The 77 Habits of Highly Ineffective Christianity by Chris Fabry is a tongue-in-check book encouraging its readers to be effective Christians by pretending to promote bad Christian habits. I recently discovered a document I drafted in 2012 taking a similar look at some of my own bad habits. Read on to find out more...

 

The number one aim of an ineffective Christian should be to constrain God’s influence upon your life. God can be as small or as big as we allow him to be in our lives. Ineffective Christians ensure that God is as small as possible; in my personal experience the following habits have proved there worth in the pursuit of ineffectiveness.

We should never expect God to do any more than we have previously experienced. To ensure our ineffectiveness as a Christian we must base our assumptions about our future on our past experiences and at all costs avoid truths such as Eph:3.20 “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us”.

A brilliant habit to nurture ineffectiveness, and one which we can dress up to appear as spiritual wisdom is ‘preparation & planning’. Never set off on any adventure with God until he has revealed each step of the journey beforehand.  Rather than trusting an unknown future to a known God, revel in ineffectiveness and pass away the time waiting for God to reveal all, with endless planning meetings, strategy sessions, focus groups & training sessions.  A word of caution to my fellow students of ineffectiveness. The problem with this habit is its foolishness is easily seen when exposed to truths like 1 Corinthians 2:9 “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.”

 My personal favourite material to constrain Gods influence is to believe passionately that God has favourites and that I am not one of them! Believing this allows us to pin the blame for some of the difficulties we find ourselves in on not being a favourite, rather than because of our own unwise rebellious choices. The key to the effectiveness of this strategy is to avoid any examination of Gods character as revelled in verse such as Romans 2:11 “For God does not show favouritism” and Ephesians 6:9 “...All are equal before Him” or Galatians 6:7 “Don’t be misled – you cannot mock the justice of God. You will always harvest what you plant”.

My inability to not sin (I keep doing and thinking wrong things, again and again) must mean God is terribly disappointed with me and has written me off until I get my act together. Habitually thinking in this way allows us to justify minimising our willingness to be used by God, as he would not want to use a sinner anyway. But be warned, the effectiveness of this approach is seriously undermined by Paul in his letter to the Romans when he writes, “But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When its sin verses grace, grace wins hands down” (Romans 5:20 Message version). In fact, to excel at ineffective Christianity I urge you to avoid reading the bible or giving any thought to how its contents apply to your life!

To all whom wish to excel at being highly ineffective as a Christian I can reassure you that the above habits have shackled my effectiveness and acted as a shield to minimise Gods influence in my life. The choice to embrace them or not is yours.