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Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life
In the wake of political turmoil, who do you follow?
When faced with difference and divergence, whose example do you copy?
What does it mean to follow a clear path in the midst of cultural confusion?
The aim of this little book is simple: to help readers to see more clearly, love more dearly and follow more nearly the way of Jesus Christ.
This is a fresh, inspiring look at the meaning of Christian discipleship by one of the world’s greatest theologians, perfect for anyone exploring what it means to follow Christ today or wanting to be refreshed and reinvigorated in the Christian life.
When faced with difference and divergence, whose example do you copy?
What does it mean to follow a clear path in the midst of cultural confusion?
The aim of this little book is simple: to help readers to see more clearly, love more dearly and follow more nearly the way of Jesus Christ.
This is a fresh, inspiring look at the meaning of Christian discipleship by one of the world’s greatest theologians, perfect for anyone exploring what it means to follow Christ today or wanting to be refreshed and reinvigorated in the Christian life.
86 pages, Paperback
Published July 21, 2016
202 people are currently reading
911 people want to read
About the author
Rowan Williams
260 books337 followersRowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, is an Anglican bishop, poet, and theologian. He was Archbishop of Canterbury from December 2002-2012, and is now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Chancellor of the University of South Wales.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 114 reviews
October 17, 2021
The sort of book that is better recommended and read than reviewed. Here are 86 pages of deep, aged insight into discipleship. This book can be read by anyone, and should be read by everyone.
If you are the sort of person who wonders, "Where are the Christian sages of our time?" then begin by reading Williams. There are so many "Christian books" that are really just extended TED Talks -- more a profitable marketing tool than a labor of honest love. But I believe that history will remember the work of Rowan Williams as indispensable, placing him in the chorus of Lewis, Chesterton, and Tozer.
Here is just one of my favorite quotes:
"[God is] the dependable presence that doesn't go away; the presence that remembers and holds in a single gaze what has been true and is true of us; the eternal, unshakable witness to what we are. That presence is love. We are seen, known, and held, but above all we are welcomed. We are the objects of an eternal delight" (32-33).
If you are the sort of person who wonders, "Where are the Christian sages of our time?" then begin by reading Williams. There are so many "Christian books" that are really just extended TED Talks -- more a profitable marketing tool than a labor of honest love. But I believe that history will remember the work of Rowan Williams as indispensable, placing him in the chorus of Lewis, Chesterton, and Tozer.
Here is just one of my favorite quotes:
"[God is] the dependable presence that doesn't go away; the presence that remembers and holds in a single gaze what has been true and is true of us; the eternal, unshakable witness to what we are. That presence is love. We are seen, known, and held, but above all we are welcomed. We are the objects of an eternal delight" (32-33).
November 4, 2016
What does it mean to live a Christian life? That is, what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? According to Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, it involves at least two things. The first thing is that involves continually asking "whether what we do, how we think and speak and act is open to Christ and Christ's Spirit." Secondly, it has to do with the way in which the church is a learning community, so that we might grow in our relationship with God and each other. In this brief book, making use of mostly previously delivered messages, Williams seeks to address these two questions (pp. vii-viii).
"Being Disciples" is a follow up to his earlier book "Being Christian." In that book, Williams explores four elements that help mark Christians: Baptism, the Bible, the Eucharist, and Prayer. Two of these four are sacraments, another serves to provide a source of revelation, and the fourth is a means of communication with God. These four elements are real practices, not doctrines. In this latest book, Williams looks at the Christian life, the way we live it in daily life. Again, it's not doctrine that stands at the center.
Discipleship, Williams declares in the first chapter, is about the way we live. While discipleship involves being a student, it's more than simply showing up for class once a week. It is in fact about a relationship. It means tending every word and action of the master. He writes that "Being with the Master is recognizing that who you are is finally going to be determined by your relationship with him" (p. 10). Three "indispensable qualities" of the Christian life are faith, hope, and love. According to Williams this involves a journey that begins with understanding, then to faith, which leads to hope, and then finally to love. These three qualities are followed by forgiveness. He speaks of the bread of forgiveness, borrowing from the Lord's Prayer. He speaks of forgiveness being "one of the most radical ways in which we are able to nourish one another's humanity" (p. 40). In the same context he speaks of the "bread of tomorrow, by which he means that forgiveness is a path toward the future. It is an expression of that bread of the Eucharist that we partake now in anticipation of the meal we will experience.
I think I found the chapter on holiness to be the most intriguing. Perhaps it is because as a pastor I so often hear the refrain from those outside the church that those inside the church are often hypocrites. One response to the critique is to fall back on the retort that Christians "aren't perfect, just forgiven." When we think in such terms we offer an excuse for misbehavior or a 'get out of jail free" card. But surely that's not the kind of holiness envisioned here! It's not. While we think of holiness as being set apart or separated from the world or others. Williams disagrees. The holy person is one who "enlarges your world, makes you feel more yourself, opens you up, affirms you." a holy person he suggests, makes you feel better about one's self than worse" (p. 50). That means letting go of trying to be holy. "If you want to be holy," he writes, "stop thinking about it. If you want to be holy, look at God" (pp. 54-55). So you look at Jesus and "explore the world around you.
The Christian life is contextual. That is, when we envision following Jesus, we must envision that in the context of modern life and not the first century. How does one be a disciple in a democratic society? What about secularism? We ask this question knowing that the market doesn't lead to fairness. Secondly, there is the relativity of values. We're simply not on the same page. But the Bible affirms that humans are all of equal value to God. That leads to the premise that we are dependent on each other. It means seeing each other from the perspective of an "eternal and unalterable love." That leads to the final chapter, which is about life in the Spirit. This life in the spirit involves self-knowledge, stillness, growth and joy. These four elements are the building blocks, according to Williams, of the life of discipleship.
Like it's predecessor this is a brief book that lifts up for discussion essential elements of the Christian life. To be a Christian is not simply to to believe. It has to do with life's story. I believe that this book will be helpful to all who seek to dive deeper into the life of faith.
It is a good read. It's very accessible. It can be read by the individual or in groups. Each chapter is followed by a couple of discussion questions that makes this a possibility study guide. For that purpose it's an excellent resource.
"Being Disciples" is a follow up to his earlier book "Being Christian." In that book, Williams explores four elements that help mark Christians: Baptism, the Bible, the Eucharist, and Prayer. Two of these four are sacraments, another serves to provide a source of revelation, and the fourth is a means of communication with God. These four elements are real practices, not doctrines. In this latest book, Williams looks at the Christian life, the way we live it in daily life. Again, it's not doctrine that stands at the center.
Discipleship, Williams declares in the first chapter, is about the way we live. While discipleship involves being a student, it's more than simply showing up for class once a week. It is in fact about a relationship. It means tending every word and action of the master. He writes that "Being with the Master is recognizing that who you are is finally going to be determined by your relationship with him" (p. 10). Three "indispensable qualities" of the Christian life are faith, hope, and love. According to Williams this involves a journey that begins with understanding, then to faith, which leads to hope, and then finally to love. These three qualities are followed by forgiveness. He speaks of the bread of forgiveness, borrowing from the Lord's Prayer. He speaks of forgiveness being "one of the most radical ways in which we are able to nourish one another's humanity" (p. 40). In the same context he speaks of the "bread of tomorrow, by which he means that forgiveness is a path toward the future. It is an expression of that bread of the Eucharist that we partake now in anticipation of the meal we will experience.
