The Church that Forgot to Make Disciples

For new readers: The Compass is a newsletter on spiritual formation, and “The Ruins“ is one of its recurring series. Every Wednesday it asks what the church was originally built to be — and what it might look like to build something that true again. Not nostalgia. Recovery.

Somewhere in our time, the question the church discarded the question it was formed to ask: “How do we take an ordinary human being and help them, over years, to become more like Jesus?” From the time of Jesus, when he first said, “Teach everyone to do (obey) everything I have told you” (Matthew 28:20), this question was the whole point of the church’s existence.

And then the question was changed. You know without looking the questions the church started asking: First, “How do we get more people saved?” And then, in the 1970s, “How do we grow larger?” And, then, in our time of church decline, “How do we keep the doors open?”

That original question the church discarded was about something that is no longer found in church today: discipleship. And if you think that is too provocative, then you had better put on your seat belt because Dallas Willard goes even further. In an essay for the Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology he said something that deserves to be heard: the evangelical movement has never actually had a theology of discipleship. Not lost the practice of discipleship. Never had one to begin with. Describing the post-WW2 evangelical church that influenced much of church life in the last century, he wrote this: "There has simply been no consistent general teaching or practice under the heading of discipleship," If you want to say this in a slightly different way, we could say we didn’t misplace discipleship in the churches we built. We built entire churches without a single place for it.

If you’ve grown disenchanted with the shallow spirituality of contemporary church, or left church altogether, or are a pastor wondering how much longer you can do this, that analysis by Willard carries more weight than it might first appear.

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Knowing what happened historically is important. As is often said, we ignore history at our own peril, and Willard’s tracing of the development of the evangelical movement is helpful. Following World War II, basic Christian conviction was under attack. Theological liberalism was eroding belief in the gospel from the inside and an increasingly secular culture was attacking it from the outside. Facing that energy, the movement’s energy went almost exclusively into two projects: defending the truth of the gospel and getting people to say “yes” to it. The entire ballgame became correct belief and the all-everything decision to accept it.

And here is what happened to discipleship. Conversion became the finish line, not the starting gun. I had a conversation with a philosopher at American University. He had been a skeptic and an opponent of Christianity during this time. He had used his classroom as a place to deride Christianity. But his curiosity to about Christianity so he could oppose it more coherently led, over time, to a surprising conversion. On the day of his conversion, the church rang its bells in celebration. Victory won. He waited for what came next. But nothing came next. What he had experienced was an entire movement’s zeal for conversion that turned evangelism into the entire discipleship program. Even groups that said they were built specifically to disciple people who had experienced conversion, like the Navigators, ended up training converts mainly to go make more more converts. In case you misunderstand, I’m not saying conversion is nothing. I’m not saying it’s not something worth ringing bells over and celebrating. I’m just saying this is not what Jesus meant when he told his first followers to teach everyone to “do everything I have commanded.”

Then, in the 1970s, another development occurred that further filled the vacuum created by the missing emphasis on discipleship: the church growth movement. Willow Creek, Saddleback, and the thousands of churches that copied their model asked a genuinely different question than the with which I started this article: “How do we take an ordinary human being and help them become more like Jesus?” The new question was “how do we reach seekers?” Church was designed around people who didn’t believe. This focus led to redesigning the gospel around felt needs, excellent productions, practical takeaways, and minimizing the places where following Jesus ran counter to contemporary culture. And in the sense that churches grew larger, it worked. But it also trained an entire generation to think of church in the way they relate to everything else in a consumer culture: as an experience to be evaluated. Did the music move me? Did the sermon apply to my life? Am I getting something out of this?

Perhaps I should warn you to tighten your seatbelt one more notch, because Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a name for the theology that would get exposed in this church growth movement: cheap grace. “Cheap grace,” he said, “is grace without price; grace without cost! ... grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.“ In other words, a kind of grace that doesn’t lead to the kind of surrender that causes me to do everything he told us to do.

