Being the Church: Marva Dawn on Communal Formation in Our “Technological Age”

Abstract

This article explores Marva Dawn’s contribution to the Spiritual Formation movement, focusing on her vision for the Church as a joyful, communal witness of God’s kingdom. Drawing on Jacques Ellul’s analysis of our “technological age” and the New Testament concept of “principalities and powers,” Dawn diagnosed how cultural forces like efficiency, productivity, and utility distort the Christian life. She offered a deeply theological alternative: life together in the Trinity, nurtured through worship and Sabbath, which create space for the Church to be renewed by God’s kingdom so that God’s kingdom can reign through the Church. These practices are not quick fixes, but gifts that shape believers communally into Christlikeness. Dawn’s teaching on worship and Sabbath remains a force in the Spiritual Formation movement, and are instructive for those seeking to embody the “hilarity” of community and the wholeness of life in God amid the pressures of a technological age.

Introduction

The author and theologian we know as Dr. Marva J. Dawn was born in 1948 into a Lutheran minister’s family in Napoleon, Ohio. Her given name was Marva Jenine Gersmehl, which, her publisher kindly suggested, was a terrible name for an author because no one would know how to pronounce it. Marva agreed, and, with characteristic intentionality, selected the pen name “Dawn” drawing from Isaiah 58:6–8, which encourages care for the vulnerable—when you do, Isaiah says, “then your light shall break forth as the dawn” (Isaiah 58:8a). A high school chorale trip to India introduced Marva to the ravages of global poverty, and this experience shaped how she chose to live. She selected this name because, she wrote, “I want it to perpetually remind me of the Isaianic call to a proper Sabbath fast that releases the afflicted from their burdens, that meets the needs of the hungry and homeless, that never turns away from any human being who requires our aid.” ¹

We begin with this story on Dr. Marva Dawn’s contribution to the Spiritual Formation movement for good reason: while Dawn is most remembered for her teaching on the Sabbath or her theology of worship, her husband of over thirty years, Myron Sandberg, declared that of the many topics about which she wrote and taught, the most important to her was, simply, “the poor.” Discussions on care for the poor appear across her twenty books, which she found relevant to everything from Sabbath to worship to chronic illness to children’s spiritual formation. Royalties from most of her published works were given to aid organizations. Dawn passed away in 2021, and to this day, Myron continues their practice of regularly giving to over three dozen agencies involved in the global distribution of food, medicine, and other basic needs. ²

And, perhaps, this is a fitting story to begin talking about Dawn’s contribution to the Spiritual Formation movement, that Spirit-stirred burgeoning among pastors, speakers, and authors, which exhorted the Church toward a deeper life in and cooperation with the Trinity. Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline (1978) was a catalyst for the movement; notably, he warns against viewing the disciplines as entirely individual or internal. The social implications of the disciplines are inescapable, he says, leading us to “wage peace in a world obsessed with war; to plead for justice in a world plagued by inequity, to stand with the poor and disinherited in a world where the neighbor is forgotten. We are to engage in the Lamb’s War against sin in every area. This war is waged on all fronts at once—personal, social, institutional.” ³ Dawn’s teaching and writing emerged at about the same time as Foster’s, also from an understanding of character formation as necessarily social; this fruit of Dawn’s life are her “receipts,” as kids these days might say.

A Brief Sketch of Dawn’s Life

Dr. Dawn was a consummate bible teacher, a prolific author, and an academic. From the 1970s through the 2010s, she taught at churches, seminaries, and clergy and spiritual formation conferences across North America and in nineteen countries under the auspices of Christians Equipped for Ministry, a non-profit created for her in 1979 by members of her church who saw her teaching gifts and wanted to support them. Dawn’s twenty books emerge from concerns observed in her on-the-ground engagement with believers and churches, and are guided by a commitment to deepen the Church’s growth in life with the Trinity. ⁴ She was a soul-friend of Eugene Peterson, ⁵ and a Teaching Fellow in Spiritual Formation at Regent College for over twenty years. ⁶ Although a dedicated Lutheran, she spoke across mainline and evangelical spaces, ranging from four annual symposiums run by Calvin’s Institute for Worship (1997, 2009, 2010, and 2013), ⁷ Baylor’s Hearn Symposium on Christian Music (2004) and their Alleluia Conference (2010), ⁸ the Augsburger Lecture Series at Eastern Mennonite University, ⁹ and the David S. Schaff Lectures at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (where she was also the commencement speaker in 2004). ¹⁰ To this day, Dawn’s work and teaching appears in spiritual formation resources across platforms: she was featured on the Mars Hill Audio podcast on spiritual formation in the church, ¹¹ Renovaré’s 2024 booklet entitled “In: Experiencing the Depth of Christian Community” features her work, ¹² and she wrote the introduction to the Gospel of John in Foster and Willard’s Life with God Spiritual Formation Bible. ¹³

