Ep 100! Deep Discipleship & the Redemption of Civilization

Today, we celebrate 100 episodes of the podcast with you! Thanks for being a part of the Soil & Roots community.

Brian carefully walks through key highlights from the last four seasons, tying together The Great Omission, the vital importance of “ideas,” and how we come together to restore New Testament discipleship.

Then he asks a key question: So what? What is the cost of not making deep disciples on the individual and civilization? What is the benefit to society when we do become people of spiritual depth?

Let’s celebrate 100 episodes with this special bonus!

Watch or listen on Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite platform.

TRANSCRIPTION

Why Deep Discipleship Matters

The first Soil & Roots episode aired on May 3, 2022, and the non-profit organization was launched in April 2023.

It exists to help recapture and restore a richer Christian discipleship that has largely been lost in the last hundred years or so – what we call “deep discipleship.”

This 100^th celebratory episode is a bonus!  That means we’re stepping out of the normal flow and content of the season to catch our breath.

So, we’ll do a little review, bring some folks up to speed who may be new to the community, maybe poke some fun at Kyle, and explore a question I’ve wanted to tackle for over a year.

The question is this: “So what?”

If we agree that many of us don’t know about, and aren’t being guided into the deeper waters of discipleship, if we’ve never really been brought up to speed on stages 4, 5, and 6 of our Christian spiritual journeys, so what?  If we’ve “accepted Jesus into our hearts,” what’s the big deal? We’re going to heaven, right?  In the end, it’s all good.

If Jesus is lovingly and consistently inviting us into a deeper and deeper experience with Him, others, ourselves, and creation and culture, but we aren’t aware of it and not being guided into those depths, what impact does it have?

If the Bible promises perfect peace, a real, authentic ongoing prayer conversation with God, an abundant life, contentment even when we suffer, and a life of experiencing God deeply and intimately, are we missing out because of The Great Omission?

So, we’ll spend a few minutes today exploring the answer to the question, “So What?”

The Great Omission

Let’s get everyone up to speed.

The whole reason Soil & Roots exists (both the podcast and the organization) is to help resolve The Great Omission.

In general, it’s the current condition of modern Christianity. It’s stuck, caught in some very powerful, even insidious assumptions that govern our age.

So, we talk about making disciples but struggle to actually make them.

A disciple is an apprentice of Jesus, someone whose life is centered on becoming more like Him, though that’s not always the Christian ecosystem we find ourselves in.  Our lives may involve worship services, Bible studies, service projects, and doing good things, and all of that is great.

However, what is often “omitted” is this central focus on our character formation, a formation that leads to profound love.

Are we becoming more and more like Jesus over time?  Are we growing to think like He thinks, act like He acts, relate like He relates, and love like He loves?

Are we growing in our sacrificial love, radical generosity, and wisdom in relationships?  Are we experiencing a reduction in our fear and anxiety, and an increase in the wonderful freedom to be who we are in Christ?

Do we have a good picture of how Jesus thinks, acts, relates, and loves? Do we know ourselves well enough?  Do we permit ourselves to know ourselves?

Let’s go deeper.

Dallas Willard introduced us to the concept of ideas in his book, Renovation of the Heart, and we’ve expanded on them quite a bit here, especially in Season 1.

I’ve admitted that exploring discipleship through the lens of ideas is a bit odd.  Chances are we weren’t trained on how to look at our hearts and the hearts of others by mining for ideas, but that’s one of the things that makes Soil & Roots such a fascinating journey.

Understanding and discerning ideas in our hearts and culture is one of the most vital things a disciple can do.

An idea is an assumption, conclusion, or principle in which our hearts are rooted, but we’re generally unaware of them.  They drive our thought patterns, many of our behaviors, and even with whom and how we form relationships.  Ideas are extraordinarily powerful, though we rarely talk about them in our spiritual communities, or anywhere else, for that matter.

That’s where the title for the organization and podcast comes from: the roots are our hearts, and the soil represents the ideas and desires that drive and govern us.  Like roots, our hearts are beneath the surface, often hidden, sometimes mysterious.  And the ideas that power us are generally hidden as well, even from ourselves.