I think I found the chapter on holiness to be the most intriguing. Perhaps it is because as a pastor I so often hear the refrain from those outside the church that those inside the church are often hypocrites. One response to the critique is to fall back on the retort that Christians "aren't perfect, just forgiven." When we think in such terms we offer an excuse for misbehavior or a 'get out of jail free" card. But surely that's not the kind of holiness envisioned here! It's not. While we think of holiness as being set apart or separated from the world or others. Williams disagrees. The holy person is one who "enlarges your world, makes you feel more yourself, opens you up, affirms you." a holy person he suggests, makes you feel better about one's self than worse" (p. 50). That means letting go of trying to be holy. "If you want to be holy," he writes, "stop thinking about it. If you want to be holy, look at God" (pp. 54-55). So you look at Jesus and "explore the world around you.
The Christian life is contextual. That is, when we envision following Jesus, we must envision that in the context of modern life and not the first century. How does one be a disciple in a democratic society? What about secularism? We ask this question knowing that the market doesn't lead to fairness. Secondly, there is the relativity of values. We're simply not on the same page. But the Bible affirms that humans are all of equal value to God. That leads to the premise that we are dependent on each other. It means seeing each other from the perspective of an "eternal and unalterable love." That leads to the final chapter, which is about life in the Spirit. This life in the spirit involves self-knowledge, stillness, growth and joy. These four elements are the building blocks, according to Williams, of the life of discipleship.
Like it's predecessor this is a brief book that lifts up for discussion essential elements of the Christian life. To be a Christian is not simply to to believe. It has to do with life's story. I believe that this book will be helpful to all who seek to dive deeper into the life of faith.
It is a good read. It's very accessible. It can be read by the individual or in groups. Each chapter is followed by a couple of discussion questions that makes this a possibility study guide. For that purpose it's an excellent resource.
September 30, 2022
How do we become faithful disciples of Jesus? Williams examines these areas: faith, hope and love, forgiveness, holiness, faith in society, and life in the Spirit.
Here’s a few passages I’d like to save:
“Like other theologians of his time, St. John of the Cross takes for granted a picture of the human mind that sees it as working in three basic ways: the human mind understands , it remembers and it wants. Or, in more abstract terms, the human mind is made up of the interaction of understanding, memory and will. The distinctive and fresh insight that St. John of the Cross offers is that if you put together understanding, memory and will with faith, hope and love, you have a perfect picture of where we start and where we finish. In the Christian life, Faith (he says) is what happens to our understanding; hope is what happens to our remembering; and love is what happens to our wanting. So to grow as a disciple is to take the journey from understanding into faith, from memory into hope and from will into love.”
“‘Give us this day our daily bread’… It is a prayer to be reminded of our need: let us never forget, we pray, that we have to be fed, and that we cannot generate for ourselves all we need to live and flourish. And at the same time, it is a prayer that we shall not be ashamed of our mortality, our physical and vulnerable being. We start from need—where else can we start? But that is a way into understanding how and why we matter, why we are valuable. The prayer poses a critical question to anyone who imagines that they can begin from a position of self-sufficiency; it affirms that to be in need of this ‘bread of truth,’ in need of material or spiritual nurture, is in no way a failure, but on the contrary, a place of dignity. The prayer both challenges the arrogance of those who think they are not in need and establishes that the needy are fully possessed of a treasure that needs to be uncovered and released— the humanity that draws them into mutual relation. and then you start talking.”
“Christians, then, are not called to impose their vision on the whole of society. If they have a role in the political realm, it is that they will argue that the voice of faith should be heard clearly in the decision-making process of society. The Christian disciple, in other words, does not campaign for political control (which could undermine their appeal to the value of personal freedom) but for public visability—for the capacity to argue for and defend their vision in the public sphere, to try and persuade both government and individuals that a better moral basis exists for ordering public life.”
Here’s a few passages I’d like to save:
“Like other theologians of his time, St. John of the Cross takes for granted a picture of the human mind that sees it as working in three basic ways: the human mind understands , it remembers and it wants. Or, in more abstract terms, the human mind is made up of the interaction of understanding, memory and will. The distinctive and fresh insight that St. John of the Cross offers is that if you put together understanding, memory and will with faith, hope and love, you have a perfect picture of where we start and where we finish. In the Christian life, Faith (he says) is what happens to our understanding; hope is what happens to our remembering; and love is what happens to our wanting. So to grow as a disciple is to take the journey from understanding into faith, from memory into hope and from will into love.”
“‘Give us this day our daily bread’… It is a prayer to be reminded of our need: let us never forget, we pray, that we have to be fed, and that we cannot generate for ourselves all we need to live and flourish. And at the same time, it is a prayer that we shall not be ashamed of our mortality, our physical and vulnerable being. We start from need—where else can we start? But that is a way into understanding how and why we matter, why we are valuable. The prayer poses a critical question to anyone who imagines that they can begin from a position of self-sufficiency; it affirms that to be in need of this ‘bread of truth,’ in need of material or spiritual nurture, is in no way a failure, but on the contrary, a place of dignity. The prayer both challenges the arrogance of those who think they are not in need and establishes that the needy are fully possessed of a treasure that needs to be uncovered and released— the humanity that draws them into mutual relation. and then you start talking.”
“Christians, then, are not called to impose their vision on the whole of society. If they have a role in the political realm, it is that they will argue that the voice of faith should be heard clearly in the decision-making process of society. The Christian disciple, in other words, does not campaign for political control (which could undermine their appeal to the value of personal freedom) but for public visability—for the capacity to argue for and defend their vision in the public sphere, to try and persuade both government and individuals that a better moral basis exists for ordering public life.”
July 29, 2024
Innehållet var väldigt bra! Otroligt fint bildspråk och bra struktur. Var lätt att ta till sig och ger tankar kring det kristna livet i helhet på bara 100 sidor. Något som verkligen drar ner dock är den svenska översättningen. Den var inte vad man kanske hade önskat, vilket gjorde det svårt att ta till sig vad boken faktiskt ville säga. Mycket tid gick åt åt att försöka klura ut vad som menades, inte på grund av innehållet, utan själva meningskonstruktionen. Stundtals kändes boken nästan maskinöversatt. Läs den! Men kanske inte på svenska 🥲
"När du mött dem känner du inte 'Åh, vilken fantastisk person', utan 'Vilken underbar värld'"
"[D]et verkliga problemet är inte Guds frånvaro utan vår frånvaro"
"När du mött dem känner du inte 'Åh, vilken fantastisk person', utan 'Vilken underbar värld'"
"[D]et verkliga problemet är inte Guds frånvaro utan vår frånvaro"
December 29, 2021
Dette var annerledes. Jeg sier som erkebiskop Justin Welby: Quite the most beautiful writing on discipleship I know.