Not nothing. Vacuums always get filled, and what filled the space once filled by discipleship was metrics. Willard cleverly called this the “ABCs without the D.” Attendance. Buildings. Cash. But no Discipleship. Success could be measured by the parking lot and the offerings. Activities multiplied. Platforms grew. Small groups where people used to be apprenticed into doing all that Jesus had told us to do became support groups and affinity groups. Preaching, 89% of pastors said, was their primary discipleship tool. Plenty of evidence exists now to say that the entire structure and strategy that was built during this era was the least likely to change how someone actually lives.

I can imagine some of you are discounting what I’m saying. But I don’t think this feels inaccurate to most. If you’ve been going to church, of have left, this is largely why church has felt thin. It’s become a place of good feelings and filled with charismatic presentations dispensing good, even useful, information. But it has felt increasingly light on the slow, deep work that helpls you become a more loving, less anxious, less selfish person. And the numbers back this up

• 39% of Christians cannot report any discipleship activity in their churches

• 93% of Christians have not progressed past spiritual infancy

• 5% of American churches show any signs of being a reproducing disciple-making culture.

And if you’re a pastor, I am pretty sure you know what this has cost you. Again, the numbers don’t lie:

• pastors who report being “very satisfied” with their work has fallen from 72% to roughly half of tha today.

• Half of ministers leave the vocation within five years.

• 90% of pastors who make it to 20 years within their vocation won’t make it to retirement as a pastor.

Some of that is due to all the usual stuff: overwork, politics, isolation. But I want to push into a quieter reason: pastors are themselves the product of the system I’ve been describing above. Seminary trains you in exegesis, theology, languages, and more and more, in the tactics of leadership. Spiritual formation and discipleship are not on the list of things pastors are supposed to receive in seminary. One pastor put this bluntly: “We have mistaken theological maturity with spiritual maturity.” That one senteces carries enormous weight! A leader can become fluent in biblical languages, learn to deliver compelling sermons, navigate a budget, and learn to lead the church without ever having been discipled and formed. In a way that makes me smile when I read it, someone said, “It’s the job of theological education to give the scarecrow a brain; it's the work of formation to give the tin man a heart.” Most of us in ministry got the first. Very few got the second, because almost no one treated it as a job to be done at all. It’s no wonder that the work we were tasked to do as pastors has left us depleted and exhausted.

It is one thing to say there is a problem. I’ve said that. But it is another thing to identify a solution. Based on my experience, restoring a discipleship culture to a church that leads to people doing all that Jesus commanded starts upstream from the church. It starts in the pastor’s heart.

I learned this the hard way. I was passionate about spiritual formation. I loved what it did and offered. I earned a graduate degree in it. I brought what I was learning to the church and started a program. It was good. Almost no one came.

So I did what you do when you’ve been trained in church leadership: I promoted more. I talked about it more. I recruited more. I tried to drive more people toward of it. None of that worked. What finally did work was admitting something was wrong, and it wasn’t them, it was me. I had gotten so busy running the program, and the church, that I had stopped doing the very things I was asking everyone else to do. I just didn’t have time for the practices I knew would change people. Here is what that meant: I had become a pastor with a program, not a pastor practicing it.

So I did the hard thing. I pulled it back. I stopped offering it, and just started doing it. Just me. I quit caring if anyone cared. A few months later, I was surprised that interest started growing on its own with no help from me. One day a man in the church said to me, “You’re not the same person who’s been our pastor.” And then he asked a question: “When’s the next silent retreat you’re going on? I’d like to come.”

That’s the whole argument of this series, in one conversation. People weren’t responding to my expertise; they’d already had access to that. They were responding to a practitioner, not a program.

I’ve been learning a lot since that moment. I’ve learned that the disciplines are for pastors, not just congregations. I’ve seen more clearly than ever that the goal is never the disciplines, but transformation into Christlikeness. And I’ve seen firsthand that the road to Christlikeness is never straight. There are wrong turns. There is failure. But I’ve learned over and over that the grace of God is constant, always wooing us back to the desire to do all that he commanded.

If a discipleship culture that leads to transformation is going to be restored to the church, and it can be, it starts with recovering the original question given as a mission to the church: who here is becoming like Christ, and how would we know?

More tomorrow.

Gratefully,

— Gene