We’re rounding out Season 5, Conversations. We’re inviting a few guests to the podcast to explore some of the ideas and themes we introduced in seasons 1-4. I hope you’re enjoying these discussions—I know I am.
Willard!
The challenge that the organization Soil & Roots, this podcast, the book, articles, and Greenhouses seek to help overcome is what’s called “The Great Omission.”
It’s the phrase that Dallas Willard used to describe modern Christianity. Dr. Willard was a theologian and philosopher at USC, and he was a prolific writer and commentator on many things, most notably on what’s now known as “spiritual formation.” Spiritual formation is the journey we take to become more like Jesus from the inside out, and it’s a synonym for discipleship.
As you might have guessed, Willard’s writings and videos have deeply impacted me and many others in my circle. If you haven’t read him or watched some of his teachings, I invite you to do so.
I never met him – he died in 2013, and I didn’t start reading him until 2020. However, those who did meet and interact with him consistently said he lived the life he taught. Humble, gentle, profoundly insightful, loving, gracious, wise, intentional, self-giving. I suspect most of us would like to have our lives characterized by those descriptions.
Willard wrote a book called The Great Omission, so I’ll let him share a little of what that phrase means:
“We need to emphasize that the Great Omission from the Great Commission is not obedience to Christ, but discipleship, apprenticeship to him. Through discipleship, obedience will take care of itself, and we will also escape the snares of judgmentalism and legalism, whether directed toward ourselves or toward others.”
What is missing from the Great Commission is not our attempts at obedience. Certainly, if we sit in church or listen to various sermons, we’ve been taught plenty of times what to do and not do. Many people were raised in the idea that Christianity is largely about knowing more stuff and doing more stuff.
There are modern discipleship movements based entirely on the idea that if we just do what Jesus commands, we’re automatically disciples. We will habitualize ourselves into the kingdom. Isn’t that what the Great Commission says? Baptize people and teach them to do what Jesus told us to do. What’s wrong with that?
Well, obedience and discipleship aren’t synonyms.
Willard goes on:
“Now some might be shocked to hear that what the ‘church’… really needs is not more people, more money, better buildings or programs, more education, or more prestige. Christ’s gathered people, the church, has always been at its best when it had little or none of these. All it needs to fulfill Christ’s purposes on earth is the quality of life he makes real in the life of his disciples. Given that quality, the church will prosper from everything that comes its way as it makes clear and available on earth the ‘life that is life indeed.’
So, the greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.”[1]
Discipleship is not simply learning what to do – it’s a journey of learning who to become. And those aren’t the same journeys.
It’s not just about obeying commands. God desires for us to become a people who naturally and organically do good to ourselves, others, creation, and culture without thinking about it. This is an ongoing transformation from the inside out.
The Great Omission is not about a lack of teaching, churches, programs, converts, videos, and sermons. It’s about the missing intentional formation of a people who think, act, relate, and love more like Jesus over time.
And that intentionally formative journey, as we’ve explored for over two years now, is far more than being instructed on what to do. Our hearts are more complex than that.
We’ve looked at The Great Omission from various angles, including the fact that, as Hagberg and Guelich theorized, our spiritual adventure can be broken down into six stages, but most modern institutions only guide us into and through the first three: becoming aware of God, learning about Him, and serving Him. The depth of the person that we’re talking about, however, often forms in the last three stages: the journey inward including the Wall, the journey outward, and living a life of love.
The Three Primary Problems
The major challenge worldwide, at the root of many individual and social harms, is The Great Omission. Most Christian institutions consider themselves to be education and service groups, not intimate, intentional communities designed to help form our character.
In many cases, the point is to “get saved,” not to produce deep people. It’s to make sure our doctrine is accurate, but not that we become people who love like Jesus. It’s to provide emotional and good spiritual experiences but not to help form us into self-giving, deeply rooted, free human beings. Being saved, accepting good doctrine, and spiritual experiences are all very important – though we often split them apart from the long-term heart formation we’re exploring.
The Great Omission can be solved. Numerous small efforts are underway to awaken the church and the world to this lack of deep discipleship in various places. Soil & Roots is just one of them.
However, our current age also faces Three Primary Problems that we should consider as we explore how to become people of depth.
We explored these in Seasons 2-4, so I won’t go into detail here. You already know their names: the Discipleship Dilemma, the Formation Gap, and the Forgotten Kingdom. We can break these terms down even further into just three words: story, community, and purpose.
God’s story matters. The overall narrative of the Bible matters. Your story matters. In fact, these stories are intertwined.
A deep disciple explores both God’s story and our story with Jesus and a trusted friend. And there is no such thing as a boring story.