Read
August 26, 2023You have an identity not because you have invented one, or because you have a little hard core of selfhood that is unchanged, but because you have a witness of who you are. What you don't understand or see, the bits of yourself you can't pull together in a convincing story, are all held in a single gaze of love.
January 12, 2022
I will be thinking about this book for a long time. It was short but each sentence calls you closer to Christ.
This is one of the best books of discipleship I have read because it makes discipleship about Christ and our relationship to him, not a list of tasks that a disciple should do. It is what the title suggests: being disciples, being in relationship to Christ.
This is one of the best books of discipleship I have read because it makes discipleship about Christ and our relationship to him, not a list of tasks that a disciple should do. It is what the title suggests: being disciples, being in relationship to Christ.
July 19, 2021
Thoughtful and encouraging; met me where I am right now in my faith journey
April 30, 2024
Positively illuminating and utterly gorgeous in its language. Dr. Williams presents seven essays, each based on a talk given some years ago, about the essential elements of Christian discipleship. This book is short enough and accessible enough for anyone and everyone to read it if they have any interest in deepening their own understanding of what it really means to follow Jesus.
Williams is a deep thinker, and insanely accomplished scholar, but this book comes from his pastoral side, not the scholarly side. My highlighter got a good workout in this book.
Some of my favourite quotes:
"Being where Jesus is means being in the company of the people whose company Jesus seeks and keeps. Jesus chooses the company of the excluded, the disreputable, the wretched, the self-hating, the poor, the diseased; so that is where you are going to find yourself.
"If you are going to be where Jesus is, if your discipleship is not intermittent but a way of being, you will find yourself in the same sort of human company as he is in. It is once again a reminder that our discipleship is not about choosing our company but choosing the company of Jesus—or rather, getting used to the fact of having been chosen for the company of Jesus."
--
"This helps us again with what I called at the beginning of this chapter the 'non-intermittent' character of discipleship. The relationship of Jesus to the Father is not episodic. Jesus does not receive an occasional bit of instruction from the Father; his relationship is sustained, eternal and unbroken.
He gazes into the mystery of the Father's love and he enacts it, in heaven and on earth. And so we in our discipleship are summoned to gaze into the mystery of that infinite love and to seek to do that same eternal will: to act' that same action, on earth as it is in heaven, as the Lord's Prayer puts it.
"This suggests the rather ambitious thought (though it is an ambition entirely justified by Scripture) that the heart of discipleship is bound up with the life of the Trinity; as we develop our understanding of the trinitarian life of God, uncovered for us in those wonderful passages of John's Gos-pel, so we develop in our understanding of what provides the root and energy of our being disciples here and now. We see and we do, not just because that is the way discipleship or studentship worked in the ancient world; we see and we do because that is what the Father and the Son are involved in for all eternity."
--
To be in Christ's constant company "requires of us a certain degree of inner stillness, a sort of poise: the attentiveness of the birdwatcher; attention and expectancy, an attitude of mind sufficiently free of the preoccupations of the ego to turn itself with openness to what God in Christ is giving.
"At the primary level, that will mean learning and deepening our attentiveness to the Bible, to the sacraments and to the life of the Body of Christ. Second, arising out of that, it means learning a new level of attentiveness to all persons, places and things; looking at everything with the eye of ex-pectancy, waiting for something of God to blossom within it; being in Christ's company, learning attentiveness and practising this kind of still alertness; looking and waiting for the light to break through. Third, it means being attentive to where Christ is going; keeping company with those he is with. Among them we will find the most unexpected and unlikely characters, the kinds of people Jesus seems to spend so much time with in the Gospels and today. Most importantly, we will find him keeping company with the Father, in whose company he eternally is.
"So our attentiveness is not just a kind of aesthetic attitude, an appreciation of beauty. It is also a willingness to bring an active and transfiguring love into this situation of expectancy, to keep company so that an action and a relationship may come into being. Being disciples means being in his company; learning stillness, attentiveness, ex-pectancy; being willing to go where Jesus is going and to be in the company of those he's in company with. And it means letting the action come through, letting the relation be made; letting Christ's action come through us as the Father's act comes through him.
"What seems to be suggested by these reflections upon the biblical identity of the disciple is that our discipleship in the company of Jesus is a trinitarian mode of life, embedded in the relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: that is, it is a contemplative mode of life. Not in the sense that
we should all become hermits, but we have got to grow into a mature stillness, a poise and an openness to others and the world, so that it can also be a transformative mode of
living in which the act of God can come through, so as to change ourselves, our immediate environment, our world."
--
"The distinctive and fresh insight that St John of the Cross offers is that if you put together understanding, memory, and will with faith, hope, and love, you have a perfect picture of where we start and where we fin-ish. In the Christian life, faith (he says) is what happens to our under-standing; hope is what happens to our remembering; and love is what
happens to our wanting. So to grow as a disciple is to take the journey from understanding into faith, from memory into hope and from will into love.
"St John believed that in this process of Christian growing up, one of the most difficult things is the sense we will have that we have lost our bearings on the way. What we thought we understood we discover that we never did; what we thought we remembered is covered with confusion; and what we thought we wanted turns out to be empty. We have to be recreated in faith and hope and love for our under-standing, our memory, and our will to become what God really wants them to be."
--
"Our intelligence is not in a very good state, it seems, either in or out of the Church. And we have devised a number of quite successful ways of pretending there isn't a problem.
"Now, what St John of the Cross says to us—and he's not just writing for Carmelite nuns in sixteenth-century Spain—is that out of this sense of a 'brick wall' before our intelligence, this sense of confusion and loss where our understanding is concerned, faith grows in its true mean-ing. It appears not as a system, a comprehensive answer to all our problems. It appears quite simply in the form of dependable relationship. You may not under-stand, or have the words on the tip of your tongue, but you learn somehow to be confident in a presence,
You learn somehow to be confident in a presence, an 'other', who does not change or go away an other, who does not change or go away. You realize that when the signposts and landmarks have been taken away there is a presence that does not let you go. And that is faith, I would say, in a very deeply biblical sense."
--
"The loss of understanding, of a clear sense of what we know and how we know, is part of the difficult business of learning to question at every level who we are. But we are somehow set free to face all that and live with it by the conviction that we are not let go of. Faith as dependable relationship is something other than faith as a system of propositions, or faith as confidence in my own capacity to master truth; it's much more a confidence that I can be mastered by truth, that I can be held even when I don't feel I can hold on. If my relation with the living truth is initiated and sustained by God's faithfulness not mine, it is dependable. But recognizing that requires me to step back from confidence in my own resources."
--
"Hope, then, is not simply confidence in the future; it is confidence that past, present and future are held in one relationship so that the confusions about memory—Who were we? Who was I? Who am I, and who are we?—become bearable because of the witness in heaven, a witness who does not abandon. This suggests that the Church needs to be marked by profound patience: patience with actual human beings in their confusions and uncertainties; patience in an environment when so much seems to be unclear and in danger of getting lost; patience in the sense that we realize it takes time for each one of us to grow up into Christ.
