We live in an age of almost infinite options and accessibility to Christian instruction. Certainly, the disconnection and confusion we sometimes sense are not related to a lack of available teaching and preaching.
But do our Christian institutions provide an instructional path that is actually designed for deep discipleship – to guide us into becoming more and more like Jesus? Or is our adult Christian instructional experience more like sampling food items at Costco?
TRANSCRIPTION
Instruction Isn’t Everything
We’re heading towards the finish line of Season 3, and we’ve been exploring The Formation Gap now for the last 30 episodes or so.
The Premise
Here’s our premise: the modern Christian life doesn’t always look much like the lives of the first Christians we read about in the New Testament. The transformation that the first followers of Jesus experienced and how they went on to transform cultures and nations is no longer the expectation of today’s Christians, though it should be.
This results in a deep sense of longing, of disconnection, of unmet or confused desires. Where is this life of mysterious abundance, of power, a life free from fear? A life where we can conquer long-term habitual sins, where we do experience joy even in the midst of our sufferings? A life where we are no longer anxious about what we’re to eat, drink, or wear. Where is this freedom the Christian life promises, and apparently many of our Christian ancestors experienced?
We tend to cover up this longing, this disconnection, with all sorts of distractions. Normally, we just keep ourselves insanely busy. But our hearts reveal our desires anyhow, through our thoughts, emotions, relationships, behaviors, health, and even how we handle time and money.
Let’s face it, many of us don’t come to grips with this disconnection unless something goes terribly wrong: we hit “the Wall,” we face a crisis, we begin to doubt some of the accepted beliefs to which we’ve held tightly, and some things we thought were true don’t appear to be so true.
Or maybe we reach a stage of general malaise. We go through the Christian motions because stopping would just make us feel guilty.
Here’s where things get a little different on Soil and Roots. We’ve proposed and explored the fundamental reason for this disconnection: the longing for the deep Christian life isn’t a lack of time, a deteriorating Western culture, consumer Christianity, or a deficiency in available instruction.
This disconnection is caused by powerful, deeply influential, usually unconscious, and somewhat mysterious ideas that govern our hearts, our churches, and our cultures.
Let’s admit, this is not the usual explanation for a weak church and disintegrated hearts. And it takes a while to get our arms around the power and presence of these ideas.
Yet these ideas can be uncovered, explored, and transformed. It happens all the time, though we usually don’t put vocabulary to it.
For the person who wants to apprentice with Jesus to become more like Him, Dallas Willard called this long-term, progressive transformation of ideas “discipleship.”
“Discipleship” is a loaded word today, and it usually conveys the idea of simply increasing the amount of information in our heads or the number of our Christian rituals.
So, at Soil and Roots, we refer to this guttural, intentional exploration of ideas as “deep discipleship.”
We’ve also referred to it as “digging beneath the surface,” being “awake” or “attuned” to our hearts. We’ve recently explored how the book, The Critical Journey, describes it – experiencing the latter stages of spiritual formation, the Inward Journey, the Wall, the Outward Journey, and the Life of Love.
When we move into Deep Discipleship, our hearts shift from obligation to simple desire. We do the things Jesus did not because we HAVE to, but simply because we WANT to. In fact, they become the natural things to do – to love our enemies, to abandon ourselves to God, to suffer with others around us, to engage with people, even those who are pretty difficult.
Our lives begin to center around becoming more like Jesus. In order to do that, we need to know Him comprehensively, both as Savior and King, and we need to understand and explore ourselves.
However, the human heart needs five elements in order to become like someone else. And although we assume these five elements in virtually every other human formative experience, we tend to accept far less in the most important formative journey of our lives.
If we’re to become more like Jesus, to experience the gradual transformation of these hidden, powerful ideas, our hearts require time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction. If one or more of these elements is missing, we risk becoming malformed.
You’ve heard us talk about Greenhouses – these are the communities that Soil and Roots form and support. Greenhouses intentionally embrace and embody all five elements for the purpose of becoming more like Jesus.
When communities dig into the bedrock of Deep Discipleship, the result is not only inner transformation but also family, community, cultural, and, finally, world transformation. That’s why we pray “Thy Kingdom Come.”
