As we close out Season 1, letโs crystallize what weโve covered so far regarding the Great Omission, deep discipleship, and the journey into the ideas in our hearts. Then weโll turn our attention to Season 2, and preview how weโll dig into one of the primary problems: the Discipleship Dilemma.
TRANSCRIPT
Deep Discipleship Summary
Welcome to the Soil and Roots podcast: cultivating deep discipleship in community. Iโm Brian Fisher.
This is Episode 13: Let Me Sum Up
Weโve reached the end of Season 1 of the Soil and Roots podcast! Iโm very thankful youโve come along for this journey into deep discipleship. Whether youโre listening on your own, with your family and friends, or with your Greenhouse, Iโm just glad youโre here.
Today weโre going to wrap up this season by crystallizing what weโve uncovered so far and setting the stage for Season 2.
Whew.
Though most of us started with Episode 1 and are listening or reading in numerical order, I occasionally get feedback from a few of you who have a habit of checking out random episodes out of order. Youโre like the people who start a novel in the middle of the book. I pray for you.
The podcast is designed to be listened to sequentially because new episodes build on material from previous episodes. Later seasons build on this season.
Soil and Roots as an organization is committed to cultivating deep discipleship, the journey of exploring the hidden ideas that shape us and the culture. We help form and support small, intentional communities called Greenhouses. Along with those of you listening on your own, Greenhouses work through the themes, ideas, and seasons as well in a progressive journey into the depths of discipleship.
The podcast explores various aspects of our spiritual journey from somewhat non-traditional perspectives, so itโs perfectly okay to take your time working through the material. When we enter the realm of ideas, kingdoms, anthropology, assumptions, and deep discipleship, itโs good to let things marinate. To test them. To debate them. Weโre making claims and asking pivotal questions about Christ, modern Christianity, the institution of the church, our stories, and life in general that are not usually found in our churches.
I think the consequences of not asking these types of questions are disastrous. On the flipside, if we take these questions seriously and are willing to go where the answers lead, we may see the Kingdom of Light advance in some very exciting, visible ways, starting in our own hearts and lives.
So, letโs sum up Season 1 and get ourselves ready for Season 2, which is all about how we discover the hidden ideas in our hearts.
The Power of Unconscious Ideas and Mal-formed Christians
The podcast’s primary premise is that modern Christianity is deeply confused about fundamental aspects of the faith. Weโre operating from some wrong assumptions about Christ and discipleship. The West is facing the Great Omission โ the absence of a focus on producing people who are becoming more like Jesus; who think as He thinks, who relate as He relates, who give as He gives, who desire what He desires.
A genuine disciple is someone who is apprenticing with Jesus for the purpose of becoming more like Him. Itโs a lifelong journey of character formation, but itโs one that should give us a basis for answering โyesโ to this pivotal question: Am I more like Jesus than I was five years ago? If the primary purpose of the institutional church is character formation, is that whatโs actually happening there?
On this podcast, weโve gone one step deeper and proposed that this spiritual formation happens as the ideas in our hearts are progressively formed from those of the Kingdom of Darkness to those of the Kingdom of Light. Ideas are these often unconscious, powerful assumptions that govern how we operate in the world. Understanding, exploring, and learning to discern these ideas has been the focus of Season 1. We call that journey โdeep discipleship.โ Deep discipleship is whatโs been โomittedโ from the modern conception of the Great Commission.
Some of these ideas, these hidden assumptions, are so deeply embedded in our churches, our institutions, and our hearts that we normally donโt give them a second thought. But these assumptions are causing severe downstream harm. And as culture continues to decline and flounder, the church is in danger of becoming impotent and inconsequential, not only to itself but to the rest of society. And we certainly donโt want that to be the case.
Weโve looked at a few harmful results of these wrong assumptions: the divorce and abortion rates among Christians, and the fall-off rate of so-called โconversions.โ
Divorce
Most researchers claim that devout Christians are less likely to divorce than other populations, which is good. The bad news is the divorce rate may still be as high as thirty-some percent among Christians.[1]
Though some outlets celebrate that Christians divorce less than non-Christians, I donโt think we should get excited about a potential one in three Christian marriages ending in divorce. Divorce should be extremely rare in Christian populations, not something that has become so normalized that many of us donโt give it a second thought.
Abortion
Abortion data in the church is more sobering. According to a recent Lifeway Research study, โ7 in 10 women who have had an abortion identify as a Christian, closely mirroring the overall religious makeup of the U.S.โ[2] That last phrase means that Lifewayโs Research looks a like lot other groups like Pew Research, which suggests that somewhere between 65-70% of Americans still consider themselves to be Christian.[3]
As being a Christian becomes less and less popular in our current climate, I think weโll see that number continue to drop. Claiming to be Christian and actually being a disciple of Jesus can be two very different things.
