Ep 54: Another Brick in the Wall

Spiritual Formation and Instruction

Today, we begin our excavation of the last key element of our spiritual formation, instruction.

Some Context

Let’s back up for a minute and get our bearings.

Many people in the West have the sense of being lonely, isolated, and disconnected from God, other people, themselves, and creation.  Certainly, this is true for people who aren’t following Jesus, but it’s also true for many people who do. Our church life may be great, but many of us wonder whether there is more to the Christian life than a weekly worship service, some private devotions, and a Bible study.  Something deeper, something almost intangible.

The Bible talks about this peace that passes understanding, abiding with God, the abundant life, joy in the midst of suffering, conquering sin, and a deep love for God, self, and neighbor. Loving our enemy, a life without anxiety, a life without fear.

The Bible seems to paint a picture of life that’s so…free…but that freedom seems hard to grasp.

Do I sense God’s presence that deeply?  Can I really conquer these lifelong, habitual sins?  Can I envision a life without fear or anxiety?

Let’s face it, that type of life sounds more like an aspirational fantasy or like life in some monastery compared to the lives we often lead.

We tend to cover up this underlying sense that there’s more to the Christian life with any of the innumerable distractions available to us today – busyness, leisure, eating, exercise, running our kids around, and living our lives through them.  In darker periods, we struggle with various addictions, even socially acceptable ones.

Yet the yearning in our hearts remains. We long to know and be known. And this longing tends to pop up in our Heartview Indicators, whether we want it to or not. In our thought life, our actions, our words, how we use time and money, our relationships, and even our health.

At Soil and Roots, we’ve been exploring this disconnect between what the Bible paints as the deep Christian life and what many of us experience.

We started off by digging into the concept of ideas: the concepts, assumptions, and principles that govern us, but of which we’re typically unaware.

Admittedly, this exploration of ideas is not a normal approach to uncovering biblical reality and the human heart.  It takes some time to get our arms and brains around them.

But philosophers and theologians have been exploring ideas and their role in individuals, communities, nations, religions, and cultures for a very long time. We may recognize names such as Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche, Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, and Calvin.

American pastor and theologian A.W. Tozer commented on the depth and power of ideas when he wrote,

“That our idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.”[1]

These ideas, these bedrock and somewhat mysterious things in our hearts, play a huge role in how we relate, function, and exist.

And they are deeply tied to our relationship with God.  Philosopher and theologian, Dallas Willard, taught that the journey of a disciple is the progressive transformation of our ideas.

So, there’s a connection between this sense that there’s more to the Christian life and the exploration of these hidden ideas.

But because we tend to be so content with surface things, we generally won’t go exploring our spiritual journey toward freedom and the presence and power of these ideas unless we’re whacked in the head by some sort of crisis.  And even then, we’re tempted to turn back and take it easy.

C.S Lewis famously wrote,

“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”[2]

TPPs

Ideas settle into nations, cultures, and religions, resulting in major social and cultural changes and paradigms.

Part of our struggle to experience a deeper, more formative relationship with Jesus is that we’ve been born into an era that faces Three Primary Problems, all of which stem from widespread, deeply impactful ideas. As you’ve probably heard, the Three Primary Problems are The Forgotten Kingdom, the Discipleship Dilemma, and the Formation Gap.

Over the last few hundred years, the West has so reduced, so minimized, so neutered the idea of Jesus that many people assume He just came to rescue individual persons from eternal punishment. So as long as we pray some kind of prayer or walk down the aisle at a service, we’ve punched our ticket to heaven, and we’re good to go.  We’ll check in with Jesus once in a while and look forward to floating on some ethereal plane in a disembodied state with Him for all eternity once we’re dead.

That actually sounds terribly boring.

The idea of the Bible’s grand narrative is far more than our personal salvation.  Jesus is the King of the entire Cosmos.  He has been given all authority to reign over it.  He is making all things new right now. He is, right now, putting all enemies under His feet.

The prevailing, often unconscious idea in Christianity today is that the body and this world are inherently bad and must be escaped.  That’s a rather odd idea considering that God saw that his created world and human beings were good, in fact, very good. That’s at least what Genesis tells us.

It also raises the question that, if both the body and the earth are bad, why did God come as a human with a body to the earth in order to save it?

Modern Christianity has forgotten the Kingdom. When Jesus came, He announced to the darkness that His kingdom of light had come, that He was here to take His stuff back.  All of His stuff.

Because we’ve reduced the idea of Jesus to only our personal savior and are not sure how to embrace Him as the reigning king of the cosmos, this can make our discipleship difficult.

