The Restoration Project
The Rev. Christopher H. Martin
January, 2016
If you were to visit my parish of St. Paul’s, San Rafael, California, I believe you would find it familiar. We are a pastoral size parish with just under a hundred people on most Sundays. The sanctuary is in the carpenter gothic style, from 1869, and we worship right out of the 1979 Prayer Book. The Annual Meeting, the Harvest Bazaar, Godly Play and the flow of communion kits to our beloved shut-ins would make it feel like home. We are reliably ‘Old School.’ We’re also inclusive and generous in the way so many Episcopal Churches are. We host four 12 step programs every week and support our local interfaith council.
What’s different at St. Paul’s is our devotion to core Christian practices. In the Episcopal spirit of ‘all may, none must, some should’ there are at least three doors that are always open for people to pursue spiritual depth. First, there are Bibles in every pew. Almost every sermon includes some time flipping through the text, learning the background and making connections. Further, there are three well-attended Bible Studies every week.
Second, every week there are seven different ways to serve our local poor. These include serving hot breakfast at our local school for probationary youth, hosting a support group every Friday afternoon for teen mothers and their children and regularly visiting seven men on San Quentin’s Death Row, which is less then five miles from our church.
Finally, and most importantly, every week six small groups of between four and eight people meet to pray, to support each other and to challenge each other to grow. These groups, called Discipleship Groups, begin each meeting with a carefully crafted liturgy that includes the recitation of seven vows. These vows are to pray daily, worship weekly, serve ‘the least’ of our neighbors, give generously, learn scripture, discern call and commit to the group. These vows work through the psychology of cognitive-dissonance, where the discrepancy between word and action eventually leads to commitment. These ensure that Discipleship Groups are not just support groups, but are always challenging us to reach out in mission and to grow deeper in our faith.
What I’ve just described are three elements of The Restoration Project, a reform movement within the church that I’ve been leading since 2010. We became a movement at a Think Tank of GenX and Millenial Clergy at the former Trinity Camp and Conference Center in Connecticut. At the gathering, when I described the various experiments in Christian living I was running at St. Paul’s, a small group expressed interest in trying similar things in their parishes and Dioceses. There are now parishes in at least five Dioceses actively running experiments in the mode of The Restoration Project.
The roots of The Restoration Project (TRP) are much deeper than a conversation in 2010. I didn’t so much build the movement as I coaxed it out of pre-existent material. For one, I used the outstanding process of Christian formation at All Saints’, Beverly Hills, where I was Associate Rector for five years. People don’t just jump into Christian maturity, they need help in learning the Christian story, discovering how to pray and developing the skills to read scripture. They also need the opportunity to hear stories from other people like them. Most of our parishioners are stuck in a rut of the spiritual equivalent of the 5th grade. Repeatedly, patiently and passionately teaching the basics of the faith is essential for welcoming people into the core practices.
Second, I was challenged and energized by the difficult balance of both contemplation and action modeled by the brothers of the Society of St. John the Evangelist. All of us feel either a deeper call to the inner journey of prayer or to the outer journey of service. The brothers, through their living Rule, hold each other and all who are part of the Fellowship of the Society of St. John to both the inner and the outer work. Prayer without service leads to narcissism and service without prayer leads to burn-out.
Finally, and most importantly, I was motivated by the discrepancy I felt between my own Christian life and the life of Christ I experienced at the high-commitment Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. This ecumenical church was founded and led by two Baptists, Gordon and Mary Crosby. When, in 2002, I heard Gordon teach that ‘structure’ is essential for spiritual maturity and that churches in America pay too little attention to ‘structure,’ I felt a call to action. What ‘structure’ could be introduced into ordinary churches to start encouraging the beautiful and active devotion to Jesus I experienced at Church of the Saviour?
In the two years following the Think Tank in 2010, a small group of us met at Church of the Saviour to create a ‘structure’ that would bear fruit in our parishes. After much conversation and prayer, and also consultation with Gordon Cosby and other members of Church of the Saviour, we crafted the liturgy of Discipleship Groups.
When the group of seven of us used the liturgy for the first time, we decided to go around the circle and honestly tell each other where we were in relation to the seven vows. We all felt shame. None of us was seven for seven in prayer, worship, service, generosity, learning, discernment of call and devotion to a Discipleship Group. Each of us felt intensely that the vows expressed reasonable and moderate goals for a Christian life, and yet here we were as Rectors, Deans, a Bishop and a lay person, and we all fell far short. Clearly, there was a lot of work to be done, starting with ourselves!
The point of these groups is to hold us in love as we die to our old selves and are reborn in Christ. This doesn’t happen overnight and it doesn’t happen without some pain and some cost. But the good news is that it doesn’t happen without love, either. Discipleship Groups are precisely that place where we learn to give and receive love as precisely the children of God that we are. The most visible expression of this love is in gradually being able to live out the sixth vow, which is discernment of call. We have each, lay and ordained, been given unique gifts by God, and we honor both God and ourselves when we use those gifts as God intends.
The Restoration Project has good news, bad news and good news. The good news is that if you want to pursue the core Christian practices through TRP, you don’t need to fundamentally reinvent yourself. Everything you need lies close to hand. The bad news, as the seven of us experienced in DC, is that we are likely to be far from perfect in the seven core practices, and it will be costly to get from here to there. Praying at least 20 minutes every day or learning the whole of scripture is likely to take the same sort of deep work as getting to the financial tithe.
But again the good news is that all of this work, rigorous as it may be, always feels deeply right. I believe that the seven core practices of TRP are among the best and most noble reasons we were drawn into the church in the first place. In this movement we never find ourselves asking ‘what does this church-work of TRP have to do with my loving relationship with Jesus?’ In each case, out of love, we are practicing the disciplines he taught.
The heart of TRP is Discipleship Groups, but we have also developed Basic formation classes, ways of developing outreach, a Bible Study method and a Lenten Challenge. Forward Movement has also published my book, called The Restoration Project. The book explores the deep Benedictine roots of this way of being Christian.
But what’s most important about TRP is our relationships among each other. We are constantly supporting and challenging each other and always learning. We are not a program or a product. We are a community of loyal and faithful Christians creating a behavioral and structural change in the church, starting with ourselves and our local parishes. We believe the shift of TRP toward core Christian practices will lead to thriving Christian communities even as the culture around us becomes more secular. We believe that communities of Christian spiritual rigor will survive and thrive.