"And if it takes time for us, then it takes time for the Body, the community, to grow overall. Hope and patience belong together. Only a Church that is learning patience can proclaim hope effectively."
--
I absolutely love how Williams describes God as: "The dependable presence that doesn't go away; the presence that remembers and holds in a single gaze what has been true and is true of us; the eternal, unshakeable witness to what we are. That presence is love. We are seen, known and held, but above all we are welcomed. We are the objects of an eternal delight. And if that is sinking into our minds and hearts, then what the Church is fundamentally, and must show itself to be, is a place where time and space are given, where people are allowed the space to experience eternal love, a place where nothing needs to be left at the door and where people are made free to receive in a world that can seem to be demanding of them all the time—that they give, that they trade, that they offer, that they are out there making a difference. Is the Church an environment in which people can learn to open themselves to joy? The joy that can come only by letting ourselves go, and letting go of anxious selfishness and the obsession with constantly choosing."
--
"It is a gross distortion of forgiveness that sees it as a sort of claim to power over another—being a patron or a benefactor towards someone less secure. We should rather think of those extraordinary words in the prophecy of Hosea (11:8-9) about the mercy of God: 'How can I give you up, Ephraim? ... for I am God and not a mortal'. To forgive is to share in the helplessness of God, who cannot turn from God's own nature: not to forgive would be for God a wound in the divine life itself. Not power, but the powerlessness of the God whose nature is love is what is shown in the act of forgiving. The disciple rooted in Christ shares that powerlessness, and the deeper the roots go the less possible it is not to forgive."
--
"[T]o speak in these terms of bread and forgiveness and the future presses us towards thinking about the act in which Christians clearly set forth these realities as the governing marks of Christian existence: the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist. We celebrate this Supper until Christ comes, invoking the Spirit of the coming age to transform the matter of this world into the sheer gift of Christ to us, and so invoking the promise of a whole world renewed, perceived and received as gift. This is, supremely, tomorrow's bread. But it is so, of course, not as an object fallen from heaven, but precisely as the bread that is actively shared by Christ's disciples; and it is eaten both as an anticipation of the communion of the world to come and as a memorial of the betrayal and death of Jesus. That is to say, it is also a sacrament of forgiveness; it is the risen Jesus returning to his unfaithful disciples to create afresh in them this communion of the new world. The Eucharist is our symbol of what it would mean for the Lord's Prayer to be answered fully: God feeding his people through the death and resurrection of Jesus, which establishes that new community of the Spirit in which forgiveness is the common currency."
--
"[T]he way that Jesus talks about holiness at the Last Supper is so transforming. Holiness there is seen as going into the heart of where it's most difficult for human beings to be human. Jesus goes outside the city; he goes to the place where people suffer and are humiliated, the place where people throw stuff out, including other people. 'Outside the camp', in the language of the Old Testament (also Hebrews 13:13). If we take this seriously, the Christian idea of holiness is to do with going where it's most difficult, in the name of Jesus who went where it was most difficult.
He wants us to be holy like that."
--
"Holy people, those who are saints rather than saintly, actually make you feel better than you are.
The pursuit of goodness can be experienced as if you are taking part in a competitive examination in which some people are scoring very well, others are on the borderline, and some are sinking below the line. But the holy person somehow enlarges your world, makes you feel more your-self, opens you up, affirms you. They are not in competition; they are not saying, I've got something you haven't. They are showing us something that it's wonderful simply to have in the world. ...
"...they make me feel that there is hope for my confused and compromised humanity. God is big enough to deal with and work with actual compromised and imperfect people. Look! Here is a life in which he has come alive. Real holiness somehow brings into my life this sense of opening up opportunity, changing things.
It's not about my being made to feel inadequate[.]"
"[H]oliness...[is] not an extra special kind of goodness, because somehow it's not about competing levels of how good you are. It's about enlarging the world, and about being involved in the world."
--
"[The] catch in Christian holiness [is that] it happens when you are not thinking about you, which is why there are no useful self-help books on being holy. There are self-help books on being thin, self-help books on being an effective leader, and on being a good cook, but I have yet to see a convincing self-help book on being a saint, and I would be very suspicious of any claims for one. Becoming holy is being so taken over by the extraordinariness of God that that is what you are really interested in, and that is what radiates from you to reflect on other people.
"There's the catch: if you want to be holy, stop thinking about it. If you want to be holy, look at God. If you want to be holy, enjoy God's world, enter into it as much as you can in love and in service. And who knows, maybe one day someone will say of you, You know, when I met them, the landscape looked different.
"And what goes for individual disciples goes for the Church itself. Every so often people come up with wonderful schemes for making the Church a holier place, which usually means making sure that some people don't get in, or some people who are in get out. We might think that a holy Church must be a Church that is full of people a bit like me at my best. But when the Church tries to become holy in that way it almost always ends up in an appalling mess. Exclusive, anxious and self-conscious. Am I really being conscientious enough, am I really being pure enough? Are they really being pure enough? Surely not! Whereas the truly holy Church is taken over by the excitement of the extraordinariness of God; it wants to talk about the beauty and splendour of God, and to show the self-draining, self-forgetting love of God by being at the heart of humanity, by being where people are most human."
--
"For the Christian disciple, human dignity—and therefore any notion of human rights—depends upon the recognition that every person is related to God before they are related to anything or anyone else. God has defined who they are and who they can be by his own eternal purpose, which cannot be altered by any force or circumstance in this world. People may refuse their calling or remain stubbornly unaware of it; but God continues to call them and to offer them what they need to fulfil their calling. And the degree to which that calling is answered or refused has consequences for eternity.
"This means that whenever I face another human being, I face a mystery. ... The reverence I owe to every human person is connected with the reverence I owe to God, who brings them into being and keeps them in being."
--
"There are no superfluous people, no spare people in the human world. Everyone is needed for the good of all. Human failure is tragic and terrible because it means that some unique and unrepeatable aspect of God's purpose has been allowed to vanish."
--
"Our crisis in sexual morality in the developed world is not just about a failure to keep rules; it is about a loss of the sense of personal mystery and the calling to explore and enjoy someone else's mysteriousness for a lifetime."
--
"The extraordinary resurrection story in John 21 when Mary recognizes the risen Jesus as he simply says her name, tells us a great deal about our prayer and our growth into mature discipleship. To sustain life in the Spirit' under pressure, we need to retain the ability to say to God, 'Tell me who I am'. Because I'm not going to settle with what everybody else is telling me—I'm not even going to settle with what I am telling me. I need to hear it from God, the God who tells me. Because then I know that I exist, I live, I flourish, simply because of his speaking. I have called you by name, says God, 'you are mine' (Isaiah 43:1). And on that divine speaking of our name rests our whole being. Something in our prayer is about quarrying down to that level where we can hear that God is creating me and you, now in this minute-breathing our names into the world, making us alive."
