of Christian ministry is the facilitation of an emotional encounter with the God revealed in Jesus”) rings truer with each passing year. Most ministers probably can only learn this lesson the hard way (i.e., on the far end of much ineffective experience). But for those who never learn it: How do you keep at it? I genuinely wonder…