Season 1, Ep 1: Let’s Dig In! (An Introduction to Deep Discipleship)

Let’s dig in!

Welcome to the Soil and Roots Podcast.  In this first episode, Brian explores what Dallas Willard called “the Great Omission,” the fact that the West routinely preaches and teaches disciple-making, yet struggles to actually make them. Many people feel a disconnection, a sense that there’s more to the Christian life than what we often experience. Why? If discipleship is about becoming more like Jesus, does it involve more than church attendance, Bible study, and prayer groups?

In fact, it does. The substance of genuine discipleship (often called spiritual formation) is the exploration of the heart of Jesus and our own hearts into the realm of powerful, often unconscious, experiential realities called “ideas.”

Join Brian as he kicks off our journey into what he calls “deep discipleship,” the path towards a deeper, richer, reconnected life with Jesus, others, and ourselves.

TRANSCRIPT

Season 1, Ep 1: Let’s Dig In! (An Introduction to Deep Discipleship)

Welcome to the Soil and Roots podcast: digging beneath the surface to uncover the hidden ideas that form us, the church, and the culture. I’m Brian Fisher.

This is Episode 1 – Let’s Dig In!

For many people, 2020 was really a crummy year.  It certainly was for our family, and not just because of the pandemic. Like everyone else, we dealt with lockdowns, social distancing, and a constant stream of bad news and unknowns.  However, my wife and I also experienced additional heartbreak, abandonment, betrayal, and a sudden and shocking change in our personal and professional lives.

As 2020 dragged into 2021, I realized it wasn’t just the various crises I was struggling with; it was how my heart was responding to them. Depression, exhaustion, disillusion.  Anger. Lots of anger.  I withdrew into an inner sanctum of doubt, confusion, relentless self-introspection, and a growing sense of disenchantment with the Christian institutions, systems, communities, friendships, and beliefs I had held so dear.  They had failed. Or I had failed them. I wasn’t sure.

What was going on? I’m a lifelong Christian. I don’t remember a day without Jesus – I started following Him when I was six years old. I’ve been in church my entire life.  I’m fairly well-educated. I’ve memorized some Scripture; I know the books of the Bible.  I’ve studied and can articulate a Christian worldview as well as most.  I served in the church.  I’ve spent half my career as an executive in full-time Christian ministry.

But well into 2021, my heart hadn’t improved, nor had my perspective. What was happening to my faith?  What happened to our community?  Where did everybody go?  Where did God go?  What in the world was wrong with me?

I poured back through the Bible and read about this abundant life, this perfect peace, that if I trusted in God, He would make my paths straight. I didn’t resonate with any of those promises; in fact, reading them just frustrated me.

Jesus claimed we would do greater works than He did. His yoke is supposed to be easy.  I re-read the story of Stephen’s execution.  As this amazing disciple was being killed, he echoed Jesus’ words from the cross, pleading for the forgiveness of his murderers.

His heart must have been broken, and so was mine.  How was he praying for the forgiveness of his killers while I was questioning the very foundations of my faith?

Something was missing, something really important.  Surely there was more to the Christian life than this.  I know we all suffer, but it seems like some people suffer well, and I wasn’t one of them. I was so…disconnected.  Disconnected from God, from other people, and maybe even from myself.

After decades of being in Christian community, this series of crises had uncovered an uncomfortable question – I was a Christian, but was I a genuine disciple?

If a disciple is someone who is becoming more like Jesus, does that describe me?  Was I more like Jesus now than I was two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago? Was I making any progress, even though I’ve been sitting in church and doing Christian things for decades?

My honest answer was – I didn’t know.  I certainly knew more about Jesus than I did ten years ago.  But is information the same as formation?  I had done all of the so-called Christian things that Christians do – church, small groups, Bible studies, prayer times –and I couldn’t tell you whether my heart was any closer to Jesus than it was when I was a kid.

