Is It Really That Hard to Know How to Follow Jesus? Or, Why We DON'T Really Need Religious Professionals to Explain God to Us.

Okay, I'm going to take a few swipes at my colleagues in the church business for a moment. I really think that we spend WAAAAY too much time overcomplicating the spiritual life for people. All around us are people who are really struggling with their personal life, their marriages, their jobs, their children, their future, their investment portfolios, how to spend their free time, what so and so said about them at the ball field the other day, how to decide where to spend vacation this year, exactly what color to paint the kitchen, etc., etc. Life can be really hard! So, as ministers, we develop all kinds of "strategies" to help make life more bearable for the average American Christian.  We create classes, manuals, and conferences. We talk about the "Grace Filled Life" or we try and get people to evangelize more. We enroll people in Sunday School or we try and get them to small groups. If we could just get them serving in the church more, or attending the men's pancake breakfast or the next ladies Beth Moore Study. If we could just get people to somehow WANT to learn how to do the spiritual life/church thingy, we'd be ok. I mean, Southern Baptists are declining in membership, right? We need another strategy! Another plan!

Here's one that I found on the blog of a guy named Brant Hanson. First of all, Brant is absolutely hilarious. He is very edgy in his humor, but he really gets you thinking about stuff. He takes on the Discipleship Wheel in a post entitled This Just Brings It Home. Thank You.  Reading his post got me thinking about all of this in light of some of my recent thoughts about where we actually do find solutions to our current malaise. I don't think that it is in church organizational seminars. Here is discipleship wheel that a church put together to help show how a new believer could grow to spiritual maturity:

Wow! Okay. First of all, I am not saying that all diagrams and plans for growth are necessarily wrong, so please save the nasty letter writing campaign that you were about to orchestrate against me. But it does seem like we are encountering a preponderence of strategies and programs all over the place. Secondly, here is an example of a discipleship/small group/education/associate minister somewhere with too much time on his hands, I fear. I know, because I used to be one. Before I became "Senior" pastor of our church, I spent over 5 years as Associate Pastor of Worship and Ministries. It is a former life that I don't think I've ever mentioned on the blog before. One of my jobs was to oversee our ministries and small groups. I was expected to provide training for them that was to be "reproducible." I don't think I understood what reproducible meant. I thought that meant that the training that I was supposed to write could be photocopied, I guess. I became very adept at writing manuals - manuals that no one would ever read. I spent hour upon hour typing out steps, processes, procedures, and fill-in-the-blank training manuals. The little discipleship wheel above could be considered sheer genius for it's simplicity compared to the stuff I put together. For some reason, I believed that if people had to fill in the blank when you were training them, they would then actually pay attention to what you had to say. Apparently, I knew how boring I was so I was trying to find some way to keep people from falling asleep on me. Ugh. I was falling asleep on myself.

In case you are wondering how all of that "organization" worked out for me, I can tell you that within a couple of years it became very difficult to get people to attend my training sessions. I began to fear that no one was reading my manuals.  If true, then what was I doing in the ministry?!?!? I had dreams of my manuals being published so that likeminded Associate Pastors of Everything could also train their church's leaders into oblivion by making the simple tasks of discipleship and ministry incredibly complex. I'm actually kidding about that last part.

For some reason, the American Church has become enamored with the corporate world. We have come to believe that discipleship is a "process" that can be manufactured, not unlike an assembly line. If we put a young believer into our series of steps and processes, then a mature disciple of Christ will be produced on the tail end. Fidelity to our training system is equated to fidelity to Christ. I think that we all know that it does not work that way, even though that approach is very appealling and impressive to our modern minds. Discipleship is different for everyone. It has many ups and downs. But, more important than strategies, procedures, steps, manuals, and discipleship wheels, are the simple concepts of faith and obedience. Our problem is that we have been taught a boat load of information on the Christian life, but we only obey a little bit of it. Because we are taught far more than we obey, we begin to believe that obedience is optional. Worse yet, we begin to believe that obedience can be ascertained by giving even more information that might somehow unlock the desire to obey. We have become quite gnostic that way. What is needed is faith in Christ and a decision to obey all that He has commanded us to do. If a "disciple" won't obey the simple commands of the Lord, then stop teaching him other things. If you continue to teach him other things, then you have told him that obedience in other areas is optional. Of course, the idea of "teaching" someone anything should be a give away that there is a relationship there between teacher and learner. Far too often, we have farmed out pastoring to our "processes" and have not developed the types of relationships needed to really pastor people into the wide expanse of spiritual formation. If we are truly building relationships, and the person does not obey the Lord, then the loving thing to do is to let him know he is disobeying and that we like to call that sin. I know, what a radical concept, right? But, the good news about sin is that Jesus died to forgive us of it. So, when I confess my sins, I realize that forgiveness and freedom that He purchased for me on the Cross. I am not stuck in my sins. I am not defined by them, but I can move on. I am not saying that we should focus on the sin, but we should focus on why the disciple is not able to or does not want to obey the commands of Christ. Often, there is an underlying issue there anyway and it has a lot to do with pride, rebellion, self sufficiency, and unbelief.  We hit a major snag in helping people to grow spiritually when we stick them in a disembodied process and expect the process to produce the disciple. We are actually to take the time to shepherd people with the help of the Holy Spirit. It appears that this concept has been largely lost in American churches.

