Douglas Selph · Version 3 · First published May 21, 2026

Why Articulate Disciplines at All

Christians everywhere say they are trying to follow Jesus. Yet the actual interpretation of that call varies enormously.

Scripture, tradition, and church practice contain an enormous range of guidance. Different churches emphasize different passages, practices, and priorities. Even the interpretation of the same verse may differ across traditions, congregations, and individuals.

In practice, every Christian community goes through a discernment process. A group decides—often implicitly—which teachings, practices, and priorities will guide their life together in their particular context.

Interpretation itself is socially formed. The “compass” of a community emerges from:

• its shared history
• the personalities of its members
• the environment it inhabits
• the collective decisions it makes moment by moment

In process-philosophy terms, the confluence of these factors forms the present moment, and from that moment fresh choices are made.

So if we want to describe the life of a particular Christian community, we have to name the guiding ideals that actually govern its thought and behavior—and then notice the disciplines (if any) the community adopts to train toward those ideals.

Distinctives vs. General Christian Ideals

Many Christian statements are true but not distinctive.

For example:

“Love one another.”

This is a foundational Christian principle. Yet by itself it does not tell you what is distinctive about a particular community.

It is similar to describing Chicago by saying:

“People live in buildings and commute to work.”

That description could apply to any large city.

Shared values alone do not reveal what is distinctive about a Christian community.
To understand a community, we have to ask what practices actually shape the life it lives together.

For Reba Place Fellowship, that question leads us to the concrete disciplines that have shaped its common life.

• Locality
• Regular participation in community gatherings
• Shared decision making
• Long-term commitment to the community
• Commitment to reconciliation in relationships  
• Simple living
• The common purse
• Nurturing other communities

These are not merely ideas. They are disciplines that take shape through concrete practices and structures over time.

The Mission Statement and Its Limits

The Fellowship’s mission statement reads:

“The calling of Reba Place Fellowship is to extend the mission of Jesus by being a community of love and discipleship and by nurturing other such communities as God gives us grace.”

This statement is formative—it points us toward what we are trying to be.

But by itself it remains too general. Many Christian groups could affirm the same statement.

The real question becomes:

How do we actually live this out?

Over the years, certain disciplines have emerged, along with concrete practices and structures that help us embody that mission.

At some point, however, a community must move beyond ideals and ask what practices actually train people toward them.

From Ideals to Disciplines
(When a Community Gets Serious)

Up to this point we have been talking about ideals—the things a community claims to value. But ideals alone do not tell us very much. Many groups affirm the same ideals, yet their lived life can look very different.

The real difference appears when a community begins to ask a more practical question:

What disciplines, practices, and structures help us actually embody those ideals?

Every group has guiding ideals—the things it talks about frequently, the principles it treats as weight-bearing, the assumptions that quietly steer what people praise, excuse, confront, and ignore.

Those ideals may be stated (“we love one another”) or unstated (“don’t make waves,” “protect the brand,” “keep it respectable”). Either way, if you watch long enough, you can see what actually governs the group—what gets attention, airtime, forgiveness, and discipline.

This is why there can be a mismatch between what someone says and what their life shows.

If I say “I’m a Christian,” but I mainly go to work, stay disengaged from my coworkers, go home, and numb out—then whatever I say my ideals are, my life is being governed by something else. Not necessarily evil—sometimes it’s exhaustion or fear or pain—but it is not discipleship in any serious sense.

Now here is where disciplines come in.

A discipline is not the same thing as an ideal.
A discipline is something you take on when you are trying to train toward an ideal you actually believe matters.

Athletes do not merely admire “fitness”; they adopt training disciplines because at some point admiration is not enough. You either train or you do not. Without training, the ideal remains mostly theoretical.

In Christian terms, if you assume you are already fine, you will not bother with disciplines. But if you recognize the gap between the Kingdom of God and your default life—between the false-self and the true-self—then you begin looking for practices and structures that help you actually change.

