Deep Discipleship: Why Churches Struggle
The church is remarkably good at gathering people, teaching the Bible, launching ministries, sending missionaries, and mobilizing volunteers. Yet many sincere Christians quietly wonder why years of church attendance have not produced the kind of inner transformation they expected.
We may know more about God than we did a decade ago. We may serve more, give more, and participate in more Christian activity. But are we becoming less anxious, less defensive, less controlling, and less angry? Are we increasingly present to God and other people? Are we learning to live with greater peace, security, courage, and love?
In other words, are we actually becoming more like Jesus?
That question lies at the heart of what theologian and philosopher Dallas Willard called the Great Omission: modern Christianity talks frequently about making disciples, yet often struggles to form people whose character increasingly resembles the character of Jesus.
The World Needs Deep People
Richard Foster once made a striking observation:
“The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”
That is a countercultural statement. It may sometimes be a counter-church statement as well.
Most institutions naturally celebrate what can be seen and measured. Churches are no exception. We count attendance, baptisms, conversions, volunteers, giving, programs, small groups, and social media engagement. These things may be good and important. But none of them necessarily tells us whether people are becoming more patient, gentle, truthful, secure, compassionate, or loving.
An intelligent person is not necessarily a deep person. Neither is a gifted, influential, biblically literate, successful, or highly active person.
A deep person is someone who is intentionally becoming more attuned to God, other people, themselves, and creation and culture. A deep disciple is apprenticing with Jesus so that, over time, they increasingly think, act, relate, and love as He does.
Deep discipleship is concerned with the formation of the entire human being, not simply the transfer of religious information.
What Is a Disciple?
Part of the problem is that we have reduced the meaning of the word disciple.
In some Christian environments, a disciple is essentially an educated convert. Someone chooses to follow Jesus, completes a class on the basics of Christianity, learns certain doctrines and behaviors, and may then be encouraged to disciple someone else.
Education is vital. But learning Christian information is not the same as becoming like Christ.
Jesus did not merely give His disciples a collection of teachings and send them away to study. They lived with Him. They watched Him respond to interruptions, conflict, suffering, power, rejection, children, outsiders, religious leaders, and His closest friends. They witnessed His relationship with the Father. They asked questions, misunderstood Him, failed publicly, received correction, and experienced His patience.
They were not simply students in a classroom. They were apprentices learning how to live.
This is why discipleship cannot be reduced to agreement with a statement of faith, attendance at a church service, participation in a Bible study, or completion of a course. Each of those can contribute to discipleship, but none is sufficient by itself.
The goal is not merely to know what Jesus taught. The goal is to become the kind of person who can increasingly live as Jesus taught.
Why Information Is Not Enough
Modern Christianity often assumes that instruction is the primary engine of spiritual transformation.
The logic is understandable. If people believe incorrectly, teach them what is true. If they behave poorly, explain what Scripture commands. If they are spiritually immature, give them more biblical knowledge.
Our lives are shaped by relationships, experiences, habits, communities, stories, wounds, desires, fears, and ideas that often operate beneath our conscious awareness. We can intellectually affirm that God loves us while living anxiously as though His affection must be earned. We can believe every person bears God’s image while treating certain people as though they possess less value. We can teach about trust while attempting to control everyone and everything around us.
The distance between what our minds affirm and what our hearts experience helps explain why information alone rarely produces deep transformation.
How People Are Actually Formed
Consider almost any environment intentionally designed to form one kind of person into another.
A young gymnast who hopes to compete professionally does not attend a weekly lecture about gymnastics. She enters an immersive formative environment.
She gives the process substantial time. She develops demanding habits. She becomes part of a focused community. She shares struggles, fears, injuries, progress, and setbacks with trusted people, creating intimacy. She receives ongoing, personalized instruction.
The same pattern appears in marriage, military training, higher education, recovery communities, competitive sports, early childhood, and many other intentionally formative ecosystems.
