Failure to Launch: Discipleship Endangered

Over more than 45 years in higher education, I’ve taught more than 10,000 students and I’ve learned how to catalyze deep and durable learning in people who want to learn. I also served until recently as an elder in my local church responsible for the educational programs of the church. In this podcast those two roles converge as I address the systemic failure of most churches to make disciples effectively.

Discipleship is Transformative Learning

Christian discipleship is all about transformative learning. After the miracle of personal regeneration (the application of John 3:16), we enter God’s classroom where the aim is to become more like Christ. In theology we call this process sanctification. The process of transformation requires monumental changes in our thinking and that requires the work of the Holy Spirit as we regularly experience jolts. Jolts are cognitive collisions that challenge our assumptions about the way life works.

Here's an example from James 1: 2 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

This exhortation flips the script. It calls for a total change of outlook. Trials and joy don’t belong in the same sentence for most people. But the believer knows that God is orchestrating life with “purposeful sovereignty.” The curriculum of each life is custom tailored by God to solidify learning of propositional truth in His word. Trials help us to learn at least three things.

We are not in control.
We need to depend on God.
We need to change the way we think.

Transformation of our thinking about adversity leads to steadfastness (also translated endurance) and steadfastness gives us the spiritual fitness to hold on to God when we want to give up.

Transformed by the Renewing of Your Mind

Sanctification is a process, not an event. While we live, Christians are students in search of transformation. Romans 12:2 says believers are transformed by the renewing of their mind. Their thinking needs to change from the default setting (like everyone else—conformed to this world) to agreeing with God who made all things. They need to learn to think like God. That is the essence of discipleship.

The church is charged with the responsibility of making disciples. [Matt. 28:19-20] The process of discipleship aims to internalize truth from scripture and integrate it with life experience leading to a practice that glorifies God and a heart filled with gratitude to God. Internalizing truth isn’t merely memorizing truthful statements from scripture. Internalizing is personal and it involves strenuous personal wrestling with truth on the inside. It is not imposed from the outside. It doesn’t follow automatically from exposure to a powerful sermon or from any particular program or curriculum.

Changing Thinking is Very Hard

If you’ve followed this podcast over previous seasons, you’ve heard me emphasize that changing thinking is the hardest part of learning. It is considerably easier to learn when I know very little than to learn the truth when I’ve internalized a lie. Transformational learning requires a disorienting dilemma of sufficient magnitude that it causes me to seriously question the lie. Romans 12:2 tells us not to be conformed to the world because that conformity is our default setting. There are many lies each of us has accepted that need to be disowned and kicked to the curb. Lies can’t be replaced until they are removed, and we won’t work on removal until we are persuaded in our own minds that our thinking is flawed and unbiblical. That takes humility and brokenness.

Transformation Requires Other People

It is the Holy Spirit who moves us forward in sanctification, but God has also ordained means that involve people using their spiritual gifts. For example:

Matthew 28 (ESV) 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Believers are charged to make disciples and v. 20 says teaching them is integral to disciple making. This teaching is not fact accumulation, it is teaching that results in obedience. I believe the obedience is not mere legalistic performance, but it is obedience that flows out of deep love for God. Jesus says in John 14:15 “If you love me, you will obey my commandments.” (NET).

Obedience flows out of love for God and love for God flows out of a deep understanding of my alienation from God and His merciful rescue of me.

God gives people as gifts to His church to move each member toward maturity and ministry. The pastor-teacher is central to this process, but Paul describes his work as equipping the saints for the work of the ministry. This equipping that the pastor-teacher does is to bring the truth of scripture to bear on believers in a way that the Holy Spirit uses to move the work of sanctification forward in individual lives. As sanctification proceeds, believers will use their gifts in ministry and will grow in maturity according to Eph 4:12-15. Maturation is pointed toward the goal of being like Christ (v. 15) and being wise—able to discern truth from error (v. 13-14).

Preaching ≠ Teaching

This is transformational (not merely informational) learning. Scripture recognizes two primary ways that truth is operationalized. Those are preaching and teaching. These are not interchangeable although there is some overlap.

To preach is to lay out truth, but it goes further to advocate for truth; to urge its importance and to exhort the audience to accept it, value it, and usually to implement it. When it is done well, preaching includes elements of rhetoric and possibly even flashes of oratory to keep the audience engaged.

To teach is to catalyze an understanding of truth. Teaching today is mostly misunderstood as information transfer, that is teaching is telling. It is because of this confusion that the bar of learning is set so pitifully low. The main result of telling is forgetting. If I do remember, I confuse the superficiality of content retrieval with truly understanding the ideas underlying or embedded in the content. Even conventional wisdom recognizes that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” but this is not even knowledge. Knowledge is justifiable belief and retrieval is not logical justification.

Another way to distinguish preaching and teaching is the extent of audience involvement and participation. Preaching at its best asks the audience to follow an argument derived from a text of scripture. Following an argument is for most in the audience a fairly passive endeavor. I turn to the scripture passage as it is read, I may take notes, but mostly I listen. If I check out mentally, I can usually rejoin the proceedings with minimal consequences.

