I’ve highlighted what I consider to be a discipleship crisis, where we separate discipleship from ‘life’ and we struggle to live Christianly. I’ve then tried to outline five reasons why our faith has grown shallower. It’s important to try and understand problems before we try to solve them. I’d welcome pushback on that sketch of a thesis.
Before I move on to considering how we might deepen out faith, I’d like to consider what discipleship—which I’m going to call ‘Christian formation’ as I think that’s a clearer term—involves. How are we formed towards Jesus? In three ways, each of which is important for us to understand.
Most sketches of formation that I come across go one of three ways. The most common evangelical route is to suggest that it’s all about learning. This is what the word ‘disciple’ means, so that seems like safe ground. Typically, people mean learning in the sense of cognitively gaining information, like you might learn in school, we’re talking about developing your mind. This has two unfortunate consequences, firstly it suggests that Christianity is for clever people, and secondly it suggests that perhaps there might be an exam. It makes ‘formation’ about learning the Bible and theology.
Of course, these are important, and wildly unvalued in charismatic circles. I founded a journal to help charismatics think, I’m on board with the idea that our minds should be being formed into the likeness of Jesus. An element of that will be the acquisition of knowledge—even in the formal sense we picture, perhaps—but that’s not the whole story. We need to be able to talk about forming our minds towards Jesus. This will include learning the Bible, but also how to read it—which is more like learning how to play the piano, it requires practice—and how to take every thought captive (REF). Cognitive learning is good, it’s just not the whole story.
There’s another strand of evangelicalism, more common in charismatic circles, which talks about formation as primarily about your heart. Here the ‘learning’—though calling it that would be unusual—is about finding the sin you need to repent of, rooting out ‘idols,’ and understanding the motivations behind your actions so you can change. This can either be coded as a very serious and introspective approach where we reflect on ourselves a lot, or as a more experiential approach where we aim to change in a dramatic encounter with Jesus. Both of these can be good things, though both can become unbalanced easily.
At its best the charismatic tradition does well here, at its worst we ape the language and categories of contemporary psychology and offer a sort of therapy-lite that is a less effective form of the secular thing (which is helpful for some conditions and people, but a long way from all).
The third strand, which I don’t hear so much but have written on a fair bit myself, is about what you do and who you do it with. This is to see formation as driven by habits and by communities. We are formed by the things we do and keep doing. We are formed by the people we do them with. James K. A. Smith’s cultural liturgies project is a key example here, though he is weaker on the community element. It’s been a much-needed corrective in the discourse, but Smith can sometimes talk as though the only way we’re formed is habitually, which is an overstatement.
What I’m trying to do is say yes to these three strands and say that these are all ways we learn and so are all vital to Christian formation. I suspect we commonly emphasise one, leading to an over-emphasis. For those familiar with it, this might sound a bit like a Framean epistemological triad. That’s because it is.
To put it tritely, we are formed towards Jesus with our heads, our hearts, and our hands. We change what we think, feel, and do. Chase Davis, in his book Trinitarian Formation, calls them ‘Doctrine, Devotion, and Duty,’ which is a touch clearer than head-heart-hands.
Our formation requires all of these elements. Most of us will operate this way subconsciously and our churches will move in all three. My argument is that this is natural, not novel, but that if we think in these categories we’ll stop suggesting ‘solutions’ that only revolve around one.
Lots of people have written to me saying they agree with my discipleship crisis thesis and the answer is ‘more teaching,’ or ‘get your preaching right.’ Of course that is part of the answer, but the suggestion that we just need to do one thing is magical thinking. It seems like most are just thinking of our heads, our doctrine, we are whole persons and need to be approached like we are. Of course encountering Jesus in the preached word can change your ‘heart’ too, and teach you what to do with your ‘hands’ but that doesn’t seem to be what people are suggesting.
It helps with your preaching too. If you’re thinking about application (carefully) then thinking that you want to apply things that people should think, feel, and do differently is helpful.
In my next few posts, I’d like to dig a little deeper into our need to act like Christians (habit and community), to feel like Christians (living into a story), and to think like Christians (forming our minds). I think if we get these things in kilter, it’ll solve everything.
No, that’s a lie. It won’t solve everything. That’s the wrong way of thinking. It will mean we’re in kilter and will find the hard journey of learning to follow Jesus pushes us forwards in all of our lives.
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