At Soil & Roots, we describe these as the Five Key Elements of Spiritual Formation:
- Time
- Habits
- Community
- Intimacy
- Instruction
Human beings naturally include these five elements when we are serious about formation. Yet our spiritual lives often receive only fragments of them.
We may attend a weekly worship service and perhaps a Bible study. We may occasionally practice prayer or Scripture reading. We may know many people at church without being deeply known by any of them. We may hear excellent instruction without having enough time, relational safety, shared practice, or personal guidance for that teaching to reach the bedrock of our hearts.
The Formation Gap
This absence or fragmentation of the five elements creates what Soil & Roots calls the Formation Gap.
The Formation Gap is not simply the distance between biblical promises and our everyday experience. It exists because most modern Christian institutions and discipleship experiences do not provide meaningful access to all five formative elements together.
We might receive instruction without intimacy. We might practice certain habits without a committed community. We might participate in a group without enough shared time to build trust.
We might spend years in church settings without anyone helping us explore the hidden ideas, desires, wounds, and fears that continue to govern us.
The Formation Gap helps explain the Great Omission. We say we want to make disciples, but the ecosystems we rely upon are often not structured to form whole human beings over time.
Converts or Apprentices?
A pastor I once followed frequently said, “I know the Great Commission is about making disciples, but you can’t have disciples without first making converts.”
I have come to believe we often have that backward.
Jesus did not commission His followers merely to secure decisions or produce converts who would later consider discipleship as an optional second stage. He invited people into His Kingdom and into an entirely new way of life.
The Great Commission is not simply a command to persuade people to agree with certain truths. It is an invitation to help people become apprentices of Jesus—people learning to live in His presence, under His care, and increasingly in His character.
That includes conversion, but it does not end there.
The purpose of discipleship is not merely to get people into heaven after they die. It is to invite them into life with God now: a lifelong journey in which their ideas, desires, habits, relationships, and character are increasingly reformed through Jesus.
The Cost of Shallow Discipleship
The Great Omission is not merely an institutional problem. It carries a substantial human cost.
Individually, Christians may experience a persistent disconnection between what they believe and how they live. They may know the language of peace while remaining internally frantic. They may affirm God’s love while quietly fearing His disappointment. They may serve faithfully while becoming exhausted, resentful, or emotionally absent.
Communally, shallow formation allows harmful patterns to remain untouched. Churches can become places where giftedness is valued more than character, certainty more than humility, growth more than health, and public success more than private integrity.
The world does not merely need more people who can explain Christianity. It needs people who are steadily becoming more loving.
It needs deep people.
What Would It Mean to Take Discipleship Seriously?
Recovering deep discipleship does not require us to reject churches, preaching, Bible studies, evangelism, service, or Christian education. All of these can play important roles.
It does require us to stop assuming that Christian activity automatically produces Christlike character.
We might begin by asking more honest questions:
- Are people becoming more like Jesus through their participation in our communities?
- Are they increasingly able to receive and extend love?
- Are they becoming less governed by fear, shame, control, resentment, and comparison?
- Do they have trusted people with whom they can safely explore their inner lives?
- Are they practicing habits that open their whole beings to God?
- Do they have enough time, community, intimacy, and instruction for deep formation to occur?
These questions may create tension. They should.
We willingly enter immersive, time-consuming, relational communities when we are serious about becoming athletes, professionals, spouses, soldiers, artists, or people in recovery. Why would we expect the most important formative journey of our lives to require less?
The Great Omission is not resolved by another program or a more compelling sermon series. It is addressed when we recover the conviction that apprenticing with Jesus is the central journey of the Christian life—and when we cultivate communities capable of supporting that journey.
The world needs people who increasingly think, act, relate, and love like Jesus.
The world needs deep people.
Brian Fisher is the founder of Soil & Roots and the author of Soil & Roots: Cultivating Deep Discipleship. He writes and speaks about spiritual formation, the inner life, and how people become more like Jesus from the inside out.
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