Teaching

Six Steps to an Ignorant Church

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Einstein: Duh!How to dumb down the biblical knowledge of the adults in a church in six easy steps:

1. Start with a relatively educated church.

2. Kill the adult Sunday School program.

3. Mandate that all adult education move to small groups (because that’s what everyone else is doing).

4. Fail to check whether the small group leaders are themselves biblically knowledgeable and well-equipped to teach.

5. Fail to nurture the new small groups just created, so (A) no one attends because no push occurred, (B) time erodes the enthusiasm after the initial push until the groups wither, or (C) both.

6. Do nothing, sit back, and watch the ignorance creep in.

I’m beginning to wonder if this is someone’s idea of a new programming trend, as plenty of churches seem to have done just this. Come to think of it, I suspect I know who that “someone” might be.

Are Scholars and Teachers Truly Leading the Church? And Should They?

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Don Miller

Donald Miller

Many of my Christian friends have noted Donald Miller’s recent post about rescuing the Christian Church from leadership dominated by scholars. Miller, the firebrand behind the famous (or infamous, depending on your view) Blue Like Jazz, sells his perspective hard. As always, I recommend you read the whole thing.

But is he right?

The Internet is a screwy place. If one were to view the whole of American Christendom by what one reads on the Internet, Miller’s contention might seem accurate. What’s written on the Internet does skew toward academic discussions, and yes, people fight like cats and dogs over doctrines (both macro and micro) on Web sites of all sizes.

But the Internet is skewed toward odd demographic leanings, and as a result, I don’t believe what is discussed on the Internet mirrors the discussion of the average church. Plus, those of us who write about church-related issues should not believe our own press. Fact is, the average Christian could care less about the Godblogosphere.

Or their nearest Christian seminary, for that matter. “Normal” people just don’t have the wherewithal to care about the background machinations of American Christendom. They leave such ponderings for eggheads who write blogs they don’t read or brainiacs who inhabit seminary classrooms they’ll never darken.

Hey, let’s get real, OK?

By some counts, we have 300,000 churches in the United States. In my wanderings through the Church over the course of 35 years, I’ve met perhaps two dozen people I would deem genuine scholars, and not a single one of them was running a church. I’m not sure from where Miller is getting his academic oligarchy, but if even a tenth of those 300,000 churches are pastored by someone who can translate a chapter of John from Greek to English, I’ll volunteer to shine Miller’s shoes for a year.

So much for the scholars. If anything, churches are hurting for a good scholar or two, leaders or laymen. I once attended a church that had a genuine scholar in its midst, and the church leaders would trot him out from time to time to give his academic imprimatur on some supposedly weighty theological matter, and then they would usher him back into his hermetically sealed container to await his next rethawing. If anything, when true scholars do exist in our pews, we tend to treat them as something of a sideshow act. Shame on us, but there it is. In addition, some local church leaders see scholars as a threat, not as a resource. Human nature being what it is, when you’re trying to prepare a sermon on a text and you’ve got someone sitting in the seats who held that passage in Dead Sea Scroll-version in his hands and read the Hebrew right off it, well, it’s a tad unnerving to most guys who barely made it through seminary, if they even made it to seminary at all.

Teachers are another issue, though. And on this, Miller may have a bit of a point. But, as we’ll see, only a bit, because perception and reality are not the same thing.

We have a fundamental problem in the American Christian Church regarding roles and gifts. Somehow, and more and more books are appearing that look at this problem, we’ve developed a way of doing church that focuses all the responsibility and leadership initiative on one soul: the pastor.

Yet even a casual reading of the New Testament tears down our idolmaking for that calling. The pastor simply cannot be the focal point of all ministry within a given church. The Bible makes this clear:

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret?
—1 Corinthians 12:27-30

Fact is, pastor isn’t even mentioned in that passage. The closest we get is apostle, and plenty of folks out there who get all worked up about things don’t believe apostles exist anymore, so where does that leave us?

Well, back at pastor, because our societal and cultural constructs have made pastor the be all and end all of ministry.

I’ve talked to many pastors over the years. Most of them didn’t receive a call to teach others. Most received a calling to help the Church and the people in it however best they could with whatever gifts they had. Though Miller would have us believe that church leadership at the local level is crawling with teachers, it’s really only crawling with those people who have had teaching thrust upon them. And that’s a massive distinction.

