Category: Catechesis

“We don’t need more Christians,” or “The Christian Bubble”

bubble“What a lot of us are saying in our private discussions is that we don’t need more Christians.”

A prominent theologian and leader in the evangelical world said that to me recently, and it took me by surprise. He went on to explain a scenario that sounded like several of the other “bubbles” we’ve seen recently.

Remember the dot-com bubble? Or the real estate bubble? In both cases, things got artificially inflated beyond a level of sustainability, and then they burst with a messy splat all over the people holding them. A bubble can go on growing for a while, but ultimately, every bubble is doomed to burst.

This Christian leader was telling me that American Christianity has blown up one of those bubbles, and we’re due for a pretty messy bubble-bursting at some point in the near future.

How we ended up with a bubble

The great Christian movement is a result of discipleship. Jesus called disciples. Then he sent his disciples to “make disciples.” Those disciples made more disciples, and on and on. Discipleship is the lifeblood of the church. [1]

As this Christian leader pointed out to me, the primary location for discipleship throughout history has been the home (see “The Best Children’s Ministry in Town“). And when not in the home, in another setting of intimate, mentoring relationships–à la Jesus with his disciples.

And so, in American Christianity–where providing more activities and drawing large crowds have clearly taken precedence over intimate discipleship–we run into a problem:

Essentially, we have a large number of professing Christians, but very few disciples, few leaders, few who see themselves as pastors, or have any expectation of becoming pastors.

In a culture where “church” is more often associated with attending and “shopping” than serious, intimate discipleship, we largely see ministry as something done by a few (e.g. those on stage or those hired to do it) for the masses to consume.

When the ratio of serious disciples to mere attenders gets this far out of balance, you end up with something unsustainable. There simply aren’t enough equipped Christian disciples and pastors who are able to transfer the faith to the next generation. That bubble can keep growing for a while, but eventually it will burst. If you’ve seen some of the shocking statistics about how few youth and young adults are active in the Church today, you know that we may now be seeing signs of collapse. If you see the even more staggering statistics about how much of the church’s giving today is coming from those ages 55 and over, it will show you just how quickly a collapse could come.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about this brilliantly in Discipleship [affiliate link–I highly recommend this new translation]. You should read at least the first chapter on “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” He wrote that in 1937 in Germany. Seventy-five years later, we can look at German Christianity and see the steep decline he expected.

Leaders dealing with the bubble

If you’re a leader of a congregation that has been around longer than you, there’s a decent chance you came into leadership of a congregation that has a lot of Christians, but not a lot of disciples. Your congregation might look a lot like that bubble.

If that’s the case, what do you do? If you devote most of your time to personally discipling a few leaders, will the rest jump ship because they’re not receiving what they want (enough interesting programs and variety; a well-crafted, entertaining weekend event…)?

For anyone living in a bubble, there’s a great fear that we must keep the bubble going. It can’t burst on our watch, or we’ll take a lot of the blame.

And how do you keep a bubble going?

The going wisdom would be to keep doing what created the bubble in the first place… and hope to get out before it bursts. There are surely American pastors right now looking at the financial numbers and wondering whether they’ll have reached retirement before the financial bottom falls out.

The courageous thing to do–the risky thing to do–the most promising thing to do for the sake of the Christian movement–is to invest in the substance that will allow long-term growth. Invest in genuine, intimate discipleship. As much as possible.

That’s courageous because it will come with a cost. You’ll almost surely have to shift your focus from some of the fluffy and flashy options that the bubble-people like.

That makes it risky. It’s likely to lead to a short-term loss in numbers, and in money. It starts slower. Intimate, dedicated discipleship takes time. And it makes high demands of people. Demands that are likely to scare a lot of them away. Remember Jesus asking his disciples, “You do not want to leave too, do you?”