We’ve defined discipleship as the journey to become more like Jesus.  To become like someone else, we need to know the object and the subject. We need to know Jesus, and we need to know ourselves.

It’s vital that we embrace the entirety of who Jesus is, not just the parts to which modern Christianity has reduced Him.  Otherwise, we aren’t sure who we’re supposed to become more like.

And although this isn’t particularly popular right now, it’s difficult to move forward on our journey if we don’t explore and dive into our own stories and hearts. Sometimes we have to go backward to go forward.

Thus, we find ourselves in a dilemma.  A Discipleship Dilemma. We desire to become more like Jesus, but we aren’t sure who He is, and we aren’t all that sure who we are.

This dilemma is only compounded by the fact that human hearts need certain things in order to be formed.  These five things were taken for granted for much of church history, but in our supposedly enlightened age, some of these formative elements have all but disappeared.

If we genuinely desire to become more like Jesus, we may find ourselves in a gap, a Formation Gap. We simply don’t have access to communities designed to help us be formed into the image of Jesus.

A human heart requires five elements in order to form more like someone else: time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction.

Other five-element formative communities are common in our lives today, just not in our spiritual formation. However, these five-element communities are precisely what Jesus and the early church modeled.

That’s really the essence of what Soil and Roots is all about – restoring New Testament discipleship through the formation and support of these special communities that Jesus and His followers modeled. We call them Greenhouses.

A Greenhouse is a solution to all three of the primary problems.  In them, we rediscover the Kingdom, solve the Discipleship Dilemma, and fill the Formation Gap. We journey together to align our ideas with God’s and, in the process, experience the depth and freedom the Christian life promises.

Instruction

Now, as we’ve noted, modern Christianity tends to assume that we’re formed primarily through instruction. It’s the idea that human beings are “brains on sticks.”

That if we just hear enough biblical truth, we’ll eventually become more like Jesus.  And we should note that biblical instruction is very important.

However, in our modern age, we’ve drastically overemphasized its importance in disciple-making.  Or perhaps, more precisely, the other formative elements of time, habit, community, and intimacy have slowly disappeared from culture, and instruction is the last thing standing.

In most Protestant churches, the assumed pinnacle of our spiritual formation is the weekly sermon. Most church buildings and architecture, budgets, staff and personnel, and worship songs are built around the Sunday sermon.

Nowadays, sermons are available worldwide online within minutes of being delivered and often make their way into books and other media forms.

And the sermon is generally an instructional monologue.

If we still have Sunday schools, those are instructive.  Most small-group programs are based on studying the Bible or another book. Those are instructive.  The overwhelming majority of adult church groups today are based on biblical instruction.  They form the major rhythms of most churches.  We might volunteer in other service opportunities or mission work, but even those tend to have strong instructional overtones.

It’s funny because we don’t emphasize instruction so strongly in other formative environments.  No one expects a civilian to be turned into a soldier by simply sitting in a classroom.  No one expects a toddler to be formed into a healthy, loving adult by just listening to weekly lectures from their parents.  No one expects a gifted athlete to be formed into an NFL star by just teaching him the rules of football or handing him a playbook.

We intuitively know that a civilian needs a mentor, needs a squad, hands-on, habitual experience, and a relationship in order to become a successful soldier.  An immersive community is essential to making good soldiers.

Every child needs affection, attunement, relationship, predictability, security, and a certain environment in order to flourish. In other words, she needs an immersive community to form.

And any professional athlete will tell you their formation into a star didn’t happen because of sitting in a classroom, but because of relentless habits, caring coaches, and selfless teammates.

The Critical Journey

So, let’s dig into our last key element of instruction.

Christians yearn for a deeper understanding of their faith, for a profound relationship with Jesus, for this life of freedom and abiding in Him. We may dream about what a life without anxiety, without fear, without worrying about money looks like.  Or, more positively, what a constant sense of God’s presence and two-way communication with Him might look like. A life consumed with God and directed by the Holy Spirit.

Over the last two thousand years of the church, we now find ourselves at a crossroads – we’re a generation with an overwhelming amount of information about the spiritual life, but we don’t seem to have the guidance on how to truly live it. This absence leads to spiritual disarray and disillusionment.

This presents our first question: if we have an overabundance of Christian information, where is this sense of disconnection and a sense of a lack of depth in our journey coming from?

I found a potential answer in my research, though it may not be particularly popular or comforting.

A pastor friend of mine referred me to a book called The Critical Journey, the first edition of which was published back in the eighties.

The authors, Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich, suggest that our journey of spiritual formation and discipleship can be broken down into six stages.

It’s not that we move through these stages in a line.  We may bounce between a few or skip one or two. We may spend years in just one stage.

