Another bonus episode? Didn’t we just have one? What’s going on here? Well, a couple of things.
As you know, Soil & Roots’ mission is to help resolve the Great Omission worldwide. We want to serve different people groups to help restore New Testament discipleship, which is an ongoing journey into a deeper life in the Kingdom. We’re all about helping to form people of depth.
So, I felt like we just dipped our toe into the water of exploring what a deep person is in Episodes 110 and 111, and the topic warranted another episode. So, we’re going to explore it some more in the context of deep communities today.
The second reason for another bonus episode is a bit more practical – I’ve reached out to a number of people to invite them to come onto the podcast here in season 5 – and they haven’t responded. As you know, this season is called “Conversations,” and it features specialists in areas and topics we explored in seasons 1-4. But it’s hard to have conversations with folks if they don’t come on the show. It’s not like I’m Joe Rogan.
I’m getting ready to wrap up Season 5 anyway, but I was hoping to have three or four more guests on before it ended. We’ll see how the next few weeks go. If you are listening to this in real-time, we’re going to Greenhouse this next week and then break for the holidays anyway.
Thanks for hanging in there with us.
Ok, let’s dig in. Over the last two shows we’ve explored the definition of and the necessity for deep people.
We’re describing a deep disciple as someone who is increasingly attuned or awake to the hearts of God, others, and themselves, and they’re attuned to creation and culture. This is a very different definition of a disciple compared to what many of us are used to.
Many people assume a disciple is a convert – someone who has “accepted Jesus.” Others assume it’s someone who goes to church. Still others function from the idea that a disciple is someone who has accumulated information about Jesus and the Bible. But, as we’ve explored together over the past five seasons, there is an enormous difference between information and transformation.
We’re describing a deep person as someone who is intentionally becoming more in tune with God, with others, and with themselves. They grow closer and closer to the heartbeat of God. When they’re with other people, they aren’t just paying attention to words – they are listening to hearts. They are paying attention to the whole person – voice tone, body language, emotion. They are courageously curious. They want to know the hearts of those around them.
Obviously, this is a profoundly relational way to describe a disciple, but that’s the point. If we were to sit in the Gospels for a few decades, we would discover over and again just how attuned Jesus is to His Father, Himself, others, and creation and culture. He listens and responds to hearts – to the inner lives of people. If our goal is to become more like Jesus, we will become people who walk more in tune with God and ourselves and invite others to do the same.
Some people object to the term “spiritual formation” as a synonym for discipleship, but that’s exactly what it is. Our hearts are being formed more and more like the heart of Jesus, and it’s most notable in the way we attune to and respond to the hearts of those around us.
If you’ve been in the Soil & Roots community for any length of time, you’ve heard us discuss these four relational contexts.
Many of us tend to experience life in the Kingdom in just two: God and ourselves.
If you live in the West, you’re in a highly individualistic culture that tends to minimize the role of genuine community. And as we’ve discussed before, modern Christianity has seemingly divorced itself from our role as rulers and stewards over creation and culture. However, a deep disciple explores God in all four relationships and invites others to do the same.
Tough Stuff
We’re going to wrestle with some difficult questions today about our local churches and Christian institutions in light of the Great Omission.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: We should love and support our local churches.
I’m not a revolutionary – I’m not calling for anyone to tear down long-held, helpful institutions.
However, we should be constantly reforming.
If we accept Dallas Willard’s premise that modern Christianity is struggling to produce spiritually and emotionally deep people who love Jesus more and more, who are attuned to God, themselves, and others, we must take a good, hard look at the institutions that are supposed to be doing that.
We love our churches, and we love our pastors and priests, and we should. I’m not questioning whether there is ministry happening or good things going on in our local congregations. Of course there is. I’m questioning whether they are intentionally forming us. Is genuine, guttural, character-forming discipleship happening in institutions? If not, what do we do with that?
If our goal is to become more like Jesus, but many of our institutions aren’t guiding or supporting us in that quest, we need to deal with that authentically.
A Frustrated Pastor
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a pastor from the East Coast that illustrates the tension I’m feeling—and maybe you are, too.
