How the Gym Works
Every good gym has a structure. A progression. You don’t walk in on day one and attempt the heaviest lift.
You start where you are. You build from there.
Trexo works the same way. But the goal is not physical fitness.
The goal is God.
More specifically: a life so rooted in relationship with God that everything else - your sense of direction, your capacity for peace, your experience of joy, your ability to love and be loved - flows from that root.
The monastics called this theosis - becoming, through practice and grace, more fully the person God made you to be.
This is what you are training for.
The Practices
The core of the gym is the Practices — ancient disciplines of the Christian faith, restored and made accessible for your life right now.
The earliest Christians didn’t invent these. They received them - from Scripture, from the apostles, from the people who knew the people who knew Jesus.
They practiced them together, daily, as a way of staying close to God in the middle of ordinary life. And they passed them on. Generation to generation. Monastery to monastery. Community to community.
All the way to here. All the way to you.
The Practices are organized in three levels:
The Daily Anchor (Individual Practice)
Short, simple practices you can do every day, wherever you are. The monastics prayed at fixed hours, round the clock.
You have your own fixed hours - the rhythm of your daily life. Start here.
This is where closeness with God becomes a daily reality.
1. Hearts Up! : Sursum Corda (from the earliest Eucharistic prayer)
Orientation to God. Turn your entire being toward God.
Practiced: When you wake. When life is frustrating. When life is glorious. Every time you want to turn and say, ‘thank you, God.’ ‘Help me, God’.
It takes two seconds. As many times a day as you choose to say it.
2. the Jesus Prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’.
Communication with God. Be in constant conversation with God.
This prayer was developed by ancient monastics to fulfill St. Paul’s command:
’Pray without ceasing’ (1 Thess 5:17).
Practiced: As often as possible throughout the day. When you wake, when you’re stuck in traffic, when you’re sitting with someone in pain. Use prayer beads or rosary to pray the Jesus Prayer. Count your prayers on your fingers, or small stones, beads, or shells. This is how rosaries began.
3. Bodily Prayer: lifting hands in prayer - orans, making the sign of the cross, bowing, kneeling, prostrating yourself.
Engagement with God. Participate in worship with your whole self.
Practiced: Sign of the cross at the name of the Trinity, lifting hands when praying or singing aloud, kneeling at the altar or in prayer, bowing before the cross, prostration in grief or deep distress (or thanksgiving).
The Daily Anchor Practices form your whole life - as you are living it - in relationship with God.
The Weekly Rhythm (Community Practice)
Practices that shape us in community, and radical acts of hope in a world where it can seem in short supply.
Sabbath: one full day of rest from work (or anything that feels like work).
Practiced: One full day each week (ideally).
Rest, wonder, trust that God is in charge. A day of rest is so important that it is a Commandment. God rested on the seventh day. We are called to rest as well.
Eucharist
Gather with the Body of Christ to receive Christ in bread and wine.
Practiced: Weekly (ideally)
Eucharist is the original Christian worship. The first Christians gathered as Jesus had instructed them, broke and blessed the bread and drank the wine ‘in remembrance of him’.
Liturgical Christian denominations celebrate Holy Eucharist, presided over by ordained clergy. Other traditions celebrate Communion, the Lord’s Supper, or Agape meals.
But the gathering, the breaking, the blessing, all in remembrance of Jesus’ saving acts are as old as Christianity itself.
Weekly Rhythm Practices anchor you in the life of the Church — the community of believers gathered around Word and Sacrament.
Seasonal Intensives (Deeper Training)
Times of preparation before the most important events in the Christian faith — the birth of Jesus, and his death and resurrection.
Fasting: voluntary abstinence from food for a spiritual purpose.
Practiced: Primarily in the season of Lent.
Fasting is our call to spiritual endurance training. To hearing God’s voice, and nothing else. To remembering our dependence on God, and our preparation for standing on holy ground.
