Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 8414 Plough Quarterly • Winter 2017 there that was divorcing wouldn’t submit to the authority of the church and come for counseling first to see if the marriage could be saved. They objected that this was none of the church’s business. So the church finally asked the couple to leave. That struck me as pretty radical, but this pastor told me, “It didn’t give us any joy to ask this couple to leave. They were our brother and sister. But the community has to mean something. We have to have discipline or our faith is nothing but therapy, feeling good about things.” It’s similar for us in the Ortho- dox Church. The Orthodox pastors I’ve had take confession very seriously. They will not grant you communion if you don’t come to regular confession and aren’t accountable. In American life, this kind of church discipline isn’t something we’re used to, but churches that don’t discipline their members really aren’t going to make it. The times I’ve grown spiritually have been when pastors or lay friends who were Christians called me to account and said, “You can’t do this. If your faith really means something to you, you’ve got to change, you’ve got to repent.” That’s an old-fashioned word we don’t hear much in the church anymore: repent. But the Benedict Option is all about repentance, ongoing repentance. It’s about realizing that we live in exile. Are there ways that we as American churches have to repent? Probably the worst thing we have to repent of as American Christians is lukewarmness: thinking of our faith as just something there for psychological comfort and to give us a general sense that God smiles on our middle- class American way of life. You can see now why so many young people are leaving the church – they were never given solid food. We in the conservative church also have to repent of worshiping the nation, of nationalism, and of worshiping, to some degree, the Republican Party. For much of my life as an adult Christian, I never really stopped to think about how much of what I thought was true about Christianity was so consonant with the Republican view of the world. It wasn’t until I had a child of my own that I began to think about the difference between what your generic Republican thought was the true and good way to live and the way that I as a Chris- tian thought was the right way to live. We have to repent of the politicization of church. Robert Putnam, in his book American Grace, found that, contrary to popular belief, the churches that are most politicized in their worship and sermonizing are progressive churches. So this is a problem for the whole church, not just the conservative churches. People on the left tend to focus on poverty, racism, and things like that, which are important. The conservatives tend to focus on abortion and sexuality. That’s important too. I don’t see many people in American Christian- ity doing a great job of integrating both. A friend of mine said the Democratic Party is a party of lust and the Republican Party is a party of greed, and both are deadly sins that Christians have to turn away from. We also need to repent of ignorance – willful ignorance – of our past. At the start of modernity, the Enlightenment, we Westerners cut ourselves off from the Christian past and There’s an old-fashioned word we don’t hear much in the church anymore: repent.