Dawn was a powerhouse in her teaching, and her writing is sturdy and practical; she has a straightforward, earnest, truth-telling kind of style punctuated with personal anecdotes to illuminate her points. Those who knew her describe her in-person teaching style as much the same—she was unapologetic about exposing falsehood or distortion and exhorting truth. Her husband describes her teaching as enthusiastic but not pushy, making people want to do something. ¹⁴ She said of herself, “Sometimes when I encounter unbiblical, destructive thinking and feel compelled to try to say something about it gently (not my personality’s strength!), I complain to my husband, ‘Why do I always have to be the one to do the admonishing?’ He perpetually reminds me that the obligation is inherent in noticing the problem.” ¹⁵ But, notes those who knew her, this powerhouse teaching, what one former student described as an almost crusty insistence on the Truth of God in the face of unbiblical thinking within the Church, came out of a small-statured woman whose body was ravaged by disability and illness. Those who knew her describe the juxtaposition of her strength of teaching, exhortation, and occasional admonishment against the apparent weakness of her physical body. ¹⁶

When Dawn was a high-school sophomore, she contracted measles in an epidemic that plagued her small-town high school, resulting in life-long health challenges. Because she was a gifted teacher, adept at concrete illustrations and examples to explain esoteric ideas, reading her work chronologically becomes an autobiographical journey through chronic illnesses. She did not write with self-pity; instead, her tone was insightful and matter-of-fact, drawing on her experiences to reveal God’s grace and strength. ¹⁷ In Truly the Community (1992), Dawn recounts God’s provision of a last-minute ride to a speaking engagement when her degenerative eye disease left her unable to make the five-hour drive, illustrating the vital role of church community. ¹⁸ In Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God (2001), she describes a shattered foot, which healed bent and was mistakenly treated with a leg brace and crutches. The brace caused ulcers and the crutches weakened her leg, which ultimately broke. She used this experience as a metaphor, writing, “The church cannot survive with crooked bones of doctrine merely propped up from the outside. . . Eventually those props lead to woundedness. . . we can’t walk in true faith.” ¹⁹ Through complications of diabetes, kidney disease, blindness in one eye, deafness in one ear, amputation of her other leg, cancer, and ultimately a stroke, her writing reflects a theology of suffering and weakness that is hard-won and integrous.

It is no wonder that those who knew her describe a life marked by prayerful dependence and prophetic presence. ²⁰ David Gill, an academic colleague, describes her deep spirituality and prayer life. ²¹ Patrick Mitchel, who hosted Dawn as a speaker for a summer institute in Ireland, writes that she lived with “an awareness of her mortality,” ²² and spoke with great clarity about what matters and what does not. Former students Paul and Paige Gutacker recall, “We’d never met anyone like her,” observing that, like the biblical prophets who often seemed odd or out of step with surrounding culture, Dr. Dawn spoke with an urgency and straightforwardness informed by her ongoing illnesses. ²³ She was described as a pastor to worship pastors, speaking sometimes unpopular truths while embodying God’s tender love. ²⁴ She was an exemplar of what Foster called for when he wrote: “The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people,” which she was, “or gifted people,” also true, “but for deep people.” ²⁵

However, Dawn would not have thought of herself as primarily spiritual formation thinker, author or writer. Her “real love in life was teaching Scripture,” ²⁶ and she described her own speaking and writing as a “spark to kindle fires in people’s faiths and ministries.” ²⁷ What places her in the Spiritual Formation movement was her passion to see individuals and the Church press toward deeper life in and intimacy with the Trinity—a title she used of God perhaps just as often as the title “God.” What makes her teaching unique, and well worth revisiting, is her incisive assessment of the cultural milieu in which we live, and her teaching on how believers ought to respond, both individually and corporately.