For years George Barna has polled the American Church to get a sense of where we’re at. A few years back, he polled pastors and asked them how well they thought they were teaching their charges. The mutual pastoral backslapping commenced, as pastors uniformly believed they were doing a great job teaching. But when Barna polled the congregations of those same pastors, ignorance of even basic doctrine was rampant. The disconnect was startling.

And why shouldn’t it be when we keep expecting pastors to be the primary teachers in a church? They simply aren’t in most cases. They weren’t trained to teach, don’t know how to teach well, and were cast into the role of teacher with the facts, but not the skills.

Scratch the surface of the average church pastor, and you are most likely to find someone who excels at creating vision, connecting to people relationally, or has gifts for administration and management. Some are gifted teachers, but not most, yet they are expected to teach at all times.

Miller is wrong if he believes that scholars and teachers are leading the Church for the simple reasons that genuine scholars are rarities (and even rarer in leadership within a local church) and the average teaching pastor has been ill-equipped to teach. Tossing labels around is one thing, but let’s be honest about the true state of the Church.

The better question is whether we value teaching too highly. I don’t believe that can ever be the case. Barna’s polling not only revealed the overconfidence of pastors in their teaching, but it also exposed the general ignorance about the Faith that wreaks havoc everywhere ignorant Christians go. People ARE destroyed for lack of knowledge. Christians who don’t know what they believe cannot transmit what they believe to others who do not understand. End of argument.

So, where is the balance in all this?

Ideally, the Church should…

Teach its people the Faith.

Encourage the giftings of each person within the local church for service to that church and the greater whole of Christendom.

We’re not doing either of those well.

If you’ve read me long enough, you know I have a beef about our lack of a cradle-to-grave educational plan in our churches. We must have one. Each church must determine theirs.

AND we need to identify the gifts and talents of people in the seats so that they are released to minister as God would have them. Sadly, the “pastor as church emperor” stifles that potential. If anything, the pastoral role should be just one of several. Many pastors don’t preach well. Then who is the best preacher in the church?  Many pastors are less-than-ideal comforters of the bereaved and hurting. Then who are the best comforters? Many pastors don’t listen well, either to their people or to the Lord. Then who are the best listeners and the best prophets? Many pastors don’t teach well. Then who does? Let’s get the right people in the right roles and start doing this right. And if that means the pastor reads the Scriptures on Sunday and someone else preaches or teaches, then fine. If that means that no one is paid staff, then fine. If that means the staff is huge and paid, fine. If that means that the whole church lives in one large apartment complex and does a kibbutz-type thing, fine. But let’s stop whatever we’re doing with the current model because it just doesn’t work all that well.

In short, does the Church function as a body with Christ as the head or with the pastor as the head? We know the answer. Now what are we doing to rethink how we do church so that everyone in the church is operating in their genuine giftings and receives the honor due them?

Ultimately, this is what Miller is aiming for. Taking a potshot at scholars and teachers isn’t the way to get there, though. We know the Church is a body, so let’s stop shooting that body in the foot.

How the Church Can Improve Christian Education, Part 3

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I’ve been looking at the sad state of Christian education in the United States in two previous posts (1, 2) and wanted to conclude this limited series with solutions to the problems I raised. If you haven’t read the previous posts, please do, because understanding them will make the solutions more vivid.

Right now, I believe that no other issue is as critical to the modern American Church than educating its people. Yet too many churches approach Christian education with a haphazard, also-ran mentality. Churches dedicate themselves to fighting the culture wars, being “missional,” maintaining the status quo operation of the church, and a million other causes that supersede knowing the Faith. Sadly, in our modern age, nothing is deemed worse than ignorance, and unschooled Christians become antiwitnesses against the Lord because so many don’t comprehend the priceless truths they supposedly believe.

Here is what I believe we must do to fix the problem of a broken educational system in our churches:

1.  We must get a vision for education and make it a priority.

I don’t like The Message, but this Message-ified translation says it all about the state of Christian education in America:

If people can’t see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves; But when they attend to what he reveals, they are most blessed.
—Proverbs 29:18

If that doesn’t describe where we are with educating people in the Faith, I don’t know what does.

