How does positive family, societal, or national change happen? Do these “systems” change as a result of working on the systems themselves, or do they change as the hearts of the individuals inside the systems change? Or both?
In a world somewhat obsessed with growth and systems, a deep disciple still recognizes that, most often, transformation happens from the inside out.
TRANSCRIPTION (Watch or listen to the episode here!)
Transformation from the Inside Out
This podcast is somewhat unique in that it’s a guided tour into what we call “deep discipleship.”
The premise is this:
Often, if we’re quiet, we sense a disconnection in our lives, from God, from others, and even from ourselves. Even if we’ve been following Jesus for a long time, we may wonder, “Is this all there is? Shouldn’t there be more to the Christian life than what I’m experiencing?”
The Bible promises perfect peace, an abundant life, powerful and effective prayers, and a sense of stability and calm, even when life brings struggles and trials. Yet that doesn’t always describe the life of a modern Christian. Let’s face it, anxiety, self-interests, jockeying for power and position – those types of things often describe us, or at least me.
We’re doing the proper Christian rituals. We go to church and Bible studies. We pray. We serve in the church; we go on mission trips. Yet our lives don’t always seem to resemble the lives of the early Christians we read about in the Bible.
If this sense of disconnection, of lacking something, resonates with us, chances are we’re experiencing what philosopher Dallas Willard called “The Great Omission.” Though we talk a lot about making disciples, modern Christianity struggles to actually make them.
A disciple is simply an apprentice of Jesus. However, we sometimes miss the purpose of discipleship. It’s not simply to know more or do more Christian things – it’s the ongoing formation of our hearts. It’s character formation. It’s the journey of our hearts to become more like the heart of Jesus. That we are formed to think like He thinks, to relate like He relates, and to love like He loves.
The Soil & Roots podcast explores this Great Omission and then guides us toward ways we might be better formed. We call this journey of richer spiritual formation…deep discipleship.
Season 1 (episodes 1-13) lays out the Great Omission. And it takes a pretty unique turn early on. Where this heart transformation occurs is not a place we generally explore. It occurs at the very bedrock of our hearts, and that’s the realm of ideas. Ideas are assumptions and conclusions from which we operate. But we’re not normally conscious of them.
So, we explore discipleship as the transformation of these ideas in our hearts over time.
Admittedly, this is not a normal way of looking at discipleship, which is what makes Season 1 so fascinating.
That season closes by introducing three obstacles that often hinder our spiritual formation. We call them the Three Primary Problems: the Discipleship Dilemma, the Formation Gap, and the Forgotten Kingdom.
Season 2 (episodes 14-25) is all about the Discipleship Dilemma. Here’s the dilemma: our quest to become more like Jesus is interconnected with and dependent on our willingness to know our own hearts, our own stories. At some point in our spiritual journey, God invites us inward into the depths of our hearts. Sometimes we accept His invitation, but many times we don’t.
This is not something many of us have heard about. In fact, some of us have been trained that journeying inward is selfish and counter-Christian. Thus, the dilemma. So, in Season 2, we break through the confusion and explore how to take this journey inward using a process we call Heartview.
In Season 3, we ask a critical question: Do we have access to communities to help guide us into deep discipleship? Are we part of gatherings that are designed for and intentionally form us to become more like Jesus? Or do we live in a Formation Gap? Season 3 runs from episodes 26 through 59.
So, Season 1 explores the Great Omission. Season 2 helps us understand and explore our stories and how our stories fit into God’s grand story. Season 3 is all about community and how we might find others who want to take this journey into deep discipleship together.
This season, Season 4, is all about purpose. The Kingdom of God is a primary theme throughout the Bible, yet it has largely been forgotten today. However, we find our purpose by rediscovering, by remembering, the Kingdom of Light.
We solve the Great Omission by diving into story, forming or enhancing specific types of communities, and embracing our purpose in light of the cosmic, redemptive Kingdom of God. These are necessary parts of this transformation of ideas at the bottom of our hearts, or deep discipleship.
We’re slowly charting a course to discovering that “more” to the Christian life that some of us lack. We’re reconnecting what’s been disconnected. We’re working to restore what’s been broken.
All that to say, feel free to jump into whatever episodes you like, though I always suggest folks start with Episode 1 and work forward at your own pace. Some of the episodes are pretty involved, so take your time.
Season 4 So Far
Season 4 starts with Episode 60, and we’ve covered a lot of ground so far. We reintroduced the Forgotten Kingdom and examined how our conscious or unconscious views of the End Times shape our assumptions about our purpose.
A Christian fatalist, someone who holds to the idea that the world must be falling apart, will often see their purpose and Jesus’ purpose primarily as a rescue mission. Let’s rescue as many souls as possible from the earth’s inevitable demise.