Miriam Dixon observes that Foster’s Celebration of Discipline was birthed amidst the fear, anger, anxiety, and uncertainty of 1960s America, a time in which mainline protestant denominations, including Dawn’s own Lutheran tradition, started losing political and social influence and authority. ²⁸ Dawn’s teaching and writing emerged shortly thereafter, and she expressed deep concern that young people in the church were more influenced by their culture than by their faith. In response, she worked to define as precisely as possible these “disruption[s] to nurturing character,” those dynamics that keep us from living in intimacy with Christ. “We must ask precise questions about our milieu,” she says, because “all the factors of our environment affect our development.” ²⁹ And in response to her own assessment, she encourages spiritual disciplines as habits to help us to be alert to “the way in which God’s kingdom reclaims us, revitalizes us, and renews us so that it can reign through us” in this particular time and space. ³⁰ She firmly believed that the Church “stands at a critical juncture in history,” where more and more people are dissatisfied with our cultural realities, and “the Christian community could offer an alternative society.” ³¹

Diagnosing the Problem in Conversation with Jacques Ellul

Dawn’s incisive assessment of the cultural milieu emerged from her academic work. ³² Dawn held four master’s degrees and a PhD in Christian Ethics and the Scriptures from the University of Notre Dame, writing her dissertation on Jacques Ellul’s understanding of the New Testament concept of “principalities and powers.” ³³ Ellul, a French sociologist, philosopher, and lay theologian, profoundly shaped Dawn’s thinking around communal and individual character and spiritual formation. Dawn engaged with Ellul’s ideas throughout her books, finding them to be so insightful that she recommended his writings in multiple reading lists, citing seven in her book for pastors and parents on children’s formation. ³⁴ Dawn articulated the implications of her thinking with Ellul in her Powers, Weakness and the Tabernacling of God—this book earned her the 2002 Christianity Today Award for Church/Pastoral Leadership. ³⁵ A brief sketch of these ideas, centering on her understanding of the “powers” at work in what Ellul called today’s “technological society,” will help ground the two disciplines she is most remembered for: corporate worship and Sabbath.

“Principalities and Powers” in the New Testament

“It is not enough,” wrote Dawn, “to know our individual sinfulness; we must also get to know more precisely the brokenness of the conglomerate world and the ways in which the [principalities and] powers function in it.” ³⁶ She described the powers as irreducible to either abstract ideologies (the more liberal theological position) or merely demonic creatures (the more conservative theological position); instead, the powers are concrete forces, existentially impactful realities that we experience in daily life. ³⁷ Ellul described the powers as realities that are “external to human beings and yet inextricably contingent with human and social realities,” ³⁸ which “find expression in human, social realities, in the enterprises of man.” ³⁹ Dawn particularly appreciated Ellul’s insight that while the bible does not describe the essence or nature of the powers, we know them by their functions, which include money, power, deception, accusation, division, and destruction. ⁴⁰

David Gill, founder of the Jacques Ellul Society, describes Dawn’s work as building on Ellul’s perspective, recovering “a spiritual dimension to the powers which does not detract from the social dimension.” ⁴¹ Dawn writes that the powers were created “good,” but became distorted at the fall and exert influence in and through human persons, embedding themselves in the fabric of society—they operate through networks of human institutions, organizations and governments, through any ruler, authority, created thing or cultural element “that become separated from their God-given role to serve God’s purposes and that function instead for harm.” ⁴² For example, technology and money, when staying within their God-given purposes, can serve the good. However, when technology divides us from others, it operates as a power: “a force for alienation, a power that distorts human relationships.” ⁴³ When money pulls persons or churches away from their God-given vocations, it functions as Mammon (Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13).