He’s been serving churches for years, and part of his ministry experience was running a megachurch. After years of wrestling with the fact that his church wasn’t producing people of depth, he asked the other leaders if they were willing to make substantial changes. Would they change the structure of the church to focus on forming people more like Jesus instead of just teaching, developing more programs, implementing growth strategies, and building buildings? Would they begin to steer away from creating celebrity pastors and leaders and instead empower their people to help them love well?
The other leaders said no, so my pastor friend left.
He started an intentionally smaller church and has been there for several years, but he is discovering that some of the same challenges exist regardless of the institution’s size. He has concluded that the power dynamics and goals of the modern church often work against small community-based spiritual formation.
We explored this a little bit back in Episode 12, which is called “Supersize Me.”
At one point, he said, “Look, if we define a church as a body of people intentionally being formed more into the image of Christ, to become more like Him, to become apprentices of Jesus who help make other apprentices, I think 95% of what we call American churches today aren’t actually churches.”
The worship music may be amazing, the preacher may be knowledgeable, insightful, witty, and passionate, and the service opportunities may be abundant. None of those means the church is focused on intentionally forming the character of its people.
He continued, “Not one statistical measurement in the United States suggests genuine discipleship is actually happening.”
Then he said, “What Soil & Roots, your book, your podcast, and your articles are all suggesting is that the modern church must grow smaller, not bigger. We must pare down the power structures and the organizations, not keep trying to grow them. We must become more intimate, more relational, and more vulnerable, and that simply can’t be done in an ecosystem that values budgets, size, celebrity teachers, and property more than individual spiritual formation.”
He’s referring to the Soil & Roots Greenhouse model. In this model, a group of 4-12 people gathers for a few hours a week to intentionally become more like Jesus. It’s very different from a church service, Bible study, or most small groups.
Greenhouses cap out at 12. That’s the point – spiritual formation happens best in small gatherings that embrace the five key elements that you can probably recite from heart: time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction.
My pastor friend finally concluded with this sobering thought: “What you guys are doing is spot on, though it’s going to be an enormous uphill climb. What you’re doing may resonate far more with the Nones and Dones than people attending Sunday church services.”
Nones and Dones
If you’re not familiar with those terms, a “None” (spelled NONE) is someone who is religiously unaffiliated. They may be atheists or agnostics or simply not interested in religious expression. They consist of about 28% of the U.S. adult population, according to Pew Research.
The DONEs are a bit different. According to Christianity Today, “The Dones are people who are disillusioned with church. Though they were committed to the church for years—often as lay leaders—they no longer attend. Whether because they’re dissatisfied with the structure, social message, or politics of the institutional church, they’ve decided they are better off without organized religion.
As one of our respondents put it, ‘I guess the church just sort of churched the church out of me.’”[1]
Top of Form
Christianity Today claims that Dones share some common characteristics: they were highly active in their local churches, and they didn’t want to leave, but they felt stifled by the church structure.
They follow Jesus, but they no longer attend a Christian institution. Maybe they’ve been hurt too many times, heard the same sermon too many times, or realized that the church has nothing to offer them on their spiritual journey anymore. Bottom of Form
Church leadership is sometimes quick to guilt and shame this group into coming back to an institution. Hebrews 10:23-25 is proclaimed with great passion, reminding us that the Bible calls us to gather together. Though, as I’ve suggested before, I’m not sure the modern traditional church service is what the writer of Hebrews had in mind when he penned those words. I’ve come to doubt it.
The assumption is that someone can’t grow in their faith unless they are part of the Western church model and the often-shallow communities we attempt to form there.
Another assumption that draws the ire of some church leadership is that we must attend services to receive “professional” instruction. We’re not capable of learning the Bible or journeying with Jesus in any other way. I addressed this in Episode 40, “Let the Professionals Handle It.” The problem is that if we rely on our favorite preacher to tell us what the Bible says, we may not be inclined to wrestle with it ourselves.
We need professional Christians, don’t get me wrong, though any form of Christianity that relies on them will ultimately struggle to make deep disciples.
The Critical Journey
The Dones may be leaving church institutions for another reason, one we touched on last year. We’ve looked at a book called The Critical Journey, which theorizes that our discipleship life can be broken down into six stages.
The first three stages include being introduced to God, learning about Him, and then entering a life of service. The authors of the book propose that modern Christian institutions are excellent and purposeful at guiding us into and through these three stages.