That’s a very different idea of purpose compared to a Christian who holds that King Jesus is, right now, in the process of putting all of His enemies under His feet. That He is, right now, making all things new.
That sort of idea leads to an understanding of our purpose as being part of the cosmic restoration mission. That Jesus is in the process of redeeming and reconciling not only individual people but also creation and all seven mountains of culture. And His church is the primary means by which He is accomplishing that purpose.
For the last several episodes, we’ve been uncovering some perhaps hidden qualities of a deep disciple – someone whose life centers around the Kingdom and becoming more like Jesus. We’re exploring Jesus and His friends and pinpointing some of their characteristics that don’t always make it into books and sermons.
A deep disciple is courageously curious. They’re particular. They seek out and pay careful attention to the individual. They practice releasing control. They give up trying to figure everything out or control people or situations. And they practice being restful even in the middle of difficult tension. They typically don’t find that rest by quoting isolated Bible verses or Christian euphemisms. They find that rest through wrestling, with God and maybe even themselves.
Slavery and the Bible
Today, let’s explore another quality of a deep disciple: they function from the reality that relational, family, social, cultural, or even national change happens from the inside out.
Transformation starts in individual hearts, springs up from our roots and soil, out through our Eight Indicators, and impacts other people and systems. More on systems in a minute.
So, let’s talk about the quality of functioning from the Inside Out. Buckle up because this episode goes pretty deep.
Let’s start at what may seem an odd place – slavery and the Bible.
The Bible is often criticized for not condemning slavery outright and for the fact that the New Testament church didn’t appear to attempt to take a political or social stance against the pervasive system of slavery.
This debate has many angles.
Defenders of the Bible and Christianity sometimes point out that the practice of “slavery” then differed from how we moderns view slavery today. In many cases, it was similar to indentured service. If someone owed you money and couldn’t pay, they would become your slaves, your servants, for some time until they could pay off the debt. So, some argue that slavery in the ancient world was more humane than what we think of as slavery today.
Professor Thomas Kidd disagrees.
On balance, there doesn’t seem to be much merit in the argument that ancient Greco-Roman slavery was more humane than that which appeared in the early modern world. Both featured physical and sexual abuse, though if anything the sexual exploitation in the ancient system may have been more overt and systemic. Teenage male slaves (for instance) suffered open sexual predation from free Roman men in ways that had no direct American parallel.[1]
So, if ancient slavery wasn’t any more humane than what we think of slavery today, why doesn’t the Bible outright condemn such a corrupt and harmful system? In fact, Old Testament laws recognized it as part of life, and even Jesus used the reality of slavery in some of His teachings.
God seems to take us where we’re at and go from there. For example, the Bible Project guys noticed that when we look at how God provided the law in the Old Testament, He gave portions of it over time. He would provide some direction, the Israelites would make more mistakes, and God would correct them and provide more law or clarification. There are over 600 Hebraic laws, but they weren’t all given at once.
Jesus seemed to take the same approach with people when He walked the earth. He related to them as they were, in their current condition, and invited them into a deeper relationship and deeper discipleship.
Regarding Jesus and slavery, Dr. Philip Mitchell notes:
Jesus often used masters and servants in his parables (Mt 24:45-51, Lk 12:35-48, Lk 16:1-13, Lk 17:7-10); however, it does not follow that Jesus was approving of earthly slavery or of the way that vicious masters treated their servants. Rather, Jesus is again using this historical and cultural reality to speak of ethical and spiritual conditions (Lk 7:1-10). Likewise, when Paul enjoins slaves to be obedient to their masters, and masters not to mistreat their slaves (Eph 6:5-9, Col 3: 22-4:1, I Tim 6:1-2), he is not commending such a system; rather, he is appealing for Christians to exemplify Christ in those situations. Paul does suggest that if slaves can obtain their freedom they should, nor should they enter into slavery being “the Lord’s freeman” (I Cor 7:21-23). Indeed, Paul was quite willing to intervene and play a role in a slave’s freedom (Philemon).[2]
For those of us who live in democratic areas of the world, it can be hard to swallow Paul’s admonition to submit to governments, considering the governments of his day were often brutal, promoted caste systems as a matter of fact, and considered certain people groups to be sub-human.
So why don’t we see numerous examples of Biblical writers encouraging the transformation of harmful systems such as slavery, corrupt governments, or unequal social structures?
Because, at least at some level, Jesus and the Bible direct their attention to the transformation of individual hearts. If enough hearts are transformed, the harmful systems will eventually be transformed as well.
A human being is formed from the inside out. Apparently, many systems are changed the same way.
The Air We Breathe
Going way back to Season 1, we talked about Ideas in the Air and Ideas in the Soil. Ideas in the Air are those assumptions that pervade our societies, our cultures, and even our families. We’re all born into different idea systems.
