Building Spiritual Habits In The Home | Clayton Greene and Chris Pappalardo

raising their children. So this I'm looking forward to our conversation today.

and co-founder of Goodkind. Clayton is also the Summit Collaborative director, where he supports more than 70 independent church plants. The Greens live in Durham, North Carolina with their two daughters, Cara and Susan. Our featured resource is the book Building Spiritual Habits in the Home small steps you can take today. Just go to Building relationships.

the little people that that walk around with us? And, um, it really went from good to great. One year when he reached out to me and said, hey, I've got an idea for an advent resource, and I think you'd be the perfect person to write it, which is what started what is now this partnership with Goodkind. And over and over again, him coming to me and saying, this is hard. I wish we could make it easier by doing X, Y, and Z and me saying, all right, I guess we're about to work on a new project.

but genuinely, I've read a number of different habits. Science books, uh, switch is one by Chip and Dan Heath. Of course. There's atomic habits. There's the power of habit. I mean, there's a lot of these books, but every time I would be reading these books, Gary, I would I'd be actually applying it to my spiritual life to be more consistent with Bible reading or to to pray more often.

And so I was always applying it there and then what Chris was kind of jesting about there in terms of our relationship is I come to Chris and I'd say, hey, why? You know, the habit scientists say that, you know, reminding yourself is important for being consistent with a new habit. Is that in the Bible? And he'd say, well, actually. And what we found is what James explains in Atomic Habits. You know, God actually wired into our being. And we

see that in Scripture as well. So this book is a marriage of those things where we see the foundation of these things in Scripture, and we see a direct and practical application of it for what it means for our families today.

Back to that story that Chris was saying about advent. The reason we did that is because in 2018, my daughter Cara said to us, Mommy and Daddy, you say that Christmas is all about Jesus, but it feels like Christmas is all about presents. And so she was pointing out a lack of alignment, right? Eugene Peterson would call that congruence where what we were saying and what we were living was somehow mismatched for her. And and we've been trying to work to solve that in our lives.

And this book is the playbook of how we attack those problems.

And so we felt like it doesn't. You don't have to just take a really good book on spiritual disciplines and a really good book on habit formation, and then try to figure out how they get along. We said, wouldn't it be nice if these two went together, if we could have it be biblically deep? But also this is really important for us, really, really applicable and practical. So people could read it and say, oh, you know what? I could totally do that. I could do that today.

and important thing for how we define spiritual habits. We say that a spiritual habits is us responding to a God who loves us and paying attention to what he is doing at his pace and in his grace. The short version of that is we respond and pay attention. So when we're praying, we're not initiating something there, right? God starts. God started the relationship with us. He created us. He is giving us his word. And so our spiritual habit is always going to be a response to a

conversation he has already started. The same thing is true of the Bible. The Bible is God's word to us, right? And so when we sit down to read it, we're not sitting down, initiating and trying to master some kind of new information. We're we're responding to a God who wants to know us and has revealed himself to us

in his word. So a spiritual habit, the way that we define it in the book, is responding to God and paying attention to what he is doing, but doing it at his pace and in his his grace.

read the Bible more, and we set a goal. And it doesn't feel outlandish to us, but we do it for like two weeks, three weeks, and we burn out. And then what happens after that? We feel like failures. If you know, the motivation to like, start again is then colored with shame. Because I should have been doing this more. What's wrong with my heart spiritually that I don't want to pray? So we said, all right, we don't want people to just always be doing the bare minimum.

But here's the deal. If you start small, you can do that consistently. Whether you're talking about working out or drinking more water or praying. And the more you do this thing consistently, the more it will feel like you're winning and you're doing it right, and that will build momentum to continue doing it. So those small steps and making it like so absurdly easy, it's so easy that like, you're almost embarrassed to say that this is my new goal.