Dawn would pray for courage (and guide her readers to do the same, writing, “Let’s stop and pray”) to “look realistically at our world” in order to see, uncloak, disarm, and join in Christ’s triumph over the powers. ⁴⁴ Evil is enabled to work in the world because of humanity’s complicity with the principalities and powers, and we are in turn formed by their embeddedness in society, even within the church. ⁴⁵ Notably, Dawn does not talk about societal issues of the 1980s through early 2000s in terms of “culture wars,” common Christian language of the time. She instead talks of the ways we as believers, as the Church, must be aware of our cultural milieu and resist being formed by these powers in the ways we live within the Church, so that as Christ’s Body we can enter more deeply into the life of the Trinity and be a sign and witness to the world, drawing unbelievers toward Christ. She writes, “Powers are like runaway horses that must be controlled. They are unmasked, stripped of their semi-divinity, and humbled through Christ’s victory on the level of Christians’ daily lives and work.” ⁴⁶ We “stand against” the powers and resist them by means of the armor of God, which involves, in part, stepping into our weakness and engaging communally embedded practice of the disciplines, which create the kind of space that helps alert us to how we may be participating in the powers and help direct us to the love of God and the love of neighbor.

The Powers at Work in “Method” and “Technique”

Dawn takes time across her works to “offer examples of the principalities’ fallen manifestations in churches in the new millennium” and then “what churches could be if they chose weakness in order to resist the temptations of fallen powers.” ⁴⁷ She draws on Ellul’s description of today’s “technological society,” wherein he defines “technology” as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” ⁴⁸ In a technological society, the value of efficiency promotes methods and techniques that in turn emphasize the values of productivity, achievement, universality, and standardization across all spheres of life (e.g., education, government, religion). These values become ends in themselves, overriding other humanizing values such as interpersonal connection, beauty, or meaning, and become their own autonomous system which actively shapes culture, society, and how we perceive we must live.

Dawn was greatly concerned over the Church’s adoption of the methods and techniques of our “technological culture,” which foster these dehumanizing values even “as we seek to dispense the gifts of the church.” ⁴⁹ Our embeddedness in our technological society “deceives us into thinking that if we get just the right technological fix [method or technique] we will solve our problems.” ⁵⁰ We are tempted to believe, for example, that finding the right worship music, sermon style, or spiritual discipline will grow the Church and deepen faith. Dawn had much to say to pastors and ministry leaders on this topic, highlighting the subtle temptations of power and deception that tempt us to implement rapid church-growth or marketing strategies that cater to what people “want” rather than presenting the often-challenging scriptural truths that people need. Speaking gigs and book deals surely spread the gospel, but can also feed a distorted desire for fame that may then shape what we choose to write or speak about. ⁵¹ She urged caution and discernment with our technological tools, writing with gratitude of her new time-saving word processor after having written a number of manuscripts on her typewriter, ⁵² while also expressing an “intensified disquietude” after “observing and listening to thousands of clergy and other leaders who are distanced from others because of—or overwhelmed in their efforts to keep up with—pagers, faxes, email, the Internet, TV and other media, and drowning in information overload” (and this was in 2006). ⁵³ She observed a powerful narcissistic streak in today’s culture, which coupled with money and fame leads to “an excessive idolatry of power.” ⁵⁴ She was particularly concerned over churches influenced by “what has been called since Luther’s time ‘a theology of glory,’ as opposed to the biblical ‘theology of the cross.’” ⁵⁵

Dawn’s concerns were prescient. Recent studies around religious affiliation and church attendance have begun to describe why a growing number of those first identified in 2014 as the “Dones” have disaffiliated with their local church but continue to associate with and actively maintain their Christian faith. ⁵⁶ Chief among these factors seems to be the church’s overreliance on what researchers describe as a “bureaucratic organizational model,” which, when relied on almost exclusively, lacks room “for the spiritual or human dimension in favor of organizational expediency.” ⁵⁷ Participants in a 2019 study described being unable to start a small ministry in their church to do odd jobs for seniors in the community or watching volunteers being removed from active participation in the church because “they don’t reach organizational goals.” ⁵⁸ Dawn might observe that these churches have stepped outside of their God-given vocation through over-reliance on technique and method, enabling the powers to dictate their work. If we become aware that our churches are not fostering the deep formation into Christ-likeness among our people, says Dawn, then we need to pay closer attention to the ways we, as leaders, might be falling prey to the “powers” ourselves.