If there’s one thing missing in our frantic, technologically saturated era, it’s true community. Deep disciplining communities look very different from what we normally assume—radically different.
And purpose. Why did Jesus come? Though the Gospel of the Kingdom saturates the New Testament and is its primary theme, most people are confused about what this Kingdom is. If you don’t believe me, check out your church’s statement of faith and what it mentions about the Kingdom, if anything. Do our statements of faith even define the kingdom? The kingdom is Christianity 101, though it’s missing from much of modern Christianity.
Story, community, and purpose. Some of our spiritual struggles are caused by neglecting stories, a lack of long-term, intimate community, and confusion about our purpose.
Deep disciples are people who embed story into their journeys, form intimate, intentionally formative communities, and assume Jesus’s purpose, which is to increasingly bring His Kingdom to earth.
Deep People
Ok, let’s explore what it means to be a deep person.
One of the other founders of the modern spiritual formation movement, Richard Foster, wrote this, “The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.” It’s an opening line in his popular book, The Celebration of Disciplines, which is a basic primer on how to practice certain habits to deepen our walk with Christ – habits that rarely appear in modern Christianity anymore, particularly in Protestant circles.
He goes on, “The classical Disciplines of the spiritual life call us to move beyond surface living into the depths. They invite us to explore the inner caverns of the spiritual realm. They urge us to be the answer to the hollow world.”[2]
It strikes me that for all of the talk around Soil & Roots about forming deep people, I don’t think we’ve yet tried to summarize what that means. When we talk about coming together in small communities to be formed into people of depth, what is that? Is that someone who knows a lot of theology? Who serves more and more people? What sits around having in-depth conversations all the time? Who goes to church every day? What are we talking about?
If what the world needs most right now, more than anything else, is people of depth, what do we mean by a “deep person?”
There are many good ways to answer the question, but I’m going to take a shot at describing a deep person in Soil & Roots language. So, let’s dig in.
Maybe. Maybe Not.
First, let’s just note some types of people that may be deep, but may not be:
-Theologically knowledgeable. The person who has memorized a ton of Scripture, reads a lot of books, and knows a lot of Bible facts may or may not be deep.
-Church leaders such as pastors, priests, elders, deacons, teachers, professors, and non-profit executives, may or may not be people of depth.
-Great communicators, charismatic personalities, Christian celebrities, and engaging personas may or may not be deep.
-Our favorite people, such as our family members, spouses, and friends, may or may not be deep.
-The person who serves the most at church, gives the most money, does the most Christian things, and attends the most church events may or may not be deep.
Ah, see, you listen and watch this podcast because we’re always shaking things up.
Deeply Rooted
Alright, so let’s go all the way back to Season 1, where we talked about the reason for the name Soil & Roots. It’s derived from passages such as Psalm 1.
The roots are our hearts, and the soil is the ideas and desires in which our hearts are planted.
You may remember the Creation Picture I created for you. It’s on the website. God has placed us all into four relationships: with Him, others, self, and creation and culture. The degree to which we join with Jesus to bring His kingdom increasingly to earth through these four relationships is related to how far our roots go down and the quality of our soil.
A deep person is someone who is deeply rooted. This is far more than an intellectual pursuit. It’s far more than what we know. In fact, it’s more relational and experiential.
Let me define it this way: a deep person is someone who is increasingly awake or attuned to God, self, others, and creation. I’ll repeat that: a deep person is someone who is increasingly awake or attuned to God, self, others, and creation.
Oh boy, where are we going with this? “Attuned to our relationship with culture and creation?” What sort of New Age mumbo jumbo is this? Just hang in there with me.
Here’s an example: Jessica and I have been married for almost 30 years. We’re best friends, sometimes coworkers, and lovers. We have each other’s backs, and we’re in sync about most of the important things in life.
Like many couples who’ve been married for a long time, we don’t always talk that much. We’re around each other quite a bit, but there are days when we don’t say all that much to each other. Why? Because we don’t need to.
I’ve been struggling with a chronic illness for over a year, and Jess has told me she doesn’t need to ask me how I’m feeling – she can sense how I’m feeling just by looking in my eyes.
Jess isn’t a morning person, and I’ve learned simply by watching her body language whether she wants to chat before 10 a.m. Usually, she doesn’t.
When one of us is sad or happy or grieving or confused, we normally don’t have to ask – we just know. We know each other because we have purposefully and carefully attuned to each other over the years. I’m awake to her whole person, and she’s awake to me. Not all of the time, of course, but when we’re dialed in and intentional. It’s a knowing that doesn’t come from sharing information. It comes through time, relationships, and experience.