Bad Ideas

We’ve explored several examples of ideas over the last two years, and there’s much more to come.

Let’s chat about some troubling ones that have subtly crept into Christianity over the past few hundred years and contribute to The Great Omission.

A reduced idea of anthropology, or what it means to be human.

We often assume, unconsciously, that we’re “brains on sticks.” If we just hear the right information, we’ll be formed well. This includes the right sermon, the right Bible verse, or the right study.

If we tend to view the Bible as an instructional manual, we’re functioning from that sort of idea.  The Bible contains instructions, of course, but it’s not simply a moral code that we follow like a driver’s ed manual.

Can information be helpful in our formation? Of course.  We’re created with fantastic and integrated intellects.  But heart formation is far more complex, far more relational, than simply absorbing information.

If we assume that the sole solution to someone’s poor behavior is simply to tell them what the correct behavior should be, same thing. If you’ve raised a teenager or tried to talk to Kyle about the difference between high-quality and low-quality movies, you know what I mean.

A view of being human that over-amplifies the role of the intellect fails to grasp all of the elements involved in how we’re formed.

A friend of mine once insisted that the Christian life is all about holding to the right doctrine.  His conclusion is based on a reduced idea of what it means to be human.  Doctrine is very important, but it isn’t the only formative element in our quest to become more like Jesus.

A person can claim the most accurate set of biblical beliefs and still be a Cretan, still not able or willing to love.

Christian fatalism.

This is the idea that the earth is doomed to destruction no matter what. Many people, mostly in America, hold to some version of Christian fatalism, though we rarely consider its downstream consequences.

If you sign up for a dance class but are told in advance you’re going to fail the class, chances are you aren’t going to bother to learn how to dance.

If you hold to the idea that creation and culture are headed toward inevitable destruction…well… you don’t have much incentive to be involved in stewarding creation or redeeming culture.

Christian fatalism tends to produce a reduced version of Christianity that’s hyper-focused on conversion-based evangelism and segregates itself from much of culture and the created order.  We make converts, not disciples.  We assume our primary purpose is to rescue, and we aren’t nearly as interested in redeeming or restoring.

If you’ve ever wondered why you’ve never heard of a Christian environmental organization – disciples committed to stewarding and protecting the environment – Christian fatalism has a lot to do with it.

If you’ve heard people talk about how the church should separate itself from those other “evil” parts of culture: the media, music, movies, politics, and so on, that’s driven in part by Christian fatalism.

Here’s another harmful idea: your story doesn’t matter.

Many people are growing up in spiritual environments where the practice of returning to our stories is ignored, rejected, or even belittled. Press on toward the goal!  It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.  Keep your eyes on Jesus!

Those are all good verses and sayings, though sometimes they’ve been used to drive an idea – an unconscious assumption – that your story and your heart don’t matter.  That to do the hard work of mining the ideas and desires that form you is somehow selfish, a waste of time, and un-Christian.

That’s patently untrue.  If we find ourselves stuck or frustrated in our walk with Jesus, He may be inviting us to engage in self-introspection and discovery.

For some reason, we assume that when we dig into our hearts, the only person we’ll find down there is us.

However, the hard work of exploring our hearts is often where we find Jesus most visible, relatable, and present. If we follow Jesus, the Holy Spirit takes up residence in our hearts, so it’s okay for us to venture down there once in a while.

We’re disintegrated people living in a disintegrated world.

This one is particularly powerful today, and we find it all over the church and culture.

“We can have sex with whomever we want, and it won’t impact our souls.”  This one subtle idea has revolutionized entire cultures.  However, it’s untrue.  The body, mind, and spirit cannot be split. What we do with our bodies weaves in and through our minds and spirits.

Separation of church and state!  This idea is predominant in the West in many forms.  The underlying assumption is that our political and religious views are separate and shouldn’t be intertwined.

That’s not possible.  Every political view you and I hold is rooted in our theology – our view of God and reality, whether or not we believe He exists.  It’s not possible to hold to a political position that’s divorced from our ideas about God.  Our views on immigration, abortion, national defense, gambling, marriage, and so on are all rooted in our underlying conclusions about God and the universe.

