005 We Become What We Practice
The Slow Work of Forming Healthier Christian Communities
With assistance from Judy Mitchell and Josh Daum
Why Doesn’t Anything Really Change?
It happens almost every Sunday.
Worship has ended. People gather around coffee, and someone notices a visitor standing alone with a paper cup in hand. A few members walk over with warm smiles.
“Good morning! I don’t think we’ve met before.”
The visitor shares a name. Someone asks where they live. Another describes the preschool or the mission committee, points toward the stained-glass windows, and explains their history. Before long, the visitor knows about the choir, the fundraiser, and the upcoming events.
The congregation has been kind. No one intended to make the visitor feel unwelcome.
But notice where the attention went. No one asked what brought this person through the doors that morning. No one asked what was happening in their life or how the church could pray for them. The room’s attention flowed toward the church rather than toward the person standing in front of it.
This is remarkably common. Most congregations are filled with caring people who would name hospitality as one of their deepest values.
But our attention often reveals our values more honestly than our words do.
Hospitality is not simply being friendly. It is the repeated practice of directing our attention toward another person with genuine curiosity. Learned over time, practiced until it becomes instinct, curiosity becomes one of the ways love takes shape. Many churches have practiced talking to visitors for decades. Far fewer have practiced becoming curious about them.
The difference seems small.
It reveals something large about how Christian communities are formed.
We tend to assume our values shape our culture. We write mission statements and reorganize committees, believing a clearer vision will make us the people we hope to be.
Experience tells a different story. A congregation may say it values relationships while organizing its common life around business. It may long for younger families while quietly expecting them to adapt to habits formed decades earlier. It may speak of prayer with real feeling while letting prayer become a brief prelude before the “real work” of a meeting begins.
The gap is rarely hypocrisy.
More often, it is formation.
We do not become what we aspire to.
We become what we repeatedly practice.
For years I assumed healthier churches—and eventually presbyteries—would come mainly from better decisions, clearer structures, and sharper strategy. Those things matter. Good structures protect people, create accountability, and make healthy ministry more likely. Poor ones can frustrate even a faithful community. But over time I noticed something no organizational chart could explain: healthy churches and presbyteries often had ordinary structures, while struggling ones sometimes had excellent ones. The difference lived in the quiet, repeated practices that shaped how people listened, prayed, welcomed, disagreed, forgave, and paid attention to one another. Practices became habits. Habits became culture. Eventually, culture shaped everything else.
Perhaps the first question is not, What should we reorganize?
Perhaps it is, What are we practicing?
The Practices We Stop Seeing
Every community is practicing something. Obvious, perhaps—but the implications run deep.
We usually think of practices as the things we choose on purpose: praying before meals, serving at the food pantry, singing hymns, celebrating Communion. Those shape us. But they are not the only patterns forming a community. The most influential practices are often the ones no one notices anymore—patterns inherited, repeated so often they stop feeling like choices and start feeling like simply “the way we do things.”
Take a leadership meeting, a presbytery committee meeting, or a nonprofit board meeting. Not the agenda—everything around it. Does someone rush through a devotion so the “real work” can begin, or does scripture actually shape what follows? Who speaks first, and who speaks most? When someone offers a different view, does the room lean in or fold its arms? None of that appears in the minutes. Yet it may be the most important thing happening in the room, because it reveals exactly where the group’s attention rests.
Conflict works the same way. Every congregation and every presbytery disagrees; the question is what people have practiced doing about it. Some go quiet and defensive. Some move hard conversations into the parking lot. Others have learned, slowly, to stay at the table and speak honestly, trusting that disagreement need not end the friendship. None of those responses are improvised in the moment. They have been rehearsed for years.
Budgets deserve the same scrutiny. What receives attention first in a budget conversation, and what passes almost without discussion? What is treated as nonnegotiable, and what becomes the first line cut when money tightens? A congregation—or a presbytery—can believe mission matters most and still spend its best energy, year after year, protecting the building. A budget is a financial document, but it is also a record of where a community’s attention actually goes.
Every community also celebrates something. Listen to the stories told after worship, in the newsletter, and from the pulpit. Is the Christian community more animated by a balanced budget or by a changed life, a served neighbor, a restored relationship? What we celebrate reveals where we direct our attention, and over time, what we celebrate becomes what we seek.
This is how culture forms: not mainly through mission statements, but through small, repeated claims on our attention until we stop noticing we’re making them.
Christians have long had a word for repeated, formative practices: liturgy. Strictly speaking, the word refers to the church’s public worship, where prayer, song, confession, and Communion shape our attention week after week toward who God is and who we are becoming. But the same principle extends beyond the sanctuary. Session meetings have a liturgy. Presbytery assemblies have a liturgy. Conflict has a liturgy. Hospitality, budgets, and storytelling each have a liturgy. Every repeated pattern is training a community’s attention, whether we intend it or not.
