Season 3, Ep 26: Mind the Gap

In this introduction to Season 3, we sum up what we’ve explored so far and prep our hearts for a deep dig into the average Western church experience.  

Brian reviews the Three Primary Problems: the Forgotten Kingdom, the Discipleship Dilemma, and the Formation Gap.  

And then he lays the groundwork for our journey into the Formation Gap: the distance between what our hearts truly need to be formed into the likeness of Jesus versus what most Western Christians actually experience.  

TRANSCRIPTION

The Formation Gap

Mind the Gap

Welcome to Season 3! I’m so glad you’re taking this journey with us, as we explore deep discipleship, the church, and culture from an admittedly non-traditional perspective.

This new season is all about the Formation Gap – the distance between New Testament discipleship and what many of us experience today in modern Christianity.  And it can be quite a gap.

If you’re new to the podcast, I recommend that you head back to Episode 1 and listen in order at your own pace.  The episodes and seasons build on each other, so if you start in the middle, you may get a little lost.  A lot of podcasts focus on current events or topics that let us start whenever we want, but Soil and Roots is more like a slow, formative course, and I want you to have the best experience with it.

Soil and Roots is a podcast with some visual aids!  I refer to them often, and we generally add a few new ones each season. Bookmark the Resources page at soilandroots.org. That way, you can pull them up easily.

Also, later this season, I’ll be joined by a co-host for every other episode!  My friend Kyle Moody will be joining me, and we’ll have a great time exploring deep discipleship together and inviting you into our conversations.

Let’s do a little review.

Season 1 introduced us to the current state of things in modern Christianity, and it’s a bit concerning.  Dallas Willard called it the Great Omission.  Though we talk a lot about disciple-making, we’re struggling to do it. The point of discipleship is to form our character – to help us become more and more like Jesus. That we think the way He thinks, live the way He lived, and do things He taught us to do.  That we increasingly love the way Jesus loves.

This life-long journey is known by a few names: sanctification, character formation, heart formation, or spiritual formation.

However, in modern Christianity, spiritual formation isn’t necessarily the primary vision or purpose of our churches.  Sometimes we feel this lack of discipleship in our hearts: we have a sense of disconnection with God, with others, and even with ourselves.  We wonder if there’s more to the Christian life than what we’ve been experiencing.  We talked about the six stages of our spiritual journey and how most of us are only taught and guided through the first three.

We explored spiritual formation in a unique way back in Season 1 – as the progressive transformation of ideas.  What are those? I don’t remember reading about ideas in the Bible.

Ideas are assumptions, principles, and concepts that our hearts are rooted in, but they’re often hidden and unconscious.

These ideas are incredibly powerful, but most people don’t know they exist or how they influence how we live our lives.  And we touched on some of the most vital categories of ideas: identity, anthropology, value, power, purpose, and love.

The Power of Ideas

We all function from a set of ideas, but most of us don’t know what they are or how they govern us. This is true of many Christians and non-Christians alike.

For example, if we live in the U.S., we unconsciously assume we have cars to drive and good roads to drive them on. We don’t think about it; we don’t normally sit around wondering how and why roads were built or how and why civilization has so many cars. We live our lives unconsciously accepting this reality.

But of course, in terms of all of human history, this assumption is pretty new.  And if you live in some other undeveloped part of the world, you unconsciously assume travel may still be on horseback or by foot, or that travel by car is chaotic and dangerous on crazy road systems like those in some busy cities in India or Africa.

Unconscious ideas can be far more serious than cars and traffic. The Colson Center’s John Stonestreet talks about the impact of the Sexual Revolution on Ideas.[1]

For example, sex, marriage, and babies are no longer a package deal.  For generations upon generations, the unconscious idea in society was that sex was intended to be within the confines of marriage because that was best for the family and the kids, and that babies were a natural and assumed result of sex.  These three items were all fused in the hearts and minds of people for centuries.  We didn’t give it a second thought. Sex, marriage, and babies were a cohesive and given “idea in the air.”

This integrated idea of sex, marriage, and children is now disintegrated.  Sex, marriage, and babies are all separate categories that have virtually nothing to do with each other.

The so-called “threat” of having babies as a result of sex has been mitigated due to technology like contraception and abortion.  Sex has been separated from marriage because of the same things. No-fault divorce paved the way for this separation.

And so, the institution of marriage is collapsing – it’s only logical given its separation from sex and babies. Our culture now unconsciously assumes that it functions from the idea that sex, marriage, and babies are independent and autonomous things.