Ideas in the Soil are those that seep into our hearts and govern and power who we are.
Glen Scrivener wrote a book called The Air We Breathe. He uses some different vocabulary than we do, but he argues that you and I live in a culture with certain assumptions about values such as equality, compassion, consent, science, and progress.
For example, most of us assume men and women should be valued equally. Most of us assume children possess tremendous value. Most of us assume moral and societal progress is a good thing.
Scrivener says these accepted values are the air we breathe. We aren’t even conscious of them. At Soil and Roots, we call these Ideas in the Air.
But Scrivener goes on to prove that these unconscious values that we take for granted would have been foolishness and idiocy back in the time of Christ. Women were most certainly not equal to men, and children were the property of the father to do with whatever he pleased. Progress wasn’t assumed; in fact, it may not have been considered at all.
Just like today, people didn’t give these Ideas in the Air a second thought. It was the air they breathed. He argues that slavery wouldn’t have been challenged in that culture because it would have been unthinkable to do so.
What changed? Jesus.
Despite all of the justifiable concerns and the complaining we might do about modern culture’s moral decline, Scrivener argues we still live in a very Christian atmosphere. It’s just that most of us don’t sit around studying ancient history to realize how different our air is compared to their air.
The Sermon on the Mount
This is why Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount would have been shocking. Not as much to us, because we already live in a culture largely formed by the ideas Jesus promoted. But to His original audience, the Sermon on the Mount most likely sounded radical. He was challenging all sorts of Ideas in the Air – commonly accepted assumptions about how life worked.
First, he began with the Beatitudes, in which he announced blessings on various types of people society would have derided. The poor in spirit? The gentle? The merciful? The peacemakers? Those who have been persecuted? Those who’ve been insulted? His ideas about who was truly blessed and what sort of people described His kingdom stood in opposition to whom the empire said should be blessed: the rich, the powerful, the shrewd, those in the right class, and those who owned slaves.
Then he went on to challenge the distinction between simply obeying the law and assessing the condition of our hearts.
“You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not commit murder’ and ‘Whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court.’ “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.[3]
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”[4]
On and on he went, challenging, deepening, and reframing their current ideas, their accepted values, the air, as it were, that they breathed.
The list of ideas in the air that Jesus challenged and transformed is staggering: human value, equality, the value of children, fatherhood, racism, classism, the role of a husband and wife, servanthood, selflessness, friendship, sacrifice, the role and purpose of money, leadership, the human body, the relationship between mankind and creation, and the list goes on and on.
Jesus started an Idea Revolution that has transformed the world and continues to transform it today.
Individuals and Systems
All seven mountains of culture have been dramatically influenced by Jesus’ Idea Revolution: family, education, media, the arts, government, business, and the church. His Idea Revolution transformed many of the institutions that drive these seven mountains.
If you live in a democracy, just consider the vast difference between its underlying ideas and those of the Roman Empire. The idea that people had the intelligence, value, and right to vote for their government was utter nonsense back then. Today, we’re insulted if these ideas aren’t recognized and valued.
If you’re a father, consider the differences between the underlying ideas of fatherhood now and in ancient times. Just read the Bible and see how daughters were often viewed and treated. Go back and read how Lot treated his daughters. And then how they treated him.
I don’t think they held daddy/daughter dances back then.
This brings us to a critical question if we desire to see Jesus’ Idea Revolution continue today.
How are systems built on or corrupted by bad ideas transformed? By “system,” I mean mountains of culture, institutions, programs, and some “isms” in which you and I live and function.
Your workplace is a system. A federal or local government is a system. Ageism is a type of system. Your church is a system. Your family is a type of system.
Systems impact and influence groups of individuals.
Just as the human heart is built on, governed, and powered by ideas, systems are built on, governed, and powered by ideas. Some are from the kingdom of darkness, and some belong to the kingdom of light.
A homeless shelter is a system built on light ideas. The KKK is a system built on dark ideas. Though generally, a system is a mixed bag of ideas.
If a deep disciple is committed to seeing God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven, that means we seek to transform harmful systems that influence creation and the seven mountains of culture.
If we truly love our neighbor, we’re concerned about systems that harm our neighbor.
So, back to the question: If the human heart is changed by the transformation of deeply embedded ideas at its bedrock, how are systems changed?
If a university that was originally built on biblical truth becomes corrupted over time (not that THAT has ever happened), how is the school reformed into one based on ideas of light?
What if a church or denomination drifts from ideas of light and assumes more ideas of darkness? How is that system reformed into ideas of light?
Can it be reformed or, as in so many cases, must new churches and new denominations be started to compete with or replace corrupted systems?
I’m not sure there’s an easy answer, and I doubt there’s just one approach.
However, it seems we now often deal with systems first rather than serving individuals.