Vigil: Keeping awake to God’s presence and power
Practiced: Primarily during Advent.
Like fasting, it’s intentional discomfort for spiritual clarity. It’s keeping ourselves spiritually alert and faithfully awaiting the light of Christ, especially in the darkness.
Seasonal Intensive Practices align us personally and communally with the ancient and eternal rhythm of God’s saving actions in the world — and our response.
The 6-part Practice Formula
Every Trexo Practice is built on the same framework - to show the path directly from Scripture to the early church to the great spiritual teachers of the faith through history and God’s grace to us today.
Quick Start : an overview of what the Practice is.
Why it matters today: how this Practice connects you in relationship with God.
Where the Practice comes from : its roots in the ancient Church, tracing all the way back to the people who knew the people who knew Jesus.
Biblical foundation: the Scriptural grounding of the Practice
How to Practice: the step-by-step instructions.
Troubleshooting: this is where the Trainers come in. Basil, Syncletica, Ignatius, and others have lived these Practices, developed them, and taught them to thousands of others, from their own time till today. They’re here with encouragement, wisdom, and a little tough love when you need it.
Becoming a Trexo Chapter
Everyone is invited to become part of the Trexo gym. You can join as an individual and practice completely online.
You can join with a congregation or other community and participate in the Trexo practices together (there’s even a discount for groups).
AND - you can become a Trexo ‘Chapter’ as a community if you are interested in using the Trexo Practices and guidelines as a base and developing your own Practices.
You can move from being a congregation to being a Community of Practice, without moving out of the building or changing your Sunday worship.
Today’s churches are often struggling - not enough people, resources, or growth. Our very existence may be in question.
A lot of this comes from institutional church change and living in a new era of the Christian faith. It means looking at what we do at church - and why and how - and being willing to see what is connecting us as a community to sharing the Gospel and a life of JOY, and what we may need to let go of.
Not everything a congregation does is a Practice of the earliest church.
The 6-part Practice formula is used as a tool for discernment: a way of asking, honestly and carefully, whether what your community is doing is actually forming you in Christ — or just keeping the institution running.
Then giving you the framework to rebuild.
Every true Practice must:
Connect to the ancient Church - traceable to the earliest Christians
Fall under one of four categories: Worship, Prayer, Hospitality, Service
Be rooted in your community’s own Statement of Faith
And you use the Trexo Practices as the base of a Community of Practice that connects you directly with the earliest church - and to other Christians - while maintaining the worship, denomination, and particular expression of faith of your congregation.
Learn more about becoming a Trexo Chapter → (coming soon).
Your Workout: the Rule of Life
Every serious athlete has a training plan.
In the ancient church, they called it a Rule of Life. St. Benedict wrote the most famous Rule in Christian history:
Ora et Labora: Pray and work.
Benedict’s Rule also established the Daily Office - a cycle of eight prayer services rooted in the Jewish tradition of praying throughout the day (Episcopalians still find this in abbreviated form in the Book of Common Prayer: Morning Prayer, Noonday Prayer, Evening Prayer, Compline (bedtime prayers).
At Trexo, we call it your Workout.
Practices are the things we do, but the Workout is the pattern we follow.
The Rule was St. Benedict’s great contribution: the idea that our souls are often unstable - ‘out of shape’.
We need a structure that balances our life: mind, body, and spirit.
It’s a structural framework that provides rhythm, consistency, and direction for our life with God - which is our whole life.
We’ll build our Workouts together as a commitment to the Practices we’re engaged in, how often and when.
Trexo grounds us in what unites all Christians
When you practice these ancient disciplines, you’re not joining a denomination.
You’re joining the Church.
The living body of Christ across 2,000 years, uniting every tradition, connecting everyone who follows Jesus.
And it requires something of you
Just like the physical gym - it works if you work it.
You were made for more than this.
Find out how much more when you commit to stretching and strengthening your soul. When you discover that your whole life is life with God.