Still, the Lifeway research went on to note that, โWhen asked specifically if they identify as an evangelical Christian, 16% of all women whoโve had an abortion say yes. Specifically, among self-identified Christian women whoโve had abortions, 23% say they are evangelical.โ[4] These are staggeringly high numbers.
Many of us consider our local church to be influential on the Seven Mountains of Culture, including Family. So, does the local church have an influence on the abortion rate?
โOnly 7% of women who had abortions said they directly spoke with someone in their church about their decision. For 3 in 4 women (76%), local churches had no influence on their decision.โ
There is a whole lot we can say about the marriage and abortion rates in the church, but if people apprenticing at the feet of Jesus are to look more and more like Him, why are as many as one-third of our marriages ending in divorce and so many pregnancies ending in abortion?
I donโt think we need to look much beyond these two measurements to conclude that the modern Christian community is flailing.
Why? How Christians view and honor the bedrock relationship of civilization and how Christians view and honor the value of innocent human life tells us all we need to know about the Core Ideas in our collective Christian hearts. And these statistics strongly suggest American Christians have very wrong ideas of identity, anthropology, value, power, purpose, and love deep in their hearts. In other words, the Great Omission is real, and weโre struggling to make deep disciples.
Converts and Disciples
We also touched on modern Christianityโs zeal to produce converts vs. making disciples. In our quest to save souls, weโve lost the Great Commission and its command to make disciples. โGod loves you and has a plan for your lifeโ is not the Gospel โ itโs a poor used car sales pitch.
Evangelist Ray Comfort claims that 80-90% of people who make a so-called profession of faith arenโt actually followers of Christ.[5] Dr. D. James Kennedy once said, โThe vast majority of people who are members of churches in America today are not Christians. I say that without the slightest fear of contradiction. I base it on empirical evidence of 24 years of examining thousands of people.โ[6]
A. W. Tozer said, โIt is my opinion that tens of thousands, if not millions, have been brought into some kind of religious experience by accepting Christ and they have not been saved.โ[7] Yet how many churches publicize the number of people who, โmake a decision for Christ,โ or pray some version of a Sinnerโs Prayer?
Iโve asked a few evangelicals why theyโre so intent on reporting โdecisions for Jesus,โ rather than reporting on the number of disciples of Jesus. I was told that itโs difficult to determine someoneโs heart. Let the irony of that response sink in.
But behind these high-level statistics are other pressing questions. Of the Christian marriages that donโt end in divorce, how many truly reflect the relationship between Christ and His church? Meaning how many Christian marriages are just clocking time, and how many accurately portray the love, sacrifice, and flourishing of the divine picture of marriage?
What does pornography use look like among Christians? How about sex before or outside of marriage? If the abortion rate is so high, what ideas are driving the sexual ethics that are leading to pregnancies in the first place? What wrong assumptions have invaded the church that are leading to so much death?
If โsharing the Gospelโ is more than sharing a few Bible verses and asking someone to repeat a prayer, what is it? And which Gospel are we talking about? The Gospel of the Kingdom, or a version that boils down Jesus to my own personal Savior, who otherwise has little relevance until Iโm dead?
How are we talking about Christianity in the culture? Are we being realistic about what it is and what it isnโt? C.S. Lewis said, โI didnโt go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly donโt recommend Christianity.โ[8]
To address the downstream results of divorce, abortion, and false conversions, we need to go back upstream. We need to ask some pivotal questions about American life, the American church, and yes, our own hearts. Our own spiritual formation.
In the Beginningโฆ
We started Season 1 by articulating the problem: The Great Omission, the lack of genuine disciple-making in modern Christianity. At an individual level, this results in a sense of being disconnected from God, others, and ourselves. And we have all but lost the relationship weโre supposed to have with creation and culture. We sense there’s more to the Christian life, but weโre not quite sure what it is.
And we proposed the solution: deep discipleship. We become more like Jesus through the progressive transformation of generally unconscious ideas and desires in our hearts. Sounds great, though weโve admitted that the average Western lifestyle and much of the modern church donโt really create the space and environment for this โdeep discipleship.โ Of the six stages of our spiritual journey, the average church typically addresses only the first three. Weโre sort of on our own after that.
To better visualize how deep discipleship works, we looked at the first of our visual aids: the Creation Picture. You can find all of the visual aids for free on our website.
The Creation Picture shows that we exist in the cosmos, the outer circle. This is all of creation, the natural order. We participate in and are integrated with the Seven Mountains of Culture in the background: family, education, government, business, arts & entertainment, media, and church. Culture continually promotes and persuades us to accept its ideas. We call these Ideas in the Air. Of the seven mountains, the most powerful by far in our spiritual formation is family, our family of origin.
