Unrule-ly Behavior

"Unrule-ly Behavior" is a subsection in a book called Dangerous Wonder by Michael Yaconelli, the pastor of a small church in northern California, published in 1998. Somewhere along the line, my wife, Diane, picked it up, and I’ve dipped into it occasionally − including tonight.

Here’s a question Yaconelli poses that has me pondering:

“[I]n the process of socializing our children to follow the rules, do we rob them of the discernment needed to know when to follow the rules and when to break them? Have we robbed our children (including those of us who have grown out of childhood) of the childlike intuition that caused us to know in our hearts how to recognize the Rule Maker?”

Wow! Yaconelli is surely right that following Jesus is infinitely more important than following the rules of Jesus. But how many such rules are there, really? As a philosophy professor named Howard Mueller quizzically adked a class in my freshman year at St. Olaf, how do you follow the one who followed no one?