A reader wrote me an extraordinary letter. I’m sharing it with you with his permission, but with identifying information taken out:

I’m a 28 year-old Southern Baptist layperson.

I just read your article from two days ago, asking how the Benedict Option could be applied to Southern Baptist communities. I’ve been working on that exact problem for well on two years now.

I want to engage with your question, and then ask for your advice if I may be so bold…

One of the main problems I’ve encountered, even with pastors and elders who have read the Benedict Option and follow your blog and agree with your ideas, is their inability or unwillingness to rearrange their lives (social, financial, vocational, etc) to be able to live the Option with any kind of consistency.

My wife and I have spent the past two years, over three different churches, looking for correct doctrine and a congregation who loves one another, Benedict style. In the last church we were considering, in which I agreed with the pastors and elders doctrinally in almost every aspect and had even discussed the Benedict Option, we invited ten families over across multiple weeks, and multiple times. Including every elder and pastor. Each and every invitation was declined for various reasons, but the pattern was crystal clear.

Even in our current church led by a pastor who has read the Benedict Option, hospitality and the Benedict Option practically speaking means a one-off night of playing games and trivial conversation where Christ is never mentioned. And this is at the senior pastor’s house.

We don’t leave our church because in my more cynical moments, “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better,” to quote Robert Frost. I’ve been tempted by more liturgical churches with whom I disagree doctrinally, however.

One of the main problems I see in our Southern Baptist tradition is it’s very emphasis on doctrine.

“May no fate wilfully misunderstand me,” I am all about sound doctrine and holding fast to the faith delivered once for all.

But there seems to be a dangerous undercurrent amongst the younger generation of pastors, thinkers, and leaders whom I know which, practically speaking, abandons the Augustinian idea that we are not PRIMARILY “thinking” beings…we are “loving” beings, “desiring” beings. Correct arguments don’t move us, so much as embodied and incarnated truth. Theological syllogisms don’t change people, Christians living out theology in loving community change people.

I know, I know, the older generation of SBC-er’s has the reputation of being anti-intellectual etc. But the younger generation (especially coming out of Al Mohler’s Southern Seminary) are sharp, and doctrinally knowledgeable, and aggressive thinkers. The ones I know have read the Benedict Option and agree intellectually with you almost 100%.

But amidst all this correct thinking and sound (to me) doctrine, there’s very little of living it out communally. The preaching and teaching and Sunday school classes are all filled with truth, but there’s very little applying that truth to one another’s hearts throughout the week.

It’s like a Conference Christianity, where we all gather for the weekly conference to absorb information. Once the conference is over, there might be some small chit-chat afterwards, but we’re all more interested in lunch. We’ve achieved our aim after all – absorbing more information about theology. And since it’s a conference instead of a family, I don’t have to talk to you outside of the conference, for example throughout the week.

We have emphasized our knowledge to the detriment of our daily liturgical habits. If the medium is the message, we say that as long as you KNOW and BELIEVE (intellectual belief only) the right things, and don’t sin gratuitously, you can live however you want. In our culture, this tends to default to the the secular American Dream of radical individualism stemming from liquid modernity.

But you and others have taught me that the Church is a family, and as such daily habits, and weekly habits of praying for one another, getting to know one another spiritually, fasting and catechizing together incarnate the truths we proclaim we hold and teach. They are the boring, glorious ways the truths we KNOW shape who we ARE.

And that’s hard. It requires staying out late with little kids, traveling more than five minutes by car, being vulnerable with other sinful human beings, and actually reading Scripture and being an engaged Christ follower. Even the way our cities and towns are designed are against us, indeed against almost any kind of community (if you haven’t encountered Ray Oldenburg’s book “The Great Good Place” on that topic, I’d recommend it!). To Benedict (I turned it into a verb, ha!) requires not just correct thinking about community but a willingness and desire to turn your whole American life upside down, and expend copious amounts of energy fighting up stream.

We SBC-er’s HAVE a precedent for how to Benedict. The Puritans called it “Holy Conference”…when several families met throughout the week to apply truth and Scripture to one another’s lives. They wrote prodigiously on the subject, and there is a wealth of examples from their lives on how to forge communities. https://www.heritagebooks.org/products/godly-conversation-rediscovering-the-puritan-practice-of-conference-jung.html and https://banneroftruth.org/us/store/commentaries/judges-2/ (sermon 74) are some great places to start.

I don’t think my SBC Benedict would look terribly different from your Orthodox Benedict-ing. We may use different catechisms, and have different prayers, and follow different liturgies — but the principles are the same, as you’ve said so often before. Gather regularly outside of corporate worship, press into one another’s hearts and apply Scripture to each other, pray for one another, fast together etc…essentially what passionate Christ-followers have been doing for 2000 years before us.

However, I’m terribly discouraged. I’ve spent the better part of two years trying to instigate a Ben Op community, with sheer apathy as the only response – even from those who theoretically agree with your work.