We are integrated beings living in an integrated world.  Though many ideas promoting disintegration have infiltrated modern Christianity, it doesn’t change the reality in which God placed us and charged us with ruling.

Superpower

There are probably an infinite number of ideas, and to categorize them all is impossible, though we’ve started the effort here at Soil & Roots!

I’ve suggested that six core groups of ideas are most formative to the human soul.  The more in tune we are with these ideas in Jesus and ourselves, the freer we are to experience deep discipleship.

The core categories are identity, anthropology, value, power, purpose, and love.  Who am I?  What am I?  What am I worth?  What authority do I have?  What is my purpose?  And what do I truly love and desire?

Chances are, we all have surface responses to these questions, and many of our answers reflect biblical truth. But when we start digging into our hearts carefully, gently, and authentically, we often discover there’s a mismatch between the ideas in our hearts (in our soil) and those we espouse with our mouths.

I believe I’m a child of God, and that there’s nothing I can do to earn God’s favor.  But my heart is often driven to perform for God to earn His favor, because that’s the idea it has embraced.  My belief and my idea aren’t the same. In this way, I’m disconnected or disintegrated.

Perhaps you know a woman who intellectually believes she is deeply valued by God, and yet struggles with an eating disorder.  Her heart is rooted in the idea that she has little value.  Her heart has yet to embrace God’s idea about her value, even though her head has.

If you’ve ever held to a position tightly, not because you’re certain it’s accurate, but because changing your position feels like it would lower your value or alter the way people see you, you’ve experienced the difference between an idea and an intellectual belief. Most of us experience this type of disconnect many times in our lives.

If you’re new to the world of ideas, they take some time to settle in.  That’s normal.  But once we practice digging for ideas in our hearts, the hearts of others, the church, and the culture, a whole new world opens up.  We begin to see things very differently.

The Awakening

Philosophers and theologians refer to this posture and skill as being “awake” or “attuned.”  We begin to see ourselves, Jesus, and the world around us with greater discernment and authenticity.

I have a friend who calls it a “superpower.” That’s a bit much, but you get the point.

If there’s one thing Soil & Roots is attempting to help us all do, it’s become more “awake.”  To grow together and learn how to discern the ideas that govern our hearts, our churches, and our cultures.

So, one way to look at The Great Omission is a shortage of people intentionally journeying to become awake or attuned to the heart of Jesus, their own hearts, and the hearts of others.  Perhaps we have a good belief system, but we’re still living above the surface.

We struggle to live authentically.  We struggle to experience who Jesus made us to be because we continue to be bound to others’ opinions, things that make us feel secure, our stories, and all sorts of expectations.

We want to be free, but freedom doesn’t always look like we think it does.

That’s why C.S. Lewis said, “When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realizes that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going—provided he does it for honesty’s sake and not just to annoy his parents—the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him than it ever was before.”

Wait what?  How can the spirit of Christ be nearer to him if he stops doing the types of activities that we think should draw him closer to Christ?

Because, perhaps for the first time, he’s dealing authentically with his heart.  He isn’t performing for anyone; he isn’t behaving a certain way because that’s what he was told to do.  This young man is becoming more attuned to his heart, and that’s an invitation to deal with God honestly, openly, and humbly.

It seems Jesus would rather invite someone like that into a deeper relationship than someone who is just going through the motions.

Maybe our hearts are angry, doubtful, confused, wandering, anxious.  Jesus seems to appreciate and welcome our raw, authentic expressions of who we truly are right now.

Jesus was masterful at being awake and attuned to hearts, of course. He has an uncanny way of discerning what’s going on beneath the surface of someone’s words or actions.

He was always asking questions, rerouting conversations, telling strange stories, making really provocative statements, and doing odd things that made people look deeper into their hearts. He keeps inviting us to see, to hear, to dig, to mine, to explore because it enables us to love more deeply.

____________

So, The Great Omission describes the general condition of modern Christianity.  Many people aren’t on an intentional journey to become more like Jesus, and many people are asleep, not attuned to those around them, and certainly not to their own hearts.  Because if we aren’t attuned to our hearts, we aren’t going to be attuned to anyone else’s.