If the SBC is really in decline, we do not need more organization and strategies. Organization exists to give shape to a movement. We are not moving, unless you count sliding backwards. I don't know, do we need to organize our retreat? Actually, we are choked to death by all of the organization and strategy of religious professionals who are trying to justify their jobs with the denomination through "training" and "leadership" activities. If the SBC is really in decline, what we need is a massive heart change that would draw us to Christ in faith and that would produce in us the desire to obey the Lord - together. Until that happens, everything else is just rearranging the deck chairs at the Alamo. And yes, mixed metaphors are valuable here because the problems that we are facing are too big to be described through just one tragedy.  Our "leaders" really should just lead us to dependence upon and faith in Christ and obedience to His commands. If we do not want to place our faith in Jesus and obey Him, then we are not walking as disciples anyway and it would be quite loving if we told each other that so that we could repent and receive grace and healing. If we don't want to repent, then that's another issue entirely, isn't it?

The spiritual life is not very complicated, but it is very hard because we have to die to ourselves. Unfortunately, it seems that we'd rather write manuals and develop new strategies to organize the works of the flesh, instead of truly placing our faith in Jesus.   

Comments

[Dorcas Hawker]

Alan -

Thanks ... you have put into words something I have begun to feel recently: why is it so complicated?

Good insight.

Dorcas

[Keith Price]

Alan:

Amen! Great post! You have hit upon two points that I have been trying to emphasize over and over at our church. The first is our study of God’s Word should lead to repentance and obedience. Jesus ministry starts with repentance and his last words to the churches in Revelations was repentance. Knowledge of God’s Word without obedience has a tendency to make us “puffed up” and proud. For the Jewish disciples of Jesus, study or the better term is discipleship, that leads to obedience was paramount.

The second issue is discipleship. Sunday morning AM worship is a lousy place for discipleship. It is information impartation, but it is not really discipleship. Can we learn from a lecture delivered by a talking head? Some I suppose, but the best lab of learning is life. Discipleship is done face to face, in community, working together. I have spent a lot of years in higher education and listened to countless lectures. The stuff I remember is the stuff I used on a daily basis, worked on in a lab or had some significant interaction and discussion with professors or fellow students. Did Jesus make disciples by delivering a lecture every Sabbath? No, that makes synagogue attendees and I’m afraid what we have made is church attendees. Jesus made disciples by sharing information and then living it, with them, day by day and showing them how it all worked and allowing them to get involved.

Don’t feel bad about the complicated process and manual. I’ve written a few of those myself. The problem is that when we try to write these things we have to set up processes for every scenario or eventuality we think might be encountered and we never can really do that. In a sense we write them to little children. But if we would just have good foundational principles to start with and those are understood, grasped and obeyed, the rest of the steps and processes go without saying.

Keep it coming Alan…

Keith Price

[Guy Muse]

Thanks for reminding me why you are one of my favorite bloggers! This post should be read by everyone of us who complicate 'following Christ' and instead are engrossed in the "business of church".

IMO, this quote says it all: "If a 'disciple' won't obey the simple commands of the Lord, then stop teaching him other things." We have created this crazy information pumping machine that spews out a never-ending slew of lessons, sermons, manuals, classes that no one is paying any attention to.

I am beginning to give serious thought to going back to the simple commands of Christ (such as "love the Lord your God") and camping out there until our people are living, obeying, breathing, and understand what Jesus was saying to do. Once this one is down, move on to the second "love your neighbor as yourself" and camp out there for however long it takes to get us to actually LOVING those around us...

Is this not what Jesus meant when He said in the Great Commission "teaching them to observe all that I commanded you"? We are teaching a lot of stuff, but is it what Jesus commanded we teach?

[Rev.]

Greatness! I'll be linking up with you, brother. Good stuff here!

[Dave Miller]

Interesting. Then there is not a 12 step process that guarantees maturity?

[Beth D]

"...what color to paint the kitchen..."

How did you know?