--
"Silence, it is said, is the sacrament of the age to come—a phrase from one of the great Syrian saints, Isaac of Nineveh. And if, in our prayer and our Christian life generally, we are trying to live the life of the future, the life of the kingdom, stillness is part of that. Silence of word, stillness of body. And silence of word, of course, doesn't just mean not saying anything (although that is always quite a good idea!); it can mean finding ways of saying, ways of speaking, that settle and still you: the small phrase, repeated, that doesn't break the silence. Like waves on the beach on a calm day; just the beat of a heart; small words, small phrases that keep us steady and hold us when everything else is pushing us around. ... Something we can say in order to anchor ourselves where we are."
--
"To be opened up in this way is to discover joy: not happiness, not a transient feeling of euphoria, or feeling it's basically all right in a kind of shoulder-shrugging way, but joy-the sense that we are connected with something so real that it will break every boundary or container we try to confine it in, a sense of something overflowing, pushing outwards. 'Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water, says Jesus in the Gospel of John (7:38), about the person who receives the spirit.
"Overflow, superabundance: that is what this joy is about."
Williams is a deep thinker, and insanely accomplished scholar, but this book comes from his pastoral side, not the scholarly side. My highlighter got a good workout in this book.
Some of my favourite quotes:
"Being where Jesus is means being in the company of the people whose company Jesus seeks and keeps. Jesus chooses the company of the excluded, the disreputable, the wretched, the self-hating, the poor, the diseased; so that is where you are going to find yourself.
"If you are going to be where Jesus is, if your discipleship is not intermittent but a way of being, you will find yourself in the same sort of human company as he is in. It is once again a reminder that our discipleship is not about choosing our company but choosing the company of Jesus—or rather, getting used to the fact of having been chosen for the company of Jesus."
--
"This helps us again with what I called at the beginning of this chapter the 'non-intermittent' character of discipleship. The relationship of Jesus to the Father is not episodic. Jesus does not receive an occasional bit of instruction from the Father; his relationship is sustained, eternal and unbroken.
He gazes into the mystery of the Father's love and he enacts it, in heaven and on earth. And so we in our discipleship are summoned to gaze into the mystery of that infinite love and to seek to do that same eternal will: to act' that same action, on earth as it is in heaven, as the Lord's Prayer puts it.
"This suggests the rather ambitious thought (though it is an ambition entirely justified by Scripture) that the heart of discipleship is bound up with the life of the Trinity; as we develop our understanding of the trinitarian life of God, uncovered for us in those wonderful passages of John's Gos-pel, so we develop in our understanding of what provides the root and energy of our being disciples here and now. We see and we do, not just because that is the way discipleship or studentship worked in the ancient world; we see and we do because that is what the Father and the Son are involved in for all eternity."
--
To be in Christ's constant company "requires of us a certain degree of inner stillness, a sort of poise: the attentiveness of the birdwatcher; attention and expectancy, an attitude of mind sufficiently free of the preoccupations of the ego to turn itself with openness to what God in Christ is giving.
"At the primary level, that will mean learning and deepening our attentiveness to the Bible, to the sacraments and to the life of the Body of Christ. Second, arising out of that, it means learning a new level of attentiveness to all persons, places and things; looking at everything with the eye of ex-pectancy, waiting for something of God to blossom within it; being in Christ's company, learning attentiveness and practising this kind of still alertness; looking and waiting for the light to break through. Third, it means being attentive to where Christ is going; keeping company with those he is with. Among them we will find the most unexpected and unlikely characters, the kinds of people Jesus seems to spend so much time with in the Gospels and today. Most importantly, we will find him keeping company with the Father, in whose company he eternally is.
"So our attentiveness is not just a kind of aesthetic attitude, an appreciation of beauty. It is also a willingness to bring an active and transfiguring love into this situation of expectancy, to keep company so that an action and a relationship may come into being. Being disciples means being in his company; learning stillness, attentiveness, ex-pectancy; being willing to go where Jesus is going and to be in the company of those he's in company with. And it means letting the action come through, letting the relation be made; letting Christ's action come through us as the Father's act comes through him.
"What seems to be suggested by these reflections upon the biblical identity of the disciple is that our discipleship in the company of Jesus is a trinitarian mode of life, embedded in the relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: that is, it is a contemplative mode of life. Not in the sense that
we should all become hermits, but we have got to grow into a mature stillness, a poise and an openness to others and the world, so that it can also be a transformative mode of
living in which the act of God can come through, so as to change ourselves, our immediate environment, our world."
--
"The distinctive and fresh insight that St John of the Cross offers is that if you put together understanding, memory, and will with faith, hope, and love, you have a perfect picture of where we start and where we fin-ish. In the Christian life, faith (he says) is what happens to our under-standing; hope is what happens to our remembering; and love is what
happens to our wanting. So to grow as a disciple is to take the journey from understanding into faith, from memory into hope and from will into love.
"St John believed that in this process of Christian growing up, one of the most difficult things is the sense we will have that we have lost our bearings on the way. What we thought we understood we discover that we never did; what we thought we remembered is covered with confusion; and what we thought we wanted turns out to be empty. We have to be recreated in faith and hope and love for our under-standing, our memory, and our will to become what God really wants them to be."
--
"Our intelligence is not in a very good state, it seems, either in or out of the Church. And we have devised a number of quite successful ways of pretending there isn't a problem.
"Now, what St John of the Cross says to us—and he's not just writing for Carmelite nuns in sixteenth-century Spain—is that out of this sense of a 'brick wall' before our intelligence, this sense of confusion and loss where our understanding is concerned, faith grows in its true mean-ing. It appears not as a system, a comprehensive answer to all our problems. It appears quite simply in the form of dependable relationship. You may not under-stand, or have the words on the tip of your tongue, but you learn somehow to be confident in a presence,
You learn somehow to be confident in a presence, an 'other', who does not change or go away an other, who does not change or go away. You realize that when the signposts and landmarks have been taken away there is a presence that does not let you go. And that is faith, I would say, in a very deeply biblical sense."
--
"The loss of understanding, of a clear sense of what we know and how we know, is part of the difficult business of learning to question at every level who we are. But we are somehow set free to face all that and live with it by the conviction that we are not let go of. Faith as dependable relationship is something other than faith as a system of propositions, or faith as confidence in my own capacity to master truth; it's much more a confidence that I can be mastered by truth, that I can be held even when I don't feel I can hold on. If my relation with the living truth is initiated and sustained by God's faithfulness not mine, it is dependable. But recognizing that requires me to step back from confidence in my own resources."
--
"Hope, then, is not simply confidence in the future; it is confidence that past, present and future are held in one relationship so that the confusions about memory—Who were we? Who was I? Who am I, and who are we?—become bearable because of the witness in heaven, a witness who does not abandon. This suggests that the Church needs to be marked by profound patience: patience with actual human beings in their confusions and uncertainties; patience in an environment when so much seems to be unclear and in danger of getting lost; patience in the sense that we realize it takes time for each one of us to grow up into Christ.
"And if it takes time for us, then it takes time for the Body, the community, to grow overall. Hope and patience belong together. Only a Church that is learning patience can proclaim hope effectively."