So I’d like to ask how how you keep Holy Discontent, sent from God towards the state of His church, from crossing the line and becoming an idol of man-centered discontent??

All too often I’ve had to battle the sin of bitterness towards others in my church. I’m at my wit’s end of what to do…I lead the Men’s Ministry at our church, and regularly feel like tearing out my hair when I consider how to lead towards an authentic Ben Op community.

Do you know any other SBC-er’s who could advise me? Or any thoughts from your Orthodox tradition? Do you know anyone who has fought the uphill battle and succeeded whom you could put me in touch with? Any and all help would be a great encouragement — from one brother in Christ to another.

As I said above, I’ve dabbled with the idea of going to a more liturgical tradition. I have friends who are Anglican, and they are committed to liturgical and communal living. But I deeply care about the people in my church, and dislike the thought of abandoning them…

I thank the reader deeply for this letter. I am on vacation now in England, and don’t have time to give this letter the response it deserves. Maybe you do. I can tell you that I haven’t figured this out either — how to go from ideals to reality in my own life. I’m not even close. Mostly it’s my own fault, I think — I’ve always been really good at theory, but terrible at putting theory into practice — but if I start teasing out these ideas, I’ll be up all night, and I’m really tired, and have to be awake early in the morning to take my son cycling.

Please, readers, help this searching young Southern Baptist man. In so doing, you will also be helping this searching middle-aged Orthodox man.

(Hey readers, the comments switch over to Disqus tonight. You have been warned!)

UPDATE: Interesting comments from lots of folks. I especially was struck by these.

First, from Beowulf:

I grew up SBC and am tremendously grateful for how they brought me up to read and rely on Scripture. But having said that, I think it is a sinking ship.

The reader’s comments about how Baptists treat church like an information-absorbing seminar is dead-on. It isn’t enough for truth to be assented to merely at the cognitive level as though it were mere information, truth has to be lived. Truth is about conforming to an image of some kind. I am not saying any denomination has got this down, but Baptists might be the worst.

I think the SBC has appeared a bastion of traditional church teaching when really it is quite vulnerable to what folks on this site call liquid modernity.

I am sure the SBC tells itself it has held on to scriptural truth thus far because of sola scriptura but in fact, I think it has actually been coasting on Southern culture which is very traditional. I don’t think Baptists realize how much they have relied on a traditionalist culture surrounding them. They have been coasting and living on borrowed currency. When the culture turns, you will see how much sola scriptura counts for.

Against a backdrop of Progressivism, sola scriptura will actually become a Progressive weapon to attack all natural reason and natural law: “If Jesus didn’t explicitly say it, it isn’t binding” and it will all be wishy washy love nonsense from there.

The culture of the South is changing. Professional culture is becoming as woke in Charlotte and Atlanta as Boston or Seattle. As more SBCers go to college and become professionals in places like Nashville, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, etc they will become progressive.

Sadly, I expect the Big Southern City/suburban wing of SBC to completely fall and tear denomination apart. I hope they prove me wrong, but the reader’s frustration with the lack of will to engage in any sort of countercultural church fellowship outside services gives me little hope. I think the reader would do best for children/future children to find an LCMS or ACNA or OPC church.

Second, from Digory:

Sorry for inside baseball references, but here’s my take:

It once looked like Gen X and Y SBC would be against the “deliberate forgetting” that characterizes modernity. There was a movement to reinvigorate historical practices. Kids were read the Puritans and Calvin. Mark Dever (a well-known pastor) was all about resurrecting the things your grandmother knew about healthy churches that your parents had forgotten.

But in the past few years, that seems to be dying. It’s most notable in the area of race and gender. The only way of “ridding” the SBC of its racial history is a whitewash. Our seminaries were founded by confederates. Your grandparents used slurs and didn’t march for Civil Rights. The Puritan divines all held slaves. Unless we can redeem the old, the only other option is deliberate forgetting. So I see too many youngs who treat the olds as anti-intellectual has beens, while the youngs are all supposed to have sharp minds and seminary degrees.

Here’s the deal: it was Baptist congregationalism that was our secret sauce. It was a social capital building machine for centuries. Your grandparents might not have been educated enough to articulate it, but it was in their bones and shared experience. It looks like inefficient madness to a modern person. But it fostered a focus on community, shared responsibility, and spiritual formation of everybody in the group.

But our smart kids have canceled their Wednesday night business meetings, because it’s difficult and scary to watch congregants make decisions. They’ve gelded their deacons, the scriptural office practically assigned the task of BenOp’ing. And they’ve focused too much attention on training other smart kids who can go to seminary and join them in the pulpit, and not the kids who will be in the pews.

So my advice is to look for a multigenerational church that has decent, if not perfect, SBC doctrine. A strong set of pastor-elders, with a strong set of deacons. And here’s the key: it must have frequent congregational meetings to make meaningful decisions together. There will be boring moments, but you’ll have a spiritual community that reproduces. It’s how Baptists BenOped for hundreds of years. We won’t grow until we revive it.