Spiritual Disciplines as Communal Formation

Dawn’s discussion of the spiritual disciplines emerges from her vision of the Church as faithful witness to Christ, and she advocates for communal formation that moves the Church away from the values of our “technological age” and its accompanying powers and into the values of God’s Kingdom. Central to her concerns are what she described as the Church’s need to be formed in “the hilarity of community.” ⁵⁹ Dawn draws ”hilarity” from Paul’s use of the Greek hilarotes (ἱλαρότης) in Romans 12:8, in which he invites “those who have the gifts of showing mercy to exercise that gift with ‘cheerfulness.’” ⁶⁰ She writes that Paul’s letter to the Roman churches “presents a theology of caring and glad Hilarity much needed in this twentieth century of indifference and technological non-intimacy and injustice.” Hilarity describes an abiding gladness and cheer, a ”deep sense of wellbeing founded in trusting the Grace-Giver to work through his gifts to us.” ⁶¹ Hilarity comes from recognizing that we are already acceptable and pleasing to God through his love and mercy, which ”sets us free” from the ”frenzy of having to prove ourselves.” ⁶² This freedom enables us to ”do pleasing things,” embrace a ”communitarian lifestyle” in which we discern God’s will together, offer ourselves to one another and our ministries with a sane and sober estimate of our worth, and resist cultural pressures like competition, efficiency, loneliness, alienation, and “solo efforts” in our Christian life. ⁶³ “Wholeness” she notes, “is found in togetherness.”

To this end, if she were with us today, Dawn would be alert to discussions of disciplines, particularly at the popular level, that sound like “method” or “technique,” that include gestures toward an individualistic self-improvement, offer quick fixes, or foster anything of our culture’s narcissistic tendencies. She writes, “God, instead, initiates us into the Kingdom for the long haul, for a process of formation that won’t ever be finished until we are perfected for the consummate Sabbath.” ⁶⁴ She describes the disciplines as life-giving gifts that attune believers to the presence and purposes of the Trinity; the disciplines are not isolated practices but interconnected habits that form believers slowly, deeply, and communally into the flourishing life of the Kingdom. And the Kingdom of God, she says, is what reclaims us from captivity to our own desires and the principalities and powers, revitalizing us, renewing us, nourishing us and equipping us, and reigning through us before others, on behalf of others, in spite of others, and together with others. She asks, “What would it be like if the Christian Church were truly a community that thoroughly enjoyed being itself?” ⁶⁵

Communal Worship

The height of Dawn’s writing and speaking came during the seeker sensitive movements and “worship wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, and in this context, she had a great deal to say about how these trends distracted the Church from the “serious formational training of believers” into a communal life with the Trinity and in the Kingdom. ⁶⁶ She was particularly concerned over what she described as “worship gimmicks,” used in the name of effectiveness, productivity or efficiency, which ultimately “create superficial Christians.” ⁶⁷ The point of gathered worship is not to entertain or draw people in—that’s our job, the people of the Church. Nor was the telos of worship our formation. Rather, God is the subject and object of our worship, and the liturgy of churches—its prayers, worship music, its sermons—ought to create “a powerful environment of God-centeredness.” ⁶⁸ Such God-centered worship has a counter-formational impact: in a culture where “an overemphasis on subjective feelings may be destructive to the formation of character,” “the Church can offer a great gift in its recognition of an objective knowledge of God in the scriptural revelation.” Our emotions, she observed, are indeed important, and are best engaged in musical worship by entering into the “glorious and wonderful truths” of God “to which we might all respond with genuine emotions of our own.” ⁶⁹

In a culture obsessed with efficiency, productivity, and utility, “To worship the LORD is—in the world’s eyes—a waste of time. It is, indeed, a royal waste of time, but a waste nonetheless. By engaging in it, we don’t accomplish anything useful in our society’s terms.” ⁷⁰ And yet, the outflow of such worship is the formation of individual and corporate character that orients believers toward God and responding to God with “commitment, love, thought, and virtuous action,” ⁷¹ and the formation of a “hilarious community” that attracts unbelievers to God himself. ⁷² These thoughts on worship as cultural counter-formation might sound something like James K.A. Smith’s cultural liturgies—and indeed Smith references Dawn’s writing on worship and Sabbath, ⁷³ describing her work as “a perspective that takes seriously ‘biblical language of ‘the powers’”, where our churches and church practices may also be “‘charged’ not only with an implicit telos, but also by spirits or the Spirit.” ⁷⁴

Dawn’s convictions around this Trinity-centered theology of worship ran deep. Two with whom I spoke recall an emotionally charged moment of seeing Dawn at a spiritual formation conference. She began her plenary talk with a particularly strong indictment of the opening musical worship: it was filled with emotive “me”s, “I”s, and “mine”s, playing into those narcissistic tendencies over which she was so deeply concerned, rather than being focused on the glory of God. On the one hand, relayed those present, her admonishment seemed embarrassing for the worship team and awkward for the audience; on the other, it may have been prophetic.