Here they are:

Stage 1 is a Recognition of God.  This is when we become a Christian or at least become aware of God.

They call Stage 2 the Life of Discipleship.  I wish the authors had chosen a different name for this stage, because it basically means just learning.  We come to know God, and then we take time to learn more about Him.  So, this entails things like Bible study, lectures, classes, maybe being mentored, and so on.

Stage 3 is the Productive Life.  This is when we start to give back.  We begin to serve. Maybe it’s through volunteering at church, working in the nursery, mentoring others, or going on mission trips.  We know God; we know more about God, and now we’re ready to share God with others through myriad opportunities.

So far, we all recognize these three phases. Many of our stories involve coming to Christ, joining a community of faith, learning more about Him, and then taking on a more serving role in some capacity.

Candidly, when I first read the book, I wondered what phases might be beyond these first three.  I thought the first three were all there was.

I was very wrong.

Stage 4 is called The Inward Journey.

“It almost always comes as an unsettling experience yet results in healing for those who continue through it.  Until now, our journey has had an external dimension to it. Our life of faith was more visible, more outwardly oriented, even though things certainly were happening inside us.”

“At this stage, we face abrupt change to almost the opposite mode.  It’s a mode of questioning, exploring, falling apart, doubting, dancing around the real issues, sinking in uncertainty, and indulging in self-centeredness.”[3]

 Near the end of stage 4 is what they call “The Wall.” St. John of the Cross called this type of experience the “dark night of the soul.”

“The Wall represents the place where another layer of transformation occurs, and a renewed life of faith begins for those who feel called and have the courage to move into it.”

“This experience is perhaps the most poignant example of mystery in the whole journey of faith…Experiencing the wall is both frightening and unpredictable.”[4]

They cite some biblical examples of the Wall to give us context: Jonah in the belly of the whale, Job in the middle of his illness, Elijah when he hid in the cave, and Sarah being barren for so long, finally giving up and giving Hannah to her husband.

The wall is often brought on by some sort of crisis: a job loss, a cancer diagnosis, a death in the family, divorce, betrayal, a move, or wondering if our career, our ministry, or our perspective is valid or “right” or honoring.

When we hit the wall, we have a few options.  We may press into it and engage in the struggle and introspection it brings.  Or we may turn back and settle into a previous stage because we just aren’t willing to dig beneath the surface. In some cases, a person simply abandons the faith altogether…they deconstruct.

The wall is a pivotal part of our journey because it often causes us to revisit the truths and the ideas we assumed when we were younger.  And we discover God in new ways. We experience Him more deeply, and that draws us into a more trusting relationship with Him.  We learn to surrender.

As best as I can tell, I’ve stumbled into the wall twice in my life. The first time, I ignored it and turned back, making sure to keep myself incredibly busy with my family and career. The second time I pushed into it, more out of frustration than some sense of bravery. In many respects, I’m still on the wall today.

After the Wall comes Stage 5, which is the Journey Outward. And Stage 6 is the Life of Love.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast episodes in order, you know we’ve been wrestling with what a mature, intimate Christian disciple actually looks like. Is it the supernaturally overpowered Christian, or the doctrinally accurate Christian, or the placid Christian?

This last stage is the book’s answer to that question. They maintain that a deep, abiding disciple of Jesus looks a lot like Him, is a lot like Him.

Their description of someone in Stage 6, a life of love, sounds somewhat paradoxical.

“At this stage we reflect God to others in the world more clearly and consistently than we ever thought possible…When we are at stage 6, we have lost ourselves in the equation, and at the same time we have truly found ourselves.  We are selfless.  This factor allows us to do the most extraordinary things. We may figuratively wash other people’s feet or give our very lives in the service of God…We are at peace with ourselves, fully conscious of being the person God has created us to be. Obedience comes very naturally without deliberation because we are so immersed in God’s work.”[5]

They list other characteristics: wisdom gained from life’s struggles, compassionate living for others, including our enemies, detachment from things, and stress.  They argue that someone living in Stage 6 may seem strange to the rest of us. They aren’t trying to perform or accumulate much of anything.  They may appear slow. They’re so unconcerned with things that concern us, we aren’t sure quite what to do with them.

The Church and the Six Stages

We could spend a lot of time exploring these Six Stages, though you might consider picking up the book and digging around in it in your Greenhouse.

But here’s the point: with all of the instruction available to us today in our churches, institutions, books, videos, and courses, how much of it is designed to help us move through all six stages?

How much of the instruction we receive helps us understand it’s ok to enter Stage 4 (the Inward Journey), where we purposefully engage our stories, our hearts, our theology, and ask questions, or express doubts, or even take a break from our normal Christian habits?