That's actually just right to build momentum, to make this a habit, which is what we want. The goal isn't to really do some impressive spiritual stuff for a week, but to make this stuff ingrained in our lives. So we are people of prayer and people of the Bible.

adding additional things to do. So it's not that we we think that that our spiritual lives, there are hard parts to it, but particularly if we think about our families, we don't want to be doing a spiritual habit, that it looks too hard or not appealing to our kids

because we actually want to bring them along in it. So. So making the starting point Easy is a way to invite a new believer, of which our children hopefully are all going to take that step at some point, and it provides an easy way for us to invite them in as well. So it's not just about us, it's about involving our families as well.

that an accident? We realized, no, that the tangible element was what made them care. And that's when we turn to Scripture to say, well, was there anything in the Bible about our faith being tangible? And it's wild to me that we hadn't asked that question before, because the moment we asked it, everything started to come alive. And you start to see, well, God, all throughout the Old Testament says, hey, build an altar here for me. Build

this temple here. And telling people to build all sorts of tangible things, and often saying when your sons and their their sons and generations to come look at this and say, what is this for? You're to tell them, this is where God met me and did such and such. So the the tangibility was meant to act as a reminder for God's people in the from the altars of the Old Testament through the Passover meal, which Jesus then

picked up. And at the Lord's Supper he didn't say, all right, guys, we've graduated now, and you don't need tangible reminders because this is the this is the varsity version. And they were JV. No, he said, this is still tangible. Like, I want you to keep eating this. Keep drinking this. Because the more you do this tangible thing, the more you'll be reminded of this spiritual reality.

But putting your Bible beside the chair that you sit in in the evening after your kids go to sleep, or that you that you sit down in, um, after dinner putting your Bible there, that can be a reminder that you're ready to read. That's a that's a tangible reminder. Um, another one that we've that our families do is it's something called the cube. It's a 12 sided die that we put on our our dinner tables. There's one on mine, there's one on Chris's. Uh, and what happens is our

our kids pick it up and they roll it. And what they think they're doing is playing a little game with the dice, you know, a 12 sided die. But actually what they're doing is they're initiating a meaningful conversation where we're pointing them to God's presence in their life

and how to be grateful about that. And so those those tangible reminders, they're kind of like little spiritual speed bumps where they're like making us kind of pause, bringing our attention to what we were we're wanting to do in that moment.

He was in the fire. He was in the temple, which there's fire that comes down and there's the Holy of Holies. All of these different things were instructional. They were telling God's people about where he was, who he was, and how to relate to him. Right. So the place that we're doing our spiritual habits, the places that we're living, our lives are doing. James Clear says we're a victim of those things. It's doing something to us. And so, Gary, we like to kind of joke like, what does what

does your environment, like, teach you about God? You know, what does it teach you about life? I would say my environment, I don't know about yours teaches me that I need to stop by target and pick up something, you know, because it's just it's right there. And so we think that we can be a little bit more intentional, probably more so in our homes than on the highway of actually pointing us towards God and being and thinking

about where we're doing our spiritual habits. So if you have kids that are doing homework or homeschool, I think it's probably a good idea to have them reading their Bible in a different location just because we want them to think of it, of it differently. Or if you're wanting to have a meaningful conversation with your family or people who come over, you probably don't want to be sitting in a room that has everybody's phones and TV around.

So the place ends up being important because it's it's the place is actually directing how we how we're experiencing the moment. I think we would all understand that reading your Bible in a library or reading your Bible on the side of a mountain is going to make you experience something different. And that's something beautiful, you know? And but we think we should pay attention to that in order to take advantage of it.

we'll do a brief lesson about whatever this is. I mean, how many times did Jesus offer his teaching in a church setting? A few times, right? He was in synagogue, but most of the time he was like, okay, guys, see these birds? See these flowers? You see that building over there? So, I mean, there's there's a lot of value to taking it outside if you can have if you're nimble enough to be able to recognize what God might be doing in that situation and how to make

it relevant for your kids. And if you're okay with them finding worms and saying, okay, I guess that's what we're doing now instead, because that's also fine. They're children, you know?

What I learned from Chris. Chris, I don't know if you want to speak to this as well, but I remember when Chris was writing the book and he wrote down, we didn't create the hours in the seconds, right? God only created the evening. He created evening and morning, evening and morning. We see that in in Genesis, in the creation story. So what we're saying here is the timing really,

really matters. And if you're, um, if you're having a tough time, uh, reading your Bible, one of the things you could consider is read your Bible at a different time of day. Chris, you have a story that goes along with that, right?

he didn't. He was having significant doubts. But then he mentioned that, like I asked when he was doing this and he said, well, you know, I just like I always did in college, I'll do this just before I go to bed. And the trouble he was having was that he would fall asleep while he was reading. And so I was like, hey, this may not be a spiritual problem at all. It might be that when you were 20, reading the Bible at 11:00 at night was fine because you were alert and wide awake, and now

you're 30, and that's harder. So don't do it just before bed and you won't fall asleep. And it was. I mean, we both laughed about it because it seemed so obvious after the fact. But sometimes we we tie ourselves up and not giving ourselves permission to recognize like, oh wait, the timing here just might be a little wonky. That's keeping me from doing a thing I really want to do.

cannot do the, like, crack of dawn, anything. She'll get up. She's got to go to work. She's got to do her things. But you know, and she recognizes, like, look, I'm not a lazy person. I just don't like the first hour of the day, and that's okay.