So, let’s continue digging into the final key element in our spiritual formation: instruction.
I Should Have Explained That
One of my favorite memories of raising our two boys occurred when we lived back in Pittsburgh, and our firstborn son, Caleb, was probably four or five years old.
I had a home office attached to the family room, and I would sometimes attempt to seclude myself in there to get some work done. That was usually futile, because the office had a set of doors on one wall, but the other entry was completely open. So, people could walk in whenever they pleased.
One day, Caleb sauntered into my office while I was working at my desk and began asking me questions. I don’t recall his topic, but I do recall getting annoyed that he had simply barged in and was demanding my response.
“Son,” I said, “I’m busy at the moment. Just hold your pants on.” And I went back to work.
Some thirty seconds later, I realized he was still in the room. I looked up and found him patiently waiting for me to re-engage him, while grasping his pants with both hands, having hiked them up above his waist, just to make sure his pants didn’t fall off.
In terms of how we learn from instruction, context and clarity are very important.
So far, here’s what we’ve concluded about instruction:
1. We exist in an era of ubiquitous and instantly available Christian instruction. We have faster, more comprehensive, and generally free access to teaching and preaching on virtually any topic or passage – infinitely more so than any generation in human history.
Yet we’re lonelier than ever, and this idea that there’s more to the Christian life than what we’re experiencing continues to gnaw at us.
2. Perhaps the instruction we do have access to isn’t helping to guide us into the deeper stages of our journey to become more like Jesus. Are we being instructed and guided through the Journey Inward, or the Wall, or this life of love? Does the ubiquitous access to instruction include what to do when we face a crisis or doubts, or wonder why we seem to be stuck in our formative journey?
Hopefully, the answer is yes.
Today, we’re going to look at another aspect of Instruction, and this one may be a bit controversial.
As you’ve listened to the podcast, you’ve often heard me list the five key elements of formation with adjectives.
The five elements are time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction. Sometimes I’ll qualify them, such as intensive time, specifically designed habits, immersive communities, appropriate and transparent intimacy, and repetitious and increasingly complex instruction.
Repetitious and increasingly complex instruction? What does that mean?
Back to school
Let’s go back to elementary school. When I was in second grade, my teacher (whose real name was Mrs. Library) began teaching us multiplication tables. Do you remember those?
In the first week, we learned that 1×1=1. Then we learned that 1×2=2, all the way to 1×12=12.
The next week, we started working on the “twos.” 2×1=2, 2×2=4, and so on. But we also reviewed the material from week 1. This went on for the entire quarter, and by the end of the twelve weeks, we had learned all of our multiplication tables up to 12×12.
In other words, the instruction was repetitive and grew more complex each week. The point was to build on what we had previously learned, and still be able to calculate all of the multiplication tables back to 1×1.
I studied music when I was a kid. When I started taking piano lessons at seven years old, my teacher taught me where middle C was on the piano, and I learned the C major scale. The next week, we reviewed the C scale, and then we added the G scale. As time went on, I learned all of the major scales, then the minor scales, and began working on various songs.
After years of study, I was playing very complex, difficult pieces of classical music, yet I could still play the C scale. In fact, most elite pianists warm up or even spend a few hours each day working through the basic scales and finger exercises they learned when they first began.
If you went to college, chances are several of your freshman courses started with “An Introduction to…whatever.” By the end of your senior year, you were taking courses that reinforced and built on the ones you had taken earlier in your major.
Whether we’re learning a field of study, a sport, a new skill, a new language, fostering a talent, or raising a child, we learn by repeating basic things and building on them with new, increasingly complex things.
Repetition is the Key to Learning
Repetition is extraordinarily helpful in healthy formation. According to one source:
· It fosters learning.
· Repeated tasks become second nature and strengthen the brain.
· Repetition builds confidence.
· It can reduce stress.
· It improves focus.
· It can increase your learning speed.
· It fosters predictability.
· It helps you develop from a student to a teacher.[1]
If we grew up in church and went to Sunday school, our experience there most likely embodied this same process.
In early grades, we learned basic, foundational truths about Christianity. God created the world. Jesus loves us. We should read our Bibles. If we went to a church that offered catechism for older kids, we were probably introduced to the church’s doctrinal beliefs and to more complex biblical concepts, such as the sacraments, the atonement of Christ, God’s sovereignty, original sin, and maybe the various stages of salvation.
