American
Christianity suffers incredibly from the disease of intellectual weakness. Mark
A. Knoll writes, “Taken together, American evangelicals display many virtues
and do many things well, but built-in barriers to productive thinking remain
substantial.”[1]
Ever since I can remember, I have heard more than one pastor caution about
trying to present issues, doctrines, or concepts that are far too meaty for
their community, and that we must first give people the milk before we put them
on the meat. Some of these pastors have been pastoring those churches for 5,
10, and even 30 years. And they are still worried about asking their congregants
to use their mind a little more than they have in the past. I think I
understand why this is the case, but we will come back to that toward my
summary.
One has to look
no further than the lack of interest in or commitment to the deliberate
training of young men for future ministry. We put our money into missions, into
evangelism, into social programs and such that produce immediate feel-good
results. But we seem to shy away from anything that might require a little
effort, some patience, or a little hard work. Has the church become a mirror of
the intellectual sloth we see in the culture? Sadly, I think she has. More
often than not, the local Christian community is little more than a mirror of
the culture in which it finds itself, priorities, values, and all.
What about this
complaint that we have to give people milk? Is this a legitimate concern? Do we
try to take people too deep when we make an effort to help them understand
something about how divine revelation serves as the basis for Christian truth?
Is it so difficult to look up metaphysics or epistemology in a dictionary or
encyclopedia? Is it just too hard to follow when an alternative view is
presented so that we can understand what is wrong with it? I don’t think so and
I don’t think Scripture would support taking such a shallow and intellectually
lazy approach to discipleship either. Whatever happened to new believer
classes? Should we consider a program that separates those who have been around
for a while from those who have not so that both groups receive the appropriate
training and education? I think that only makes sense. But what about those who
have been in Christ for 10-20-30 years and who are obviously capable of understanding but still
require milk? What I think is that they need a swift kick in the pants. What
about them? Honestly, they are not on my list of concerns. If someone has been
around for 20 years and they still know more about the current television
programs and fantasy football and politics than they do about Scripture, I must
confess I have little hope that they will ever care about equipping themselves
for Christ. They will give an account to God for they’re laziness, not that
they care about that at all because if they did, I suspect they would have
already done something about it.
Christian
leaders, beginning with pastors, have to stop worrying about numbers and
attendance and finances and begin to focus on the things that Scripture commands
them to focus on. Every church should have a 1:1 discipleship program and every
believer, especially new believer should have a spiritual mentor that they meet
with and talk to regularly. This should not be a group meeting and it most
definitely should be more than a check-the-box coffee meeting. Moreover,
someone should be actively managing that program, providing oversight to the
mentors so that they appreciate the work they are doing. On the one hand you do
not want to overload your mentors while at the same time you do want to be in
regular communication with them. They should each be assigned an elder to work
with. Finally, there should be some separate class in the church specifically
geared toward those who are less than one year in the way. This class should be
designed to cover the basics of Christian teaching and praxis. The discipleship
relationship covers both of these as well but emphasizes praxis while the new
believer class emphasizes doctrine.
The question I
have is why is this type of structure absent from just about every church in
existence? Instead, we offer a variety of classes and leave it to the new
believer to pick one just like they would at the shopping mall. We also leave
it to the new believer and other mature believers to pursue discipleship
relationships. The structure is not just loose; it is non-existent. The Church
needs to focus on those who are new believers, say less than a year and those
who are beyond that and should be progressing in the faith. But the sad truth
is that we have believers that have been in the church 30 years who cannot even
articulate the gospel. Most of them could not utter a single word about the
history of the bible. Very few could have an informed conversation around the
importance of believing that the Bible is the self-attesting sole authority of
the Christian faith. This is not just pitiful, not just embarrassing, it is
scandalous. To the pastor who tolerates such lethargy in his congregation, and
in his leadership, I want to ask what right do you have to take the souls of
other men under your care? I acknowledge this is strong language, but isn’t
that part of the problem. We don’t use strong enough language to counteract
apathy in places where apathy has no business existing. Persistent immaturity
in the Christian community can be pinned mostly on the leadership. Now, I will
admit that the community will shrink when spiritual growth is expected because
such expectations will weed out false converts. But isn’t that the point?
Paul grumbles
to the Corinthians that he was not able to speak to them as to men, mature in
the faith, but rather he had to speak to them as if they were infants. Paul
founded the church at Corinth sometime around 50 and left the work there
sometime around the spring of 51. He wrote this letter to the Corinthians in
55. This was a church plant in 50 and Paul expected her to be mature within 5
years. One should keep in mind that these folks had nowhere near the resources
that modern Christians have. Yet Paul was very stern in his rebuke of the
immature congregation. The writer to the Hebrews issues his audience virtually
the very same rebuke. His opinion was that this community should have been
teachers by now but they were still on the elementary things.
