Belong, Behave, Believe

As part of my Executive Certificate in Religious Fundraising, I'm watching videos from the online resource for the course  The one I just finished was by Rabbi Jason Bonder.  As part of the video, he talks about the "three B's of religion."  I had never heard of those before:  they are believing, behaving, and belonging.  The are used to help describe people's faith journey.

The three B's are not always used in the same order.  Isn't that interesting? Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, a "great Jewish thinker of the 20th Century" puts them in this order: belong, behave, and believe.

What do you think?  Does that order make sense to you? It does create a picture of a person belonging to a faith community, and then acting in service.  Those two experiences: belonging and behaving would then, in this order, help lead to belief.  Is that a "fake it till you make it approach?"  I don't ask that question to be facetious, but to say that sometimes that is the way of it.

I'm not sure if this is a related thought or not, but this did bring to mind John Wesley's assertion that we could not do good works - works of God - until we had the assurance of salvation that comes from justification.  In one of his sermons, Justification by Faith (III, 5), Wesley says this about good works:

If it be objected, "Nay, but a man, before he is justified, may feed the hungry, or clothe the naked; and these are good works;" the answer is easy: He may do these, even before he is justified; and these are, in one sense, "good works;" they are "good and profitable to men." But it does not follow, that they are, strictly speaking, good in themselves, or good in the sight of God. All truly "good works" (to use the words of our Church) "follow after justification;" and they are therefore good and "acceptable to God in Christ," because they "spring out of a true and living faith." By a parity of reason, all "works done before justification are not good," in the Christian sense, "forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ;" (though from some kind of faith in God they may spring;) "yea, rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not" (how strange soever it may appear to some) "but they have the nature of sin."

It seems that Wesley would put belief first. 

I'm not offering an answer; I just think it is an interesting question.