A New Wesley on the West Coast? John Mark Comer’s Call to Become Apprentices of Jesus
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Review of Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did., by John Mark Comer, Waterbrook, 2024.
Everywhere I turn recently, I find that churches of various traditions are reading, thinking about, and listening to someone I hadn't heard of even two years ago: a pastor from Portland named John Mark Comer, who now takes up residence in Los Angeles as the director of his non-profit called Practicing the Way.
Brad East, in Christianity Today, writes exactly what I thought when I first heard of him:
From afar, he seemed like one more polished celebrity pastor turned speaker turned writer, with slick content designed to evoke the Rob Bell aesthetic of yore—and for that reason, to annoy people like me. By “people like me,” most charitably, I mean bookish believers and teachers concerned with orthodoxy. Less charitably, I mean snobs with too many degrees who look down on books sold in airport terminals (and by “down,” I mean “with envy”).
But after listening to his sermons and reading some of his books, East changed his tune:
Comer is well aware of the tens of millions of Americans who have stopped attending church in recent decades. He’s from the Pacific Northwest, which is to say, from the future. He knows the score. He writes, then, for the sake of a church that is not yet, a church that might develop the backbone to endure in the West. Looking forward, therefore, he looks backward, drawing on the best of church tradition. Given the state of popular Christian culture today, with its influencers and celebrities, its digital brands and breathless innovation, Comer’s model stands apart. He’s willing to trade follows for roots. May his tribe increase!
I also have become persuaded that Comer is addressing the critical needs of the Western church in a way that is accessible, transformative, and, when you experience it yourself, even exciting.
I first encountered John Mark Comer in his book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World. It's an account of his journey from being a busy pastor of a large megachurch in Portland into a different, quieter life patterned on the rhythms and life of Jesus.
In that book, Comer was clearly touching a widely held cultural anxiety: we're overextended, way too busy, lonely, friendless, and just plain tired. He diagnoses the pace of modern life as unsustainable, and then gently invites readers to consider if they desire something different. (And, of course, we do!) In that book, Comer uses one of his best gifts: an ability to stoke a longing to follow Jesus, to make a life of apprenticeship to Jesus appear desirable, as something we actually want if we take any amount of time to think about it.
Comer's Practicing the Way builds upon this desire and offers a more comprehensive guide to what it looks like to become an apprentice of Jesus, to model your life on his. The first question in the Alpha course wisely asks, “Is there more to life than this?” Comer's book, along with its eight-week video course and subsequent teachings on the spiritual practices of Jesus (available for free online), answers this question with a resounding yes! And then, in a theologically deep yet accessible way, Comer leads readers into what it might look like to experience a life with Jesus as your master, to be with him, become like him, and do the things that he did, in the words of the book's tagline.
I'm a pastor at Asbury Methodist Church in northern Kentucky. We're a congregation that is over two-hundred years old and now a part of the newly formed Global Methodist Church. And my hope, which is a hope I'm hearing from most of my friends and colleagues in the Wesleyan world, is to find a way to call the local church into small groups of intentional discipleship and spiritual formation. We long to find the best way, in our current day and time, to retrieve the practice of what John Wesley called class meetings and band meetings, which were small groups to promote discipleship and accountability.
When you look historically at the mainline Protestant traditions in America, and Methodism in particular, you can see a clear shift from groups focused on transformation (class and band meetings) into groups focused on information (Sunday schools and Bible studies). The decline of these more transformation-centered groups in Methodism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries contributed to the decline in Methodism's passion for pursuing holiness together, until it became clear to many that Mainline Protestantism had the "form, but not the power of religion," in John Wesley's prophetic words. Scholars like Kevin Watson have been such a gift to Methodism in making us aware of this rich heritage we had forgotten and all but lost.
Comer's book offers a similar diagnosis, though he is looking at more recent history from the non-denominational, broadly evangelical church tradition he was raised in on the West Coast. He writes, “Spiritual formation in the North American church is often truncated to this three-part formula:
Go to church.
Read your Bible and pray.
Give.”
He writes that many people, doing these (very good and needed!) things, never experience the transformation that is possible in Christ, and the fallout in the Western church results in:
Churches full of people who are Christians but not apprentices of Jesus
A widespread cancer of hypocrisy that has infected the church, where the gap between Jesus' teachings and people's day-to-day lives (including those of many pastors) is too great to be explained away graciously
A generation of people disillusioned with the faith
Many who quietly ache for more of God and his transformation but feel stuck in their spiritual journeys and blocked in their growth.