This is a prime example of an Idea in the Air that has radically changed in just the last century or so.

We’re governed and powered by all sorts of ideas – but we normally don’t know it.  Some of our ideas are shaped by culture, but many are formed in our families of origin and in our early childhood relationships.  Many of the ideas that govern us are formed by our stories.

Near the end of Season 1, we realized that the Great Omission is caused by and further complicated by three primary problems in our era: the Forgotten Kingdom, the Discipleship Dilemma, and the Formation Gap.

Primary Problem #1: The Forgotten Kingdom

We’re going to go deep on the Forgotten Kingdom in Season 4, so let’s quickly remind ourselves of what it is here.

Is our idea of the Gospel of the Kingdom big enough? Modern Christianity often presents an idea of the Gospel that’s too small. It’s reduced. It isn’t high enough; it isn’t majestic enough.

We have forgotten the Kingdom of Light. What we now assume about the Kingdom doesn’t really recognize Jesus as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. Instead, it treats Him as our personal savior who, frankly, appears to be struggling to redeem the rest of His creation, at least from our media-saturated perspective.

But the prominent theme of the New Testament is that Jesus came to redeem and reconcile everything – not just our souls, but the entire planet. He is making ALL things new.

This is the Gospel of the Kingdom. We enter the Kingdom of Light through Christ and the forgiveness of our sins, but the Kingdom also encompasses our relationships with others, ourselves, and the entire created order.

Somewhat audaciously, I propose that the current downward spiral of culture is primarily due to the Forgotten Kingdom – the loss of the Gospel of the Kingdom in the church over the past few hundred years.  We no longer recognize Jesus as the King who makes all things new.  So, we tend to function as if He isn’t the king of the universe.

We don’t expect Jesus and His church to overcome evil, to redeem and restore creation and the seven mountains of culture.  And as the Christian community receded from the Gospel of the Kingdom, it receded from culture.  And when the church recedes from culture, the kingdom of darkness is more than happy to come in and wreak havoc.

In general, we’ve come to unconsciously assume that the mission of the church is to save as many souls as possible while the rest of creation falls apart, rather than recognizing that our King is plundering and conquering the entire cosmos for His purposes and His glory.

Those are two very different visions of Jesus and His Kingdom.

Primary Problem #2: The Discipleship Dilemma

This brings us to Primary Problem #2 – the Discipleship Dilemma. If we have an incomplete or reduced idea of the Gospel of the Kingdom and its King, we will – by definition – have an incomplete or reduced idea of discipleship. The Forgotten Kingdom leads to a Discipleship Dilemma.

If the purpose of discipleship is to become more like Jesus and we unconsciously assume Jesus really isn’t the King of the Cosmos, that His Kingdom is only spiritual, that although the church is growing worldwide, the rest of culture belongs to the darkness, we are already off-target.

We have an incomplete vision of who Jesus is, so our discipleship path will be incomplete.

Also, if deep discipleship is the journey to become more like Jesus, that means we’re getting to know two people well: Jesus and ourselves. It’s this concept of “double knowledge” that, to be transformed more like Jesus, we explore two hearts: His and ours.

In our era, however, it can be very difficult to find communities that intentionally explore our own hearts, ideas, desires, and stories as part of the discipleship process. In fact, in many places, the exploration of our hearts is either subtly or openly condemned. Thus, the dilemma.

Do we really know who Jesus is?

I’ve been pondering a question for a few months now, and I wanted to share it with you: “Have I ever met someone who reminds me of Jesus?”

It’s a fascinating, somewhat vexing question.  I’m not asking if I’ve ever met a mature Christian because I know plenty of wonderful Christians. But that seems to be a different question nowadays.  I’m asking if I’ve ever walked away from an encounter with someone and thought, “Boy, that person totally reminds me of Jesus!”

For part of my life, I avoided reading the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  I’ve been following Jesus most of my life, but I had a hard time reading about His time on earth.  He seemed so…other…than me. So foreign, so alien.  I was comfortable reading the Old Testament and had no problem with the Epistles. They have stories about regular old humans.  But the red letters – I found those pretty intimidating.

A while back, I concluded my concerns were dumb, so I decided to get to know Jesus better. I realize the entire Bible is about Him, but I started reading all four Gospels and the book of Acts once a month, over and over again. I became fascinated by Jesus and the birth of the early church.

I’m not trying to extract every theological point from these five books at the moment. I’m reading them to get to know the person of Jesus and His impact on the apostles Peter and Paul and on the early church.  I read the books as stories, and I insert myself into the narrative.  I listen to what Jesus says, and I observe what He does.  I watch how He interacts with different types of people.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read these five books by now, but Jesus continues to attract me and confound me at the same time.  He rarely acts like I expect Him to.