The problem is the modern church provides little guidance or help in the latter three stages: the Journey Inward and the Wall, the Journey Outward, and Living a Life of Love. Yet these last few stages are deeply transformative and tend to form people who transform those around them. The depth of the human heart and the heart of God are normally discovered or rediscovered experientially in stages 4, 5, and 6.
The Hard Question
Now, we each have to decide whether we resonate with the way The Critical Journey outlines its stages.
But let’s just say we at least acknowledge these six stages CAN describe what many of us experience in our discipleship. Are the authors correct when they propose that the modern church doesn’t provide much help or support in the last three stages? Do they help guide us through the suffering, doubts, questions, and heartbreaking maelstrom of the Wall? Are they attempting to help form us into people who give radically, forgive easily, pursue selflessly, deal with our anger, and dig deep into our own hearts and stories to discover God there?
I’ve yet to find a church leader familiar with the book who disagrees, and I’ve asked. They all nod their heads with the authors, noting that the contemporary church is not concerned with the inward journey or the radical life change that normally happens in the latter stages.
You may recall my chat with Dr. Jim Reiter earlier this season. He suggested that the modern church doesn’t intend to help us through these latter stages because it meets its budgets without having to. Stages 4, 5, and 6 are personal, often messy, and require substantial time and experience. In our age of efficiency, systems, and institutional growth, that just isn’t in the cards for many Christian institutions.
Perhaps the Dones have left the institutional church for various reasons, including this one: They yearn for the abundant life, the perfect peace the Bible promises, and a two-way conversational relationship with God. They want to learn silence and stillness, and what it means to abide in Christ. They long to dig into their own stories to understand why they think, relate, act, and love the way they do, and their church isn’t in a position to help them.
So they leave, not knowing where to go.
If modern church institutions aren’t designed to form our hearts and don’t provide help or guidance in these later stages, here’s the hard question: What do we do with that?
If we find ourselves in stages 1, 2, or 3, that’s great! There is a myriad of churches available to us.
But what if the church has failed us or hurt us? What if we have real, authentic, deep doubts and concerns, and the church isn’t a safe place to explore those? What if we hit the Wall and our hearts are longing to move from information about God to a deeper, more intimate experience with Him, others, and even ourselves?
To be fair, we’ve already discussed that there are scores of people who never want to leave Stage 3. That fourth stage, the Journey Inward, is often uncomfortable.
But perhaps the Dones are at a point in their journeys where they are willing to be uncomfortable for a while in order to experience Jesus, others, and themselves at a deeper level, to be able to live life in the Kingdom in a way that’s often missing today.
The Need for Small, Deep Communities
Back to the comment the former mega-church pastor said about Soil & Roots and spiritual formation in general: the Christian church must grow smaller, not larger.
This may be a hard statement to accept. Isn’t the point that every person hears about Jesus? Aren’t we supposed to share the Gospel with every person we meet? Shouldn’t we be building bigger churches, bigger media presences, and bigger social media sites to tell the world about Jesus?
Shouldn’t we invite everyone to a church so they can get saved?
Again, we find ourselves wrestling with the definition of a disciple.
From my perspective, the current Western strategy is what we might call “breadth through breadth.” Put as much material on the Internet as possible. Grow churches by inviting people to be converted and then taught. That’s the Western model, and it’s largely unquestioned.
Might we ask ourselves if this is the way Jesus related to people? Did He ask everyone He met to accept Him as His Lord and Savior? Did He make certain that everyone He came across prayed a prayer of salvation?
Doesn’t seem like it. He did invite some people to simply follow Him. He fed others. He physically healed all sorts of people. He had mass teaching events such as the Sermon on the Mount. But the overwhelming majority of His time was spent with a pretty small group of people, living in close, intimate relationships. He not only taught them – they experienced Him. And He experienced them.
Can modern Christianity grow smaller? Instead of hundreds or thousands of people consolidating power and giving it to one or a few people, what about distributing the power and authority into many smaller groups with their own sets of leaders? Leaders who personally know the hearts, stories, and spiritual formation journey of each person in their care. Groups that are small enough so that every person is known, understood, and listened to.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to his Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them.”[2]
The Best Environment for Spiritual Formation
I made the case over the past few seasons that the overwhelmingly most effective ecosystem for slow, compassionate spiritual formation is a small, long-term, committed group of people who want the same thing.