So when I say I want to articulate the disciplines of Reba Place Fellowship, I am not saying disciplines are the whole story. The Fellowship has guiding ideals—love, simple living, shared life—and also certain training structures that make those ideals harder to evade and easier to practice over time.

Those disciplines take shape through concrete practices and structures—locality, common life, small groups, shared decision making, the common purse, and simple living—that help form a people whose life reflects Christ.

The Core Disciplines

The Discipline of Locality

One distinctive practice is what I would call the discipline of locality.

Members intentionally structure their lives so that they can be regularly present in one another’s lives.

This usually involves:

• living near one another when possible
• sharing regular meals
• informal contact during the week
• small gatherings and meetings
• daily or weekly points of interaction

The goal is not merely proximity but being known and knowing others.

Seeing someone only in a single context—such as Sunday worship—reveals only one facet of a person. But people live 24/7 lives. Real discipleship requires seeing the larger pattern of someone’s life.

How locality works in practice

Members regularly create opportunities for contact:

• neighborhood living
• shared dinners
• small groups
• ministry collaboration
• informal visiting
• sharing everyday resources (cars, tools, laundry equipment, the proverbial cup of sugar)

There are no social police enforcing attendance, but if someone withdraws consistently it will naturally become noticeable.

Someone may eventually ask:

“How are you doing? We haven’t seen you lately.”

This is not surveillance—it is informal relational accountability.

Locality creates the conditions in which genuine care and discipleship become possible.

Living in sustained proximity across generations also creates opportunities for mentoring, role modeling, and mutual care between older and younger members of the community.

Spiritual Disciplines and Formation

In addition to the communal disciplines already described, Christians also practice a wide range of personal and shared spiritual disciplines intended to deepen their relationship with God.

But these practices vary widely:

• prayer
• reading scripture
• service
• worship
• fellowship
• common work

For members of the Fellowship, this also includes participation in local congregations. While members may attend different churches, active involvement in a local body of worship is generally understood to be an important part of Christian formation.

These disciplines take many forms, but they share a common purpose: they help orient a person’s life toward God and the transformation discipleship requires.

The deeper reality is that our life together is aimed at something larger.

This communal dimension of discipleship is deeply woven into the Christian story itself. Jesus did not primarily disciple isolated individuals, but formed a group of followers who learned by living, traveling, eating, praying, serving, and struggling together. Paul’s letters likewise assume communities learning how to embody the life of Christ together over time.

In that sense, intentional Christian community is not an attempt to invent a new form of Christianity, but an attempt—however imperfect—to lean more intentionally into something already present within the New Testament vision of the church.

The Saint Producing Factory

One way to describe the project of Christian discipleship is this:

The church is a Saint Producing Factory.

By “saint” I do not mean a flawless person. I mean a person whose life is increasingly healed and aligned with God.

The core assumption is:

Being found in God is the deepest form of healing.

The process of growing into that reality involves what might be called Divine Therapy.

Divine Therapy

Divine Therapy refers to the lifelong process through which God gradually heals and reshapes a person’s inner life.

This includes confronting what spiritual writers often call:

• the false-self
• the true-self

The false-self is the collection of survival patterns and identity structures we developed over our lives in order to secure safety, approval, control, or other forms of emotional security. These patterns are not inherently bad; they often helped us navigate real situations earlier in life. But when they are over-relied upon or applied inappropriately, they can begin to cause harm—to ourselves or to others.

The true-self is the person God is actually forming us to become.

Intentional Christian community provides a context where these patterns become visible.

And when they become visible, healing becomes possible.

Accountability Through Shared Life

Because of the discipline of locality, members see each other in many contexts.

This naturally creates accountability.

If someone says they want to follow Christ in a particular way, the community can help support that commitment simply by being present in their lives.

This is different from the typical “commuter church” model where people gather briefly and disperse.

In commuter churches:

• people may attend Sunday services
• they may have friends
• but they often remain largely unknown

Intentional community attempts to move beyond that pattern, creating a context where people can actually be known and where commitments to follow Christ are lived out in the presence of others.

Small Groups and Meaningful Support

Many churches encourage small groups.