He rarely answers a question directly that’s been asked of Him.  He never heals someone the same way.  He is astonishingly compassionate with some people and uncomfortably direct with others.

At one point, after Jesus has a verbal spar with the Pharisees, the disciples come up and ask Jesus if He realizes He’s offended them.  Jesus’ reply?  “Leave ‘em alone.”

The shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept,” comes at an odd time.  Jesus is standing outside Lazarus’ grave, about to raise him from the dead.  He knows He’s going to do it.  He purposefully waited to come to town until after Lazarus had died.  He just told Martha he’s going to raise her brother from the dead.

Why is He weeping now?  There are lots of commentaries on this passage, but He’s overcome with grief simply because of the grief of those around Him. He is so compassionate – He enters into suffering with those who suffer – even though He is about to relieve their suffering most profoundly!

Jesus never seems to be in a rush, though He is a man of relentless purpose.  He doesn’t worry about food, clothing, the weather, or the people continually trying to kill Him.  He falls asleep on a boat while it’s being battered and tossed around in a maelstrom. I’d like to be able to sleep soundly regardless of what’s going on around me.

Speaking of water, in Mark’s version of the story of Jesus walking on it, Mark says the wind was against the disciples and their boat, so they were straining at the oars.  He then says that Jesus was walking towards them on the water…intending to pass them by.

Wait, what? Pass them by?  So, Jesus is walking faster than the boat is moving. Picture this for a moment – the apostles are straining to row the boat in the direction they want to head, and Jesus is about to overtake them, walking on the water. Was Jesus going to wave at them and wink as He sauntered to the other side of the lake?

How about Jesus and evangelism?  Does He ask everyone He meets two important questions, or does He recite four spiritual laws?  No, he rarely interacts with this person the way He does with that person.  He doesn’t seem to function from any sort of system or script.  Sometimes, He verbally invites people to follow Him. Other times He heals someone or touches someone and just moves on.

He is intensely aware of the hearts and motivations of those around Him, and He seems to have no hesitation in uncovering those motivations.  He is personal and vulnerable with some; He is obscure and coy with others.

He is always in control, always inviting, never hurried, never worried.  He is divine, and yet the most human human ever to walk the planet.

So, have I ever met someone who reminds me of Jesus?  And I’m not talking about performing supernatural miracles. I’m talking about how He relates to God, Himself, and people.

I don’t think so.  Maybe you have. I’m sure there are folks out there who walk so closely with God that you come away from them sensing you’ve just been in the presence of someone who truly thinks, acts, relates, and loves like Jesus.

I don’t think I’ve met anyone who consistently treats people the way Jesus does. Who continually invites people into a deeper understanding of God’s heart and their own heart as a matter of course.

Someone with the strength of character, the stability, the poise, the unhurried, completely God-dependent relationship that He has.

I certainly don’t remind myself of Jesus.  Unfortunately, I resonate more with a pre-Pentecost Peter or maybe Thomas.  Once in a while, I stumble on something profound, but otherwise routinely put my foot in my mouth.

And I think, for better or worse, there’s a difference between someone who reminds us of Jesus and someone we typically think of as a “mature Christian.”

A mature Christian today is someone who knows a lot about the Bible, exemplifies the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5, and is nice to everyone. Maybe we think of a mature Christian as someone who is non-controversial or someone we look at and say, “Everybody likes her!” Someone who is always happy or seems to deal with wounds and harm as if they never even happened.

That’s great… except Jesus wasn’t nice to everyone and not everything rolled off His back.  We can’t claim Jesus was non-controversial. At times He purposefully caused controversy. We certainly can’t say everyone liked Jesus. It seems more people hated Him than liked Him.  He wasn’t always happy, and He certainly didn’t treat harm and wounds as if they never happened.  Jesus isn’t Pollyannaish.

I wonder if we wouldn’t be put off or confused by someone who truly reminded us of Jesus.  I wonder if we might find them strange or even disrespectful in some cases.

And yet… we’re to become more like Him. That’s the whole point of discipleship, right?

Know Jesus, Know Ourselves

I think most Christians would at least intellectually agree that we should become more like Jesus, even if we may not have a clear idea of who He is.

But I don’t know how many would agree with the second pursuit –that we should intentionally explore who we are.