That realization changes the questions leaders ask. Before rewriting a policy, we might first ask: What are we already practicing? Where does our attention actually go? What kind of people is that forming us to become?
Those questions prepare us to read the Gospels differently—to notice that Jesus was not only teaching ideas about the reign of God. He was training a community’s attention until its shared life began to make visible the reign of God he proclaimed.
Jesus Formed a Community Before He Sent a Movement
If repeated practice shapes a community, this is not a new insight. It is one of the oldest in scripture.
It is easy to focus almost entirely on what Jesus taught—the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the great commandments. We are right to study his words. But Jesus did far more than teach. He formed a people.
The Gospels show a rabbi who invited ordinary women and men to share his life: walking together, eating together, praying together, crossing social boundaries together, failing together, beginning again together. His disciples did not simply attend lectures. They learned a way of life.
Notice how rarely Jesus solved a problem by giving more information. When the disciples argued about greatness, he placed a child among them. When they needed to understand servant leadership, he knelt and washed their feet. When thousands gathered with nothing to eat, he placed bread in the disciples’ hands and asked them to feed the crowd. When they asked him how to pray, he did not lecture on prayer. He prayed with them.
The Gospels compress three years into a few hundred pages. The disciples lived those years one ordinary day at a time—thousands of conversations, hundreds of shared meals, long roads between villages, patient corrections, failures, and second chances. Their attention was being retrained, meal by meal, mile by mile. The reign of God was not only explained to them. It became the environment they learned to inhabit.
We often assume transformation follows better information—a compelling enough sermon, a clear enough vision, a persuasive enough argument. Jesus trusted something slower. Character forms as truth is practiced in community over time, not merely heard. His words gave meaning to the shared life he invited his disciples into, and that shared life gave flesh to everything he taught.
The church inherits both: the teaching, and the way of life that makes the teaching visible. Before Jesus entrusted his disciples with a mission, he spent years shaping people who could carry it. The mission grew out of the community he had formed, not the other way around.
That same pattern runs through the whole biblical story, including one of Israel’s darkest seasons.
When the Institutions Were Gone
Israel’s story makes the same case from another angle.
God gave Israel institutions to order its life as a covenant people—temple, priesthood, monarchy, festivals, and sacrifice. These were gifts. They gave shape to Israel’s worship and reminded the people that they belonged to God and to one another.
But the prophets kept warning that institutions alone could never produce faithfulness. The people offered sacrifices while neglecting justice. They kept the festivals while exploiting the vulnerable. The outward forms of religion survived even as the heart drifted. The problem was never the institutions themselves. It was the belief that institutions could accomplish what only a practiced way of life could produce.
Then came the catastrophe no one imagined. Jerusalem fell. The temple was destroyed. The monarchy ended. Everything that had seemed permanent was gone.
By any ordinary measure, that should have been the end of the story. Nations that lose their homeland and institutions rarely survive. Israel did, because its identity had never rested only in those visible structures. Beneath them was a people who had learned, however imperfectly, to keep Sabbath, to pray, to teach their children the story, and to trust the promise.
Those practices turned out to be portable. The temple could be destroyed, but prayer could still be offered. The monarchy could end, but a mother could still tell her child the story of the Exodus. The land could be lost, but not the God who had called them into covenant.
This is not an argument that structure does not matter. Some structures must change regardless of the culture around them—a governance model that hands one person unchecked power, a budget with no real oversight, a polity that makes abuse easy to hide. Waiting patiently for culture to reform a dangerous structure is not faithfulness; it is negligence. Structure and culture continually shape one another. Healthy structures strengthen faithful practices. Unhealthy ones can undermine even a community with good intentions.
The claim here is narrower, and still important. Structure can organize a community, protect it, and sometimes wound it. It cannot, by itself, produce the kind of people a faithful community needs. That is the slower work of formation: worship, prayer, shared meals, truth-telling, forgiveness—the ordinary practices that rarely make it into an annual report but give life to everything else. Institutions built on that foundation become living servants. Cut off from it, even the strongest institution eventually goes hollow.
If that is true, Christian leadership is not primarily about designing better organizations.
It is about cultivating the practices that keep forming a people.
What Leaders Really Cultivate
If communities are formed through repeated practices, leadership begins to look different than we often imagine.
It is tempting to think of leaders primarily as visionaries, strategists, or problem solvers. Those responsibilities matter. Congregations, presbyteries, and Christian organizations all need wise decisions, thoughtful administration, and leaders who can respond faithfully to changing circumstances. Yet Christian leadership begins one step earlier. Before leaders shape plans, they are shaping practices. Whether they intend to or not, they are teaching people what deserves attention, what is worth celebrating, how disagreement should be handled, how newcomers are welcomed, and what faithfulness looks like in ordinary life. People learn these lessons far less from policy manuals than from repeated experience.
