I did it, therefore it must be right…

In The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely claims that humans are prone to acting irrationally. Sometimes our irrational tendencies are helpful, but at times our irrational tendencies lead us to make wrong choices. One way that our irrationality manifests itself is that we are powerfully conditioned to think that what we are doing, or the way we have always done things, is right. Ariely suggests:

“We need to doubt our intuitions. If we keep following our gut and common wisdom or doing what is easiest or most habitual just because ‘well things have always been done that way,’ we will continue to make mistakes—resulting in a lot of time, effort, heartbreak, and money going down the same old (often wrong) rabbit holes. But if we learn to question ourselves and test our beliefs, we might actually discover when and how we are wrong and improve the ways we love, live, innovate, manage, and govern.”

Ariely’s book is thoroughly secular, but perhaps Christians can learn from his conclusions. We are quite prone to viewing our way as the right way. Sometimes our habits are based on careful thinking, but perhaps more often we assume that our ways are right because we don’t like to admit we might be wrong. Ariely describes a phenomenon called “self-herding,” which means that we tend to replicate actions we have taken in the past, even when a careful examination of the situation might lead us to follow another path. We follow our past actions not always because they are right but because we are conditioned to assume that we must have been right.

Some in the church today have been arguing for a movement away from traditional methods of doing church by asking ourselves how we would do church if all we had to base our practices on was the Bible. Certainly if we had the Bible and nothing else, and assuming that we really could forget all the traditions that are such a part of us, many churches likely would look very different. But is this radical rejection of any and all tradition other than what was passed on to us in Scripture really the best way to go?

Not all tradition is bad, but what we as churches need to learn from Ariely’s call to question everything is that just because we do something does not make it right. First, we must learn to question what we do. We must be open to the possibility that a different way of doing church might be much more effective in making disciples, and much more importantly, we must be willing to admit that God might be leading our churches into radically different ways of doing church. Second, we must allow Scripture to be the Great Tradition in our lives through which we evaluate all of our traditions as churches. We must learn to celebrate those traditions that lead us to be more biblical churches, and we must reject those traditions that are keeping us from being the churches God has called us to be. In the end, if we are unwilling to question what we have done and what we are doing, and if we are unwilling to follow the Spirit in new and uncomfortable directions, we will likely never be more than we were yesterday, as churches or as Christians.