To put this in biblical terms, in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes, “And to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” A deep person is so attuned to God and those around them that it surpasses head knowledge. And they’re not just attuned to surface things like physical appearance or words. They are attuned to hearts.
It’s the same idea God shares with Samuel when He selects David as the next king of Israel. God is more concerned about our inner lives than our outward appearance and behaviors. A deep person is the same way.
Listening
If we go back to Season 4 and some of the qualities of a deep disciple, we touched on this. One of the primary characteristics of a deep person is the willingness and skill to listen to hearts and not just words. To be blunt, people who talk and talk and talk are not generally deep people. People who listen simply to respond and not to really hear are not deep people. I know because I’ve been those people. Sometimes, I still am.
Let’s explore what it means to be awake or attuned to each of these four relationships: God, others, self, and creation and culture.
God
One of the pitfalls of modern Christianity is our habit of positioning our salvation as the end of our search. We “get saved,” punch our ticket to Heaven, and try to live a good life until we die, and then we really get to enjoy things.
But a man or woman of depth lives in the reality that the moment we enter into the kingdom is just the beginning. As Trevor Hudson notes,
“We really need to grasp this because we have a tragic tendency to regard only those who are outside the Christian faith as seekers. We then assume that once someone gives their life to Christ, their seeking comes to an end. It is exactly the opposite. That is when the quest really begins. Christianity is essentially a seeking faith.”
We see this play out in how many people interpret the Great Commission. “Go and make disciples of all the nations” is understood as “Go and introduce Jesus only to those who don’t know Him.” Many well-meaning evangelistic Christians forget the first part of the verse. Jesus declares He’s the king of the cosmos. The invitation to become more like Him is extended to everyone—to those who don’t yet know Him and to those who do. Disciple-making isn’t constrained to the lost.
A deep disciple is curious about God. Always seeking, questioning, wrestling. And not just to accumulate knowledge but to experience the type of relationship we just described – where words aren’t necessary in prayer. Where we experience God not only in our typical “Christian” environments like church and Bible study but in the grocery store, at work, while we sleep. Just like a flourishing intimate marriage. That we are so familiar with God and He with us that our lives are bound up in each other. Which is exactly what He hopes and desires with us.
Others
I’ve been writing on Substack about the fact that deep discipleship is formative not only for our conscious selves but also for the unconscious parts of the human person. After all, if we desire to be people who act, relate, and love like Jesus without having to think about it, that means even the layers of ourselves underneath the surface are transformed.
There are at least two vital, generally unconscious forces that sit on the bedrock of our hearts: our ideas and desires. In some ways, these act as the “operating system” of the human person. They power and govern us from behind the scenes unless we’re intentionally mining for them.
A deep person pays attention to others holistically, like Jesus. They listen and watch carefully for clues about the other person’s genuine ideas and desires—just like Jesus.
We’ve termed this skill “heart listening.” Some people do this naturally. For the rest of us, it takes some time and practice to perceive what’s going on beneath someone’s spoken words. We practice being present, curious, particular, and discerning.
We practice heart listening because it’s so essential to loving another person well. As we become deeper people, we become more attuned to others so that we serve them in deeper ways if they allow us.
Self
However, we’ll struggle to listen to other people’s hearts if we don’t listen to our own. We can’t give away what we don’t possess.
We’ve spent quite a bit of time exploring how we uncover the hidden ideas that govern us, these assumptions, conclusions, and principles that power our lives. You already know that sometimes our ideas align with our belief statements but sometimes they don’t. A deep person is gently working with Jesus to align them – to match our ideas about God, others, ourselves, and creation with His ideas.
This is not just an intellectual exercise. Our ideas and desires gradually form into His over time as we invite Jesus and some trusted friends into our hearts. These ideas are formed far more through experience and relationships than through instruction. It’s the old adage that more is caught than taught.
That’s why I’ve proposed that the best ecosystem for forming the human heart engages five elements: time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction. While modern Christianity focuses on instruction and the spiritual formation movement tends to center on habits, the unconscious parts of our hearts are best formed when we intentionally experience all five.
This journey into our hearts requires us to be vulnerable, authentic, and raw. Just because we “accept Jesus” and then go to church doesn’t mean we’re being formed.
Author David Benner asks, “But if an encounter with divine love is really so transformational, how is it that so many of us have survived such encounters relatively unchanged?”
He then answers his own question, “The single most important thing I have learned in over thirty years of study of how love produces healing is that love is transformational only when it is received in vulnerability.
It is not the fact that being loved unconditionally that is life changing. It is the risky experience of allowing myself to be loved unconditionally. Paradoxically, no one can change until they first accept themselves as they are. Self-deceptions and an absence of real vulnerability block any meaningful transformation.”
