How Do People Actually Change? - Mockingbird

The Rule is another example of Augustine’s spiritual realism: it is an honest, unsentimental guide for the challenges of living in community, well acquainted with the heart’s crooked bent toward selfishness, snobbery, greed, and exclusion.

Changing our model requires us working through issues of theology, rethinking definitions of community, reimagining our idea of discipleship and ministry, and rewriting our long-held liturgies.

What practical things can help the quarreling husband and wife to function redemptively? How can the counselor build a relationship that promotes God’s work in the discouraged, struggling woman? How can parents establish such relationships with their children? How can pastors build them into their ministry? What do relationships that promote person

And in that moment Augustine’s counsels took on a new relevance for me as I realized that in this season of our marriage and in this stage on the road, the kind of detachment Augustine encouraged—the refusal to be dominated by the libido—was exactly the word I needed to hear.

The success of this endeavor can be assessed by a bottom-line question every preacher should ask at the end of each sermon: When my listeners walk out the doors of this sanctuary to perform God’s will, with whom do they walk? If they march to battle the world, the flesh, and the devil with only me, myself, and I, then each parades to despair. Howev