Why spiritual growth might be harder in the West

For the last few weeks I've been meeting with a group of up and coming leaders in our church. They are leading a study around John Piper's When I Don't Desire God. In other centuries and on other continents, spiritual growth and multiplication is assumed and visible from the earliest days of Christian life.

We were puzzling over why that is not the case in the West. One brother, from the East who was converted in the West, mused that it was because we were ignorant and unaware of the nature of Biblical Christianity - - struggle, warfare, and growth go together. He really hit the nail on the head when he essentially stated that a call to discipleship and not just to belief is viewd as an addition to the Gospel, only because we have been proclaiming a Gospel that has subtracted all of the hard elements of the Christian life. I responded with the thought that "the Christian life" lived by Christ is normally viewed under the rubric "obedience", when in our Catechism and the Scriptures it is viewed under the rubric "humiliation" and "suffering service." One brother pointed to Job as the model and we chuckled how a PR campaign for the Christian life would look like with Job as the poster child!!

I had a feeling Newbigin would have some helpful insights, and lo and behold, he did:

The most famous and influential statement of the rights of man, however, defines them as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. there is reason to think that what was originally intended was 'public happiness,' that is to saythe happiness that comes from participating as free men and women in the management of public affairs. in practice, however, the pursuit of happiness without this definition came to be seen as the right of all people. Happiness is, of course, a word with multiple meanings. The question, 'what is true happiness?' can only be finally answered on the basis of the answer to another question: What is the chief end of man? But the age of reason had banished teleology from its way of understanding the world, and so 'happiness' had no definition except what each autonomous individual might give it. Moreover, there is a further element of pathos in this idea of the right to the pursuit of happiness. Medieval people believed with great seriousness that final happiness lay on the other side of death. They did not expect it in its fulness on this earth. But the methods of modern science provide no grounds for belief that there is anything beyond death. Hence, the whole freight of human happiness has to be carried in the few short and uncertain years that are allowed to us before death ends it all. The quest for happiness becomes that much more hectic, more fraught with anxiety that it was to the people of the Middle Ages. Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, pp. 26-27

Abraham, Job, David, Daniel, Jeremiah, Jesus, and medieval saints had a strong teleology operating. They could look past (e.g. Jesus Heb. 12.2-3) temporary pain/angst/uncertainty because certain things were certain. Perhaps now, we are certain of our entitlement to present victory/joy/satisfaction and uncertain of "the weight of glory." The weight of sufferings is ever near and the weight of glory doesn't register on our scale. The Western scale has been calibrated on the pursuit of happiness rather than a pursuit of persevering, enduring, and saving faith. Maybe that is why we have an anemic and whiney faith.

Hi, my name is Shawn and I'm addicted to the pursuit of happiness.

Do you know how to reproduce?

People who walk past our family (with four boys, and now a baby girl puppy) in our local mall will never ask us this question!! Our kids even like to form a line like "crack the whip" which makes us few friends among our fellow shoppers!

This questions haunts me when it comes to church and discipleship. Recently I've been gripped by the need and desire to see disciples made of our existing and future church community. Our church and presbytery is quite keen on reproducing churches to reach Canada for Christ. But it has been hard going with mixed results.

Over at World Changers I came across this stunning quote that I want to unpack in this post:

“If you can’t reproduce disciples, you can’t reproduce leaders.
If you can’t reproduce leaders, you can’t reproduce churches.
If you can’t reproduce churches, you can’t reproduce movements.”
Neil Cole

Our church has had both a dearth and death of leadership in its 18 year history. One of the reasons, I now believe, stems from the inability (for whatever reason) to reproduce disciples. In our small churches getting adherents is a thrill, adding members causes us to swoon, and to produce a disciple we would say "Beam me up Jesus. My life is complete."

In their book, No Man Left Behind, Patrick Morley, David Delk, and Brett Clemmer state "We pray for disciples and make workers" when instead we should "Make disciples and pray for workers." Trying to get our slots filled is deadly competition for our real mandate of the Great Commission that must and will be fulfilled.

As I've done a lot of reading about this phenomenon lately I'm convinced that it's possibly (how's that for humilty) a lack of a conceptual map of what a progression of discipleship would look like.

Dennis Bennett, Training Consultant at the PCA's EQUIP for Ministry mag offers this map:

Level 1 Searching: UNSAVED Being nurtured along and is very interested in spiritual things
Level 2 Believing: NEW CHRISTIAN Immature, needing nurturing
Level 3 Growing: ACTIVELY GROWING personally, but not involved in ministry
Level 4 Becoming: SPIRITUALLY MATURING needs now to be trained to disciple new believers
Level 5 Serving: SPIRITUALLY MATURE train to disciple to others ( A-C)
Level 6 Leading: SPIRITUALLY MATURE should be leading the Church (A-F)

A few questions might help us use this map and address the needs concretely:

• How long will we let a person call themselves "a new Christian"?
• What signs of growth would we be looking for? Regular attendance? Small group participation? Tithing? Witnessing? A fish sticker on the tailgate? Starting a blog on theology?
• If discipleship becomes the "portal priority" or defining grid through which all ministry takes place, would discipling become a test case for leadership readiness? Which is the question "do you know how to reproduce"? This is a tad different than the "apt to teach" required of elders, but is related to it. (Check out No Man Left Behind for a definition of discipleship as "portal priority")
  
• If we don't have a framework for training believers, how will we reproduce leaders who could nurture disciples?
  

This last question is one reason why many of our churches never move past the "one cell" level that Carl F. George discusses in Prepare Your Church for the Future. If only the pastor has the power/knowhow/woo to make disciples, the one thing each of them will have in common is the pastor. What this will produce is a small number of disciples, and will perhaps produce a groupie/clique dependence that they will never grow out of. The ego of the pastor and the dependence of the disciple will hamper the ability to go out and reproduce. He will not be free to" play the field" and shepherd the whole flock, and definitely not be able to seek and save the lost outside of the fold.

This is one of the most powerful but also deadly characteristics of the lead planter. If he is a winsome communicator, empathetic counselor, and a mediocre networker, he will start the church and perhaps never outgrow a group of needy, dependent "cling-ons." Humanly and practically speaking, our planters should be winsome communicators, occasional counselors, and rabid networkers that takes the shape of discipling disciplers who will also be networkers. The growth needs to be viral rather than architectural (see George's analogy of coral growth and yeast growth). By the way, I'm all for counseling and I'm taking training to correct this blindspot in my schooling, but we should look at counseling as short-term, focused discipleship rather than a long-term relationship that leads to a "forsaking all others."

So what does this look in terms of ministry for 2007 for me?

• The current situation and future growth requires that I focus on reproducing reproducers (Bennett's Level 4-6). It's a painful admission to say that even though we are a small church and even though I'm a nice guy, I can't connect with everybody at a deep level. But other people in their God-given uniqueness can. This means I can and must identify people and their natural networks that are the perfect context for either peer-to-peer or mentoring style discipleship. Being intentional in this way monopolizes on the viral/biological power that we often ignore. (Natural Church Development has captured this powerfully and they have cool color diagrams!)
  
• Getting out and meeting Level 1's.
• Short term counseling and regular encouragement of Level's 2-3
• Prayer! The stagnancy demons will probably only come out through prayer and fasting.