Unable to claw my way out of depression by myself, I finally agreed to speak with a new friend who offered to help me dig into my heart.  And I threw myself into what has always been close friends – books.  So began a slow, sometimes halting, admittedly painful journey of healing curiosity.

I ventured into dozens of texts, ranging from ancient church history to anthropology, neuroscience, philosophy, spiritual disciplines, trauma recovery, the history of Western thought, theology, and cultural studies.

One of the books I came across is called Renovation of the Heart by philosopher and theologian Dallas Willard. He was a professor at USC. I didn’t know who he was, but I figured if anyone’s heart needed renovating, it was mine. Despite being a Bible-believing Christian my entire life, Willard used a few terms that were new to me.

He referred to discipleship as “spiritual formation.” I suppose I had heard the phrase before, but it never registered.  He talked about the word “ideas” in a way I had never encountered, and in a way that made me a bit uncomfortable.

Deep Discipleship and Formation

We use the word “formation” in many different ways: educational, character, and skill formation.

Let’s say you’re a high school senior, and you want to become a surgeon.  You embark on a rather immersive journey of educational formation.

How about raising children?  We want our kids to grow up to be mature, healthy citizens.  We call this character formation.

Developing a trade?  That’s called skill formation.

Willard taught that being a disciple means we are apprentices of Jesus, becoming more like Him.  That the core of who we are, our hearts or our spirits, is formed more like His. That, over time, we do the things He did, we love like He loves, we think like He thinks, we desire what he desires.

So, to be a disciple really is about character formation or, as he put it, spiritual formation.

However, the types of formation we just mentioned are all designed to be experienced in specific environments or ecosystems.  Our educational formation happens with specific instructors in specific, intentional communities.

Our character formation is primarily experienced at home with caregivers with whom we initially spend enormous amounts of time.  If we’re working on a trade, we apprentice with a more senior person in close proximity over an extended period so that our skills are properly developed.

There’s a deeply relational, even experiential aspect to how we’re formed.  Instruction is part of our formation, but it certainly isn’t the majority of it.

As we read the Gospels and Acts, we realize that spiritual formation is not something we’re meant to experience on our own, yet that’s exactly what many of us do today.  In contrast to other highly formative experiences, our discipleship is primarily self-directed.

Meaning, I choose a church, listen to a non-interactive sermon, choose a small group study on a topic I’m interested in, and maybe take a marriage class.  In modern Christianity, I’m basically in charge of my own formation through the spiritual engagements I choose, almost like an à la carte menu.

Self-directed discipleship doesn’t make much sense. The Bible tells us our hearts are mysterious and have a habit of wandering.  The purposes, the desires, in our hearts are like deep wells.  Many of us aren’t in tune with our desires. If we struggle to understand our own hearts, we may not be the best people to direct their formation.

In fact, Willard believed the state of genuine disciple-making in the West was so off-target that he called it the “Great Omission.”

The Power of Ideas

He also proposed a rather surprising, disconcerting, and fascinating concept about what drives our spiritual formation, and it doesn’t sound at all like what most of us have been taught.  Willard claimed that at the very root of our discipleship, of our journey to become more like Jesus, we don’t find doctrine or theology or even belief.

We find ideas.

He doesn’t mean “ideas” like our “aha” moments when we suddenly form a new thought or solution.  He isn’t referring to the metaphorical lightbulb over our heads.  He means assumptions and principles buried deep in the recesses of our hearts.  Hidden, somewhat mysterious things. Things of which we aren’t even normally conscious.

That got my attention. I don’t recall reading about “ideas” in the Bible. And I didn’t particularly like the thought that I was powered and governed by concepts of which I wasn’t even aware.  Then I discovered Willard wasn’t the first person to explore ideas. In fact, they’ve been the subject of intense discussion since the early philosophers and theologians, including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, and Calvin.

Ideas are constantly and powerfully at work in individual hearts, and also in families, communities, cultures, and nations.  And most of us don’t know they’re there.

