We are in a discipleship crisis. Caused, perhaps, by the many other crises in the air, but here in the UK our faith is shallow.
To be more precise: our churches are not forming us into deep and rich faith.
I’ve been writing around this for a while, but I don’t think we’re talking about it enough. There are, of course, wonderful exceptions of individuals with deep and rich faith. You, dear friend, may well be among them. May Jesus continue to draw you towards himself.
There are even exceptions among churches, but in my circles less than we’d like. I don’t think this is for want of trying, and I hope most Pastors would recognise what I’m describing. I do think there are things we can do about this, though many of them aren’t ‘solutions’ because solutions are what got us here, and all of them are long-haul approaches. Perhaps we can change the face of Christianity in this nation by at best an inch or two in our lifetimes, but think of the fruit that could be borne a century or two downstream if we try. That’s a life worth living.
When I say our faith is shallow, what do I mean?
Broadly, that we have problems in three areas. Each I’ve touched on before, but I’ve not knit them together like this.
Life
Our lives look the same as our neighbours. Our habits and the rhythms of our households look the same as everyone else of our social class who lives in our place. When we turn to more structural things, from the shape of the household to the objects we purchase and what we do for a living, we all again look pretty similar.
I don’t think we’re supposed to.
Our churches don’t teach what a household or Christian life looks like in terms of real physical things. Many of us are good at habits of individual devotion—and I suspect if my neighbours knew I rose at six in the morning to read the Bible and pray that would seem strange, and I’m not unusual at all—and many of our churches have been good at teaching them. We’ve been less good at getting people to change how they live.
To take an example: churches have generally been good at teaching people to give their money away to levels that would appal our neighbours—and that explains how they can afford all those nice holidays—we need that for everything else.
Is this overstated? A little. I can name multiple ways that my rhythm of life makes no sense to my neighbours. “But why do you feed 12 people every Wednesday?” I remember when the builder questioned the need for the size of our dining-kitchen and we explained, he asked “are they family?” Sort of.
But we aren’t that radical. Well, I did once change jobs so I could go to a prayer meeting, so maybe I am that radical.
There are examples of radical living all over the place, but they aren’t that widespread. In the last week I watched a video of a church’s 50 anniversary celebration: it extolled the kindness of God to them over those five decades and was glorious. I was struck by the early radicalism of the new church pioneers in the 70s and 80s. We don’t hear many stories like this anymore. We’ve all got respectable.
I’ve also spoken with two young people who are saying essentially, ‘I’d love to do something really radical for God but I don’t know what.’ As I write, one of them has a plan and the other doesn’t. So it’s not because we’ve ‘cooled’ generationally or anything, though I’m sure the times have something to do with it. The striking thing was that they were struggling for options.
We don’t all need to be firebrands, but we need firebrands to help us all turn the temperature up.
Community
We live in a cultural moment of fractured community. It’s difficult to get to know other people and we’re not used to inviting others into our households. We struggle to live alongside others, whether we mean physically or emotionally in the sense of appropriate and healthy vulnerability without turning all our relationships into faux-therapy sessions.
We also live at the end of a centuries long degrading of friendship. If friendship is the love of kingdom, Christians should be the people who are good at friendship. In the mild sense, we are. I know a lot more people than my average colleague. Helen’s colleagues always used to comment when she’d say a friend was helping with x or had offered us y, that she had a lot of friends. They were, of course, folk from our church.
Where we struggle more is being advocates for the full-throated friendships. The deep and life-giving David-and-Jonathan friendships. The two or three lads you’d die for. Your Inklings. Some people have this, but we don’t talk about it or how to do it well. Especially for men there’s an epidemic of friendlessness and our specific cultural winds make it harder than it is for women and harder than it was for men in the past.
The church is supposed to be the answer to all of this. In patches it is. I think we need to go further and deeper. We talk a great talk about this, but our follow through often leaves something to be desired.
Again, we need those who plough a furrow we can all walk in and live in the good of.
Mind
Christians don’t know the faith. I’m fairly sure that if I took an average group of Christians in charismatic evangelical churches and asked them to walk me through a statement of Christian faith—let’s say the Apostle’s Creed—that they’d struggle. What can they say about core doctrines like the Ascension or the Descent? Probably very little.
We haven’t systematically catechised people in generations. It’s not their fault that they don’t know: no one has told them and no one has told them that maybe this is stuff that most Christians should know. While what we should consider normal is related to ability and situation, I think we should expect much more than we do.
We seem content to affirm people in God’s love for them (wonderful!) and then leave them there (not wonderful) rather than teach them what the writer to the Hebrews calls ‘meat.’ Even his list of ‘milk’ includes some things that some Christians might struggle with.
This is not an attempt to insult new Christians or those who are just keeping their heads above water. But I do question why our churches don’t develop the minds of those who’ve been Christians for decades, or why we don’t teach new Christians the basics.
When you take the time to sit with people and open the Bible, over years and not just in Sunday worship, slowly they will develop a taste for it. The deep things of God whet the appetite.
A Crisis
I could name many examples of those who are bucking the trend in each of these areas, but at least in charismatic evangelical circles I fear that the trend is real. I’d love to be wrong. I think we’ve lost our edge.
Combine these three issues together and you reach a problem of discipleship. We’ve become comfortable. I think churches should be thinking deeply about formation, about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Some of this is becoming trendy again, at least, through John Mark Comer’s work.
I’ve written around these issues here at nuakh a fair bit. None of these are surprising themes to regular readers. I’m intending to try and get under these ideas a bit by intentionally writing into them. I’m going to try to explore the ‘crisis’ in a couple more posts, then delve into why this might be the case, and then explain what ‘formation’ is as I understand and how it’s meant to work. It’s entirely unsurprising that these three areas go together in my opinion.
Then, assuming my own steam and my readers’ patience hasn’t run out I’d like to look at these areas in turn and explores some suggestions and provocations on how to deepen our faith.
Photo by Vance Osterhout on Unsplash
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