The Moral Majority of the 80’s and its attempt to reform the political sphere. Attempts to reform the American public school system by throwing billions of dollars at it. Attempts to thwart violence and crime through various criminal justice reforms. Are these honest attempts to protect people from harmful systems? Sure. Do they work?
Can a system truly be transformed if the hearts of those within it remain unchanged?
We Need to “Spread the Gospel”
Most likely, you’ve heard the typical Christian answer to the question of how to transform corrupt systems. How do we save churches from slipping into darkness? How do we stop violence in schools? How do we end racism in its various forms?
The same message is constantly being spread on the Internet, in churches, in books, and in coffee shops. The secret to social reform and saving corrupt systems is to… spread the Gospel.
Well, what do we mean by Gospel? As we explored back in Season 1, do we mean the Gospel of Salvation or the Gospel of the Kingdom? Are we talking about people getting “saved” (the Gospel of Salvation), or participating in the answer to the Lord’s Prayer – that heaven continues to come to earth? That God’s will be increasingly done here in every aspect of life and society. That’s the Gospel of the Kingdom.
If we look at the last 50 years of American Christianity, maybe even more, the answer is the Gospel of Salvation. Get people saved. Make converts.
May I politely suggest that, although perhaps we’ve successfully made converts through an untold number of TV shows, pamphlets, crusades, and outreach events, we have not produced a church of people whose deeply embedded ideas about all aspects of life have been steadily formed in the crucible of deep discipleship? There’s a profound difference between making converts and making disciples.
I doubt this will be very popular, but I suspect one of the primary reasons Western cultures continue to experience social and moral decline is not because of some prophecy that predicts our inevitable destruction, or because prosperous nations and cultures must fall apart, or because of any lack of effort to convert wide swaths of populations.
It’s because of the Great Omission. A long-term lack of genuine disciple-making will inevitably result in moral decline. The salt loses its saltiness.
Christian conversion itself has, in many respects, become “systematized.” But true discipleship is not a system. It’s a messy, long-term, hard, ongoing relationship
The underlying idea in modern Christianity is that social, political, or relationship transformation will result if we just get people “saved.” With due respect, that’s a deeply flawed, surface-level, woefully incomplete answer. With all of the TV shows, events, crusades, and efforts of the 80s and 90s to make converts, are we experiencing a renaissance of kingdom ideas in creation and all seven mountains of culture today?
I often hear calls for revival. Revival of what? What do we want to see revived? Do we want to see a revival of converts or kingdom-bringing, world-changing, people of tremendous depth and love?
Inside Out
Let’s go back to Jesus. Why was He so extraordinarily successful at turning ancient upside down? Why is it that today we take so many of His ideas for granted, even though they were unthinkable and radical 2,000 years ago?
Well, for starters, all of His ideas are good for the human race. Ideas of light lead to human flourishing, while ideas of darkness are designed to kill us.
Jesus not only taught light Ideas, but He is also light ideas. He embodies light ideas. He spoke them, modeled them, lived them, died for them, and showed us how to live in them.
What about His friends and early followers? It would take a few hundred years, but Christian ideas turned Rome on its head. They would eventually lead to equal rights, the birth of science, the advent of healthcare, the idea and hope of progress, the valuation of children, the reformation of governments, and leaps forward in philosophy and anthropology.
And once in a while, we find a deep disciple so grounded, so powerfully rooted in Ideas of Light, they change the world. Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Wilberforce, Hannah Moore, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa.
Did these saints transform systems? Did they not root out the bad ideas driving harmful systems, challenge them, change them, and overcome them? Did they not influence individual after individual through their thoughts, behaviors, relationships, words, and how they used their time and money?
We tend to look at those heroes of the faith and consider them exceptional, so different from us. And maybe they are. But do they have to be?
Perhaps in a world of deep disciple-making, they’re the norm. Perhaps, as our hearts become more and more in tune with the ideas of light, and we become more and more enamored of Jesus and His ideas, we’ll realize that not only is the reformation of corrupt systems built on bad ideas possible. It’s inevitable.
Can corrupt systems be transformed? They often can, if we’re willing to identify, call out, challenge, and transform the ideas on which they’re built. We’ve explored the concept of Heartview – the process of exploring our hearts to identify the ideas that drive us. The same concept works with systems. To transform systems, we must first do the hard work of identifying the ideas that power them.
A deep disciple operates on the idea that change happens from the inside out, both in the individual and, very often, in the systems in which we live. And the more the ideas in our hearts become formed into those of Jesus, the more powerful, helpful, and life-giving the transformation.
[1] https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/slavery-old-and-new
[2] https://www.dbu.edu/mitchell/early-modern-resources/biblesla.html
[3] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Mt 5:21–22). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
[4] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Mt 5:27–28). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