Reba Place Fellowship does as well, but the purpose is somewhat different.

Affinity groups form around shared interests. That can be helpful, but discipleship requires something deeper.

In Fellowship small groups, the reason for gathering is mutual discipleship.

Members come together specifically to:

• support one another spiritually
• share life struggles
• pray together
• discern decisions
• encourage growth in Christ

The point is not to solve every problem, but to ensure no one walks through life alone.

Shared Decision Making

Another central discipline is shared discernment.

Members commit to the Fellowship:

“until it can be collectively discerned that God is leading elsewhere.”

This reflects a theological conviction:

God’s guidance is often clearer through the Body than through isolated individuals.

This discipline pushes against a strong cultural instinct—especially in America—that prizes radical individual autonomy. That is, the mindset of:

“It’s just between me and God.”

Shared discernment invites others into major life decisions:

• career changes
• relocation
• marriage
• major financial choices
• difficult personal struggles

This does not remove individual responsibility. Rather, it recognizes that wisdom and accountability often emerge through community, especially in moments where we may be tempted to drift toward our own isolated inclinations.

Vocation and the Discipline of Staying

Another reality that emerges from the life of the Fellowship is the way vocation is approached.

In most modern contexts, occupation tends to determine where a person lives. People relocate—sometimes across cities or even countries—primarily because of job opportunities. Success is often associated with upward mobility, increased responsibility, higher income, or greater career prestige. None of this is inherently wrong. It is simply the normal pattern of life in our society.

But when someone commits themselves to an intentional Christian community, a different set of priorities often begins to take shape. Career advancement is not automatically treated as the highest good. It is weighed alongside other concerns: time for family, participation in community life, availability to others, and the overall health of shared relationships.

In the Fellowship, the commitment to a particular community in a particular locality becomes, in practice, a discipline of its own. Members are not primarily asking, “Where should my career take me?” but rather, “How can my work fit within the life God is building here?”

This does not mean that people never leave. Members do move away at times, often because they sense a calling elsewhere in the work of the Kingdom of God. But occupation by itself is usually not treated as the primary determining factor.

In practical terms, this means that certain professions can become difficult to reconcile with communal life. Some occupations demand such extreme time commitments or geographic mobility that sustained participation in a local community becomes nearly impossible. Medicine is a common example. Becoming a physician is an honorable vocation, but the structure of the profession can make long-term participation in intentional community very difficult.

There are also moral considerations that sometimes arise. Many within the Fellowship hold a strong conviction regarding the discipline of nonviolence, and occupations directly tied to military violence are therefore often viewed as incompatible with the call many feel they have received from Jesus.

None of this is approached with condemnation. People pursue many different paths in life, and those choices can be good and honorable. But part of what members implicitly accept when they commit to the Fellowship is that community itself becomes one of the guiding priorities around which other decisions—including occupation—are arranged.

In that sense, remaining rooted in a particular community is itself a discipline.

Simple Living

Another discipline is simple living.

This is not unique to the Fellowship. Many Christians—and many non-Christians—value simplicity. But within Fellowship life, simple living is not merely about minimalism or personal frugality. It is also a response to the powerful pull of materialism and compulsive consumption within modern society.

The underlying question is not simply, “How little can we own?” but rather, “How can we live in ways that free us to love God and neighbor more fully?”

Part of the vision behind simple living is the recognition that unchecked consumption often isolates people from one another and concentrates resources unevenly. The discipline therefore becomes a way of setting voluntary limits on ourselves so that resources, time, attention, and energy can be shared more equitably.

Or as the old phrase puts it:

“Living simply so others can simply live.”

Within the Fellowship, this discipline is closely tied to another practice:

the common purse.

Simple living expresses the value; the common purse provides a concrete structure that helps make that value sustainable in everyday life.

The Common Purse

The common purse is another distinctive practice of the Fellowship.

Members agree to:

• pool their income into a shared financial structure
• live within an agreed budget
• share resources collectively

In practice, this means certain expenses are handled together, such as housing, transportation, medical costs, and other shared needs. Members also live within agreed limits for discretionary spending, such as food, clothing, entertainment, and other personal or household purchases.

