Nov 1, 2020
By Carl Greene
Executive Director
The school bus was something of a learning center for me during elementary school.
It was on the bus that I was introduced to the card game “bloody knuckles,” and also learned the painful price of losing a game (there is some truth to the game’s name). In addition to critical socialization lessons, I also learned language skills and an extensive vocabulary. Along with those lessons came discernment—namely what vocabulary words were considered appropriate with family and teachers and what words were only for the bus.
I was immersed in these formative experiences—ongoing interactions which shaped me and deeply influenced me because they were recurring and reinforced by what felt like everyone. Or almost everyone.
Counterformative
My school bus driver was different—there was something about her that pushed against the all-so-formative “school bus subculture.” She was human mind you—she would routinely pull the bus over to the side of the road and announce that she was “Paid by the hour and can sit here all day if you don’t quit raising Cain.” Some afternoons it took a while to get home from school.
Yet, there was something different about Linda. She is the person who remembered that Thursday was band rehearsal, and if I did not lumber my trombone case onto the bus, she would remind me to run back to the house and grab it. She is the first person I remember who publicly and aggressively defended the marginalized. If you picked on or said something questionable to the marginalized members of the school bus society, you would face Linda’s righteous anger. Linda was a counterformative influence amidst a sea of peer chaos and turmoil. I honestly do not remember how to play “bloody knuckles”—but I do remember how to notice people.
Today’s School Bus
Outside of the brave saints who are bus drivers, most of us do not spend much time on a school bus these days. Yet, we are swimming in formative experiences all the time. We are formed through lots of experiences: our work culture, social media likes and sharing, the advertisements that tell us what we need to be happy, the conversations with friends about the amazing experiences they recently took in, even the expectations that we will say yes to responsibilities unless we can prove how busy we are. We are formed into busy, worldly-minded, self-centered, “undisciplined disciples.”2
Counterformative Leadership Practices
This brings us to today. As leaders in our families, in our churches, in our communities, at work—what are ways that we can rise above the formative influences that we are immersed in on a daily basis? How do we look, act, and be more like Jesus in our leadership, and less like what we see all around us on a daily basis?
Wellness. Attention to wellness matters. Our physical, emotional, financial, and spiritual health truly does matter. Health gets a lot of lip service in our culture, but not much consistent action. When it comes to deciding between long-term health and a short-term feel good, we struggle to even see that there is a choice. Based on what people practice around us, we choose unhealthy over healthy habits. We know the healthy habits to talk about—the ones that we do for a week or two. A leadership practice is to engage in health and wellness as a consistent practice rather than simply sound bites.
Watching. A great way to practice wellness is to watch someone who knows how to live wellness. Reading books and blogs about health and wellness are helpful—connecting with someone personally is where we dramatically grow. Finding a counterformative influence when it comes to a healthy leadership style and personal wellness habits is key. Who have you asked to mentor you? An intentional mentor dramatically ramps up the likelihood of soaking in counterformative practices despite the formative influences that might be trying to squeeze us into a certain mold. Watching also includes our intentional role in disciple-making—who are we investing in and being watched by? If we are not discipling someone, we are not putting ourselves in a healthy place of being watched for counterformative practices. When we are watched, we are accountable and encouraged toward personal growth.
Worship.3 Good leadership practices rely upon worship. If we are not looking upward toward God in awe and reverence, we are looking upwards at ourselves far too much. Worship is a place for us to confess and to be reassured of God’s work in and through our lives. Worship is where we confess our sin and simultaneously confess our passion to live as disciple-makers in this world. Worship is what reminds us that everything is not about us—worship starts and ends with God Himself.
We Need to Ride the Bus
There is no getting around it—we figuratively ride the bus every day of our lives. We are influenced, pushed, and squeezed by a number of influences. However, if we are going to be the healthy leaders that God is calling us to be, we must intentionally seek out counterformative influences that God has strategically linked to our lives. Let’s encourage each other on this bus ride—with counterformative practices.
1 Thank you to Pastor David Stall for encouraging me to read You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A. Smith. 2016. Baker Publishing, Grand Rapids. This is where I was first introduced to the term “counterformative”—and the book as a whole is a great read.
2 Dallas Willard credits Jess Moody with this phrase. To see Willard’s unpacking of this cultural phenomenon in our churches, you can find it in abbreviated form in: Devotional Classics. 1990. Edited by Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith. 1990. Hodder & Stoughton, London. The original classic by Dallas Willard is The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives. 1988. Harper and Row, San Francisco.
3 This is the mainstay of James K.A. Smith’s discussion of counterformative practices—worship is a key in this if we are intentional about keeping it from merely mimicking our world-oriented formative influences.