As I was reading, I couldn't help but think of another bookish, introverted, much less hip pastor also named John, who was dissatisfied with his and his countrymen's spiritual life; one who sensed the need for a method, a “way,” to experience in his heart and soul what is promised in scripture; one who desired to know in community the love of God that is poured out through the Holy Spirit.
This other John, John Wesley, also utilized the technology and media at his disposal to teach people more clearly about the lifelong, holistic nature of salvation and about the means of grace (or “the practices” in Comer's language). Wesley also, like Comer, took the Sermon on the Mount as a vision Jesus actually wants us to live out, rather than a vision of a perfect, unattainable life to make us realize how sinful we are. Wesley was seeking a healthier balance between the biblical doctrine of grace with the calling of Jesus to a holy life, a healthy and holy co-operation with the Holy Spirit, what Randy Maddox calls “responsible grace.”
Comer strives for this balance too. He writes, “Christlikeness in our inner being is not the result of the right application of spiritual disciplines…. [I]t is always a gift of sheer grace. You will never work harder for anything in your life than Christlike character, and nothing else will ever feel like such an unearned gift. This is a paradox you simply have to experience for yourself.”
Wesley preached that there is no holiness but social holiness. Comer agrees and writes, “The radical individualism of Western culture is not only a mental health crisis and growing social catastrophe; it's a death blow to any kind of serious formation into Christlike love. Because it's in relationship that we are formed and forged.” Wesley encouraged his followers to start small groups of people who covenanted together for a certain way of following Jesus. He called this form of life the General Rules; Comer calls it a Rule of Life. And yet, both point to the wisdom that we find freedom in limits and in obedience, especially when we are living into those limits with others in a loving Christian community.
Wesley, like Comer, was also operating at times of great social upheaval. We often forget how profoundly the industrial revolution transformed Great Britain during the time of the evangelical revival of the 18th century. We too, in the age of social media and AI and quantum computers, also feel as if we have no solid ground on which to stand. To this kind of culture, a life of spiritual disciplines is highly attractive and deeply needed.
The more I read Comer, the more parallels with Wesley I noticed. He emphasizes financial generosity as a core practice of discipleship. He notes the centrality of the Holy Spirit as the agent of spiritual transformation. He locates love as the central goal of sanctification. He strikes a neat balance between a forensic and therapeutic understanding of sin and salvation. He clearly attributes considerable authority to the early church fathers. He shows how the practices of Jesus make us available to God though we do not earn our salvation in any way. He thinks practically about how to help churches form small groups to live all of this out together.
Based on the popularity and resonance of his work, it looks as if Comer is becoming one of the leading voices in American Christianity, changing the conversation about what churches should focus on in order to become resilient disciples in the post-Christian West. We Wesleyans should take heart in this. We need more apprentices of Jesus, rather than attendees without transformation. We need more small groups of real Christian fellowship, and fewer informational meetings to learn about the Bible. We need more people practicing Sabbath with friends and family, and fewer families too busy with travel sports and extracurriculars to have a shared meal around the table. We need more people praying and fasting in the Holy Spirit, and fewer people who view prayer as a chore, one more thing to add to their calendar.
The Global Methodist Church that I am a part of wants to make disciples (apprentices) of Jesus Christ and spread scriptural holiness across the globe. I don't see how we do this apart from doing something like what Comer proposes in his book. Because of our engagement with Practicing the Way, my wife and I have spent the past several weeks intentionally taking a Sabbath with our family, spending time in prayer, and even trying to fast one day a week (this one's the hardest for us!). I needed an invitation from someone like Comer, even as a pastor, to remember what the word “disciple” means and that this is the life I actually want.
Our churches are filled with hungry, tired, broken, and lonely people who are looking for more from a life in Christ, longing for the beautiful, good life as his apprentices. I am grateful to Comer for his articulation of what this might look like. And I pray that he is like Wesley, in the sense that I hope his work is a mighty seed of revival, an awakening of people who want to pursue a holy life. May God give us grace and courage, as we together heed Jesus' calling and put his words into practice.
Cambron Wright is an elder in the Global Methodist Church and serves as the lead pastor at Asbury Methodist Church in Highland Heights, KY. Cambron also writes about Methodism, theology, and culture on his Substack, Wright Writes.