There is a need
for milk to be a regular component within the community insofar as there are
new believers regularly being added to the community. I would never argue
otherwise. However, leadership has to take the command to disciple and care for
those over whom God has made them overseer far more seriously. Saying you take
it seriously pastor does not make it so. What we need to see are the signs or
the evidence that pastors and leaders are taking serious the issue of spiritual
growth in the congregation. It begins with discipleship and a focused,
structured platform that provides for the training of all Christians and also
incorporates the kind of accountability, respect, and appreciation it deserves.
What is the
real problem? Is it the difficulty or the abstract nature of the doctrine or
subject we are talking about or is it something else? For some reason,
Christians appear to think that Bible study should be easy. Americans spend
just under three hours a day watching TV. That is approximately 20 hours of TV
per week. Look at it this way: Americans spend 20% of their waking life watching TV.
If you live to be 80 years old, that means you will spend approximately 10 years watching TV. Now, I don’t have anything against watching TV. I watch my
share. But I do have an issue with biblically inept people watching 20 hours of
TV per week and then complaining that the lesson was over their head.
I don't believe
this problem is a simple one even if it appears I am being overly simplistic
about it. Part of the issue is spiritual leaders who are without much
conviction or courage in how they lead their people. A leader without
conviction is a leader without courage. He will not take the stand and exhibit
the passion necessary to stimulate or inspire or confront his people to make
the personal sacrifices necessary to know God by spending the time and energy
required to understand the Bible. He is worried that people may leave if his
church is that kind of church.
Another problem is the amount of trash-talk that has been involved in the need
to know abstract things like doctrine or perhaps apologetics. Doctrine has been
belittled and attacked for a few decades now and that attack has done its work.
We have a lot of ignorant people in the church where the Bible is concerned.
They know and understand very little of its content and nearly nothing about
its nature and history. Another major contributor to this problem is the need
for immediate gratification. People view the weekly church service as something
that is supposed to give them an emotional reboot, to make them feel good, to
inspire them to have a good week, kind of like a pick-me-up sort of gathering. In
essence, American Christians see the weekly service as revolving around them
and their “felt needs.” To them, being a better employee, getting promoted,
being a better parent, a better person, succeeding on and off the job are all
things involved in being a better Christian. There is no connection between the
purifying and heart-cleansing word of truth and spiritual growth.
The only way
that the issue of spiritual immaturity and the problem of biblical knowledge
can be addressed is if the leaders actually believe it is important. And you
will see when leadership thinks this is important by the steps they take to
address it. Preaching a sermon where it is mentioned once in a while is not an
indication that the pastor or leadership thinks it is important. What must
happen requires a degree of deliberateness and focus. It isn’t a bible study
that will solve this. It has to do with the very structure and fiber of the
church. It touches everything from sermons to Sunday school to the very
structure and organization of that body. Spiritual lethargy is not difficult to
spot if one is looking for it. There is no real discipleship program; No new
believers class; No focus on spiritual growth and true personal accountability.
There is no outreach either locally or globally. Missions is never or rarely a
topic that is broached. Evangelism simply is ignored. There is very little true
community. And apologetics is so foreign to such environments it is hardly
worth mentioning. Nevertheless, all these things are supposed to be the dynamic
fruit of every congregation. The members of the church are unengaged with the
culture from a Christian perspective. They may be able to tell what President
Obama is doing but could not provide hardly one story about something going on
someplace in Christendom.
The Christian is
commanded to have a superior mind and not to be conformed to this world (Rom.
12:2). Paul commands the Corinthians to become sober-minded, and stop sinning.
He then charges some of them with no knowledge of God and says that he speaks
this to their shame (1 Cor. 15:34). Shame was something to be avoided just
about more than any other single thing in that culture. The command to come out
of their drunken stupor and to stop sinning caps his argument in this unit. The
stupor would refer to a benighted worldliness and a lack of spiritual
awareness. Philo (Drunk. 38 §154)
defines drunkenness in the soul as “ignorance of things of which we should
naturally have acquired knowledge.”[2]
What we call “people needing milk” Paul calls a drunken stupor and shameful. Ignorance of God will naturally lead to immoral living. In this case, patience is not a virtue; it is a scandal of apathy and in many cases a lack of courage.
What we call “people needing milk” Paul calls a drunken stupor and shameful. Ignorance of God will naturally lead to immoral living. In this case, patience is not a virtue; it is a scandal of apathy and in many cases a lack of courage.
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