The Three Primary Problems

Our modern age brings a few more obstacles to our spiritual formation, which we here call the Three Primary Problems.  They are difficult challenges, but the good news is that hope is the hallmark of the Christian life, and so we explore these problems knowing that they are and will be overcome.

1. The Discipleship Dilemma: as I just noted, your story does matter. Your family of origin, your early relationships, your joys, your tragedies, your heartbreaks, your behavioral patterns, and your deep interactions matter.

For lots of reasons, our modern age provides limited opportunities for you and me to explore our stories, and it’s usually only in counseling or support groups like AA or Celebrate Recovery.

Exploring stories is certainly not a regular habit of the normal church experience. Thus, the dilemma. Yet it’s essential in our journey to become more like Jesus.

And God has provided very practical, earthy, mundane signposts for us to discern the true, authentic condition of our hearts.  We call them the Eight Indicators: things like our thought patterns, emotions, relationships, and how we use money.

2. The Formation Gap: unlike communities in the New Testament and intentionally formative communities such as college, marriage, the military, professional sports teams, and support groups like I just mentioned, many of us lack long-term gatherings intentionally designed to help us grow to become more like Jesus.

The human being is best formed when engaged in cultures with five key elements: time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction.  Because of our somewhat frenetic and overly complicated lifestyles, we tend to find ourselves in a gap between our actual Christian experience and the richness, fullness, and flourishing found in long-term, community-based disciple-making.

3. And finally, we live in a time that has largely Forgotten the Kingdom. The Kingdom of God is the primary theme of the New Testament and is hinted at rather loudly in the Old Testament, though many followers of Jesus today have heard little about the Kingdom.

When we don’t comprehend the vast, cosmically redemptive nature of the Kingdom, we tend to reduce Jesus to our personal savior and little else, and we tend to view reality in pieces and parts.  This has a downward, minimizing impact on our discipleship.

_______________

We spent over two years exploring The Great Omission and the Three Primary Problems, and we explored various ways we can come together with God to become deeper disciples and solve the Three Primary Problems.  We can engage our stories, we can awaken to our hearts and the hearts of those around us, we can reform intentionally formative communities, and we can certainly be a part of God’s kingdom growing in and through us and spreading throughout creation and culture.

But let’s be honest, resolving The Great Omission and the Three Primary Problems sounds like a ton of work.  We’re up against some very ingrained, powerful ideas that have invaded the church and culture over the past few hundred years.

Deep discipleship involves change, humility, sacrifice, and probably some pain and suffering, along with self-introspection.  If we have money in the bank, good jobs, a nice family, and a comfortable church, what gives?  So what?

So What?

This isn’t a sarcastic question. If we’re guaranteed a place in heaven and are living a relatively quiet and comfortable life down here, why go through the struggle, trials, and confusion that often accompany the journey into deep discipleship?  Do we really want to be a Stephen, a Paul, a Rahab, a Sarah?

We aren’t going to fully answer this “so what?” question today, but let’s get the conversation started.

I propose that avoiding, ignoring, or bypassing the journey into the deeper end of discipleship has harmful and destructive impacts on both the individual and our communities at large.

On the other hand, if we do come together, unify, and intentionally become more like Jesus with His help and others’ guidance, it brings enormous blessings, peace, and flourishing to both the individual and the community.

This is why I think a lack of deep discipleship is the issue: it’s the core concern in modern life.  It isn’t politics, the environment, immigration, or the struggle to keep the family together.  Those are all very real, pressing, important concerns. But they aren’t the prime concern.

The Great Individual Omission

Let’s take a look at this individually.

Let’s say a deep disciple is someone who is increasingly abandoned to God, experiences this peace that passes all understanding, is attuned to her heart’s ideas and the ideas of those around her, isn’t rattled or anxious about current events or the news or her bank account, isn’t hurried, forgives well, is a wonderful listener, and just seems to be at rest. Sounds amazing.

What’s the impact of NOT being someone like that?

We lack peace, are ignorant of people’s hearts, and experience constant inner anxiety about money and circumstances. We’re always feeling rushed, we don’t pay very good attention to our loved ones, and we have difficulty slowing down and resting.  In other words, we just don’t love as well.  We don’t allow ourselves to be as positively formative in the lives of those around us.