In Stage 4, we may begin to question why we go to church at all, or whether there’s more to our experience with God than the rituals and rhythms we’ve relied on for so long.

Do our churches make room for this stage? Do they have communities that invite us to work through it together?

How much of the instruction we receive invites us to engage the wall?  Are we taught how to love others who are currently in the wall?

John Stonestreet refers to the “Romans 8:28 grenade,” meaning that our common Christian response to trial, struggle, or crisis is to immediately remind everyone that God works all things together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.  That’s true, though it may not be helpful at all to someone currently living in the wall.

Do our churches instruct us to anticipate the wall, to embrace it?

Or is the vast majority of available instruction geared to Stages 1-3?  Being introduced to God, basic Bible knowledge, and then moving into service?

Stage 4 is about an intentional look inward, at our stories, at our pasts. How often does that show up in our instruction?  And if the Wall is characterized by doubts, questions, and perhaps even some undoing of ideas we took for granted, is that even allowed in our church communities?

I was talking about these Six Stages to a pastor friend of mine who had been in ministry for a few decades, so I asked him,

“In your years of ministry, how often did you see a church teach on stages 4-6?”

“Almost never,” he replied.

“Why not?” I asked.

He sighed and then said, “Because churches can succeed financially without doing the hard work and making the commitment that Stages 4-6 require.”

I then asked, “Well then, how do churches deal with people who are struggling with things like the Wall?”

He replied, “They don’t. Or they send them to counseling or a support group.”

Not Enough Instruction?

We’ve explored that the Western church has overemphasized instruction as a formative element in our journey.

Yet, if we, even on the surface, agree that the Christian journey goes well beyond meeting Jesus, learning about Him, and volunteering for Him, what instruction is available to us to help navigate these later, quite frankly, deeper stages of our formation?

If the vision for our discipleship is to live in Stage 6, this “Life of Love,” and to get there, we need to take a pass through the Journey Inward and the Wall, what sort of instruction is available to help us walk through this journey?

My pastor friend’s comment that most churches no longer recognize or support disciples in Stages 4, 5, and 6 because they can financially perpetuate themselves without doing so really bothered me.

However, it’s hard to argue the point.  These later stages, The Journey Inward, the Wall, the Journey Outward, and the Life of Love all require a tremendous personal, if not one-on-one commitment.  Large churches certainly can’t go there – they are just too many people in the congregation.

Evangelizing, teaching, and providing volunteer opportunities can all happen at scale; those are stages 1 through 3.

But exploring a person’s story, sitting with them in their wall, and exploring a life of love – these aren’t things to be accomplished in mass gatherings.  This is time-consuming, often messy stuff.

In fact, engaging in Stages 4-6 may require a very different mindset: the goal of a church isn’t to grow the number of people; it’s to grow disciples.  If I may, it’s a quality-over-quantity mindset.  Or depth over width. Or at least prioritizing depth over width.

The Trellis and the Vine

There may be a few other things in play here that stop churches from instructing us about the deeper, frankly harder, more personal stages of our formation.

Colin Marshall and Tony Payne wrote a book for pastors called The Trellis and the Vine.

The trellis represents a church’s administration, business, and programs. It’s the structure needed to support the ministry’s work.

The vine represents the actual journey of making disciples.  This is the interpersonal interaction, the teaching, the counseling, and the transparent conversations over coffee. The time-consuming, hard, messy work of formation.

Their concern is that, in many, if not most, churches, the trellis consumes most of the church’s energy and effort.  Running the operations, buildings, and programs has consumed the church, and the actual vine work has taken a back seat.

“And that’s the thing about trellis work: it tends to take over from vine work.  Perhaps it’s because trellis work is easier and less personally threatening.  Vine work is personal and requires much prayer…Which is easier: to have a business meeting about the state of the carpet, or to have a difficult personal meeting where you need to rebuke a friend about his sinful behavior?”[6]

They continue, “The concentration on trellis work that is so common in many churches derives from an institutional view of Christian ministry. It is very possible for churches, Christian organizations, and whole denominations to be given over totally to maintaining their institutions.”[7]

Indeed, it’s not only possible but routine.  We explored this in some detail back in Episode 12: Supersize Me.

The reality is that communities committed to genuine, deep discipleship leading to this stage 6, this life of love, are very difficult to find in most church institutions today.

Churches can financially support their budgets, programs, and ministry structure by deliberately ending their discipleship efforts at Stage 3. And a church can scale quite large at that point.