Though rarely seen in modern Christianity, the ancient creeds, confessions, and catechisms were once read and studied with great repetition. They were used in education and often memorized because they articulate the basic doctrines of the faith. These include documents such as the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, the Heidelberg Confession, and the Belgic Confession.[2]
What about Adult Christian Ed?
Despite the fact that virtually every educational, formative human process follows this approach, of repeating basic things and building on them with more complex things, is this the average experience of the Western adult churchgoer?
Is our adult Christian experience based on repetitious and increasingly complex instruction? As we engage our churches, small groups, and Bible studies, is our instructional experience intentionally designed to consistently reinforce fundamental concepts while continuing to lead and guide us into more complex, deeper Christian concepts?
Or is our instructional experience more like an ala carte menu? We pick a sermon series, a passage or book study, and a small-group curriculum. In any given year, we may learn some wonderful things about God and the Bible, but it’s rare that the various things we do learn are interconnected and intentionally laid out to deepen our formation.
Going all the way back to Episode 1, our instructional experience is generally self-directed.
For the most part, the only adult Christians who have exposure to a repetitive and increasingly complex instructional experience are those who attend seminary. They become “professionals,” and then we rely on them to instruct us.
Does this lack of an intentional, progressing journey of spiritual instruction impact our spiritual development, our churches, or the culture?
Uh-Oh
Despite the ubiquitous and instant availability of Christian instruction, we seem to be losing our grasp of both the basics and the more complex concepts of our faith.
Every two years, Ligonier Ministries conducts a nationwide State of Theology survey and reports its findings. Here are some of the highlights from their 2022 study.
1. About half of evangelicals in America believe that God changes. He learns and adapts to various situations. By the way, the general population believes the same thing.
2. 56% of evangelical Christians believe that God accepts the worship of all religions.
3. 43% of evangelical Christians believe that Jesus was a great teacher, but He was not God. That’s up 13% since 2020.
4. The percentage of evangelicals who believe the Bible is not literally true is now at 26%, up from 15% in 2020.
5. Somewhat strangely, considering the previous responses, 94% of evangelicals believe sex outside of marriage is a sin.
I’m not sure what to make of that. A 2020 Pew Research Study concluded that about one-third of evangelical Christians think casual sex between consenting adults is sometimes or always acceptable.[3]
6. 37% of evangelical Christians believe that gender identity is a matter of choice. So over 1/3 of people sitting in evangelical churches believe it’s good and healthy to pick our own gender.
The study concludes:
“In the evangelical sphere, doctrines including the deity and exclusivity of Jesus Christ, as well as the inspiration and authority of the Bible, are increasingly being rejected. While positive trends are present, including evangelicals’ views on abortion and sex outside of marriage, an inconsistent biblical ethic is also evident, with more evangelicals embracing a secular worldview in the areas of homosexuality and gender identity.”[4]
Somewhat predictably, the study recommends more apologetics and more teaching.
Perhaps we need more apologetics and teaching, though the availability of instruction may not be the issue.
Why Aren’t We Being Trained?
We could take this topic in all sorts of directions, and I invite you to if you’re in a Greenhouse, but let’s just try to tackle one fundamental question.
If human beings are best educationally formed by experiencing instruction that is both repetitious and increases in complexity, and that is not the typical Christian experience today, why is that?
Should we not expect our church institutions to teach through multi-year, well-formed instructional plans that reinforce basic concepts while gently introducing us to more difficult topics? Do our churches, Sunday schools, and small groups approach our Christian education with the same philosophy we use when we learn to drive, or when we encounter a new culture or a sophisticated technical skill?
If not, why not?
At least in my time in the church, this has not been my experience, nor that of most of my friends. This is true regardless of whether a church tends towards “expositional” preaching or “topical” preaching.
“Expositional” means your pastor teaches verse by verse through a book of the Bible. Someone who preaches “topically” generally picks a (you guessed it) topic and teaches from it for a few weeks from various parts of the Bible.
If your church features “sermon series,” they probably gravitate towards topical preaching. If your pastor spends a year or two preaching through Romans, it’s probably expositional.