Where it's like, I'm working, I'm doing good things. I'm even I'm doing good things for God. But Sometimes that can slip into the fact that work and seriousness is a direct reflection of our maturity. But Jesus says, let the little children come to me. Right. And the reason that he is giving that, that that analogy there is because he's talking about their humility and how they come into the kingdom. And he's he's putting that as an

example in front of us. What we think happens with play is there's a certain amount of humility that is necessary in order to play with someone. There's a certain amount of vulnerability and connection to someone before you start doing something really silly singing a song, dancing around the living room, playing a game, whatever it might be. And so when you do that, interestingly, after you've played that game or you sang that song, you actually increase your

connection to that person in vulnerability. You weren't thinking about yourself as much as you were thinking about them. And so there's actually these very beautiful spiritual things that are happening in that moment. Now, that doesn't mean that if you are playing a game that that is somehow inherently spiritual, but we actually think that it increases memory with our kids. It increases the appetite for them to engage with us. And so we think you should, at minimum, be playful

with your kids. And in some ways, we think play is has the spiritual component to it.

on to and want to come back to. And so we've just leaned into it to say, hey, you know, what would this look like if I were to try to translate this spiritual habit into the language and practice of a seven year old? What would make prayer possible for someone that age. What would make Bible reading possible for a seven year old? And then just starting that and inviting us as grown ups into that. This is true of so many kids resources. We found this with

Advent Blocks. We wrote it for the kids, but we were kind of like writing it over the shoulders of the parents. So many of the parents reached out to us to say, I never realized this about God, about his presence and his work in the world. And I think it's not an accident that that happened to them because they were reading something that was written for an elementary school kid that was light and like, silly at times.

And it was just the sort of like approach to something very important that opened their eyes for the first time.

these habits into their lives? Or maybe they feel like you're kind of forcing them into habits that they don't want now because they are tending to develop logical thought. And they may question some things that you have been teaching them. How does a parent deal with all of that?

actually talking about training, not teaching. We're like showing the way. The example that we like to give, thinking about training is how many, you know, 5 to 7 year olds in the United States, do you think could go into a gas station and find a pack of Sour Patch Kids and pay for it if they had a credit card in their hand? I would say almost all of them could. Now, how many parents actually taught them how to do that? They actually taught. Here's what a credit

card is. Here's where you go. Here's where you swipe. This is where they keep the Sour Patch Kids. None of them. I've never I've never met anyone that has actually done that. But their kids know how to do it. So I think if that if you're experiencing that pushback, which even with our kids, we've experienced pushback on some

things that we tried to do with them. I think what we're doing most is we're we're modeling for them and embedding in the operating system of their life something that they are going to to take with them because they've seen us do it over and over. My mom had a recipe for pot roast from her grandma, who she got the recipe from, from her mom. And so all these generations had passed down this recipe, and my mom always would cut off a certain amount of the

pot roast before she would actually put it in. And at some point somebody asked her, why do you do that? And she said, well, that's because you have to. That's what you do. That's what the recipe says. Anyway, she ended up going to ask her grandma. She said, why do I cut off the end of this? And she said, oh, you don't have to cut off the end. My mother just had a pot that was so small, we always had to write.

I'm doing right now with my small group. There's just something about the way God wired us that we are relational beings and we know this, and yet we very quickly forget this when it comes to doing significant spiritual stuff. But God wants us to do this in community. And when we find our friends, or as we often like to say, like companions on a spiritual journey because they don't always have to be your best friend that you

click with. But when you find somebody else you can link arms with, it will make that experience of, say, reading the Bible. It'll make it more meaningful. It'll make it more likely to happen because they'll offer you accountability. It'll actually make it more fun because they're bringing elements to it that, uh, that you enjoy. And, and they'll show you things that you don't know. It's hard to overstate just how big a deal it is to do

all of this with other people. This is, um, a saying that if you if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. And that's like God is going to shape us over the course of God willing, decades. And if that's the case, then we have to do this in conjunction with other people rather than blitzing ahead at any one point, all by herself on one thing.

