“How is it that great religious traditions... are borne into the future by such small and culturally restricted... institutions as the majority of American congregations appear to be?” (Bass 1994, 171). So begins a quest that launched a rich vocational trajectory. This question, posed by Dorothy Bass—historian, practical theologian, and companion sojourner in the Christian faith—is tucked away in Volume Two of a study on American congregations supported by the Lilly Endowment. Even if less widely known than her other writings, her chapter on “Congregations and the Bearing of Traditions” marks a major turning point in her work, the moment when her dissatisfaction with conventional historian-type questions of change and continuity blossomed into a deeper desire to understand how scriptural traditions, and the “transcendental realities” they bear, live on in people’s lives (181). The answer, stated simply: these traditions live on by inviting individuals and families into practices intrinsic to them.

This conviction about the centrality of practices invigorated conversation between Dorothy and Craig Dykstra, then vice-president of the Lilly Endowment’s Religion Division, and also invested in renewing Christian practices as a way to enhance theological education. Together they set out to elucidate practices not only so that people could revitalize them—a primary aim—but also so that scholars, teachers, and ministers could enrich their understanding and thus contribute to sustaining them. The rest is history. And a rich history of interchange and publication it is.

Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, which Dorothy edited and published a few years later, was a game changer for both church and academy. In the church, its influence can be measured easily by numbers and lives affected. One account of the book’s impact describes it as traveling “nonstop through church circles for the last 12 years, read and used by clergy, laypeople, denominational leaders, seminarians and others” (Winston 2009). By 2009, it had sold 100,000 copies, making it one of Jossey-Bass’s most successful books.

In a way, the book simply rode the wave of a change already occurring in the academy around practices and religion. Although Dorothy credits philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in her 1994 essay with the idea that “social embodiment is essential to the bearing of living traditions,” a growing number of scholars from a variety of different angles besides Aristotelian ethics were challenging the “notion that traditions are principally borne by texts” (180) or by belief statements and doctrinal debate. Practical theologians and scholars in religion in general already had begun to pay greater attention to the local, the material, and the embodied as constitutive of theology and faith.

In another sense, however, Practicing Our Faith both capitalized on this shift and contributed greatly to its development by giving the idea of practices conceptual depth and concrete illustration, and by spreading the word beyond the academy to communities where people strive to live out their faith. As worship scholar John Witvliet says, the book “sparked a small ­movement, a whole way of thinking [that] ­crystallized the insight that the Christian faith is not just a set of cognitive beliefs, but a way of life” (quoted in Winston 2009).

The important conceptual moves found in Practicing Our Faith ensured its widespread impact. In a co-written introductory chapter, Dorothy and Craig offer a definition of Christian practices clear and expansive enough to undergird a multitude of future consultations, projects, and publications. In their distillation, Christian practices are“things Christian people do together over time in response to and in the light of God’s active presence for the life of the world” (1997, 5; their emphasis). Each phrase in this pithy sentence captures elements they deem essential—community, history, and the ultimate aim of God’s care for the wider world. Each element disrupts popular New Age perceptions of spirituality as something that floats free of its context and the pursuit of wider human and divine goods. Christian practices are related to basic needs shared by all human beings, not activities unique to Christianity or spirituality. All such practices have a history deeply intertwined with religious traditions. They require and are deeply embedded in community. They are practices we do together. We need companions. Finally, they are guided by aims that reach beyond individual self-improvement. It is not all about “me.”

As this suggests, Practicing Our Faith expands our imagination about what counts as a Christian practice. It suggests daily activities we normally overlook as vital sites for faith, such as organizing our time, spending our money, making decisions, attending to our bodies, and forgiving each other. Indeed, “our daily lives are all tangled up with the things God is doing in the world” (1997, 8; their emphasis). These everyday practices stand in intricate relationship, as broth to consommé, to formal practices we usually identify as “religious,” such as praying, reading scripture, and going to worship. The more official acts, prescribed and performed within congregations, distill the heart of belief and are central to Christian life. But we see now how these “darker and richer” (1997, 9) instances of faith must flow into our daily lives and shape our everyday activities in order to sustain Christian faith.

Practicing Our Faith also expands our imagination about how people might go about engaging in such practice. In fact, Dorothy has centered her efforts on finding ways to help people breathe new life into these practices. This does not mean developing anything like a twelve-step guide to spiritual enlightenment. Rather, Dorothy and Craig invite people and communities to do their own thinking and talking about how they are “already participating in each practice” in their life together (2010, 211). In the second edition, they guide their readership through the same series of questions that contributors considered in composing their chapters, inviting people to consider how a practice’s history and scriptural context shape it and how it might be restored today. If Christian belief involves a “way to live,” then its many practices are interrelated and abundant. One can start anywhere, with practices one already enjoys or performs well with the assurance that “focusing on even a single practice,” such as keeping the Sabbath or practicing hospitality, “can lead you into a new way of life. Get started with one and you find yourself in the middle of another” (1997, 11).