For years, there has been a not-so-quiet debate about the merits of expositional versus topical preaching styles. My point here isn’t to engage in that debate, but rather to note that neither philosophy may actually help congregations avoid repetitive and increasingly complex instruction. I’m not sure preaching style is the issue.
Perhaps your experience has been different. Maybe your church rigorously reinforces basic principles of the faith while introducing new and more difficult concepts, whether through sermons, Sunday schools, or small groups. That’s great.
But if you’re like me, you may be wondering, “Why doesn’t my institutional Christian education follow an intentionally formative path?
There may be dozens of answers, but let’s just explore two potential reasons. One involves our pastors and church leaders, and the other involves us. And they both fall into the category of Ideas of Expectation: our unconscious assumptions about what we expect.
The Professional Christian
1. The first reason is something we’ve explored briefly before, and that is the underlying, Western idea that there are “professional” Christians and “non-professional” Christians.
The professional Christians, such as pastors, professors, theologians, and missionaries, usually attend a Bible school or seminary, and we trust they have experienced a few years of well-formed educational instruction.
However, when they graduate and move into a church or community, they are now faced with people at all stages of their spiritual journeys. Perhaps the church has some people who haven’t yet decided to apprentice with Jesus, and there are others who are new in their faith. They probably also have some people who have been following Jesus for years and have a strong, solid foundation in instruction.
How does a professional pastor construct an instructional journey for a congregation that includes people in all sorts of places?
The short answer is…we aren’t asking the right question.
The question under the question is, “Why are so many professional Christians the only ones responsible for teaching everyone else?”
Which Pastoral Role?
In The Trellis and the Vine, Colin Marshall and Tony Payne make some startling conclusions about the modern church.
“By far, the greatest obstacle to rethinking and reforming our ministries is the inertia of tradition – whether the long-held traditions of our denominations and churchmanship or the more recent traditions of the church growth movement that have become a kind of unspoken orthodoxy in many evangelical churches.”[5]
Ouch.
They go on to suggest that the modern-day professional Christian assumes one of three roles in churches:
· The pastor as service-providing clergyman
· The pastor as CEO
· The pastor as a trainer
The pastor, as a service-providing clergyman, feeds his flock on Sunday mornings through the sermon and sacraments. He organizes and runs the weekend gathering. He puts on other services for baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and he personally counsels congregational members.
This is a long-standing role of pastors in our history. It lends itself to smaller churches and was pretty popular prior to the mega-church movement.
But Marshall and Payne are concerned about this model today.
“In many respects, this first way of thinking about pastoral ministry reflects the culture and norms of a different world – the world of 16th and 17th century Christianized nations, in which the whole community was in a church, and in which the pastor was one of the few with sufficient education to teach.”[6]
The second role many of us recognize today is the pastor as CEO. Most large church pastors and virtually every celebrity pastor fit this role. There are benefits to this model, but making deep disciples isn’t one of them.
“Willow Creek Community Church recently discovered this after 20 years at the forefront of the church growth movement. In a detailed survey of their members, the Willow Creek staff discovered that despite running one of the slickest and most well-organized churches in America – with superb structures, high-quality music and drama, and an impressive level of involvement of members in all manner of small groups and activities – personal spiritual growth as disciples was not happening.”[7]
The last category, the pastor as trainer, is what the authors endorse, but also recognize as not prevalent or even expected in much of Western Christianity. Our “idea,” our assumption, of the role of a pastor rarely takes this form.
“There is a radical dissolution, in this model, of the clergy-lay distinction. It is not minister and ministered-to, but the pastor and his people working in close partnership in all manner of word ministries”[8]
The pastor comes alongside the laypeople, training them and imitating for them the life of a disciple. It’s time-consuming, and it’s vulnerable. The pastor pours himself into a small group of trainees, for the purpose of them becoming like him, even if that means they end up with a deeper and more powerful knowledge of the faith than him.
Though entirely biblical, this is now a radical notion for most churches and pastors. It requires a pastor to spend substantial time, energy, and effort with fewer people, and then have those people replicate that time, energy, and effort with others.
So, what does this have to do with repetitious and increasingly complex instruction? Why is this not our normal Christian experience?