People notice whether their leaders listen before speaking. They notice whether meetings begin with genuine attentiveness to scripture or simply include a devotional before “getting down to business.” They notice whether difficult conversations are approached with patience or anxiety, whether mistakes become opportunities for learning or occasions for blame, and whether decisions emerge from prayerful discernment or from whoever speaks most forcefully.
Over time, these experiences become normal. They establish expectations about what leadership is and what the community values. That is how culture is formed.
This is why organizational change, by itself, so often disappoints. A church or presbytery may adopt a new committee structure while continuing to practice the same patterns of mistrust. It may rewrite its mission statement while continuing to celebrate the same measures of success. It may launch new ministries while repeating old habits of competition, exhaustion, or institutional self-preservation. The structure changes, but the culture often remains remarkably familiar.
Healthy structures matter because they support healthy practices. They clarify responsibility, establish accountability, remove unnecessary obstacles, and create room for ministry to flourish. They are like a trellis that supports the growth of a vine. Without the living vine, however, the trellis is only a framework.
Perhaps that is why scripture so often describes faithful leadership with images drawn from cultivation rather than construction. Shepherds tend a flock. Vinedressers prune branches. Farmers sow seed and wait for growth they cannot manufacture. Yet they do not labor without expectation. They cultivate in hope of a harvest. Paul expresses both the humility and the confidence of this work when he writes, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6).
We cultivate faithful practices in hope of a harvest we cannot manufacture, fully measure, or always live to see.
For Christian communities, that hoped-for harvest is not simply larger attendance, stronger institutions, or organizational survival. It is the visible fruit of God’s reign of shalom: people learning to love God and neighbor more fully; strangers becoming companions; truth being spoken with courage; wounds being repaired; power being used justly; resources being shared generously; and communities becoming more capable of participating in God’s healing work in the world.
Leaders cannot manufacture that harvest. They can cultivate the conditions in which faithful practices take root: telling stories that shape imagination, establishing rhythms of prayer and hospitality, interrupting unhealthy habits, and inviting people into a shared way of life. They may not live to see every result of what they plant. Some harvests come years later, through people and communities they may never know. But delayed fruit is not the same as absent fruit, and Christian hope does not labor without expectation.
Formation has always been slower than management. It unfolds through ordinary faithfulness repeated over months and years until the practices of a community become part of its character. That pace can feel frustrating to leaders under pressure to deliver measurable results. Yet it is the pace of agriculture, the pace of discipleship, and, throughout scripture, the pace at which God ordinarily forms a people.
The work of leadership, then, is not simply to build better organizations.
It is to cultivate the conditions in which God continues shaping a community into the likeness of Christ.
Begin with One Practice
By this point, the implications can feel overwhelming. If every meeting, every conversation, every budget discussion, and every shared habit is shaping the character of a ministry, where does a leader even begin?
The answer is surprisingly simple.
Begin with one practice.
Healthy communities are rarely transformed by dramatic moments. More often, they are shaped by small acts of faithfulness repeated until they become part of the community’s common life. The goal is not to redesign everything at once but to introduce one practice that gradually redirects the community’s attention toward Christ.
Imagine a leadership meeting that begins every time with ten minutes of genuine reflection on scripture before anyone touches the agenda—not a devotional exercise to complete, but the lens through which every decision is considered. Over time, leaders begin expecting God’s Word to shape their conversations rather than merely introduce them.
Or imagine a presbytery making room at every stated meeting for one story of a life changed through the shared ministry of its congregations. Participation and finances still matter, but the community slowly learns to celebrate transformed lives as readily as balanced budgets. Little by little, the presbytery’s imagination begins measuring faithfulness by more than institutional success.
Or imagine a leadership team that commits to asking one sincere question before offering a single rebuttal whenever disagreement arises. The practice does not eliminate conflict, but it gradually teaches everyone in the room that understanding another person’s perspective is not a threat to faithfulness. Listening becomes part of the community’s character.
None of these practices is especially complicated. None requires a constitutional amendment, a strategic planning process, or a major financial investment. Yet each quietly redirects a faith community’s attention. Wherever attention is repeatedly directed, formation follows.
Formation, however, is not an end in itself. We cultivate these practices in hope that they will bear the fruit of God’s shalom. We cannot control when that fruit appears, fully measure its reach, or assume that we will be the ones who gather it. But we practice in hope of a harvest.
This is one reason Jesus so often spoke about mustard seeds and yeast. God’s reign of shalom rarely announces itself through spectacle. It grows quietly, almost imperceptibly, until one day its presence becomes unmistakable. Christian formation often works the same way. Small practices, repeated faithfully over time, reshape people in ways that cannot be rushed or easily measured.