In some cases, we’re negatively formative. We consciously and unconsciously transmit our unhealed wounds, our frantic hearts, our people-pleasing, our conflict-avoidance or our conflict obsessions, and our polite addictions to those we love the most!

We grow up with the idea that we have to perform to earn love, and so we pass that on to our kids.

We’re steeped in embedded patterns of insecure relational attachment, and we watch as our spouses become more and more insecure.

We’re controlling, and we may not even know it.  And we wonder why the people closest to us seem to pull away, begin to resent us, or fear us.

We may well believe that Jesus died for our sins.  We may know a lot of Scripture, and we may lead and teach Bible studies.  But the truth is, we’re not forming those around us to be more like Jesus.  We’re not promoting and encouraging deep human flourishing.  In fact, many of the ideas that are driving us and spreading to others are from the kingdom of darkness.

I’m speaking in gross generalities here, but I hope you get the point.  If to love someone means to seek their goodness, that means we become increasingly attuned to what that means in the lives of those around us.  And that requires deep humility, often confession, kindness to ourselves and others, gentleness, a willingness to untangle our hearts, and a lot of work and practice.

Individually, the costs of not journeying to become a deep disciple are enormous.  We simply don’t love as well as we can or we ought, and that generally means people are being unnecessarily hurt, including ourselves.

If we’re honest, I’m not sure how many of us expect that the Christian life on this side of death can really be characterized by this type of love.  I suspect many of us accept our salvation, try to live a good life, assume the deeply embedded, harmful ideas are here to stay, and are basically waiting it out until we experience “real” eternal life.

But that’s not the picture the Bible presents.  Eternal life starts the moment we enter the Kingdom of Light, right here, right now. And our capacity to love and seek others’ goodness only increases and multiplies.

I can’t remember where I read it, but I recall being shocked by a theologian who claimed that, when some people die, they won’t realize there’s been any real change.  They’re so abandoned to God, so attuned to His heart, so oriented around loving as Jesus loves, so closely aligned to His ideas, that death is somewhat insignificant.  They’re like Enoch, who walked so closely with God that God just took him.

Is that our vision for our discipleship?

The Great Cultural Omission

What about The Great Omission’s impact on communities, creation, and culture?  So what?  If we continue to struggle to make disciples, does that have any meaningful impact on societies and cultures?

If you’ve been around Christianity for any length of time, you’ll hear that we’re supposed to be “in the world but not of the world.”  I used to see that phrase on bumper stickers.  That verse has been misread and misinterpreted countless times.

In the language of Soil & Roots, it means we continue to be formed in ideas from the kingdom of light and continue to shed ideas from the kingdom of darkness.  But not just individually!

One of the most popular and accurate critiques of modern Christianity is that it focuses too much on the individual.  We accept Jesus as our “personal” savior.  We have our personal prayer time and our personal devotions.  That’s all good. But, as with so much of what we explore here, it’s reduced.

Jesus is not just our “personal” savior – He’s the savior of the cosmos.  The Christian life is not just about you and me. It’s about the holistic effort to restore the planet.

We just need to preach the Gospel?

Here’s what I think is going on.  For decades, we’ve been trained in the idea that Jesus can transform our hearts…but can’t really transform anything else.  No one says that, of course, but it’s a powerful idea ungirding many of our religious rhythms and rituals.  When this idea takes hold, it results in what D. James Kennedy called “the stained-glass ghetto.”

We accept a world in which we have Christian books and non-Christian books. Christian music and non-Christian music.  Christian movies and non-Christian movies.  Christian politics and non-Christian politics. Christian schools and non-Christian schools.

Many of those things are good and necessary, don’t get me wrong.  But what’s the underlying idea driving this disintegration, this separation, this labeling of various aspects of culture?

To quote C.S. Lewis again, “The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.”

If we accept that Jesus is king of the cosmos and is, right now, making all things new, we often join with Him in bringing His kingdom more fully to earth when we live out, embody, and spread His admittedly radical ideas…right where we are. In the “secular” areas of culture.

What’s the impact on society when disciples aren’t living, embodying, and spreading good, healthy, nourishing ideas right where we are? Ideas of darkness take hold and take over. When the church retreats and starts creating all sorts of “Christian” sub-cultures, the rest of reality becomes easy prey for the kingdom of darkness.