--
I absolutely love how Williams describes God as: "The dependable presence that doesn't go away; the presence that remembers and holds in a single gaze what has been true and is true of us; the eternal, unshakeable witness to what we are. That presence is love. We are seen, known and held, but above all we are welcomed. We are the objects of an eternal delight. And if that is sinking into our minds and hearts, then what the Church is fundamentally, and must show itself to be, is a place where time and space are given, where people are allowed the space to experience eternal love, a place where nothing needs to be left at the door and where people are made free to receive in a world that can seem to be demanding of them all the time—that they give, that they trade, that they offer, that they are out there making a difference. Is the Church an environment in which people can learn to open themselves to joy? The joy that can come only by letting ourselves go, and letting go of anxious selfishness and the obsession with constantly choosing."
--
"It is a gross distortion of forgiveness that sees it as a sort of claim to power over another—being a patron or a benefactor towards someone less secure. We should rather think of those extraordinary words in the prophecy of Hosea (11:8-9) about the mercy of God: 'How can I give you up, Ephraim? ... for I am God and not a mortal'. To forgive is to share in the helplessness of God, who cannot turn from God's own nature: not to forgive would be for God a wound in the divine life itself. Not power, but the powerlessness of the God whose nature is love is what is shown in the act of forgiving. The disciple rooted in Christ shares that powerlessness, and the deeper the roots go the less possible it is not to forgive."
--
"[T]o speak in these terms of bread and forgiveness and the future presses us towards thinking about the act in which Christians clearly set forth these realities as the governing marks of Christian existence: the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist. We celebrate this Supper until Christ comes, invoking the Spirit of the coming age to transform the matter of this world into the sheer gift of Christ to us, and so invoking the promise of a whole world renewed, perceived and received as gift. This is, supremely, tomorrow's bread. But it is so, of course, not as an object fallen from heaven, but precisely as the bread that is actively shared by Christ's disciples; and it is eaten both as an anticipation of the communion of the world to come and as a memorial of the betrayal and death of Jesus. That is to say, it is also a sacrament of forgiveness; it is the risen Jesus returning to his unfaithful disciples to create afresh in them this communion of the new world. The Eucharist is our symbol of what it would mean for the Lord's Prayer to be answered fully: God feeding his people through the death and resurrection of Jesus, which establishes that new community of the Spirit in which forgiveness is the common currency."
--
"[T]he way that Jesus talks about holiness at the Last Supper is so transforming. Holiness there is seen as going into the heart of where it's most difficult for human beings to be human. Jesus goes outside the city; he goes to the place where people suffer and are humiliated, the place where people throw stuff out, including other people. 'Outside the camp', in the language of the Old Testament (also Hebrews 13:13). If we take this seriously, the Christian idea of holiness is to do with going where it's most difficult, in the name of Jesus who went where it was most difficult.
He wants us to be holy like that."
--
"Holy people, those who are saints rather than saintly, actually make you feel better than you are.
The pursuit of goodness can be experienced as if you are taking part in a competitive examination in which some people are scoring very well, others are on the borderline, and some are sinking below the line. But the holy person somehow enlarges your world, makes you feel more your-self, opens you up, affirms you. They are not in competition; they are not saying, I've got something you haven't. They are showing us something that it's wonderful simply to have in the world. ...
"...they make me feel that there is hope for my confused and compromised humanity. God is big enough to deal with and work with actual compromised and imperfect people. Look! Here is a life in which he has come alive. Real holiness somehow brings into my life this sense of opening up opportunity, changing things.
It's not about my being made to feel inadequate[.]"
"[H]oliness...[is] not an extra special kind of goodness, because somehow it's not about competing levels of how good you are. It's about enlarging the world, and about being involved in the world."
--
"[The] catch in Christian holiness [is that] it happens when you are not thinking about you, which is why there are no useful self-help books on being holy. There are self-help books on being thin, self-help books on being an effective leader, and on being a good cook, but I have yet to see a convincing self-help book on being a saint, and I would be very suspicious of any claims for one. Becoming holy is being so taken over by the extraordinariness of God that that is what you are really interested in, and that is what radiates from you to reflect on other people.
"There's the catch: if you want to be holy, stop thinking about it. If you want to be holy, look at God. If you want to be holy, enjoy God's world, enter into it as much as you can in love and in service. And who knows, maybe one day someone will say of you, You know, when I met them, the landscape looked different.
"And what goes for individual disciples goes for the Church itself. Every so often people come up with wonderful schemes for making the Church a holier place, which usually means making sure that some people don't get in, or some people who are in get out. We might think that a holy Church must be a Church that is full of people a bit like me at my best. But when the Church tries to become holy in that way it almost always ends up in an appalling mess. Exclusive, anxious and self-conscious. Am I really being conscientious enough, am I really being pure enough? Are they really being pure enough? Surely not! Whereas the truly holy Church is taken over by the excitement of the extraordinariness of God; it wants to talk about the beauty and splendour of God, and to show the self-draining, self-forgetting love of God by being at the heart of humanity, by being where people are most human."
--
"For the Christian disciple, human dignity—and therefore any notion of human rights—depends upon the recognition that every person is related to God before they are related to anything or anyone else. God has defined who they are and who they can be by his own eternal purpose, which cannot be altered by any force or circumstance in this world. People may refuse their calling or remain stubbornly unaware of it; but God continues to call them and to offer them what they need to fulfil their calling. And the degree to which that calling is answered or refused has consequences for eternity.
"This means that whenever I face another human being, I face a mystery. ... The reverence I owe to every human person is connected with the reverence I owe to God, who brings them into being and keeps them in being."
--
"There are no superfluous people, no spare people in the human world. Everyone is needed for the good of all. Human failure is tragic and terrible because it means that some unique and unrepeatable aspect of God's purpose has been allowed to vanish."
--
"Our crisis in sexual morality in the developed world is not just about a failure to keep rules; it is about a loss of the sense of personal mystery and the calling to explore and enjoy someone else's mysteriousness for a lifetime."
--
"The extraordinary resurrection story in John 21 when Mary recognizes the risen Jesus as he simply says her name, tells us a great deal about our prayer and our growth into mature discipleship. To sustain life in the Spirit' under pressure, we need to retain the ability to say to God, 'Tell me who I am'. Because I'm not going to settle with what everybody else is telling me—I'm not even going to settle with what I am telling me. I need to hear it from God, the God who tells me. Because then I know that I exist, I live, I flourish, simply because of his speaking. I have called you by name, says God, 'you are mine' (Isaiah 43:1). And on that divine speaking of our name rests our whole being. Something in our prayer is about quarrying down to that level where we can hear that God is creating me and you, now in this minute-breathing our names into the world, making us alive."
--
"Silence, it is said, is the sacrament of the age to come—a phrase from one of the great Syrian saints, Isaac of Nineveh. And if, in our prayer and our Christian life generally, we are trying to live the life of the future, the life of the kingdom, stillness is part of that. Silence of word, stillness of body. And silence of word, of course, doesn't just mean not saying anything (although that is always quite a good idea!); it can mean finding ways of saying, ways of speaking, that settle and still you: the small phrase, repeated, that doesn't break the silence. Like waves on the beach on a calm day; just the beat of a heart; small words, small phrases that keep us steady and hold us when everything else is pushing us around. ... Something we can say in order to anchor ourselves where we are."