Dawn’s three books on worship contain significant warning about the ways technique and method threatened to distort worship of God. ⁷⁵ They are also highly constructive, including, for example, practical, detailed instruction on assessing whether a song’s lyrics and musicality were written in such a way as to lead a congregation in true and appropriate worship. ⁷⁶ To be clear, her concerns with the worship music did not center worship “method”—in her time the traditional music vs. contemporary music split—but motivation. If one’s motivation in song selection is to bring in new people or to retain a current congregation, then some distortion is present. If one’s motivation involves concern over how best to convey the truths of God, then song selection is on the right track. “Of course we should use new music,” she wrote, “but only if it praises God better (which it often does!).” ⁷⁷ Even so, Mike Cosper of Christianity Today, wrote in a tribute on her death, “I have no doubt that some of the credit for the renewed interest in hymnody and liturgy of the past two decades is owed to Dawn’s response to the church trends of the 1980s and 1990s, including the praise and worship movement coming out of places like The Vineyard and the ‘seeker-sensitive’ movement led by Willow Creek.” ⁷⁸

Communal Sabbath

It may be that Dawn’s most enduring work was her teaching on Sabbath. Her 1989 Keeping the Sabbath Wholly filled a lacuna in teaching on this discipline. Peterson had written on the topic for Christianity Today, ⁷⁹ but the most well-known work on Sabbath at the time was Abraham Heschel’s classic on Jewish spirituality, The Sabbath: It’s Meaning for Modern Man (1951). ⁸⁰ In her preface, Dawn observes a deep hunger for spiritual growth in our society, and in drawing together Hebrew teaching, scripture and Christian reflection, her hope was to draw believers toward a practice which, she told her students at Regent, would be life-changing. Many discovered that indeed, it was.

As in all her work, Dawn begins by describing the impact of our technological society on our lives and how we experience them, and then describes an explicitly counter-cultural Christian Sabbath practice through the framework of ceasing, resting, embracing and feasting. “Perhaps one of the most recalcitrant spirits that needs to be exorcised” from the church, she writes, “is that of needing to be effective.” ⁸¹ When we receive the Sabbath, we cease not only from work itself, but from what drives our work: “the need to accomplish and be productive, from the worry and tension that accompany our modern criterion of efficiency, from our efforts to be in control of our lives as if we were God, from our possessiveness and our enculturation, and, finally, from the humdrum and meaninglessness that result when life is pursued without the Lord at the center of it all.” ⁸² Sabbath becomes a kind of liberation, because “ceasing reminds us that the value of work lies not in itself or in the worth it gives us, but in the worship of God that takes place in it.” ⁸³

The story of Elijah, she writes, speaks “profoundly to an overwhelming need in our times—the need for emotional rest. So very often we are too emotionally drained to be able to cope with what is happening to us or because of us. The rush of time, the pace of change, the frenzy of demands upon us all leave us psychically exhausted.” ⁸⁴ Elijah, overwhelmed after his encounter with Baal, must have experienced “fear, exhilaration, terror, confidence, panic, delight, and doubt all mixed together. No wonder he wanted to die. Yet the first thing Yahweh does for him is put him to sleep.” And no wonder—as finite physical beings, we need physical rest to manage our emotional lives. Sabbath offers both, “especially by giving us a new perspective. . . offering us a different place to stand in our relationship with God, with ourselves, and with the world,” leading to emotional healing and, crucially, our ability to better discern where the powers may be subtly pulling us versus where the Spirit of God is gently leading us. ⁸⁵