But this investment is the most promising. Attractive, flashy, and fluffy can draw big, excited crowds. For decades even. And it’s not just fluffy that works. People can come and get good, deep substance, but if we don’t require anything more from them, the masses generally won’t go further than to listen and enjoy the good, deep substance. None of that transfers. It creates a bubble, then keeps trying to sustain it until the pop. But if you invest in the discipleship of a few, you invest in a few who can (and are expected to) transfer that faith to a few more, who go to a few more, then a few more. You won’t amaze anyone with the mega-church you build in five years’ time. But the movement that comes out of it–the number of genuine Christian pastors and apostles who come down from that lineage–can be staggering.

Was the Christian leader I mentioned at the start saying that we shouldn’t evangelize? Not at all! He’s quite an advocate for evangelism. What he was saying is that we need to be converting people into real, legitimate disciples. And we already have a huge number of un-discipled Christians on our hands. We need to be converting the pagans and the Christians, alike. Just getting people to say they’re Christian doesn’t cut it, and we’re about to start feeling that.

Notes

[1] Hear these statements as penultimate. Ultimately, and without question, the great Christian movement is a result of God’s love in Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the lifeblood of the Church.

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How to memorize lots of Scripture

psalm 8 initials
psalm 8 initials
A screen shot of one of my Anki cards

Memorizing Scripture is one of the best Bible studies I ever do. When you memorize Scripture, you have to think about it in a different way than when you read. To help your memory, you have to pay attention to the exact language being used and might find yourself thinking about why a certain word is (or isn’t) used and repeated. And you’ll also need to pay a lot of attention to sentence and paragraph structures — noticing the progression the passage takes and how it transitions from one piece to the next. It forces you to study the Bible inductively.

Pastors: memorizing my sermon text has been the most important part of my sermon preparation. I’ve had to live with the text and notice all its details long before I preach it. And it’s also nice to have the passage freely available in my mind as I go about the week — thinking about it in the car, the shower, waiting in line, etc.

How I used to memorize Scripture

Here’s how I used to memorize Scripture. I’d pick a verse – a small, nice quotable piece – and I’d write it down and rehearse it over and over again until I had it down. If I spent a lot of time working on it, I could memorize six or seven verses in a week. If I wasn’t careful to come back to them, I’d forget them pretty quickly.

How I memorize Scripture now

Then someone shared something that changed my whole approach to Scripture memory. They had me take a larger chunk – a full passage rather than single verse – and turn it into initials. (I’ll show you what I mean below.) I worked on a few verses at a time until I could say the full passage using only the initials as my guide. Then from there, I began to discard the initials and work on full memory.

For some reason, that intermediate step of working from initials made a huge difference. I think it also helped to begin looking at Scripture memory in terms of whole passages rather than single verses. The memorization served a deeper purpose, too, as it opened up the depth of these passages to me in whole new ways. It also helped me to see I could work through pretty large chunks, amounts I didn’t think were possible to memorize.

Step by Step

So here’s what I would suggest you do.

1. Choose a passage.

For a week, I usually set 9 verses as my lower limit and 19 as my upper limit. Less than 9 seems a bit too slow and easy. More than 19 starts to get daunting. Let’s choose Psalm 8 for an example. It’s a beautiful psalm, and one of the most oft-quoted. And it’s just 9 verses. I use the new NIV version, so that’s what you’ll see below.

2. Initial the passage.

See Psalm 8 in NIV here. You might want to have it alongside as you read this.

I take the first letter of each word, and create a card with only those first letters. Here’s how Psalm 8:1-4 looks for me:

Psalm 8 – You made them rulers   [I always title my passages]

Ftdom. Atg. ApoD.   [Yes, I also do the prefaces to the psalms]

1 – L, oL,
hmiyniate!

Yhsyg
ith.
2 – Ttpocai
yheasaye,
tstfata.
3 – WIcyh,
twoyf,
tmats,
wyhsip,
4 – wimtyamot,
hbtycft?

Notice that I preserve all the formatting and punctuation of the passage. That’s important and helps break it up.

3. Break it up into three parts.

If I’m working on something over the course of a week, I spend the first three days on initials, the next three days memorizing the three parts individually, and the final day pulling it all together.