Church institutions, large and small, can become consumed by the trellis and neglect the vine – by spending their time on denominational activities, committee meetings, conferences, and events, and not actually working one-on-one to make disciples who then go make more disciples.

For many people, myself included, there comes a time when monologues, select Bible verses ripped out of context, and the “business” of the church begin to lose their relevance.

At some point, maybe in middle age, we realize that these rhythms certainly play a part in our formation, particularly in the beginning, but there really are deeper things of the faith, deeper parts of our story, deeper parts of our hearts, deeper questions for which the modern institutional church simply does not provide instruction or support. And in some cases, not even the permission.

If true, the implications that we live in an age of overwhelming Christian instruction, yet we receive virtually no instruction on the deeper stages of our journey to become more like Jesus, are extraordinary!  If true, we’re missing the deeper, richer, intangible, rock-solid experiences the Bible promises.

Perhaps we are quite comfortable with our mudpies.

What Do We Do?

It really is a staggering premise.  So how might we respond?

1.  Our first option is to deny the premise.  We can certainly claim that our deeper longings, my pastor friend, and The Critical Journey are wrong, and that, as long as we’re being instructed and serving, that is pretty much the expected endpoint of our discipleship journey.

2.  Our second option is to acknowledge the premise but accept the present reality for what it is.  The idea of the abundant life, a life without lack, and a life so consumed with God that we obey not because we have to but because we delight to, really is more fantasy than practicality. It’s entirely aspirational, and we don’t really expect to ever experience a life of love this side of the afterlife.  My guess is that the vast majority of us sit in this response, this unconscious idea.

3.  A third option is to reach the wall and give up.  The modern term for this is “deconstruction,” when a Christian hits the wall, receives little to no help, and finally gives up on the entire thing.  No one is there to sit with them in the wall because no one has been instructed on what it is or how to help.

4.  Some people remain Christian but call it quits on the institutional church.  Their disenchantment becomes permanent, and they leave.  These people are often castigated by folks still in the church because they’re viewed as sinners, disobediently no longer meeting together.

I’ve had enough of this criticism, primarily because it’s just lazy.  It asks no questions about the deeper reasons someone left, nor about the failure of our church institutions to make disciples beyond stage 3.

5.  Lastly, we might accept the premise and press into the implications.  If the path to becoming more like Jesus does, in fact, involve the Inward Journey, the Wall, and the Outward Journey, and most of our church institutions aren’t set up to walk us through those later stages, what can we do? Does our desire to truly become more like our King drive us to assess, explore, investigate, contemplate, and question?

Instruction Deconstruction

Perhaps it’s time that we reconsider what we mean by “instruction” as a key element in our formation to become more like Jesus.

Someone recently asked me if I listed “instruction” as the last of the five key elements on purpose.

It is on purpose.

It’s also intentional that I list “time” as the first key element, because modern Christians spend very little time on the most important formative journey of our lives. The biggest objection to starting or joining a Greenhouse is a perceived lack of time. As we’ve explored, however, how we use time is a symptom, a result, and an indicator of our heart condition.  A lack of time is not the root.

When considering these five-element communities called Greenhouses, virtually everyone assumes instruction is part of the ecosystem. And instruction, at least concerning the first three stages of our journey, is ubiquitous.  It’s everywhere, all the time. So, it’s listed last.

However, an underlying purpose of a Greenhouse is to be a place to explore all of the stages of our formation, particularly stages 4, 5, 6, and the wall.  It’s a place to journey inward, then outward, and then into a life of love.

It’s a place where people experiencing the wall, this dark night of the soul, can come and explore our doubts and our questions and be with others on various stages of their journey.

Perhaps in a particular Greenhouse, a few people are still searching for God, while others have walked with Him for a long time and are being drawn into a deeper intimacy with Him.  Some at Stage 1, some at Stage 4, the wall, or beyond.  How wonderful.

[1] Willard, D. (2002). Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (p. 100). NavPress.

[2] Lewis, C.S. (1949).  The Weight of Glory (First American Edition) (p 2). McMillan Press.

[3]Hagberg, J. & Guelich, R. (2005). The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith (p. 93). Sheffield Publishing Company.

[4] Hagberg, J. & Guelich, R. (2005). The Critical Journey (pp. 114-115). Sheffield Publishing Company.

[5] Hagberg, J. & Guelich, R. (2005). The Critical Journey (pp. 152-153). Sheffield Publishing Company.

[6] Marshall, C. & Payne, T. (2009). The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mind-Shift that Changes Everything (p. 9). Matthias Media.

[7] Marshall, C. & Payne, T. (2009). The Trellis and the Vine (p. 10). Matthias Media.