Because if we view our pastors as service-providing clergy, we expect to receive services from them. If they are our CEOs, we expect them to direct the church’s operations. There is no expectation – from either party – that the relationship is supposed to be one in which we grow to become more like Jesus because of intensive, personal training.
If you are currently in a church, what is your idea, your assumption, about the role of your pastor? Do you expect your pastor to be deeply involved in a small number of people’s lives, training them, imitating Christ to them, with the expectation that they will then replicate that training? Or do we expect our pastor to deliver a sermon, visit people in the hospital, and run the day-to-day operations of a church?
There is such extraordinary pressure on pastors today to grow the number of people in their services that I’m skeptical that the “pastor as trainer” model will be widely adopted. And that leads to the second reason why most of us may not experience a repetitive and increasingly complex Christian education.
We Don’t Expect It
Or we may not want it. I’m going deep here, so just stay with me.
Randy Alcorn wrote a popular book on heaven called, well, Heaven.
He claims that the majority of Western Christians and churches have flat-out wrong or incomplete ideas about the afterlife.
Now our thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and relationships are all deeply impacted by our unconscious Ideas of Expectations. We operate in a world deeply influenced by what we believe will happen in the future.
So, our ideas about the afterlife have a significant impact on how we function today.
Alcorn maintains that, in the hearts of most Christians and many others, the idea of the afterlife is that our final destination is an ethereal plane, where we’ll exist forever in a disembodied state, playing our harps while sitting on clouds in the sky.
This belief causes an unconscious disconnection between what we do right now and the afterlife. Heaven is entirely divorced from Earth.
As we’ve explored, if our idea of the afterlife is entirely removed from the earth we now inhabit, our faith is essentially boiled down to our ability to evangelize. We may feed the homeless or work to stem sex trafficking, and that’s great.
But for the most part, the idea that we are to become more like Jesus doesn’t really make sense if the point is to simply escape after accepting His present offer of eternal life. Though Jesus reformed and transformed all four of our relationships when He lived on Earth (with God, others, ourselves, and creation), that doesn’t even register in our hearts if our idea of expectation is that the final plan is an escape hatch. Why would we steward the earth or reform culture or make amazing art if the entire enterprise will be in our rearview for eternity?
Alcorn quotes Anthony Hoekema, who said,
“Because of man’s fall into sin, a curse was pronounced over this creation. God now sent his son into this world to redeem that creation from the results of sin. The work of Christ, therefore, is not just to save certain individuals, not even to save an innumerable throng of blood-bought people. The total work of Christ is nothing less than to redeem this entire creation from the effects of sin. That purpose will not be accomplished until God has ushered in the new earth, until Paradise Lost has become Paradise Regained.”[9]
Alcorn teaches that the final destination for the Christian is not wistfully playing in the sky as disembodied spirits, but the rejoining of Heaven and Earth. The New Heaven and the New Earth. We return to Eden, where God’s place and mankind’s place meet. But this New Eden will be a better Eden.
We will be right here, on Earth. A New Earth, a transformed Earth, but this Earth, nonetheless.
Dallas Willard wrote, “The life we now have as the persons we now are will continue in the universe in which we now exist.”[10]
There is some form of continuity between life now and life in the New Heaven and New Earth.
Alcorn writes,
“A common misunderstanding about the eternal Heaven is that it will be unfamiliar. But that couldn’t be further from the truth…What we have assumed about Heaven has reduced it to a place we look forward to only as an alternative to an intolerable existence here on the present Earth. Only the elderly, disabled, suffering, and persecuted might desire the Heaven we imagine. But the Bible portrays life in God’s presence, in our resurrected bodies in a resurrected universe, as so exciting and compelling that even the youngest and healthiest of us should daydream about it.”
If we assumed that our final eternal destination will be in a new version of where we are right now, and we will be the same people we are right now with new bodies, and that there will be some continuity between who we are and what we do right now all the way into eternity, would that impact the way we think, feel, behave, and relate?
So now you might be wondering what all this has to do with our Christian institution’s educational programs.