As disciples, we seek to become like our teacher while our teacher helps us to better understand ourselves. John Calvin said, “We cannot expect to know God fully if we are not willing to know ourselves, for one depends on the other.”[2]

Knowing Calvin, he was discussing sin and our willingness to confront our failings.  Granted. But what if exploring our hearts is much more than just searching for what we’ve screwed up?

What about all of the sermons I’ve heard that if we’re depressed, anxious, or bummed out, we should just go serve others?  Isn’t serving others supposed to be the cure-all for the Christian blues?  Spending time in community understanding my own story certainly doesn’t sound very Christian.  It sounds self-centered.

We’re now touching on Ideas of Anthropology – what it means to be human.  It is, in fact, essential that we not only get to know Jesus, but we also get to know His crowning creation – us -and how we’re formed. Individually. Personally.

I’ve mentioned that theologian James K.A. Smith thinks modern Christianity is missing the mark on anthropology.  He’s surveyed Christian education and its philosophy and concluded that we assume heart formation occurs primarily through the intake of information, that Christianity is largely an intellectual exercise, and that our hearts are formed primarily by gathering data.

But as I proposed to you in Episode 11, we don’t assume that about any other type of formative experience.  We looked at early childhood, college, the military, marriage, and the New Testament church and discovered that every type of intentionally formative experience assumes far more than the absorption of information.

As we recapture what it means to be human, we realize that the ideas that govern and drive us – what we call “ideas in the soil” – are primarily formed not through instruction but through relationship.  Through your story. Through experience.  Our hearts are primarily formed in our families of origin, early childhood and adolescent experiences, and other major life events and communities.

But in general, modern Christianity has yet to reconnect the dots on this.  In too many cases, the modern church ignores formative relationships and story or relegates them to support groups and counseling.

Many of our church experiences have far more to do with the event of a Sunday morning service and its sermon than it does with deep, intentional, time-rich relationships with the people we see at church.

This is an enormous error that strongly suggests the modern church has forgotten biblical anthropology and genuine spiritual formation.

An All-Too Common Example

Take pornography addiction, for example.  Jay Stringer wrote a fascinating book called Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals our Way to Healing, and he provides some sobering statistics:

-Porn use will nearly double the probability of a couple getting divorced

-About 35% of all Internet downloads are porn-related

-Porn sites receive more monthly traffic than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined

-Porn is a $97B industry, with as much as $12B of that coming from the U.S.

-About 57% of our pastors and 64% of our youth pastors struggle or have struggled with pornography[3]

Studies may differ on this, but like abortion and divorce statistics, in general, there doesn’t seem to be a big difference between porn use inside the church and outside. And if the majority of our church leaders have struggled or are struggling with porn, I think we can safely assume this is a real problem.

Typical Christian responses to porn addiction include scripture memory verses, listening to sermons and messages on sexual purity, accountability partners, and porn-blocking software.

But according to Jay Stringer, what is any addiction, including porn, a human response to? Trauma. In other words, a harmful part of someone’s story – a broken, corrupted, or exploitative relationship.

And in our current age of multiplying generational sin and harm, trauma has become standard fare.  So, porn has become standard fare, as men and women unconsciously or consciously attempt to escape and numb the wounds from their stories. And as helpful as porn-blocking software might be, it scratches the surface of the reason a person is addicted to porn in the first place.  It’s like taking aspirin for appendicitis.

Anyone who has survived trauma and returned to wholeness will tell you it can’t be done unless the wounds are carefully, compassionately revisited and healed in the context of a caring community.  Trauma corrupts and warps our Six Core Ideas, and our hearts don’t embrace good, core ideas without revisiting our stories in a safe, intentional environment.  When we choose not to embrace our stories, we cope.  And we are masterful at inventing and applying all sorts of coping mechanisms.

So, how do dark ideas formed by our stories truly transform into ideas of light? By being immersed in cultures and communities of light.

Good news here: God has scattered His creation with Ideas of Light.  They’re obviously in the Bible, but we also find them in God’s second book, creation.  We find His ideas in nature, in ourselves, and in other people.  I sound like Chris Traeger, but our hearts are literally surrounded by life-giving ideas of light all day, every day. Ideas of light are good, beautiful, and true.  They lead to our flourishing.

Ideas of Darkness are corruptions or incomplete ideas of light.  There are no original ideas of darkness. Evil can’t originate – evil is a corruption of original goodness.  Ideas of darkness are found in culture, in ourselves, and in other people.

Dallas Willard maintained that evil works primarily in the realm of ideas in the air – systems of ideas, as it were.  I think he’s right. The enemy is a crop duster.  Evil spreads efficiently when it affects entire systems of ideas. And those ideas are designed to kill us.