Teaching at its best requires audience engagement much more directly. It expects active participation in responding to questions which are the engines of thought. In the process of answering a carefully constructed sequence of questions audience members not only follow the argument but reconstruct the argument in their own heads connecting it to their own conceptual framework. This process frequently surfaces misunderstandings or practical application questions which can be addressed in real time or moved to a future teaching session as appropriate.

I do not pit preaching and teaching against each other. I would not argue for replacing preaching with teaching. I think both are necessary as I’ll detail in a moment. What I will argue is that real teaching for transformation is mostly conspicuous for its absence in churches and discipleship is compromised or nullified because of this gap.

A Proper Sermon

Preaching should be preceded by intensive personal wrestling with a text of scripture. The pastor can profit immensely from this effort to properly apply exegetical and hermeneutical principles to determine what the author is saying in a passage. In KJV language the pastor is charged with “rightly dividing the word” —that is, properly declaring what the author intended to communicate.

John Piper says it this way:

“Faithful biblical preaching is what I call expository exultation. The word expository implies teaching and explaining what the Bible actually means. And the word exultation implies that the preacher himself feels and communicates the worth of what he’s seeing.”

The pastor’s private Bible study is the basis for the public proclamation of the passage. Sermon preparation is called homiletics and employs principles of rhetoric to effectively communicate the message. If the pastor has wrestled well, he can rightly declare as he preaches, “thus saith the Lord.”

This public proclamation is a type of telling. It is a lecture and suffers from the same limitations of lectures. The primary reason for communicating in this way is to lay out an argument that has God’s imprimatur. The pastor is the messenger, but the truth is God’s. We are enjoined by scripture to be quick to hear and slow to speak. We are culturally conditioned to interrupt one another, but we dare not interrupt when God is speaking. Let us hear the whole argument without derailing its rhetorical and spiritual force.

The Mainspring of Discipleship

It is after we have listened that it is incumbent on us to interact purposefully with the truth we have heard. This is the mainspring of discipleship. A very small fraction of the congregation will individually pursue further study of the sermon.

The lament of the lecturer to his students, “Don’t you remember- We talked about this?” is also applicable for a sermonizer. The reason is that it wasn’t “we” who talked, it was one-sided communication. How can the congregants move away from forgetful hearer status to those who internalize and act on truth? The answer is in James 1:25—(NET) 25 But the one who peers into the perfect law of liberty and fixes his attention there, and does not become a forgetful listener but one who lives it out—he will be blessed in what he does.

There is no substitute for active individual peering into and fixing attention on the truth. Clever homiletics cannot overcome the passivity intrinsic to listening. A good sermon can inspire many, a great sermon can motivate further study in some, but discipleship calls for a reliable way to immerse as many as possible in structured inquiry and application of the sermon text.

Focused Exegesis

Where is this focused exegesis to take place? There are two possible events in most churches: Sunday School and small groups. I favor small groups as the optimal locus. Wherever you do it at your church, you must do the deeper dive. The gap between sermonizing and discipleship must be closed. The cycle of truth proclamation followed by evaporation must be broken.

9 Marks on Sunday School Options: https://www.9marks.org/journal/dont-be-too-cool-sunday-school/

The 9 Marks organization in an article on small groups recognizes the possibility such groups represent:

“Many churches have chosen to align the teaching/discussion time of a community group with the weekly sermon. This alignment can be helpful, especially if it gives the opportunity for participants to go deeper into the biblical text.”

Then they immediately counter with “Unfortunately, in practice, the model often leads to commentary on the pastor’s sermon rather than engagement with the biblical text itself.”

This is not a defect in small groups, but a failure to train group leaders properly and a failure to produce a series of questions that will move the group into a deeper exegesis of the text replete with practical application questions. These are structural defects. Small groups devolve in unhelpful ways when the leaders fail to understand how to teach. That’s not surprising since there are few models worthy of emulation even among professional educators. Telling is almost universally all that’s expected of teachers. To most it’s all about delivering good content.

The most common problems in small groups are:

1) a surface level discussion driven by the opinions of group members about the sermon itself or an opportunity to air their own opinions about all manner of topics. Here the teacher lets the group members determine the real curriculum. People participate, but God’s word as exposited on Sunday is not the focus. Alternatively,

2) the leader fills the time with a monolog of content about the sermon passage and leaves little or no time for discussion. Accordingly, group members settle back into the passive stance and fail to share and grow. The leader goes deeper with the passage, but not the group members individually.

Optimizing Sunday School

The other place that deeper dives into sermon texts could be done is in Sunday School classes. That’s possible but less likely than small groups to involve class members individually in owning personally the argument the biblical text of the sermon is making. Often Sunday School classes are considerably larger than small groups and this makes individual participation less likely or participation is concentrated only in a few. This can be overcome by a skilled teacher, but it is more challenging than leading a small group.