--
"To be opened up in this way is to discover joy: not happiness, not a transient feeling of euphoria, or feeling it's basically all right in a kind of shoulder-shrugging way, but joy-the sense that we are connected with something so real that it will break every boundary or container we try to confine it in, a sense of something overflowing, pushing outwards. 'Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water, says Jesus in the Gospel of John (7:38), about the person who receives the spirit.
"Overflow, superabundance: that is what this joy is about."
August 13, 2016
Being Disciples is a companion to Being Christian from former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Having covered the essentials of Christianity, namely Baptism, Bible, Eucharist and Prayer, in this work Williams offers thoughtful reflections on what it means to be a Disciple of Christ. The book is composed of six short chapters, based on edited versions of six addresses given by Williams between 2007 and 2012.
With the topic of discipleship being one heavily covered in Christian literature, there's a danger of being yet another filler amongst shelves of trite and vacuous calls to live a life with purpose. Williams however, serves up nothing of the sort, offering insightful meditations that cut right to the meat of the human condition.
Williams sees the Disciple as the one who follows, with patient expectation. The true disciple maintains a listening awareness waiting for sudden and unexpected wisdom to break through from the Master. Along with awareness it is also a desire to follow the Master where the Master goes, but that this “is very frequently not where we would have thought of going, or would have wanted to go.”
In order for a disciple to grow, writes Williams, they must take the journey from understanding into faith, from memory into hope and from will into love. By this, he means that we should seek to recover our bearings. What we thought we understood, we realize we never did. What we think we remember is often clouded in confusion while what we want fails to satisfy. He continues: “we have to be recreated in faith and hope and love for our understanding, our memory, and our will to become what God really wants them to be.”
He rails against the tribal, moralizing, noisy forms of faith as a sign of our collective lack of confidence in being able to trace God's works or to proclaim for ourselves God's word. This mindless action is a distraction from the path of a disciple. Instead we are encouraged to a deeper relationship with our creator centered around listening, awareness and stillness.
Yet Williams does not consider the fruit of discipleship to be mere introspection, our first reflection when engaging with other individuals or communities is to ask what is Christ giving us through these people. We should look for the wisdom of our Master in all of our encounters with others, while using these moments to “point quite simply to the God who does not let go.” By clinging to the lost, the suffering and the marginal ourselves we show “what it is to have faith in the one who doesn't let go.”
Each chapter ends with a pair of relevant discussion questions, coupled with the short length make it an ideal study book or quick weekend read for those looking to broaden their perspective on discipleship. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read that I look forward to returning to again and again.
With the topic of discipleship being one heavily covered in Christian literature, there's a danger of being yet another filler amongst shelves of trite and vacuous calls to live a life with purpose. Williams however, serves up nothing of the sort, offering insightful meditations that cut right to the meat of the human condition.
Williams sees the Disciple as the one who follows, with patient expectation. The true disciple maintains a listening awareness waiting for sudden and unexpected wisdom to break through from the Master. Along with awareness it is also a desire to follow the Master where the Master goes, but that this “is very frequently not where we would have thought of going, or would have wanted to go.”
In order for a disciple to grow, writes Williams, they must take the journey from understanding into faith, from memory into hope and from will into love. By this, he means that we should seek to recover our bearings. What we thought we understood, we realize we never did. What we think we remember is often clouded in confusion while what we want fails to satisfy. He continues: “we have to be recreated in faith and hope and love for our understanding, our memory, and our will to become what God really wants them to be.”
He rails against the tribal, moralizing, noisy forms of faith as a sign of our collective lack of confidence in being able to trace God's works or to proclaim for ourselves God's word. This mindless action is a distraction from the path of a disciple. Instead we are encouraged to a deeper relationship with our creator centered around listening, awareness and stillness.
Yet Williams does not consider the fruit of discipleship to be mere introspection, our first reflection when engaging with other individuals or communities is to ask what is Christ giving us through these people. We should look for the wisdom of our Master in all of our encounters with others, while using these moments to “point quite simply to the God who does not let go.” By clinging to the lost, the suffering and the marginal ourselves we show “what it is to have faith in the one who doesn't let go.”
Each chapter ends with a pair of relevant discussion questions, coupled with the short length make it an ideal study book or quick weekend read for those looking to broaden their perspective on discipleship. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read that I look forward to returning to again and again.
December 19, 2024
It's a good one. Well worth the time for anyone exploring Christianity, or anyone already in the faith.
December 31, 2019
This was not a book I found easy-going. The writing style was fairly difficult to parse and, more importantly, it sometimes felt that in a desire to say something new he also said things that weren't quite true or, at least, much related to the topic at hand. For example, the chapter on 'forgiveness' was certainly a take I'd never come across before, but basing the whole thing around daily bread seemed an odd choice that didn't quite work. He also said statements like 'to forgive is to share in the helplessness of God...not to forgive would be for God a wound in the divine life itself' and that God is 'powerless' but to forgive which I just think is... not true? I think he was trying to present a new take on the topic, to force people into truly considering forgiveness/other subjects by saying something dramatic and novel but I think that sometimes the book in general strayed into strange places in the desire to be original.
I did mostly agreed with the basic underlying themes and there were good points within the book and things worth taking away. However, I think that there are better (and more enjoyable) books on these topics.
I did mostly agreed with the basic underlying themes and there were good points within the book and things worth taking away. However, I think that there are better (and more enjoyable) books on these topics.
March 30, 2021
Rowan Williams offers sneak peeks of his outstanding vision of spirituality in this nice little book. Covering topics as diverse as forgiveness and faith in the public square, traditional themes of his archbishopric (and theological career) are clearly explained in a pastoral way. However, I’d say this work missed the fifth star for its editing. In contrast to the other titles in this series, it’s not clear to follow why these particular topics were selected and what’s the logic behind this agenda for discipleship. One glaring omission is a chapter dedicated to the mission of the church, even though there’re implications drawn for it in each chapter. Nevertheless, its excellent content still deserves a careful (and meditative, I should say) reading by every Christian interested in a spirituality for the modern world.
December 21, 2023
Kind of forgot to finish this book after starting it but man… it’s rich. It feels like, in the short 87 pages, Williams so clearly and succinctly describes what it means to be a disciple of Christ. In the same way Bonhoeffer does with Life Together, in such a short span, Williams encapsulates what it means to follow Christ in your personal walk as well as in community, giving practical guidance to deepening your fellowship with God and man. Absolutely loved reading this and looking forward to Being Human next.
April 4, 2018
Much can be said in few words, and Rowan Williams is adept in the skill of powerful impact in concise writings. I found myself somehow wondering whether I had ever truly understood the "essentials" of discipleship before. In this essay compilation, he discusses various topics like faith, hope, love, forgiveness, holiness, community life, self awareness, stillness, growth, and joy. Being Disciples is challenging, enlightening, and encouraging.