Apparently, the most important thing we need to become a deeper person is…other people. Not Bible studies that meet for six months and never explore our stories, not small groups that are forced to break up every year, and certainly not simply attending a weekend service in which there is barely any interaction with the leader or other attendees apart from small talk. Those things all have their place, but none of them embody and embrace the vulnerability, authenticity, honesty, and safety that our hearts most need.
Our deepest desire is to know and be known – and to do so requires kindred spirits who are willing to risk, willing to persevere, willing to embrace us, tolerate us, correct us, rebuke us, encourage us, sustain us, and suffer with us. Truly, intimately, lovingly.
C.S. Lewis wrote, “He works on all of us in all sorts of ways, not only through what we think our ‘religious life.’ He works through Nature, through our own bodies, through books, sometimes through experiences which seem (at the time) anti-Christian…But above all, He works on us through each other.”[3]
To Sum Up
Since starting this podcast a few years ago, I’ve had wonderful conversations with many Christians and non-Christians alike. Most people resonate with the idea that what the world needs most is deeper people. I haven’t met anyone who disagreed with the Great Omission. It’s actually been shocking.
Many recognize the core human longing to know and be known. Most agree that the ideas and desires buried in the bedrock of our hearts are often hidden, cloudy, and unconscious, though they do power and govern us. Many also recognize that those ideas and desires are often at odds with our belief statements.
Most people would love to be more attuned to God. Many people acknowledge the need to dig into their stories and to know themselves better. Virtually everyone would love it if their friends, families, spouses, and co-workers were more attuned to their hearts. Who wouldn’t?
But can I be honest with you? Though I’ve had virtually no pushback on what we claim are the deepest longings of the human heart and a desire to experience the type of Kingdom life the Bible promises, very few people can see beyond the religious structures in which they find themselves.
They will all agree that spiritual formation happens best in environments that feature time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction, yet they are unwilling to embrace such environments.
There is virtually unanimous agreement that the Great Omission is the world’s greatest problem. Most agree that modern Christianity is a shallow version that inhibits us from experiencing all that Jesus offers in this life.
Yet, the perceived risk of pursuing the kingdom life, the deeper, more attuned life, is just too great.
There are dozens of reasons for this, and maybe we’ll explore them next week or next season. We can discuss the pitfalls of prosperity or the crazy, hectic lives we think are mandatory but rarely are. Many would say the modern church needs a little persecution—not only do I think that’s wrong, but it’s also a terrible thing to desire or anticipate.
To some extent, I just don’t think we know what we’re missing. The West has been embroiled in a shallow faith and its obsession with growing institutions for so long, we don’t know anything different. It’s just the air we breathe.
So, to suggest that genuine discipleship is missing and that to recapture it, we should grow smaller, more vulnerable, and more intimate seems un-American and maybe unchristian. Certainly, it seems un-evangelistic.
To suggest that wrestling with the Bible or a sermon with some friends is more important, more formative, than simply listening or watching a preacher seems non-traditional. To suggest the modern celebrity Christian may be more unhelpful than helpful sounds heretical. To suggest that many of our institutional power structures and programs work against our spiritual formation just seems crazy.
I’ll just close with this. If everyone we talk to agrees that the Great Omission is at the root of our problems and if we agree with Richard Foster that the solution is the formation of deeper people who are increasingly attuned to God, themselves, others, and creation, okay. If we also acknowledge that many modern church institutions are not forming the character of their people and that the weekend sermon is not the most formative 30 minutes of the week, okay. If we also agree that modern institutions aren’t helping us with these latter stages of our discipleship and, at least over the past 50 years, have made a little movement towards that end, then okay.
But do we really think that repeating the same behavior and institutional patterns going forward will solve the problem? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.
In any given age, true reformation happens when a group of pioneering people reframes the argument. They challenge the current circumstances not to bring division or cause harm but rather to promote healing, freedom, and hope.
If we desire depth, if we desire the abundant life, if we desire to love and serve as Jesus does and if we’re concerned this is not the state of modern Christianity, it may be time for some personal and institutional reformation. And that’s hard. It normally involves sacrifice, a different perspective on things, and a few people willing to be disliked, even as they patiently and compassionately make their case.
If we become more like Jesus by experiencing Him, may we be willing and courageous enough to join, form, and reform intimate communities to do just that.