Here’s our working definition of an idea:  An idea is a fundamental concept, assumption, or principle in which our hearts are rooted but of which we are generally unaware.

Willard wrote, “Ideas are so essential to how we approach life that we often do not understand when and how ideas are at work… (People) don’t know what moves them, but ideas govern them and have their consequences anyway.”[1]

Once we become aware of ideas, we realize how prevalent they are in our lives and in our deep discipleship journey. We have ideas about freedom, about science, about God. We have ideas about love, sex, culture, and marriage.  We have ideas about what it means to be human.  Our hearts unconsciously embrace ideas about our identity, our authority, our power.

And these ideas are not just buried in our hearts because of the media or information we consume – they are powerfully shaped by our stories.  By our individual relationships and experiences.

Just how powerful are these systems of ideas?  How much do they influence us, our behaviors, our words, what or whom we love?

Dallas Willard commented on how evil impacts our world through idea systems, and he wrote, “These systems are the powers’ main tool for dominating humanity (italics mine).” [2]

Systems of ideas are the main tools of darkness for dominating humanity? That’s a rather bold claim.  If true, these unconscious systems of ideas have enormous implications for ourselves, our relationships, our families, and even cultural institutions such as the arts or government.

In Colossians 1, Paul talks about two kingdoms: a dark kingdom and a light kingdom, and I wondered how ideas fit into these two kingdoms. Perhaps the Kingdom of God has one set of ideas, and the Kingdom of Darkness has another?

As if answering my question from the 18th century, theologian and thinker Jonathan Edwards once wrote, “Truth is the agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God.”[3]

Two sets of ideas.  One set belongs to the Kingdom of Light, the other to the Kingdom of Darkness.  One set of ideas results in human flourishing and goodness; the other set is designed to kill us.  And apparently, our hearts embrace a combination of ideas from both kingdoms.

But back to our original question: how do these mysterious ideas relate to our discipleship and spiritual formation? If my heart is rooted in ideas from both the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light, does this impact my journey to become more like Jesus?

Willard wrote, “The process of spiritual formation in Christ is one of progressively replacing those destructive images and ideas with the images and ideas that filled the mind of Jesus himself. (2 Corinthians 4:4).[4]

Deep discipleship is a process of replacing ideas of darkness with ideas of light, understanding that many of us don’t even know these ideas exist or how they got there.

This seemed like a far deeper, far richer way of thinking about discipleship and spiritual formation than just showing up to church and doing a Bible study, as good as those things are.   If we could understand Jesus’s ideas, it would give us a clearer vision of who He is.  If we could determine which ideas are working in our own hearts, that would provide us with a path and context for our spiritual formation.

How easy is it for these ideas to slowly change in our hearts?

“Changing those governing ideas is one of the most difficult and painful things in life…Jesus confronted and undermined an idea system and its culture, which in turn killed him. He proved himself greater than any idea system or culture, and he lives on. He is continuing the process of a worldwide idea shift that is crucial to his perpetual revolution, in which we each are assigned a part.[5]”

We grow to become more like Jesus through the progressive transformation of these hidden, unconscious ideas that sit in our hearts, and that journey isn’t simple or particularly comfortable.

Release the Deep Discipleship Visual Aids!

At this point, I needed a visual aid.  I needed some way to see how all of this fit together, so I started sketching a simple drawing.  I drew a nature scene to help me get my arms around all of this. It’s called the Creation Picture.  You can find it on the Resources tab at www.soilandroots.org.

I’ll describe it briefly.

Creation Picture

The outside of the Creation Picture is a large circle.  The circle represents all of creation and the cosmos, thus the name of the drawing.

Inside the circle in the background are seven mountains.  These represent what’s known as the Seven Mountains of Culture.  We’ll dig into those in a few episodes, but the mountains are areas like business, media, entertainment, and government.

In the foreground is a big, beautiful tree, and that’s you.  And around you are other trees – those are people you interact with. We are all placed in four relationships.  We have a relationship with God (the invisible author of the picture), with others, with ourselves, and with creation.

