I’m reading a book for school called Teaching for Understanding, which explains an approach to teaching that I’ll be studying next week in Bellingham, then trying out in summer school. In the TfU paradigm, understanding is not a mental state (something you merely think or know), but something you do, a performance. It seemed to me that the same should apply to faith: faith is not just what you think, or what facts you consider true; faith is embodied belief, coupled inseparably with action.

When we try to treat faith as a mental state, we reduce Christian growth to studying the right facts, discipleship to scholarship. But faith is a performance - not a show for us to prove that we deserve God’s love and grace, but an acted-out life of obedience and practice of what we say we believe. Not only is this a more authentic and realistic view of faith, but it also shows that we can accomplish, by God’s power, things we did not think we were capable of. We did it, and we have been changed forever by the process.