The tree in the middle of the picture is you. Youโre a lovely tree. Youโre in relationship with lots of other people represented by the other trees around you. The core of who you are is your heart. Your heart is your center; it is the seat of your ideas and desires. Your heart is your roots, and your roots are planted in soil. The soil represents the ideas that drive and govern us.
The Creation Picture shows us that we exist in four relationships. We have a relationship with the invisible Creator of the picture. We have relationships with other people, with ourselves, and with creation and culture.
All four of these relationships were broken by sin. Most Christians acknowledge that. What many Christians arenโt sure about is if all four are being reconciled through Jesus today. Most followers agree that our relationship with the Creator has been repaired, but we donโt spend too much time thinking about Jesusโ impact on the other three.
That led us into our exploration of the idea of the Gospel. What are our assumptions about the word โGospel?โ Is the gospel only about our relationship with God, or is it the Gospel of the Kingdom?
The Gospel of the Kingdom is a very, very big deal, but itโs something we hear little about in modern Christianity. But to have context for our spiritual formation, we need to regain a deep understanding of the Kingdom. If weโre to become more like Jesus, we need to know Him not only as a Savior but also as the ruling King, and come to grips with what this Kingdom is all about. As we explored the idea of the Gospel, we realized that our modern era has distilled the Gospel of the Kingdom into something less than what it really is.
The Forgotten Kingdom?
We briefly explored an idea of expectation. In our current era, what is the prevailing idea of how the world is going? Is the world winding up prior to the end of the age or is it winding down? Or something else? And how do our unconscious ideas of expectation impact the way we operate in the world today?
If we tend towards Christian fatalism (the idea that the world must inevitably come to some form of destruction prior to the end of the age), what does that mean for our relationship with creation and culture? If our idea is that the world is heading towards a destructive end, it makes sense that our focus is on evangelism and relief efforts. We want others to escape a bad body and a bad earth. Though how do we reconcile that with the Cultural Commissionโs charge to rule and reign the earth? How do we reconcile that with the Gospel of the Kingdom, the reconciliation of all things? Have we forgotten the Kingdom?
The Formation Gap?
Then we tackled a few ideas of anthropology โ what it means to be human.ย If you want to brush up on the ideas of Anthropology, check out the On Being Human picture on the website.ย
Most of us are born into the idea that humans are largely formed through instruction. Is theologian James K.A. Smith correct when he concludes that modern Christianity has made a terribly destructive conclusion that we are transformed solely through the intake of information in our minds? That if we attend enough services, go to enough Bible studies, agree to enough doctrine, listen to enough podcasts, we are formed by intellectually agreeing to certain facts?
Or are we missing the location of true transformation by about eighteen inches?
Certainly, we agree that our minds are engaged. The ideas of light are objectively true. We need to form a Christian worldview, a set of beliefs that help us frame the world. Those beliefs are rational and consistent across our personal relationships, all of creation, and culture. The Christian worldview is the only worldview on the planet that actually holds together in our Creation Picture.
But does that truth always seep into our soils? Or is there more to discipleship than simply agreeing to or accumulating certain facts?
We discovered that the Biblical model for spiritual formation actually consists of not one, but five Key Elements: time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction.
Yet weโve discovered that the modern Christian experience doesnโt normally involve all five of these elements. Most of us arenโt part of immersive communities designed to form our character to be more like Jesus. Most of us dart in and out of โChristianโ rituals while we juggle lots of different communities. These five elements arenโt really part of our daily or even weekly rhythms.
A Discipleship Dilemma?
Our spiritual formation occurs through much more than instruction, it occurs through relationship, our four relationships: with God, with others, with ourselves, and with creation and culture. And in most cases, our heart formation occurs progressively. It takes time for many of the ideas of darkness in our hearts to bend towards the light.
Our hearts may be changed abruptly in one direction or the other. Our salvation is often an abrupt change of ideas toward light through divine intervention. And our hearts may turn towards ideas of darkness abruptly through trauma, tragedy, and harm.
We may break a bone suddenly, but it takes weeks, if not months, for that fracture to heal. Our hearts work the same way. Our ideas of identity, value, or purpose may be corrupted in an instant as the result of someone wounding us. But it takes time, life-giving habits, appropriate intimacy with trusted people who seek our good, a vibrant community, and often repeated instruction for our hearts to embrace ideas of light, if we allow them.
Because our spiritual formation occurs primarily in our earliest years, we will struggle to understand the ideas in our hearts now unless we do the hard work of understanding our storyโฆ from the beginning.
Your family of origin and early interactions with others are the incubator in which your spirit was formed. That is where time, habit, intimacy, community, and instruction deeply influence very young, very supple hearts. And if we go through life unconscious or uncaring about the ideas we’ve formed, we inevitably project those ideas onto our four relationships, for better or for worse!