One important feature of this practice is that members receive the same discretionary allowance regardless of how much income they individually earn. In that sense, the common purse creates an alternative distribution system. It loosens the connection between personal earning power and personal spending power.

This practice resembles certain forms of monastic life and reflects passages such as Acts 2, where believers shared their possessions. It is not merely a financial arrangement, but a discipline aimed at mutual support, shared responsibility, and greater freedom from the power of money, status, and accumulation.

Why practice this?

Several reasons emerge over time.

Spiritual formation

Money can easily become an idol. Structuring finances collectively helps loosen the grip of mammon.

Mutual support

Financial structures provide care automatically. No one needs to beg for help during hardship.

Collective capacity

Pooling resources enables things individuals could not easily accomplish alone:

• housing
• vehicles
• loans
• property
• ministry projects

The financial structure itself does much of the work of caring for one another.

How the Disciplines Work Together

These disciplines are not isolated from one another. They overlap and reinforce one another in ways that gradually shape the life of the community.

For example:

• locality makes accountability and mutual support more possible
• shared life helps build trust
• trust makes practices like the common purse sustainable
• small groups create spaces for discernment, care, and reconciliation
• shared disciplines deepen discipleship over time

Together they form an interconnected way of life that makes certain forms of mutual care and spiritual formation more possible than they otherwise would be.

The Cost of Community

The Blessing and the Cost of Intimacy

Intentional Christian community has a paradox.

The great blessing of it is intimacy.
The great cost of it is also intimacy.

When people live closely together, their false-selves inevitably emerge.

Old wounds, defensive habits, insecurities, and blind spots surface.

This can produce harm in a number of ways. For example:

• misunderstandings
• criticisms
• conflict
• exhaustion
• emotional strain

These difficulties are not anomalies. They are part of the process.

The Complexity of Human Brokenness

Each person carries unique patterns formed by life experience.

None of these dynamics are unique to intentional community. Every person, family, church, workplace, and social group must navigate human brokenness in one form or another. What intentional community changes is not the existence of these realities, but the degree to which they become visible and difficult to avoid.

Sometimes these manifest as:

• unresolved trauma
• relational dysfunction
• addiction
• deep criticism of leadership
• social blindness
• emotional fragility

Communities must navigate these realities carefully.

They must balance several callings at once:

• love the difficult-to-love
• maintain healthy boundaries
• remain available for outward service
• protect the ordinary health of persons and households

Without boundaries, the energy of the community can become consumed by internal crisis. But the reverse can also happen: individuals or the community itself can become consumed by outward service in ways that neglect rest, family life, prayer, or the basic care needed to remain healthy over time.

Why the Community Holds Together

In the end, intentional Christian community can only remain healthy over time if its members remain committed to the deeper spiritual work.

That work is the ongoing process of consenting to God’s transforming work and learning to trust God and one another more deeply through:

• confronting the false-self
• nurturing the true-self
• participating in Divine Therapy
• growing into Christ

The disciplines and structures of community are not the final goal.

They are tools in the larger project.

Final Reflection

At its heart, the church—any church—is meant to be a community through which God forms a people whose shared life reflects the character of Christ.

But this does not mean that each of us is independently trying to become a saint on our own. In the New Testament vision, the Body of Christ grows together. What God is forming is not merely a collection of individual saints, but a communal life that itself reflects the character of Christ.

Each person contributes something to that life. One person may give their time in ministry, another their labor, another their financial support, another their wisdom or care. Working together, what none of us could embody alone begins to take shape collectively.

Intentional Christian community is simply one possible structure that attempts to support that process.

It is not the only way to follow Christ. But for those who choose it, it offers a unique path where discipleship is lived not merely as an idea, but as a shared way of life in which the Body itself is gradually formed into something holy.

Discipleship is not merely an idea.
It is a shared way of life in which the Body itself is gradually formed into something holy.

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• Version 2,3 — May 28, 2026
  Revised over time through ongoing community feedback and reflection.