It’s a top-down approach to spreading ideas of darkness.

The Kingdom of Light usually works the opposite way.  When we choose to follow Jesus, to become His apprentice, our hearts – our roots – start forming into His, and ideas of light spring up from our soil, through our branches, and impact ourselves, others, and all of creation on behalf of the Kingdom of Light.

The enemy is a crop duster, but Jesus is a tender, careful farmer.  He invites us to embrace His ideas through community, and then we work with Him to impact other individuals for the Kingdom. Over time, these individuals impact neighborhoods, communities, institutions, and ideas systems.  The Kingdom of Darkness tends to work top down, and the Kingdom of Light tends to work from the heart…the roots…up.

Primary Problem #3 – The Formation Gap

Let’s touch on Primary Problem #3 and the focus of this new season – the Formation Gap.

Because much of the church has forgotten the Kingdom, it leads to an incomplete and inaccurate view of spiritual formation.  That’s our Discipleship Dilemma.  We fix the Discipleship Dilemma by getting to know Jesus and His Kingdom, and by diving into our own hearts to get to know ourselves.  Not the person we present to the world on Sunday, but who we truly are.

Now here’s the trick – the human heart responds to certain elements or circumstances to be formed.

The Formation Gap is the distance between what is necessary for our hearts to be formed into the likeness of Jesus and what most of us currently experience.  Our exploration of the Gap this season compares the genuinely formative environments of the New Testament with what most of us experience today, which tends to be a mere shadow of what previous generations enjoyed.

The human heart responds to the Five Key Elements, five circumstances, as it forms.  This is true whether we’re formed into darkness or light. The elements are time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction.

Our hearts become more like the heart of Jesus by being immersed in cultures intentionally designed around the Five Key Elements to form us like Him. The problem is that these types of communities have, for the most part, disappeared from culture and been replaced by event-driven institutions.

Heart formation goes both ways – towards the Kingdom of Darkness or the Kingdom of Light.  Unfortunately, I think there are far better examples of immersive communities of darkness today than immersive communities of light.

Dark Formation

I mentioned in a previous episode that one of the most effective examples of spiritual formation I’ve ever seen is Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion.

I watched a documentary on it on Hulu several months ago. The purpose of the program was to highlight the stories of women who had been physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by Hefner and the Playboy enterprise.  The damage inflicted on these women makes this documentary difficult to watch.  But when you look at it through the lens of how ideas are formed and changed in the human heart, you realize just how much of a genius Hefner was.  It’s like watching the 5 Key Elements of Formation on steroids.

The women Hefner formed were invited into and molded by a specifically designed culture of time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction.

So much so that many of the women who admitted being harmed or even destroyed by Hefner still maintained that Hefner’s underlying ideas are good and healthy for women. Even after all of the abuse and suffering, most of the victims still promoted the idea that the objectification of women…is good for women.  Their hearts were still entrenched in ideas that exploit and demean women, even after escaping the abuse caused by those very ideas!

That’s the power of intentional communities of formation!

But these intentional communities of formation in the Kingdom of Light may be difficult to find today.

You may be thinking, “Hold up.  What about my church? What about my small group?  What about the family?”

Those are all potentially good examples of immersive communities, but maybe not.

We’re likely going to feel some tension as we head into Season 3.  The tension will be caused by the conflict between the Five Key Elements required to form us, which are abundantly present throughout Scripture, and our modern church traditions, our lifestyles, or our tendency to sugarcoat our history and experience.

I’m going to propose to you that the average American’s church experience often bears very little resemblance to the formative communities in the Bible or to formative Christian periods in history.

So, yup, we may feel uncomfortable at times as we walk through this Season. And that’s okay.

But we’re also going to have a lot of fun.  Believe it or not, we’re going to look at modern advances in neuroscience – how the brain works – to help us grasp and embrace just how important the Five Key Elements of Formation are.

So, let’s Mind the Gap as we head into Season 3.

We’re going to start by exploring the Key Element of Time. Why is time so important in our spiritual formation? Time with whom or with what?  If our hearts are wounded or broken, does time play a part in our return to wholeness?

Lots to explore this season, so thanks for coming along with me on Soil and Roots.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJEdUmn1en8

[2] Thompson, C. (2015). The Soul of Shame (p. 108). Inter-Varsity Press.

[3] Stringer, J. (2018). Unwanted: How Sexual Behavior Reveals Our Way to Healing (p. xvii – xviii). NavPress.