Look, let’s say you are the parent of a school-aged daughter. She’s in second grade, and you expect her to learn multiplication. She comes home one week and tells you her teacher has been reviewing addition and subtraction. Cool, that makes sense. But the next week, your daughter tells you the teacher introduced long division. You think that sounds odd because long division is more advanced than multiplication tables. The week after that, she tells you they reviewed how to simply read numbers. Ok, that’s weird. You thought they covered that in kindergarten. The week after that, the teacher covered analytic geometry. Then your daughter reported that her class was studying trigonometry.
You would be upset, baffled, and confused. Instead of gradually and gently moving your daughter into higher math, it seems her teacher is bouncing all over the place, starting topics she didn’t finish, introducing new ideas without any foundation, and confusing the entire classroom. You would demand an explanation from your daughter’s teacher about why she is not slowly building on the foundation already established for your daughter’s mathematical formation!
Unless…you had no expectation that your daughter was ever going to need math beyond the second grade. If you had no expectation that she would require basic and advanced math skills to navigate life as a teenager and an adult. In that case, you might find it reasonable and helpful that your daughter was experiencing a sampling of different math classes. The point isn’t to form her into a mathematician; it’s simply to expose her to various math disciplines and hope that something sticks.
I’m not sure how different that is from what many of us experience in our adult Christian education. Many people’s theology is currently being formed by one-liners and individual Bible verses posted on social media.
But if our idea of expectation is that what we do here beyond evangelism has little to no impact eternally, that there is no continuity between life now and life here on the New Earth, then expecting or demanding Christian education that reinforces the basics while inviting us into the deep end of our faith really doesn’t make sense. All we really need is a sample of this, a series on that, and a Bible study here. We have no expectation to be formed now in a methodical, thoughtful way because we don’t see the relevance of a future that’s entirely disconnected from our present.
It’s not about formation, it’s about participation.
So, if every other instructional formative process we endorse is based on repetitious and increasingly complex instruction, why do we not make the same demands of our Christian institutions? Why are we not begging our pastors and church leaders for a defined, slow, progressive instructional journey into the deep end of the faith?
1. As we’ve explored, most of us don’t have that expectation of our Christian teachers. We don’t expect them to play that role. It’s time-intensive, messy, and a lot of work on everyone’s part. It’s easier for us to self-direct our discipleship.
2. If we don’t expect that much of anything we do here matters for eternity because we have no expectation to be here, that the good things we do or make or form or transform will simply cease to exist with no eternal significance, then taking instructional samples on whatever interests us like we’re walking around Costco checking out the food stands make total sense. In fact, an a la carte, self-directed approach to our Christian instruction is the logical conclusion.
But, if we’re destined to spend eternity in a New “Right Here,” and if what we do and, more importantly, who we are and who we’re becoming does stretch into eternity and matters for eternity, then would we not demand the same sort of comprehensive, formative instruction we expect for our kids in grade school? Or our young adults in college? Or ourselves if we’re learning a new trade, a new job, or a new skill?
If our becoming more like Jesus has a profound impact on others, ourselves, and creation right now, and that impact will carry on forever, right here, would we not approach our instructional spiritual formation with the same passion and intention that we expect for any other instructional experience?
We are governed and powered by unconscious ideas, and one of the most powerful categories is the Ideas of Expectation. They dramatically impact how we operate, what we value, how we’re instructed, and whether we’re serious or not about our character being molded more into the character of our King.
[1] https://irisreading.com/9-benefits-of-repetition-for-learning/
[2] https://www.crossway.org/articles/creeds-and-confessions-101/
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/31/half-of-u-s-christians-say-casual-sex-between-consenting-adults-is-sometimes-or-always-acceptable/
[4] https://thestateoftheology.com/
[5] Marshall C. & Payne, T. (2009). The Trellis and the Vine, (p. 93). Matthias Media.
[6] Marshall C. & Payne, T. (2009). The Trellis and the Vine, (pp. 95-96). Matthias Media.
[7] Marshall C. & Payne, T. (2009). The Trellis and the Vine, (p. 98). Matthias Media.
[8] Marshall C. & Payne, T. (2009). The Trellis and the Vine, (p. 99). Matthias Media.
[9] Alcorn, R. (2004). Heaven (p. 106). Tyndale Momentum.
[10]Alcorn, R. (2004). Heaven (p. 159). Tyndale Momentum.