Importantly, Dawn frames Sabbath practices as not merely “a negative ceasing” of work, but as a positive “embracing of Sabbath values,” which includes this wholly embodied rest. ⁸⁶ Sabbath practice offers a spaciousness of time for presence with community instead of rushing to complete tasks, giving instead of accumulating, and a sense of who we are before God instead of what we do before God. She describes her own experiences where, for example, Sabbath reading (a fairy tale or a George MacDonald novel) “stirs up great longing” to attend to the creative parts of her personality, which can get lost in the left-brained dominance of her work week, and the work week of many in a technological society. ⁸⁷ Sabbath invites us into feasting together with others on beauty, music, food and affection which are built into our Sabbath worship, allowing the deep things of God to “soak into our beings through means other than words” and evoking “adoration of the heart beyond rationalizations of the mind.” ⁸⁸ This is a kind of feasting, she says, that counters modern tendency toward overconsumption, as this feasting heightens our hope, the joy of our present experience of God’s love and its foretaste of the joy to come. ⁸⁹

For Dawn, practice of Sabbath is eschatological—each week, she assured her students, Sabbath is not earned, it simply comes, and as we receive it, we participate in the already of the Kingdom. ⁹⁰ Sabbath “enables us to integrate all the scattered parts of ourselves into a whole,” where “even in the darkest times. . .when it seems that God is more absent than present, keeping the Sabbath has given a wholeness to my life that is not otherwise possible. . . In the silences, we often meet the God hidden in our afflictions.” ⁹¹ Sabbath keeping, she writes, “is the very thing that our technological world needs.” Instead of expediency, God’s will and purpose become the ultimate criteria. Instead of sterility and control, “Sabbath-keeping offers the gift of intimacy in the Christian community and the freedom of a relationship with a faithful covenant God whose control bequeaths to us perfect shalom.” ⁹²

Dawn’s teaching on Sabbath is like the never-ending ripples from a pebble cast into a pond. Her Keeping the Sabbath Wholly, can be found on lists of spiritual formation books and resources alongside works by Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, Eugene Peterson, Thomas a Kempis, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila, and continues to be referenced on podcasts, substacks and blogs. ⁹³ AJ Swoboda’s award-winning book Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World references Dawn’s work on both Sabbath and worship. ⁹⁴ Thena Ayres, Professor Emerita who served as Dean of Students during Dawn’s time at Regent noted that “countless students took her teaching on Sabbath keeping seriously and started to creatively ‘honour the Sabbath,’ and they in turn, influenced others.” ⁹⁵ Paul and Paige Gutacker described the impact of Dawn’s teaching on their own lives and ministry. Work, ministry and school made it difficult, they said, to imagine a consistent, weekly practice of Sabbath. Paige recalls that Dawn’s guidance “left us with a sense that to refuse this gift. . . well what a waste that would be.” The Gutacker’s current ministry among emerging adults, Brazos Fellowship, emerges from their own life-changing Sabbath practice, as taught by Dawn. ⁹⁶

Conclusion

Although Dawn would not consider herself to be a spiritual formation author or teacher, her desire to see “the Church of the new millennium” be formed more deeply into the life of the Trinity places her firmly within the Spiritual Formation movement of the last fifty years. Her bible teaching and writing was heavily informed by Jacques Ellul’s diagnostic critique of our “technological society” and understanding of the New Testament’s “principalities and powers,” which, she observed, work against the nurture of character and spiritual depth that she longed to see within the Church. The Church, she said, is to be a sign and a sacrament to the world, an interdependent community marked by the “hilarity” (deep, joyful well-being) of being itself, a community manifesting the “already” of the kingdom in a culture where we are profoundly aware of the “not yet.” Her teaching on Christian life within the Church, which include a robust theology of worship and rich teaching on Christian practice of the Sabbath as ceasing, resting, embracing and feasting, emerge from her concerns over the Church’s undiscerning adoption of values such as efficiency, utility, expediency, and productivity, and which have eroded interpersonal intimacy, care for the vulnerable, and attentiveness to the slow work of God. Her published writing, says Eerdman’s, continues to sell and reach a wide audience, ⁹⁷ and her books appear prominently on spiritual formation resource lists from a variety of organizations. Dawn discerned her own spiritual gifting as a “spark to kindle fires in people’s faiths and ministries,” ⁹⁸ and indeed, her teaching and writing has inspired lives and ministries across the globe.