Spiritual Disciplines

BONHOEFFER'S LIFE TOGETHER describes disciplines for Christian formation. Based on communal life, these disciplines assist Christians to take seriously Christ's call to discipleship.
This article describes the disciplines of dispersion and community, reading Scripture, prayer, solitude, discernment, service and confession. Disconnected from contemporary Western life, they seem to bear little relationship to spiritual awareness pedagogy contemporary classrooms. The article considers some classroom processes akin to Joyce and Weil's Personal Family and Social Family models of teaching that contribute to spiritual awareness pedagogy that eventually enables children to embody these disciplines as Christians who take their call to discipleship seriously.

Key Words: formation, classroom, spiritual disciplines, Bonhoeffer, Life Together, spiritual awareness pedagogy. Personal Family and Social Family models of teaching.

Genevan Reformer John Calvin produced a half dozen catechisms during his tenure in the city from 1536 to 1538 and 1541 to 1564. While not nearly so well-known as his Institutes of the Christian Religion or Geneva Bible, and not nearly so heavily used today as the later Reformed catechisms of Heidelberg or Westminster, Calvin's catechisms were impressive for their biblical acuity, pristine language, and doctrinal precision and for their power to integrate the far flung Calvinist communities of the sixteenth century. This Article samples these catechisms, and analyzes their use in spiritual formation and discipline for both children and adults in Geneva.

When the Lord's Prayer is seen as providing a pattern for focused attentiveness in the life of prayer, it becomes a transformative means of immersing oneself in the human-divine dialogue, which authentic prayer ever is. A slightly different form of this essay was also published in Paul Anderson, Following Jesus: The Heart of Faith and Practice (Newberg, OR: Barclay Press, 2013) 68-77.