The Art of “Conference”
Whether in the context of home or church, one of the primary ways that Christian relationships advance our spiritual formation is through the honest, serious, God-honoring conversations that they make possible. The apostle Paul teaches that when believers are “speaking the truth in love” to one another, they will “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:15). Reformation-minded Christians have always taken this idea seriously; as historian Alec Ryrie notes, “One of early Protestantism’s distinctive features was enthusiasm for spending swathes of time simply talking about religion with fellow believers.”1 For Wilhelmus à Brakel, “mutually promoting one another’s spiritual growth” through such conversation is one of the key ways that a real “communion of saints is practiced.” This can take the form of “helping each other to arise again after having fallen,” “encouraging and exhorting one another,” “comforting each other in times of discouragement,” and “faithfully assisting each other in times of perplexity.”2 This last one is an especially good example of how Christian relationships further spiritual formation in a way that few other things can. Each one of us will face situations in life that are unique, and what we often need isn’t so much a set of generic rules but rather wisdom to apply those rules to the complicated situation before us. As Proverbs 11:14 reminds us, “In an abundance of counselors there is safety,” and wise Christians will make good use of the other people God brings into their lives.
A Heart Aflame for God explores spiritual formation practices that are consistent with the 5 solas, presenting the riches of the Reformed tradition for 21st-century evangelicals.
For the Puritans, this pursuit of relationships that angled deliberately toward spiritual formation went under the name of “conference.” Early moderns could use the word “conference” broadly, much in the way we use the word “conversation” today, but often in Puritan devotional writing, one finds a stress on the need for a special kind of “holy conferences” among Christians. Whether they involved “instructing, exhorting, admonishing, counselling, [or] comforting one another,” wrote the Puritan pastor John Downame, “we must use the help of holy conferences . . . that we may be further edified in our holy faith.” Explaining this idea further, Downame likened believers in conference to sticks in a firepit: when “scattered asunder,” they “hardly keep fire,” but once gathered together, they “quickly grow to a great flame.”3 The basic conviction underlying such rhetoric is that contact and conversation with godly people can help us become more godly ourselves, and hence we should always be looking “to stir up one another to love and good works” (Heb. 10:24).
Sometimes such conference would involve only two believers encouraging each other and holding one another accountable. Richard Baxter recalled how one “intimate Companion” helped sustain Baxter’s Christian zeal during his time studying at university. For Baxter, this friend became “the greatest help to my Seriousness in Religion, that ever I had before,” and as the pair regularly walked, prayed, and read good Christian books together, Baxter recounts that his friend “would be always stirring me up to Zeal and Diligence.”4 But more often than not, when Puritans stressed the need for “conference,” they imagined small groups of Christians talking deliberately about spiritual things. Echoing the language of Ephesians 4, the Scottish theologian Robert Rollock (ca. 1555–1599) explained,
They who are Christ’s, are ever going about to meet and to holde themselves together, that they may speake, and confer of all thinges, that fall out concerning Christ, and the estate of His Church, whether they be joyfull, and comfortable, or sad and sorrowfull, that they may edifie and further one another, mutually in the course of their salvation, that they may be joyned together, and make up, and complete one body.5
We note that the above description must have gone beyond the ordinary church service because it explicitly involved everyone present speaking and sharing together, something that would not have ordinarily occurred during Sunday morning worship. Yet Rollock insisted that such “meeting together” held out a particular blessing, bringing “with it an exceeding consolation and joy.”6
Wise Christians will make good use of the other people God brings into their lives.
Retrieving this Puritan practice of conference could represent a helpful way to relationally reignite spiritual fervor in our own contexts. That is the conclusion of Joanne Jung, who describes conference as “piety’s forgotten discipline” and suggests that its recovery “would serve as a welcomed catalyst for spiritual formation, strengthening the spiritual pulse of community” in evangelical churches and small groups.7
But it is fair to ask, What would the idea of Puritan “conference” actually add to an evangelical culture that already prominently features small groups and other opportunities for Christian fellowship? To my mind, the most helpful thing to come from reading the Puritans and other early modern Reformed authors on this subject is the intensity of their insistence that conversation among believers actually matters and that it can function as a spur or hindrance to spiritual formation. When we’re standing around with coffee cups on a Sunday morning after church, it’s very easy to lose sight of this reality. And while I would not want to belittle the value of ordinary conversation revolving around sports scores, vacation plans, and who is starting up at which school when, we should also not lose sight of the fact that if all our conversation takes this shape, then we are not only missing a source of real blessing but also failing to do our Christian duty to “stir up one another to love and good works” (Heb. 10:24). So the first step in retrieving something on par with the Puritan practice of conference is simply to acknowledge the role that intentional conversation can play, and the second is to look intentionally for ways to pursue it.
Notes:
- Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 390.
- À Brakel, Christian’s Reasonable Service, 2:102–3.
- John Downame, The Christian Warfare (London, 1634), 1165.
- Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae: Or, Mr Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of His Life and Times, ed. N. H. Keeble, John Coffey, Tim Cooper, and Tom Charlton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1:215–16
- Robert Rollock, Lectures upon the History of the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Edinburgh, 1616), 392–93.
- Rollock, Lectures, 393.
- Joanne J. Jung, Godly Conversation: Rediscovering the Puritan Practice of Conference (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 1, 179.
This article is adapted from A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation by Matthew C. Bingham.
