This is the fourth of four letters through the month of October calling us to keep Christ at the center of our lives. Review previous letters in this series here.

Beloved in Christ, 

Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus, who is in the midst of us. 

For three weeks we have asked one question – How then shall we live? - from three directions. In Connexion, we asked how we belong to one another. In Politix, we considered how we witness to Christ in public life. In Reflexion, we turned inward to listen for the still small voice. 

This week the question steps into the intersection, where personal piety and social holiness meet. This is where “on earth as it is in heaven” draws nearer to God’s hope for humanity.  

Praxis is faith with its work clothes on. It is theology practiced, not merely professed. 

So, here is our question for this week: How are we expressing Christ in everyday life? 

James puts it plainly: “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22). He is not setting works against grace. He is describing what grace looks like once it has a body. 

That is the pattern of the gospel itself. The Word did not stay mystery. “The Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). He touched the untouchable, ate with those society deemed “the wrong people,” and knelt to wash feet. 

Praxis invites us to keep Christ at the center of our lives. A Christ-centered faith is never a stationary faith, because Christ is always on the move toward someone. His expectation, and his invitation, is that we move where he moves. Calling us to not merely think about faithful living – but to move boldly into faithful living.  

Ours is a thinking and a doing faith. Wesley urged us to “unite the two so long divided, knowledge and vital piety.” Our tradition has never trusted a faith that stays in the head. Wesley gave the early Methodists three General Rules: do no harm, do good, and attend upon the ordinances of God. Bishop Rueben Job taught a later generation to hear that third rule as stay in love with God. None of these can be done in theory, They can only be done on an ordinary day, with an actual neighbor, by a deliberate choice. 

So, praxis is not the fourth topic in this series. It is where the other three are tested. Belonging becomes a meal shared. Witness becomes a neighbor defended. Reflection becomes a changed habit. If Christ is at the center of how I belong, how I understand power, and how I discern, it will show in what I do with the living of my days. 

In the Wesleyan tradition, praxis is faith working by love (Galatians 5:6). It is grace received and grace given away, so that what we believe about God takes shape in how we pray, how we live, and how we treat our neighbor. Wesley would not separate holiness of heart from holiness of life. The love of God poured into our hearts must go somewhere, and it always goes toward the neighbor.  

Wesley taught that God meets us through the means of grace - ordinary practices where grace is reliably found. He named two kinds, and Methodists have always needed both. 

Works of piety keep us close to the heart of God: 

Prayer, scripture, and fasting in our private lives 

Holy Communion, worship, and honest accountability with one another in community 

Works of mercy carry that love into the world: 

Feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and the imprisoned, and welcoming the stranger, one person at a time 

Seeking justice and dismantling what keeps God’s children oppressed, together 

Mercy is not the reward for piety, and piety is not a rest from mercy. Wesley counted works of mercy as means of grace in their own right. We meet Christ at the communion table, and we meet him again in the face of “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40). This is why he could say there is “no holiness but social holiness.” A faith formed alone and kept to ourselves is not yet the faith of Jesus. 

Outward facing faith is a road we walk in response to a grace that has already found us. Day by day, practice by practice, we go on to perfection, being made perfect in love. 

So praxis, for us, is simple and demanding: stay close to God, stay close to your neighbor, and do not let either one go. 

The church has learned praxis best from people who could not afford a faith that was only talk. 

Howard Thurman understood this. In Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), he asked what the religion of Jesus offers people who live with their backs against the wall. His answer was not a doctrine but a way of living: refuse fear, refuse deception, refuse hatred, and love anyway. Thurman did not leave that on the page. In 1944 he helped found the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, an intentionally interracial congregation in a segregated nation. 

Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper, was jailed and beaten in 1963 for her work helping neighbors register to vote. She kept singing, kept organizing, and later started a farm cooperative so hungry families could eat. For her, the ballot and the bread were the same discipleship. 

Gustavo Gutiérrez, a priest among the poor of Lima, taught that theology is the second step. First comes the commitment to love the neighbor who suffers. Reflection follows, and then sends us back to act. 

Ada María Isasi-Díaz, a Cuban-born theologian who taught at Drew, gave us a phrase for where this happens: lo cotidiano, the everyday. She insisted that the daily lives of Latina women, their kitchens, bus rides, and struggles, are where God is known and where justice begins. 

These four came from different worlds: a pulpit in San Francisco, a cotton field in Mississippi, a parish in Lima, a classroom in New Jersey. They shared a conviction: we come to know Christ by doing what Christ does, alongside the people Christ stands with. 

The election is days away, and many of us are tired and braced. Praxis does not ask us to do everything. It asks us to do the next faithful thing. Here are five small, sturdy practices for the days ahead. 

Pray by name. Pray for the people on your ballot, including the ones you will not vote for. Pray for one person whose yard sign troubles you. It is hard to despise someone you are praying for. 

Vote as an act of love. Go to the polls thinking of your neighbor, especially the neighbor with the least power. Then help someone else get there: offer a ride, watch the kids, cover a shift. 

Do one good that no one will post about. Take a meal. Make the call you have been putting off. Sit with someone who is lonely. Quiet goodness is still the strongest witness we have. 

Guard your words. Before you speak, share, or forward, ask the first rule: does this do harm? If it does, let it stop with you. 

Come to the table. Worship, pass the peace, receive communion, and stay for coffee with people who will vote differently than you. The table is where we practice the world God intends. 

None of this will make the news. All of it makes disciples. A community that does these things together becomes a sign of beloved community, whatever the returns say. 

Take this week’s question with you into the kitchen, the combine cab, the classroom, the clinic, and the voting booth: How are we expressing Christ in everyday life? 

Ask it alone in prayer. Ask it aloud in your small group, your church council, and at your dinner table. Then choose one practice from the list above and do it before Sunday. 

I will write once more on following the elections. Whatever that day brings, we will still wake up on November 4 called to love God and love our neighbor. Praxis is how we get ready for that morning. 

May Christ, who is in our midst, be seen in the work of your hands. 

In Christ’s peace, 

Bishop Lanette  Plambeck
Dakotas-Minnesota Episcopal Area of The United Methodist Church