Psalm 8 is nine verses long. I’d break this up into three verses per day, but that leaves a bit of an awkward break at verses 3 and 4. So here, I’d probably break it like this:

Part 1 – verses 1-4
Part 2 – verses 5-8
Part 3 – verse 9 (a nice, light ending)

4. Begin memorizing

On day 1, I learn part 1, using the initials as my aid. I work on the verses for the day until I can do the whole thing by only looking at the initials. Same for days 2 and 3 (reviewing, of course, the previous days).

On day 4, I learn part 1 from memory. I use my initials as an aid until I can quote the section without my initials. Same for days 5 and 6 (reviewing, of course, the previous days). On day 7, I work on quoting the whole passage from memory.

5. Keeping it

The hardest part of memory is the first part – memorizing it in the first place. If you memorize something, then don’t review it to maintain, you’ve done all the hard work for temporary benefit, when a little bit of review could have made it permanent.

If you want a structured way for learning and then reviewing these, I highly recommend Anki software. Download it onto your computer, and then you’ll probably want to watch a quick tutorial video or two to understand how to use it. Anki is the best memory tool I’ve ever seen. I’m using it for Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, a catechism, and Bible memory, and it has been excellent for all. At its core, the principle is to identify things you’re struggling to memorize and show them to you more often, and to show you things increasingly less often as you go — essentially reminding you of it just before you might have forgotten it.

So for a week, I create 7 Anki cards. It doesn’t take much time with some copy and paste work. The first 3 cards show the initials on the front and the full passage on the back. The last 4 cards for the week show only the passage title on the front and the full passage on back. Play with Anki for a while. You’ll get it. And I think you’ll love it.

How about it? Give it a try for a week. Why don’t you start with Psalm 8? I think you’ll be surprised. And I think you’ll get a lot from it. I’d love to hear how you do. Or hear if you have more questions.

See my Facebook Page linked on the side? Click “Like,” and you’ll be able to join some of the discussion there.

Building a Discipling Culture

building disciplingI’m just beginning Building a Discipling Culture (affiliate link) by Mike Breen and Steve Cockram of 3DM, and already I’m intrigued by a number of the quotes. Several relate to things I’ve been writing about recently. I’m posting here a few quotes, followed by links to my posts on similar topics. I’d love to hear what you think about these.

If you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples.

Most of us have become quite good at the church thing. And yet, disciples are the only thing that Jesus cares about.

The first half here is profound, and I suspect, true. The second half makes me a little uneasy. A bit the same way I felt in “When ‘Missional Church’ gets too outwardly focused.” Does it go too far to say Jesus only cares about disciples?

Now try this:

Effective discipleship builds the church, not the other way around. We need to understand the church as the effect of discipleship and not the cause. If you set out to build the church, there is no guarantee you will make disciples. It is far more likely that you will create consumers who depend on the spiritual services that religious professionals provide.

Again, profound and quite true, I think. Is this how we look at the relationship between church and discipleship? Yes, they’re a bit reciprocal. But is it best to see the church more as the effect of discipleship? That’s what I’m pushing for in “The disciples became apostles.”

Also, I’m glad they’re calling out our tendency to create consumers rather than disciples. Offer the Gospel!

And finally, there’s this interesting piece:

Now one of the buzzwords around today is the word ‘missional.’ People want to create missional churches or missional programs or missional small groups.

The problem is that we don’t have a ‘missional’ problem or a leadership problem in the Western church. We have a discipleship problem. If you know how to disciple people well, you will always get mission. Always. You see, somewhere along the way we started separating being ‘missional’ from being a disciple, as if somehow the two could be separated. Pastors started saying they didn’t want to be inwardly-focused so they stopped investing in the people in their churches so they could focus on people outside their churches.

Our problem isn’t about leadership or being “missional”; it’s about discipleship. I can’t disagree.

Some early, thought-provoking thoughts from a book I think I can already commend to you. What do you think about these?

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