our way. And it's surprising how much that that candor of the struggle will put you in a spot where you can find somebody else who's willing to kind of walk along that with you.

in some some way yourself. But I also just the encouragement there for someone who might be listening that's that maybe doesn't have a robust kind of list of spiritual habits. Is that starting small and engaging with God over a long period of time? We know that God is going to do something in us, and so that's where we put our faith, not in our ability to be consistent or to do these things. But it's actually we put our faith in the God who is is going to

change us. And so also what we're trying to do is to get our kids to engage with that same God. And so we want to be leading them in it by by engaging ourselves.

of person who's dishing out advice that I'm not taking. Fortunately, there was very little as we were writing where we found that incongruence. But one of the biggest in terms of my spiritual habits is just recognizing how important a tangible item is to kickstarting a spiritual habit. And so we've been trying to pray more with our kids. And it's an uphill battle right now. Not because they're resistant

to it, they actually are quite open to it. But it's hard to find the time where it seems natural and it's not awkwardly jammed in there. So we're trying to come up with some sort of physical thing that sparks the question, so that even if just for 30s, we can sit with them and say, let's, let's thank God for something today, or where do you need God's help? We're fussing around with things and may not have found the perfect physical object. We've got kind of a fidget

right now with some blocks that spin. It may not be the winner, but I think for the rest of my life I'm going to carry that with me to say, all right, I want to start a new spiritual habit, or I want to invite someone else into this spiritual habit. First thing I'm going to do is say we need something that you can hold. If this is going to take.

You know, Chris mentioned earlier, kind of feeling guilty for not doing things the way that you intended to do, not reading the Bible as much as you thought that you would read. It's actually by removing some of that pressure, that guilt that actually keeps me engaged. I'm way more likely to come back because I know, hey, this is hard. I'm I'm I'm trying to get better at these things.

If I if I get off of my rhythm, I can pretty easily get back into my rhythm without any guilt, because I know that God is gracious and invites us back in, into reengaging with him and and even more so, you know, I'm applying that as the seasons of my life change. Like, I recognize that when my my kids are, you know, three and five, there's a certain amount of time of day, there's a certain amount of thing that I can do because they're engaged in my life in

a certain way. When they're 12 and ten, things have changed. You know, at five and three, I wasn't thinking of coaching their soccer and how my car ride with them was, was pertaining to their spiritual habits and, and the conversations that we would have. But now I do. And that applies to a lot of things in our life. Gracious to ourselves and lowering the bar for for the barrier for entry so that we can actually remain engaged more often.

day of the week. We were not doing it currently, but but last year there was a couple of months in a row where one day a week we would both fast and, um, we had these tangible reminders like Chris talked about, like these chips that we would carry around with us, um, that we would write our prayer for the day on. And for the first couple of weeks, I would forget that reminder. And sometimes, you know, I would be unsuccessful in kind of going through the through

the whole day. So it's actually the location of those chips that would remind me, hey, by the way, it's Thursday. This is what you're doing with Chris. I was blaming myself for not being consistent when actually I just needed to move my reminder so that I actually continued to remember and put a calendar invite over my lunch, you know? So those types of things, um, I've kind of course corrected on as well. What were you going to say, Chris?

life shifts. And that doesn't mean that you've abandoned the faith. Now, I'm not saying you stop praying or stop reading the Bible, but the way you do that, the time of day, like the method of engaging, you know, there's a time when I was in seminary where part of my quiet time every day was reading a few verses in Greek and translating them because I thought, this is I want to flex this muscle. I want to really get to know the original language. And I'm not doing that now.

And there's there's a piece of me that says, well, if you're real Christian, you would keep doing that, that very fruitful thing.

a new spiritual habit. I hope it's a tool that can be used over and over and over again.

I expected better. When, as I read the Gospels, what I see is Jesus who invites us in and says, are you weary? Are you tired? I've got a better life for you. Come to me. I want to spend time with you. And if we could, if people really do take to heart that God, even in our failures, wants to draw near to us and wants us to draw near to him, I think that would be revolutionary

for the way that we approach our spiritual habits. It's it's I know that's been the case for me in Clayton, and I really am praying that that will be the case for all of our readers, too.