Self-knowledge is essential to loving ourselves and others well. And that means we come to God as we are, with all of our talents, gifts, quirks, addictions, sin patterns, foibles, wounds, and joys. Most people don’t take that journey because they think it will be hard and painful. Well, it is. But it’s worth it. And it’s necessary to become a person of depth.
Creation and Culture
Ok, so what is a deep person’s relationship with creation and culture? What does it mean that we’re “awake and attuned” to nature and the seven mountains of culture: church, education, government, the arts, media, business, and family?
Let me suggest three ways.
First, we listen to creation and culture the way we listen to the heart of God, others, and ourselves. Meaning, we listen for Ideas in the Air.
You may recall we broke Ideas down into a few categories. Ideas in the Soil are those that govern our hearts. Ideas in the Air are those that influence entire societies, cultures, and nations. If you live in the West, you live in a set of ideas that includes things like rights, consent, freedom, individuality, and self-governance. We don’t think about these ideas – they are the air we breathe.
A deep person learns how to identify Ideas in the Air and how they influence whole populations. Jesus did this all the time – He promoted Ideas of Light and confronted Ideas of Darkness. Just by speaking to the woman at the well, He confronted dark ideas about the value of women, religious division, and racism. His behavior was often as surprising and transformative as His words.
Second, a deep person stewards creation well. I’ve remarked before that it’s shocking to me how little interest modern Christianity has in protecting and caring for nature. Where are all of the Christian environmental organizations?
The very first thing God taught humans to do is steward and care for the earth. That command didn’t expire—it didn’t fall out of fashion. If we are to rule and take care of the earth, where are the bold Christian groups working to save endangered species, stem pollution, or ensure that our efforts to promote human flourishing also promote creational flourishing? Certainly, those can go hand in hand.
One reason so few followers of Christ are concerned about stewarding creation is some harmful Ideas in the Air. Plato is alive and well in modern Christianity. He believed that the physical body was bad and that true life was only in the spiritual. We frequently find his philosophies mixed in with Christian thought and structures today.
However, the biblical reality is that we are integrated people living in an integrated world. So, a deep person, as she relates to creation and culture, assumes her role as a steward and seeks to participate in ruling for the flourishing of the earth and the people on it!
I realize for some, protecting and caring for the earth seems non-Christian, if not heretical, but Genesis 1 is pretty clear. Those most concerned about caring for the planet should be those most concerned about serving its Creator.
Lastly, a deep person considers and lives in the reality of Ephesians 4. God is over all, through all, and in all.
As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote,
“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
The deep person looks for and finds God not only in the customary places: church, the Bible, devotions, and the like.
She finds Him everywhere, believing that Earth is crammed with heaven. That God is over all, through all, and in all. As Paul explained to the Athenians, in Him, we live and move and exist.
This is not an easy concept for many moderns. The legalists will warn of pantheism or earth worship. We’re not talking about worshipping the created versus the creator. We’re discovering and experiencing the Creator in His Creation.
Do we find security in God’s stability in a 100-year-old oak tree? Do we hear God’s whisper in a kind word from a stranger? Do we relish in God’s vastness when we gaze at the night sky, or marvel at His whimsy when a butterfly flits by? Do we sense God’s intimate desire for us when our lover catches our eye, or laugh at His creativity when we see pictures of a platypus?
If God is over all, through all, and in all, do we live in the depth of that reality? Or have we unconsciously put God in a box – only to be experienced when we engage in specific religious activities? Do we immerse ourselves in the idea that God not only created but is still creating? Delightfully so?
I found this quote by G.K. Chesterton which strikes me as one that a person desiring depth might resonate with:
Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are free in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in the monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in the monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God made every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
What the World Desperately Needs
What is a deep person? Someone who is intentionally journeying with like-hearted people to become increasingly awake or attuned to God, others, themselves, and creation and culture. They listen, not just to words, but to hearts. Yes, they accumulate knowledge, but they do so to experience life and life abundantly and invite others to do the same, not just to be correct. There’s a difference. A deep person is intensely curious, dialed in, inviting others to know them and them to be known, and often puts the needs of others before their own, without even thinking about it. They come to God as they are: raw, unfiltered, non-patronizing. They can sit in silence with God and communicate easily without ever uttering a word, just as long-time lovers do.
This is the type of person the world desperately needs. And it’s someone I hope to someday become. I hope you do too.
[1] Willard, D. (2006). The Great Omission – Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship, (xiv-xv). HarperOne.
[2] Foster, R. (2018). The Celebration of Disciplines: The Path To Spiritual Growth, (p. 1). HarperOne.
