John Mark Comer’s “Practicing the Way”

The New York Times Bestseller That Redefines Sin, Hell, and the Gospel

I did not know who John Mark Comer was until a Patron asked me to do a podcast on his influence a few months ago. I put it on my list but prioritized other matters until I could begin reading him. What brought his recent book, Practicing the Way, to the front of the list was the fact that his influence intersected with a world I am more familiar with. As I reviewed J. D. Greear’s latest book, Everyday Revolutionary, I noticed that he kept quoting Comer. A quick internet search revealed that Comer had made the rounds on some of the top evangelical platforms. He was on Russell Moore and Preston Sprinkle’s podcasts. Christianity Today gave him a glowing review and stated:

Comer is well aware of the tens of millions of Americans who have stopped attending church in recent decades. He is from the Pacific Northwest, which is to say, from the future. He knows the score.

You may be thinking, “Where have I heard this before?” It is reminiscent of the praise evangelical elites offered to earlier figures from blue regions, such as Mark Driscoll or Tim Keller, who allegedly held the key to reaching the developing secularized world and maintaining a Christian influence within it. This may be what managerialists are interested in, but common people are interested in something else.

Comer offers an alternative to what he calls the “radical individualism of Western culture” that produced a false gospel which made people Christians but not followers of “the way” (95). His alternative approach is to “apprentice under Jesus into a whole new way of living” which includes things like contemplative prayer (16). This call to deeper spirituality, set against the backdrop of shallow Western Christianity, is what made Practicing the Way a New York Times bestseller.

Before I explain why I believe Comer’s approach has anti-biblical elements and leads to a dead end, I want to highlight a few points of agreement. Comer is correct in noticing that modern life is too demanding and exhausting. People genuinely long to connect to something meaningful but do not know where to begin. Many of the practices Comer encourages, such as slowing down, loving others, and praying, are good spiritual disciplines for Christians to cultivate. He is also right that in the West a certain kind of autonomous mind set makes conforming to divine purposes impossible.

Yet, in the book, Comer cannot even bring himself to define sin as a violation of God’s law and hell as the just place sinners go.

On the subject of sin, Comer writes:

Much has been said in the Western church about the forgiveness of sins, which is good. Sin, as we’ll explore in the pages to come, is the major obstacle on the path to becoming a person of love. But what is sin? We’re regularly told that the word sin (hamartia in Greek) means “to miss the mark.” True. But this begs the question, What is the mark? Is it moral perfection? Is it a full ledger before the court of heaven? Is it not breaking any of the commands laid down in the Bible? What if the mark is union with God? What if it’s the healing of your soul through participation in the inner life of the Trinity? What if it’s adoption into the Father’s new multiethnic family through the saving work of his Son, Jesus? What if it’s becoming the kind of person who is so pervaded by love, wisdom, and strength that we have developed the capacity to eventually rule with Jesus over the cosmos itself? If so, this gospel is an inadequate foundation on which to build a life of apprenticeship that is conducive to deep inner healing and overall transformation of body and soul.

If you notice, Comer orients the definition of sin away from God, as a violation of “moral perfection,” transgressing the “court of heaven,” and “breaking any of the commands laid down in the Bible.” Apparently, this understanding of sin is not only incorrect, but also represents an “inadequate foundation” for the Christian life. Instead, sin is seen as a threat to one’s true potential because its consequences prevent someone from spiritual blessings.

This understanding of sin is very similar to Tim Keller’s, when he stated that sin was “the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God” (Reason for God, 162). Both Comer and Keller make the mistake of conflating the consequences of sin in people with sin itself.

On the subject of hell, Comer says that “some people are living in hell now” based on their choices (87) and repeatedly mocks traditional Christian understandings. For example, a gospel presentation that begins with the fact that people are sinners “going to hell” is, in his view, a “caricature” that “doesn’t sound anything at all like the gospel Jesus himself preached” (35). When Jesus said that He was the only way to heaven in John 14:6, Comer argues that He did not mean that some people are going to hell and some to heaven (43). When Jesus instructed Simon and Andrew to “become fishers of men” in Mark 4, Comer insists that He was not asking them to “snatch people from the precipice of hell” (138). Comer even says that mixing the message of “Jesus loves you” with “warnings about the fires of hell” is “bizarre” and pushes people away from God (150).

Hell is no longer the place God justly sends those who violate His law after death, which Christians should warn others about, but a place sinners choose to go in this life as the result of accumulated choices.

In the end, Comer’s version of Christianity leaves someone in the self-help malaise he claims to offer deliverance from. If people’s vision of God’s holiness is clouded by their own self-interest, there is no way for them to transcend their autonomous individualism. They are still operating as the objects of their own sin and the rulers of their own judgement, and in doing so they usurp God’s rightful place.

As if Comer’s ideas on sin and hell were not enough of a theological red flag already, he also corrupts the meaning of the gospel itself, and in doing so tampers with both the spiritual nature of the invisible church and the distinction between justification and sanctification. Comer claims that since World War II, “the gospel was preached in such a way that a person could become a Christian without becoming an apprentice of Jesus” (35). He goes on to say that many millennials leaving the church for other religions are doing so because they were never “taught a Jesus-based model of change” (101).

Western Christians, according to Comer, incorrectly believe that “It’s not about what you do; it’s about what Jesus has done for you.” In other words, evangelical Christians are guilty of making the gospel about justification and therefore miss out on deeper spirituality. This call to conversion, he says, “does not sound anything like the gospel Jesus preached” (38). Instead, Jesus’ gospel includes the transformative power to receive resurrection life and participate in the healing of the cosmos itself. The gospel becomes a holistic program, which Comer compares to political movements and health fads where people “can find community, and how to live a good life and become a good person” (153). He plainly states that preaching the gospel means announcing “the good news of Jesus and the availability of life with him in the kingdom of God” (153).

Comer does not meaningfully discuss Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice for sinners except to say that Jesus’ sacrifice for us is also something we do with Him as we take up our own cross (95). And it is our cross Comer repeatedly emphasizes, not Christ’s. The basic error, which flows naturally from a weakened concept of sin and hell, is the idea that Jesus came chiefly to set an example of sacrificial love that we are to follow, and by following it both we and the world improve. This is true, but it is not the gospel. The gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom 1:16). What Comer describes is fruit of the gospel, not the gospel itself.

Furthermore, his framework treats sanctification (Rom 6:4) as a process that does not need to come through the door of justification (Rom 3:24). This likely explains why Comer cites homosexual affirming Christians, Quakers, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox writers as authorities on what it means to truly follow Christ. For him, the doctrine of justification appears just as expendable as the doctrines of sin and hell.

As a side note, in addition to its theological shortcomings, the book is obviously Left coded as well. Comer does not mention LGBTQ+, unrestricted immigration, or abortion as negatives. But he does mention climate change, Christian nationalism, and capitalism as problems (16, 34). My suspicion is that Comer’s book functions as an offramp from traditional evangelical Protestantism to what has become of the Mainline churches, and the results will be the same.