And here we may find ourselves in a dilemma. If discipleship means weโre on a journey to become more like Jesus, that means we should know Him really well, including His Kingdom. But it also requires us to understand ourselves well, our hearts. A critical component of our spiritual formation is digging into the ideas in our hearts by engaging our stories, including the hurt, harm, and wounds from our families of origin and early life experiences.
Wait, in order to move forward, I may need to look backward? Is this the picture of discipleship weโre used to in our modern experience? Have we been taught that our journey to become more like Jesus is dependent on exploring and discovering our own history?
Maybe, but maybe not. Many of us have experiences where contemplation and digging into our stories is frowned on and labeled as navel-gazing, selfish, and unnecessary.
Yet, this is one of the reasons why itโs possible to have the worldโs best doctrine, the most intellectual apologetics, and memorize entire books of the Bible and still have very wrong ideas in our soil. We can live very โChristianโ lives with corrupted ideas of darkness that distort all four of our relationships. And the reason is that genuine discipleship requires uncovering the ideas that power us, and those are formed primarily through relationship and experience. In other words, through our stories.
This is why understanding our stories, all the way back to their beginnings, is such an essential foundation of discipleship. We may well be governed by ideas that are contrary to the Kingdom of God, even after sitting in a Bible-believing church for decades!
But if we find ourselves in environments where exploring our own hearts and stories is demeaned, degraded, or ignored, we are in fact in a dilemma. We may well get stuck in our spiritual journey.
The Three Primary Problems
Well, Iโve just sneakily laid out the outline for the next three seasons of Soil and Roots! Iโve just shared the three major obstacles to our journey to become more like Jesus, and weโre going to explore them in detail, along with the solutions to these challenges.
At Soil and Roots, we call these obstacles the Three Primary Problems.
Problem #1: If discipleship is a journey of character formation to become more like Jesus, we need to know Him really well. However, we live in an age that seems to ignore Jesusโ primary message and the overarching theme of the entire Bible โ His Kingdom. We live in an age of the Forgotten Kingdom.
Problem #2: This journey of formation requires us to know Jesus well, but we also need to know ourselves well. An essential aspect of deep discipleship is exploring our individual stories in order to discern the ideas and desires in our hearts. Many of us have no safe, secure environment in which to explore our stories, and the modern church rarely acknowledges this as vital. We face a Discipleship Dilemma.
Problem #3: If deep discipleship occurs best in cultures that intentionally embrace the five key elements of any human formative experience, do we have access to such communities? Are we invited into small, immersive groups of people who intentionally want to become more like Jesus? Groups exploring who Jesus is, including His Kingdom, and create space and time to explore our own stories? If we donโt have access to these specific communities, we live in a gap. A Formation Gap.
There you have it, the Three Primary Problems. The three major obstacles to our spiritual formation and major causes of the Great Omission: The Forgotten Kingdom, the Discipleship Dilemma, and the Formation Gap. The next three seasons will dig into each of these and, most happily, propose solutions to them so that we can resolve the Great Omission once and for all.
Weโre going to start with the second primary problem, the Discipleship Dilemma. Thatโs the subject of Season 2. If becoming more like Jesus means uncovering the ideas in our own hearts, how do we do that? How do we explore our stories, our relationships, our history, our experiences in order to determine whatโs going on in our hearts?
Heartview
We touched on this journey a bit earlier this season. The great news is that God has provided signposts for us to evaluate ideas of darkness and light in our hearts. There are Eight Indicators that point us toward the ideas our hearts embrace, and we call the process of discovering these signs โHeartview.โ
The problem is the Discipleship Dilemma. A part of the solution is learning how to practice Heartview in safe, intentional, small communities.
Season 2 will be a wonderful exploration of how we learn to discern the ideas and desires in our hearts. I hope youโre as excited as I am.
Thanks for listening! If youโre enjoying the podcast so far, would you mind giving it a great rating on your favorite podcast platform? Great ratings mean more listeners and viewers, and we need to reach as many people as possible.ย For more information, check out soilandroots.org. And weโd love to hear from you! So, email us at fish@soilandroots.org.ย Weโll see you next time.ย
[1] https://www.gotquestions.org/Christian-divorce-rate.html
[2] https://research.lifeway.com/2021/12/03/7-in-10-women-who-have-had-an-abortion-identify-as-a-christian/
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/
[4] https://research.lifeway.com/2021/12/03/7-in-10-women-who-have-had-an-abortion-identify-as-a-christian/
[5] Ray Comfort (2010). God Has a Wonderful Plan for Your Life: The Myth of the Modern Message, p. 18. Ray Comfort.
[6] https://livingwaters.com/true-and-false-conversion/
[7] https://www.livingwaters.com/true-and-false-conversion/
[8] C.S. Lewis (1970). God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, p. 28. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