I’m going to upset some people, but culture is not redeemed and reformed by simply “sharing the Gospel.”  Again, I’m not entirely sure we have a grasp on what the Gospel is, at least the Gospel of the Kingdom.

Culture is not reformed by simply trying to get everyone “saved.”  I realize that is a very popular idea in parts of the world right now.

Way back in Season 1, I shared how evangelist Ray Comfort conducted research that revealed that over 80-90% of “Christian conversions” don’t stick. Meaning they were never truly converted in the first place.^[1]

Making converts doesn’t redeem culture. Getting people “saved” doesn’t redeem culture.  But making disciples often does, in business, in education, in the arts, in media, in the church, in our families.

Why would I claim that deep discipleship often results in the redemption and reformation of systems, governments, institutions, and the various mountains of culture?  Because if deep discipleship is becoming more like Jesus, that’s exactly the impact He’s had on culture.  And a careful walk-through of church history reveals the same – those whose hearts beat most in time with our King often love in such a way as to transform the world around them.

That transformation often comes through sacrifice, radical expressions of love, struggle, heartache, and the day-in, day-out mundane activities of life, wherever God has planted us.

To love as Jesus loves is to affect the world, and to watch its transformation as the kingdom continues to come.

Once in a while, it comes through worldwide movements, miraculous events, and well-publicized happenings. But generally, it comes through the increasingly radical way we love the people we run across and interact with every day.

That’s why the life of someone becoming a deep disciple is an amazing adventure.  And it’s best taken with others on the same path.

At least in my view, the Great Omission is the root cause of the pain, heartache, and suffering we see in societies across the globe.  At the same time, fulfilling the true, deep, radical nature of The Great Commission remains the cure.  We just need to recover it.

A Personal Closing Note

As I shared at the beginning, the first episode of Soil & Roots was released in early 2022.  This podcast developed out of a time of extraordinary pain and introspection, as 2020 was a terrible year for our family for various reasons, and my faith was shaken to the core, as was my identity.

I’ve been following Jesus most of my life, though when I smacked into the proverbial wall, I realized that many of the structures and supports I had built my life on weren’t as solid as I had thought.  I had been living above the surface and didn’t even know it.

In some ways, I started the podcast to force myself to dig to find answers to new, confusing questions and doubts.  It was a way for me to wrestle with God and myself in a structured way that I hoped would help others. For perhaps the first time, I started to “awaken” to my heart and the heart of God. I began to experience Him in new and different ways, especially through pain and suffering.

I’d love to tell you that, two years later and 100 episodes in, I have it all figured out.  I’d love to tell you that I’m now a deep disciple, am completely healed and restored from all we’ve been through, and daily experience the abundant life and perfect peace we talk about here.

But I can’t tell you that. I’m a work in progress. I have good days and bad days. I have moments when I think I’m “getting there,” only to realize that this discipleship thing is two steps forward and one or two steps back. Sometimes three.   Although my co-hosts have been a great help, between Tim’s insightful questions and comments and Kyle’s pathological hugging.

At the same time, reading, studying, researching, debating, discussing, and wrestling with the ideas and concepts we share here has been the most formative spiritual time of my life, bar none.  Forming and gathering with our Greenhouse has been far more like “church” than any church of which I’ve been a part, as thankful as I am for those institutions.

I’m not alone. I only know that because many of you have told me.  However God is speaking to you, you are being drawn into a deeper, more connected experience with Him, yourself, and those around you, and you find that a life of richness, depth, and contentment is just around the corner.

You’ve hit the Wall at some point in your life, and you’ve submitted to the tension, confusion, and doubt that it brings.  And, like me, you’re experiencing a strange reality – that to submit to the struggle and suffering is to come to God more authentically than ever before, and that is the pathway to the peace and comfort we’ve heard about for so long.

Thanks for taking this journey with us.

Tim and Kyle will be back next week in the Greenhouse next episode, so we’ll see you next time.

[1] Comfort, R. (2010). God Has a Wonderful Plan for Your Life: The Myth of the Modern Message (p. 18).  Ray Comfort.