The temptation for leaders is to wait until they have the perfect plan before taking the first step. The invitation of the gospel is different. Begin with one faithful practice. Repeat it with patience. Allow it to become part of the community’s shared life. Then trust that God will use ordinary faithfulness to accomplish work that no strategic plan, by itself, could ever produce.
The Good News About What’s Already True
Every Christian community is already becoming something.
Whether anyone notices it or not, every meeting, every hallway conversation, every welcome offered to a stranger, every difficult conversation, every prayer, and every shared meal is shaping the life of the community. Those ordinary moments are teaching people what matters, where to direct their attention, and what it means to follow Christ together.
That realization can feel daunting.
It is also deeply hopeful.
It means the future of a ministry is not determined only by its next strategic plan, its next capital campaign, or its next major initiative. It is being shaped, day after day, by the countless small practices through which people learn to love God and one another.
This has always been God’s way. Israel learned faithfulness one Sabbath at a time. The disciples were formed one shared meal and one act of service at a time. The early church became a compelling witness not simply because it believed the right things, but because it practiced a distinctive way of life together. Their common life made the gospel visible.
These questions are not only for congregations. Presbyteries, denominations, camps, seminaries, and every ministry of the church are also becoming something. They too are shaped by the meetings they hold, the stories they celebrate, the conflicts they avoid, the prayers they pray, and the habits they repeat. No Christian institution is exempt from the slow work of becoming.
The same invitation stands before the church today. In a culture that prizes speed, efficiency, and measurable outcomes, Christian communities are called to something slower and, ultimately, more enduring: a shared life that continually draws people’s attention back to Christ and bears the fruit of God’s shalom in the world.
Some of that fruit may be visible quickly. Much of it will not. A conversation practiced differently today may make reconciliation possible years from now. A leader encouraged now may guide a congregation through a crisis long after those who encouraged her have moved on. A presbytery that learns to listen, pray, tell the truth, and share power may sow seeds whose harvest belongs to another generation.
Long before a Christian community is known for its ministries, its programs, or its buildings, it is becoming a certain kind of people. That work is happening today, whether anyone notices it or not.
The invitation, then, is not simply to ask what our churches and presbyteries are accomplishing.
It is to ask what they are becoming—and what fruit their common life is beginning to bear.
Because, in the end, we become the people our shared practices have been teaching us to be.
Questions for Reflection and Practice
- Choose one area of your community’s life—meetings, conflict, hospitality, budgeting, storytelling, worship, leadership, faith formation, or generosity. What is its present liturgy? In other words, what repeatedly happens, in what order, and who is expected to do what?
- Where does that liturgy direct the community’s attention? What does it teach people to value, protect, fear, celebrate, or avoid?
- What kind of people is this repeated pattern forming you to become? Where is it helping your community embody Christ’s love? Where might it be working against the values you profess?
- What fruit of God’s shalom would you hope to see if this liturgy became more faithful? Be concrete. What might change in people, relationships, the use of power, the sharing of resources, or the community’s relationship with its neighbors?
- What is one practice your community could begin, stop, or change for the next ninety days? What guidance, accountability, or partnership would help you practice it faithfully?
Deeper Practice One: Rewrite a Liturgy
Choose one recurring part of your common life and write its present liturgy using short action statements.
For example:
- We arrive hurriedly
- We offer a brief devotion
- We move immediately to business
- The same people speak first
- We debate proposals
- We avoid unresolved tension
- We adjourn when time expires
Then write a more faithful liturgy. Describe not only what the community will do, but where it hopes to direct its attention and what fruit it hopes the revised practice will bear.
Consider inviting another congregation, presbytery, ministry partner, or trusted outside leader to review the proposed liturgy. What can they see that may be difficult for your community to recognize from within?
Deeper Practice Two: Rewrite the Annual Report
The annual statistical report of the PC(USA) records important information about membership, demographics, baptisms, participation, and finances. These measures help describe the institutional condition of a congregation, but they do not fully describe its formation.
What questions could your congregation or presbytery add to its annual reporting so that it also learns to notice, remember, and celebrate formation?
Consider asking:
- Where did strangers become companions?
- Where did trust deepen or a damaged relationship begin to heal?
- Where did people learn to listen, pray, forgive, or speak truth more faithfully?
- Where was power shared or used more justly?
- How were resources directed toward mercy, justice, healing, or human flourishing?
- What repeated practice became more deeply rooted in our common life?
- What visible fruit of God’s shalom did we witness?
- What seeds did we plant whose harvest may belong to another generation?
- What did we attempt that did not bear the fruit we hoped for, and what did it teach us?
- How are we becoming a different kind of people because of the life we have practiced together?
Do not replace required statistical reporting. Place a report of formation and shalom beside it.
A Final Question
Imagine that your congregation’s building, programs, and formal structures disappeared tomorrow.
What practices would still enable you to live as a covenant people? What would your surrounding community miss most? What do your answers reveal about the life you are practicing together?