Sunday School By All images from the F 2076 Alvin D. McCurdy fonds were uploaded as part of the Archives of Ontario’s GLAM Wiki project., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92951735

I think it is appropriate here to recognize that Sunday School has outlived its original intent. Sunday School was developed to meet the challenge of illiteracy among poor children who were unschooled and worked in arduous conditions six days a week. It provided an opportunity to evangelize and catechize children while addressing their illiteracy. In this it was extraordinarily successful. Obviously, we are in a very different place today. Nonetheless, the Sunday School time slot has persisted and can be a significant place for discipleship.

To answer the question, “what is the optimum use of the Sunday School hour?” I need to take a step back first. I am an advocate of expositional preaching for many reasons that are outside of the scope of this podcast. Topical sermons may seem to be more immediately relevant to the congregation. They often center on current events, or they address felt needs or relationship stresses or failures. Unfortunately, it is tempting for topical sermons to psychologize scripture texts.

Topics and Discipleship

Discipleship particularly focuses on systematically internalizing and applying scripture, but there are topics that need to be addressed as well if we are to be effective in making disciples. This is where I think Sunday School should be situated. Topics like marriage and parenting are crucial and are best developed as topics with a focus on helping class members exposit key scripture passages. Evangelism and biblical worldview understanding can help Christians to live wisely enabling them to be salt and light in their communities and work environments.

In my experience there are two major problems that minimize the effectiveness of Sunday School in this topical discipleship mission. Churches often have appropriately high aspirations for Sunday School, but those may die on the vine due to the drought of a dry and dusty curriculum or the droning of ineffective teachers.

The 9 Marks organization has a promising free overview course of the New Testament that is a 26 week class in what they call their Core Seminars. Here are the first two objectives that they list as the purpose and summary of the course:

“To understand the big picture of each book of the New Testament. [More like a flight across the country than a family cross-country road trip]. We will avoid getting caught up in the minor details, but we’ll see the scenery change as we fly over different books.
To understand the continuity between the books in the NT.”

Understanding is the right goal and understanding the big picture framework of the New Testament is a worthy aspiration to underpin biblical thinking. However, it is one thing to assert that students will understand and quite another to craft a path that will reliably result in understanding.

Continuing at the 9 Marks site we’re told that “our course is structured to discuss different aspects of the King and the Kingdom.” This is not a discussion course, however. The teacher will present these different aspects and the class members will fill out worksheets. This will be telling as teaching. The amount of material per lesson is such that a devotion to coverage means that there won’t be any time for discussion.

Not only that, but in a piece authored by pastor Jonathan Leeman on the 9 Marks site in a piece ironically titled “Don’t be Afraid to Teach” we’re told this:

“For the most part, the teacher teaches. He may ask questions and take questions, but the majority of the time is spent downloading content.”

That’s telling, not teaching. This is not an isolated example. Later on the same page Leeman says this approach “leaves the Sunday school hour free to download content. Lots of content. Lots of really, really good content.” The trouble is that you can’t download content into people. The coverage model is based on a mythology sometimes known as the jug to mug model.

Teaching As Persuasive Dialog

In contrast to the naivete that views teaching as downloading content, real teaching is inherently a dialog; the teacher and the student are talking to each other. The transformation that discipleship is aiming at comes from persuasion as we all interact with the truth—with ideas and not mere “content.” Yuval Levin recently commented about the power of persuasion in his encounters with the writings of C.S. Lewis.

“I think Lewis is incredible at recognizing that what you do when you try to persuade someone is enter their consciousness, enter their thinking in an inviting way, in an open-armed way, and try to show them themselves in a mirror in a way they recognize, and then show them something that they ought to change.”

The ideal in these encounters is a two-way conversation where the persuasion is tailored to the questions and push back the growing disciple is facing. Even in the absence of verbal feedback an effective teacher reads the non-verbals, the body language, of the student and alters the interaction accordingly. In a group setting this adaptive approach to a subset of the class that is responding can improve the persuasion for those who are silent and/or hard to read. That’s the power of small groups. Someone else may articulate the very question that I’m still struggling to frame.

This all means that there is no mass scale batch-processing of disciples. Disciple making is intrinsically individual and personal. There are many reasons why Jesus chose twelve as his disciples and why he sometimes narrowed that group to the inner circle of Peter, James, and John. Jesus modeled disciple making with small groups. His norm was to go deeper—explaining the import and application of truth he had preached to the masses. That’s a lesson all believers need to implement.

Note: The free 9 Marks curriculum [core seminars] mentioned above is in some ways better than most. It could provide a good basis for adult classes, but the lessons would need to be rewritten to emphasize a few major ideas and couch them as a series of questions that would provoke discussion to surface concepts and connect them logically to answer the questions. No curriculum is a substitute for a teacher who is adept at leading focused discussions through probing questions. For more on questions, see season 5 of my podcast starting here.