Given the potential fruitfulness of faith practices, it should come as no surprise that Practicing Our Faith spawned an assortment of companion volumes, opening up to ­ever-widening communities. Indeed, in trying to capture its significance I am struck by the sheer abundance of creative output. I almost don’t know where to stop my account. In Dorothy’s leadership of the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, a Lilly Endowment program based at Valparaiso University, she mentored, guided, cajoled, nurtured, and sparked a plethora of other projects. She gathered people, led them in discussion, and organized their writing together. To have convened successfully so many diverse groups, drawing out each person’s best effort and eventuating in collegial co-authorship, is no mean accomplishment. Way to Live: Christian Practices for Teens (2002), which Dorothy edited with Don Richter, breaks down the practices into themes that teens confront on a regular basis—stuff, food, work, play, time, friends, justice, prayer, and so on. Adults and teens join together to write each chapter, exemplifying in method the value of working in community. On Our Way: Christian Practices for Living a Whole Life (2010), edited with Susan Briehl, reaches out to young adults who teeter on the edge of bigger commitments of work and love, a critical time for faith formation.

These volumes are only two of the many Dorothy either directly sponsored through the Valparaiso Project or indirectly influenced. The front matter of the second edition of Practicing Our Faith lists several books in which individual authors develop one of its twelve practices into full-fledged books, such as Dorothy’s own Receiving the Day (1999), a beautiful meditation on the day, the week, the year, and how the flow of liturgical time stands in relationship to and over against regular time. And the twelve practices covered in the book do not exhaust the possibilities. The project also supported books that address new practices, such as caring for children (Miller-McLemore 2006) and prayer (Wolfteich 2006). In recent years, look-alike books with gerunds as titles have appeared, reflecting at least the indirect, if not immediate, influence of Practicing Our Faith (e.g., a book series on Christian Explorations of Daily Living, with volumes on working, playing, eating, shopping, etc.).

Dorothy and Craig also considered the theoretical infrastructure behind their labor and invited groups to explore how academic theology, faith, and practice evolve together to shape a Christian way of life. Dorothy convened a group of systematic theologians, producing along with co-editor Miroslav Volf Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (2002). A few years later, she and Craig invited practical theologians, ministers, and scholars from other disciplines to consider the role of practical theology, leading to publication of For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry (2008). Currently she is working with four colleagues on a book, Christian Practical Wisdom: What It Is, Why It Matters (forthcoming 2015), that explores the kind of knowledge distinct to practice.

 Although some people might place Dorothy’s academic theology within the MacIntyre tradition of virtue ethics, this does not do full justice to the range of her commitments nor to her own Christian formation. East Coast education, feminist leanings, and progressive politics do not completely align with a communitarian position that sometimes sets faith and culture in opposition. Instead she remains deeply invested in the relationship between Christian communities and the wider public, and in how the former must make a difference as a key player within the latter.

If I have learned anything from Dorothy, it is that people are so much more together than any one of us would ever be on our own. This may sound simple, but I mean this precisely as it pertains to her primary commitment to the living out of Christian faith in the day-to-day world. My life is so much more because of her friendship, love, and collegiality for nearly thirty years. But I am far from the only beneficiary. She has fostered abundant life for a host of people and communities, a blessing that will live well into the future not only through her family and wonderful children (who exemplify so much of what she values and whom I regard with awe and appreciation), but also through her writing and the many writings she has inspired.

In the late 1980s, Dorothy and I had seminary offices next door to one another. From the oasis of our sporadic sack lunches together years ago, squeezed into days otherwise overflowing with teaching and parenting young children, to our long distant friendship today renewed through unhurried dinners while on study retreat in northern Minneapolis, I have been on the road walking side-by-side with Dorothy for a long time. On occasion—the type of occasion I believe many others have shared because of her presence—our hearts have burned within us only to notice that Christ has been walking with us. Since our secular age makes such moments ever harder to grasp and proclaim, we cannot fully measure—not by books sold nor by flowery tributes composed—her many gifts. We can simply express immense gratitude for her good company in seeing life anew along the way.

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture at the Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion of Vanderbilt University.

Works Cited

Bass, Dorothy C., Kathleen Cahalan, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, James Nieman, and Christian Scharen. Christian Practical Wisdom: What It Is, Why It Matters. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, forthcoming 2015.

Bass, Dorothy and Susan R. Briehl, eds. On Our Way: Christian Practices for Living a Whole Life. Nashville: Upper Room Books, 2010.

Bass, Dorothy and Craig Dykstra, eds. For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.

Bass, Dorothy and Don C. Richter, eds. Way to Live: Christian Practices for Teens. Nashville: Upper Room Books, 2002.

Bass, Dorothy and Miroslav Volf, eds. Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

Bass, Dorothy. Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.

_____, ed. Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997, 2010.

_____. “Congregations and the Bearing of Traditions.” American Congregations, Volume 2: New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations. James P. Wind and James W. Lewis, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Miller-McLemore, Bonnie J. In the Midst of Chaos: Care of Children as Spiritual Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006.

Winston, Kimberly. “The Practice of Faith.” Faith and Leadership, February 2, 2009. http://www.faithandleadership.com/features/articles/the-practice-faith. Accessed January 9, 2014.

Wolfteich, Claire. Lord, Have Mercy: Praying for Justice with Conviction and Humility. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006.