10.21.2026

Whenever I get together with my pastor friends someone always brings up how different church life is since Covid. Attendance is down. Many rely on live-streams rather than worshiping in person. 

That year or so of  Covid lockdown shaped the habitus of far too many believers!

Habitus, as I wrote last week, is the deeply ingrained habits, skills, dispositions, and ways of perceiving the world that people acquire through their upbringing and social environment. 

We all have a “habitus.” What matters is what forms it! 

The world bombards us with a constant barrage of information. We counter that with . . . what? A couple of hours in church each week? Maybe a few moments of Bible reading/study each morning? 

What forms our habitus as believers and protects us from the habitus of the world?

In the early church, one of the important means of shaping the Christians’ habitus was scripture memory. Why did they memorize scripture? Because memorizing scriptures ingrained into the believers’ hearts the resources that both encouraged the early believers and pointed them toward new possibilities of living. 

The early believers sought to live faithfully in a society marked by violence, anger, retaliation, hatred, classism, prejudice, immorality, greed, with no regard for the needs of anyone other than themselves. So Paul had to counter that by writing passages like the one we memorized, Colossians 3:12-15. 

Yes, we memorized it, but it's really important to keep reviewing scriptures or you’ll quickly forget them! Reviewing those passages of scripture everyday, and thinking about them as we say them, can help shape our habitus. And if we can make those concepts of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, love and thanksgiving the governing principles of our lives — so much so that they happen without thought — then we are truly living as the world converted by Jesus. 

In my recent study of the early church, I was surprised by one  of the passages that new believers in the early church memorized. Origen, writing in the 240s, said, “For who of all believers does not know the words in Isaiah? ‘And in the last days the mountain of the lord shall be manifest . . . and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares.’” Christian teachers used their teaching to fill the people’s memories with significant biblical texts such as this poetic, visionary passage from Isaiah. Here’s the entire passage:

In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. 

The early believers didn’t look on that as a future experience. They believed they were living it every day! The early teachers truly believed that Christians, in the way they responded to their enemies (or to anyone who would provoke them), were bringing this beautiful promise to fulfilment! There was no need to wait for “peace in the valley for me someday,” but they could and did experience the passages' fulfillment when they lived the words of Jesus: “But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” 

In the lives of the people of God there was no room for anger, revenge, unforgiveness or the rest.  They had experienced the love and forgiveness of Jesus, and wanted to make love and forgiveness the hallmarks of their lives. They believed their way of life was important because lifestyle was not only a product of belief, but it was also a display of what they truly believed. 

Again, they were not so much seeking to convert the world but to be the world converted by Jesus.

And the greatest way we can be the world is the way we love — something we learned from Jesus.

Right now, we’re shaping our habitus by memorizing the words behind our mission of “loving God . . . loving others.” In Mark 12:29-31, one of the scribes asked Jesus which was the first commandment of all, “Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Memorize these words with us! Allow them to shape the way you live your life as a follower of Christ.

Blessings,
Pastor Terry