August 24, 2024
Rowan Williams is always amazing, and here he is particularly so. He has such a quiet, lovely wisdom in his popular books that really does get to the heart of things. Like this:
"...the saint, or holy person, is somebody who has been enabled to create that kind of artwork out of their very lives, to let something come through, to let a bigger world appear, a new light and a new landscape."
How wonderful and beautifully true.
"...the saint, or holy person, is somebody who has been enabled to create that kind of artwork out of their very lives, to let something come through, to let a bigger world appear, a new light and a new landscape."
How wonderful and beautifully true.
October 7, 2019
Easy read but deep insights. Great for a church class or book club.
April 26, 2021
Eloquent, of wide-ranging, beautiful, deep and rich, practical, generous and kind. Let us learn from Rowan Williams...
August 26, 2021
Best book on being a disciple of Jesus Christ I have ever read.
November 13, 2024
“Many commentators on the Lord’s Prayer, such as Gregory of Nyssa, underline the irrationality of praying for our daily bread while then seeking to hold on to it at the expense of others.”
“Being where Jesus is means being in the company of the people whose company Jesus seeks and keeps. Jesus chooses the company of the excluded, the disreputable, the wretched, the self-hating, the poor, the diseased; so that is where you are going to find yourself.”
“We are seen, known and held, but above all we are welcomed. We are the objects of an eternal
delight. And if that is sinking into our minds and hearts, then what the Church is fundamentally, and must show itself to be, is a place where time and space are given, where people are allowed the space to experience eternal love, a place where nothing needs to be left at the door and where people are made free to receive in a world that can seem to be demanding of them all the time.”
“One of the worst things that we as Christians can do (and have done) to the gospel is somehow to convey the impression that joy should be the very last thing on our minds, or in our hearts, in our worship or in our relation with one another…Too often the message we give to the world around us is nervousness about God, rather than joy.”
“The truly holy Church is taken over by the excitement of the extraordinariness of God; it wants to talk about the beauty and splendour of God, and to show the self-draining, self-forgetting love of God by being at the heart of humanity, by being where people are most human.”
“Being where Jesus is means being in the company of the people whose company Jesus seeks and keeps. Jesus chooses the company of the excluded, the disreputable, the wretched, the self-hating, the poor, the diseased; so that is where you are going to find yourself.”
“We are seen, known and held, but above all we are welcomed. We are the objects of an eternal
delight. And if that is sinking into our minds and hearts, then what the Church is fundamentally, and must show itself to be, is a place where time and space are given, where people are allowed the space to experience eternal love, a place where nothing needs to be left at the door and where people are made free to receive in a world that can seem to be demanding of them all the time.”
“One of the worst things that we as Christians can do (and have done) to the gospel is somehow to convey the impression that joy should be the very last thing on our minds, or in our hearts, in our worship or in our relation with one another…Too often the message we give to the world around us is nervousness about God, rather than joy.”
“The truly holy Church is taken over by the excitement of the extraordinariness of God; it wants to talk about the beauty and splendour of God, and to show the self-draining, self-forgetting love of God by being at the heart of humanity, by being where people are most human.”
June 14, 2020
This is one of those books, relitively few in number, that are so good and so short that as soon as I finish them I start on them immediately again. Because I'm sure there's good stuff in there that I missed the first time around.
One week later update: Yep, it's really good. This is one of those books, rare enough though they are, that kind of read like poems, and are hence unparaphraseable. I think you should read this. If you are in a small group, I think you should suggest that your small group read it together.
One week later update: Yep, it's really good. This is one of those books, rare enough though they are, that kind of read like poems, and are hence unparaphraseable. I think you should read this. If you are in a small group, I think you should suggest that your small group read it together.
March 1, 2022
Tynn tungvekter! Gjennom seks små kapitler legger forfatteren ut hvordan disippelskap ser ut. Kapitlene er Being disciple - Faith, hope and love - Forgiveness - Holiness - Faith in society - Life in the Spirit.
July 9, 2020
I liked it, but I’m not sure why he wrote this separately from his book Being Christian. Anyway, here’s a good quote about church and state:
“The Christian disciple is not seeking to make the state into a church, but is proposing to the state and to the culture in general a style and direction of common life—the life of the Body of Christ—that represents humanity at its fullest.“
“The Christian disciple is not seeking to make the state into a church, but is proposing to the state and to the culture in general a style and direction of common life—the life of the Body of Christ—that represents humanity at its fullest.“
November 21, 2016
This small book (88 pgs.) is based on six addresses given by the author over the period of 2007-2012. The six chapters include Being Disciples, Faith, Hope & Love, Forgiveness, Holiness, Faith in Society and Life in the Spirit. Thus, the book was put together as an afterthought under the heading of "Being Disciples" and not written as one coherent statement on that topic. So, this is not your general "how to" book on discipleship. Rather, the author takes a deeper and more reflective look at each of the aforementioned topics. I found five out of the six chapters quite interesting. The author, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has a wonderful capacity to look at each topic and bring something of it that might go unrecognized. This would be a good book to read devotionally over the course of a single week.
October 31, 2018
short review: This is a book of wisdom about living the Christian life. Williams is making an argument in this and his previous book Being Christian that Christianity is a relationship with God and that primarily we are Christian through practice of becoming like Christ. That is not to minimize theology and knowledge, but to say that the primary issue is the practice and relationship not the knowledge.
These are two very short books. Less than 100 pages each. And they were originally based on lectures. They are pithy and tight. Very readable and would make very good small group discussions. Both because of content and length and readability.
My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/being-disciples/
These are two very short books. Less than 100 pages each. And they were originally based on lectures. They are pithy and tight. Very readable and would make very good small group discussions. Both because of content and length and readability.
My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/being-disciples/
April 11, 2022
This is a short read but the kind that somewhat reads like poetry that requires a re-read or two. I connected with some chapters more than others, but the one on holiness surprisingly impacted me deeply. Welby - using Jesus’s example - defines a holy person not as someone who is pure, perfect, set apart, but as one who “makes you see things in yourself and around you that you had not seen before; that is to say, enlarges the world rather than shrinking it…you come away from them feeling not, ‘Oh what a wonderful person,’ but, ‘What a wonderful world,’ ‘What a wonderful God,’ or even, with surprise, ‘What a wonderful person I am too.’
November 23, 2022
There’s something in the way Rowan Williams writes that touches something deep within me and kindles my love for God and humanity. It’s hard to describe what I feel when reading this but the closest words would be an ache to be truly human and in relationship with the triune God.
Williams‘ tenderness and wisdom are a gift.
Williams‘ tenderness and wisdom are a gift.
September 2, 2016
It's hard to rate an academic book - and make no mistake, that's what this is - and even more difficult to rate any book about faith. I found it both challenging and welcoming, and I shall return to it for reasons both academic and personal.
November 15, 2016
An interesting and informative book about how to live as a Christian in the 21st century.
January 1, 2017
Everyone read Rowan Williams
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