2023 Book Study: The Common Rule by Justin Earley

Dear Renewal Church,

Starting February, we are inviting our church community to enter into a season of exploring how our relationship with the living God is worked out in our day to day life through the habits of our hearts, mind and hands. We are exploring this together through our Formation Group gatherings using “The Common Rule” by Justin Earley. This resource will help draw us deeper into an integrated life: how we structure our life matters in how we are formed as people; as Jesus invites us. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love” (John 15:9, ESV). We are invite to become people that share in the quality of life that Jesus has: in the loving presence of the Triune God.

Eugene Peterson’s Message paraphrase of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, highlights this a bit more:

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you” (Romans 12:1-2, MSG)

Through this book we are exploring together how we might fix our attention to the living God in all of life. Or more precisely we are walking together through a set of practices that gives us a structure for our hearts, mind and hands to orient towards the living God. This sort of intentional and ordered living (of putting to habit our hearts, minds and hands) is called a “Rule of Life” as articulated within Church and Christian history. While we might have varying modern-day connotations around “rules”, when we think of a Rule of Life, explains Pastor Ken Shigematsu, we can think of a grapevine.

“The word rule actually comes from the Greek word that means “trellis.” A trellis is a support system for a vine or a plant that enables it to grow upward and bear fruit. For a grapevine to produce good grapes it must have a trellis to support and guide its growth or it will slump to the ground. When this happens the fruit tends to rot before it ripens. Grapevines in the wild will use just about anything—a tree or even a rock—as a trellis. It is part of their nature to seek structure. Like a trellis, a rule of life supports and guides our growth. It supports our friendship with Christ so that we bear the fruit of His character and are able to offer his nourishing life to others. The purpose of the rule, in this sense, is not to be harsh or confining, it is to cultivate fruit. It serves as a pattern for life that enables us to experience the presence of Jesus in each moment of our lives, empowering us to become people who embody his love to others.” (God in My Everything, pg. 21)

Justin Earley’s book draws us into putting into practice a set of daily and weekly habits that centre around this love of God (and neighbour). These habits aim to help us reorder and resist the ways we are deformed by the overly-technical, impersonal and fragmented way of modern life. We are excited to journey through this together as it brings us into the Lenten season.

Grace and peace,

The Elders, Pastor Josh