Part Six: The Walk

Everything before this part is something to use. This part is the place where the using stops. The benches, the cards, the instruments and the map are for particular moments. The walk is the rest of the time, which is nearly all of it. Chapter Twenty-One gives the shape of the walk and the one rule for reading it. Chapter Twenty-Two puts the walk where it is lived: in a local church, in the street, and in the ordinary hours.

Chapter Twenty-One — Concentric, Not a Ladder

Drawn from The Companion, The Vine Is the Path, The Anchor Below the Storm

One of the project's instruments carries a reference that no other part of this book has used. The Canonical Context Brief, which Chapter Sixteen described, helps a preacher place a text. Its seventh pass asks where the text speaks on the disciple's walk, and the brief gives nine positions to answer with.

A reader who has come this far will know most of them. Position two is Chapter Two. Position four is Chapter One. Position five is the vine of Chapter Three, and positions six, seven and nine are the school of Chapter Four. Position eight is the part the book has not yet named.

The list comes with a rule, and the rule matters more than the list. The brief calls it non-negotiable. These are "positions a message locates and serves, not stages a disciple completes and leaves behind." And then: "The list is concentric, not a ladder: later positions add depth without retiring earlier ones." The brief gives two examples of what that means. A disciple "deep into theosis (position 9) has not left position 2 behind; nearness to God deepens the felt poverty rather than resolving it." And restoration is "not a stage completed once" but the pattern of the whole walk at every depth. The brief's own test is whether a message "implies a hearer has 'moved past' poverty of spirit, or past the ongoing need for restoration." A message that does that "has drifted from what this corpus teaches regardless of what else it gets right."

This is the rule Part One began with. Matthew 5:3 is not a door that is walked through and shut. It is the floor of the house, and the walk takes place on it. Any reader who finishes this book feeling that he has moved up a rung has misread it, and this paragraph is the correction. The instruments of Part Three and Part Four, the map of Part Five, and the volumes the book summarizes are for a person standing at position two and walking in position five, wherever else he is also standing.

The walk has three seasons that every disciple meets. The corpus has something to say to each one.

The ordinary season. Most of the walk is dishes, email and the drive home. The Companion gives its practice in one sentence: "Not with a program. With a sentence, said inwardly, in the middle of the dishes or the email or the drive: You are here." It adds, "He will not scold you for the forgetting in between." The book's image of the practice is this: "The branch does not strain to be near the vine. It abides — and the sap rises on its own." The Vine Is the Path names the structure of the daily decision in three words, Ask, Wait and Move. It says of them: "These are not stages you pass through and leave behind. They are movements you cycle through repeatedly, moment by moment, decision by decision." The same concentric rule, in the other volume's words.

The dark season. The Anchor Below the Storm is addressed to the believer who has not felt God "in months, or years," and the sermon's answer is a distinction worth keeping: "You are not required to feel it for it to be true." It names where the knowing lives when the warmth is gone: "The knowing is not the warmth. The knowing is the orientation." And its last lines are given to the hour when the question is hardest. "The anchor holds now." "It will hold tonight between midnight and four." A disciple in position seven needs that sentence before he needs any instrument. Chapter Seventeen's first caution applies: a score describes a page, and a dark season is not a page. The corpus answers it with a sermon preached to a person.

The season after failure. The corpus does not treat failure as an exit from the walk. Position eight says so in the list's own words, and the caveat makes it a standing rule. Chapter Four gave the working distinction: sonship is a gift at the door, and walking is the day-by-day business. A disciple who has failed has missed a step. He takes the next one. The instruments cannot do this for him. The mercy that restores him is the one that received him at position three, and it has not changed.