It’s a cutaway scene, so you can see what’s going on underneath the surface.  You can see the roots of your tree.  The roots represent your heart, which is your core, your center, the deepest part of you. What you love, what you desire.  Life and love flow from your heart, just as life comes from the roots of trees.

Your roots are planted in the soil.  In this Creation Picture, the soil represents ideas – fundamental assumptions and principles in which our hearts are rooted – but we typically don’t know they’re there.

Thus, the organization’s name is Soil and Roots. And the title of this podcast.  Our hearts and the idea systems that govern and influence them as we journey in discipleship.

Deep Discipleship

Ultimately, Soil and Roots exists to help us cultivate what we call “deep discipleship” in community. This is a journey beneath our healthy and formative Christian rituals and our belief statements.  Deep discipleship is a journey into the realm of exploring the ideas and desires of Jesus and exploring the ideas and desires in our own hearts.  And, as we’re going to discover together, our ideas and desires don’t always match up with what we say we believe.

To some extent, we are all disconnected.  We long for a deeper, richer, experiential relationship with God, others, ourselves, and even with His Creation.  Deep discipleship is the journey we take together to reconnect and to experience this abundant life, this life of peace, even when we suffer.

This podcast is designed to help us journey into Deep Discipleship.  We’re going to ask a lot of questions, some of which are uncomfortable.  We’ll ask ourselves questions, God, and even our traditions and Christian institutions. We’re going to explore the Bible, and we’re also going to dig into anthropology, philosophy, culture, science, and a whole lot more. Deep discipleship involves a lot of curiosity, even about things we normally take for granted.

If you’re concerned about Western culture and the modern Christian church, if you’ve ever asked the same sort of questions I have, I invite you to stick around.  If you’re concerned about the Great Omission, this may be a wonderful journey for you.  If you’re a skeptic, not currently apprenticing with Jesus, or have “deconstructed,” this podcast may pose questions worth exploring. If you sense a spiritual shallowness, a disconnection, a longing for more in your journey with Jesus, I think this may be a place for you.

Perhaps you’re checking out and exploring this podcast on your own.  Great to have you!

You may be a part of what’s called a “Greenhouse.”  Much more on that to come, but a Greenhouse is a community formed and supported through Soil and Roots that comes together to become more like Jesus in this journey of deep discipleship.  If you’re part of a Greenhouse, welcome, and I’m excited and praying for your journey as well.

As we close today, just one more note: the transformation of ideas in our hearts takes place in ways that modern Christianity doesn’t normally talk about.  So, some of this podcast journey may be new to you.  But it isn’t really new – it’s more about recovering what’s been lost or forgotten over the past few hundred years.

Each episode builds on the previous ones, so I recommend checking them out in order.  Many of the episodes are transcribed, and you can find them on our website.

Admittedly, it takes a while to get used to the concept of ideas, how powerful they are, and how they profoundly impact our hearts, our children, our marriages, and even our culture.  So, we’re going to dissect one in Episode 2. It’s an idea that most people think they know rather well; in fact, it’s pretty well baked into the church and into culture.  It’s an Idea of the Gospel.

But as we’ll discover, the unconscious assumptions we make about the Gospel may be different than what the Gospel actually is.

Thanks for listening!  If you’d like more information on Soil and Roots, check out the website at www.soilandroots.org.  Feel free to drop us an email at fish@soilandroots.org. We’ll see you next time.

[1] Willard, D. (2012). Renovation of the Heart (p. 97). NavPress.

[2] Willard. Renovation of the Heart (p. 98).

[3] Edwards, J. (2009). “The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: From His Private Notebook” (p.30). Wipf and Stock Publishers.

[4] Willard, D., & Johnson, J. (2006). Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice: Experiments in Spiritual Transformation (p. 72). NavPress.

[5] Willard, D., & Johnson, J. (2006). Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice: Experiments in Spiritual Transformation (pp. 68–69). NavPress.