A college in town has an artificial ski slope with a snow-like astroturf. It’s steep and fast and feels risky even on an inner tube, which is the only way this middle-aged man was willing to give it a run. Once you push off, you have little control, but one thing is certain: you’re on your way down. 

The faith tradition I grew up in warned us about ​“slippery slopes.” There were different kinds: the worldly slopes of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, and the spiritual slopes of bad doctrines and weird practices.

Their point was, like the ski slope, once you slip over the edge, you’re on your way to the bottom. And what was the bottom? They didn’t say exactly, but I inferred it was some kind of lava pit of destruction in this life and punishment in the next.

Whether warned about them or not, many Christians have a built-in slippery-slope detector. That’s normal and useful. Some hillsides are genuinely dangerous. But the same fear that keeps you from stepping off a cliff can also keep you from stepping up to an overlook. Wisdom is learning to discern when a fear is keeping you alive and when it is keeping you from being alive.

One of Renovaré’s core ideas is to embrace the abundant life of Jesus in all its fullness: contemplative, holiness, charismatic, social justice, evangelical (Word-centered), and incarnational — what we call The Six Streams. 

Most of us, because of personality and personal history, swim only in a subset of Streams. Jesus invites us to experience more of them and more of him, because he is the fountain and source and embodiment of them all. He longs not only for us to be in the Streams but for the Streams to be in us. ​“Out of the believer’s heart,” Jesus tells us, ​“shall flow rivers of living water.” (John 7:38).

One way to answer this invitation into a deeper life is to explore different Christian traditions and practices. This can feel uncomfortable, risky, and even wrong. The very fact that you’re reading this email means you are more open to exploration than most. Still, we all experience resistance, the cold shock of an unfamiliar Stream’s water on our toes.

I felt resistance a few years ago at a charismatic church with people who spoke in tongues and waved flags. I felt it a few months ago at the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, which confronted me with racial injustice. I felt it a few weeks ago at an Anglican church when the Book of Common Prayer had me confess once again, as if God and I had forgotten, the things I had done and left undone.

You might feel resistance being around people not like you.

You might feel it reading a spiritual classic, whose author speaks from another time and a different way of being.

You might feel it when you hear the quiet, insistent invitation of the Master to serve someone in a way you know will be the death and the life of you, and you just don’t want to do it.

This resistance is usually fear — fear dressed in a robe of reason. 

May I suggest asking the Holy Spirit to help unrobe this fear and discern the root of resistance that keeps you from fullness of life in Christ? 

The Spirit might uncover… 

A fear of uncertainty. 

A fear of losing identity.

A fear of losing connections.

A fear of being hurt or hurting others.

A fear of being heretical or unfaithful. 

A fear of offending God and thus being abandoned in some way by God.

A fear of getting to heaven and being met by Christ’s disappointed face. 

All these fears and more may keep us ​“safe” right where we are, but they also keep us from abundant life.

That isn’t to say we throw all caution to the wind when it comes to experimenting with unfamiliar practices, different ideas, or fresh expressions of the church. There are guardrails of Scripture, creeds, wise community — and of course the life and person of Jesus himself, who, as someone put it, is perfect theology. But don’t let some undefined fear of a slippery slope keep you from exploring new mountains with God. There, among unexpected hills, you may find Streams that refresh you and fill you to refresh others.