What is our local church’s vision for its discipleship program? What is God saying to our local church leaders about how they should be directing education in the church? What is our church’s cradle-to-grave education program? What does that program look like at every step in the disciple-making process?

If we can’t answer those question immediately, our educational programs in our churches are in trouble—and are probably failing altogether.

Some people will cry that the whole revelation/vision thing is too charismatic (which I’ll address further down), that we have to be practical. Okay, fine. How then is it that we aren’t serious about these words from the lips of Jesus?

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
—Matthew 28:19-20

How’s that for a start for a vision? Somehow, we have instead let everything else intrude on the simple job of making disciples.

What if we stopped all the other distractions and focused everything we had on educating people in the Faith? What if we stopped directing so much time and effort to fighting the culture wars and instead got serious about ensuring our people actually know what they believe? In the end, isn’t the equipping of the saints the beginning of any effective ministry? How can one even fight the culture wars or be “missional” if one has no clue what one believes (and can support that belief with deeply ingrained wisdom)?

I think all of us, church leaders especially, need to repent of the red-headed stepchild approach we’ve taken to teaching people. We need a vision for education. Otherwise, we will continue to keep stumbling over ourselves and continue to bring up Christians who have no idea what they are talking about.

2. We must start listening to the Holy Spirit.

One of the oddities of our present age is that a lot of church people  say they are sympathetic to listening to the Holy Spirit, yet at the same time they recoil at the thought of anything charismatic happening in their churches. Sadly, this is even true of some churches that claim to be charismatic.

The upshot is that we’ve gone deaf to the Lord.

Sure, we may glean some general truths from the Scriptures, but too many church leaders have no specific direction for ministry within their churches because they’ve stuck fingers in their spiritual ears.

That has to end.

We live in challenging times. I believe the Lord wants to mobilize people, but we need to hear the specifics of those marching orders. I don’t believe that “one size fits all” in the Church because God shows preferences repeatedly in the Scriptures, and if we’re deaf to individualized instructions for specific purposes within the Body of Christ, we will miss out on vast swaths of ministry opportunities.

No area of ministry shows this deficiency more than Christian education. One church’s educational program may be different than another’s because one church’s people may have different needs than another’s. Don’t believe me? Well, check out the Lord’s letters to the churches in Revelation. Those churches don’t sound very cookie-cutter, do they?

It’s time to acknowledge our error in turning down the volume on the Holy Spirit. We need His direction now more than ever. The churches that succeed in opening their spiritual ears will be the ones God uses to advance His Church. All the others will fail.

Church leaders: Open the Scriptures and start refamiliarizing yourselves with what they say about the Holy Spirit, His guidance, and how the gifts work in the Church. Work to develop your spiritual ears. There can be no alternatives.

3. We must rethink our church staffing priorities.

How is it that we have paid administrative pastors, counselors, secretaries, youth pastors, and a billion levels of associate, assistant, and emeritus pastors yet most churches can’t hire someone to implement the educational direction for the Church?

The most epic fail in Christian education in the last hundred years has been the wholesale dismissal of paid education staff. Churches damaged their own destinies as effective ministers of the Gospel by tossing out trained educators.

If so much is riding on educating our people, then the most important staff members are those charged with that task. Where are they then?

Churches, get a clue on this! You want to know why you can’t hold onto visitors? Want to know why your young people succumb to worldliness? Want to understand why your church is so dry? It’s because your educational direction is nonexistent and no one is charged to correct that lack.

If a church does not have at least one paid staff member who does nothing but manage and direct the educational vision for the church, that church will fail to educate its people. There’s no end-run around this.

“But,” some will interject, “we have volunteers to do this.” I contend that in most churches the volunteer model for educational staffing doesn’t work either. It’s time to stop lying to ourselves about this. The need is too great and volunteer leaders cannot devote the time to make an overhaul work. We’re fooling ourselves if we think we can deal with the enormity of this issue without a monetary cost and by relying on people with divided affections. The people charged with education have to be all-in, because part-timers who are worried more with putting food on the table and keeping their outside jobs intact will not have the heart to tackle the vast educational task within the average large church.

I understand that many churches are small and don’t have a huge payroll. Nevertheless, the minimum staffing at a church should include at least one paid Christian educator.

4. We must know the distractions and eliminate them.

If one word describes America a decade into the millennium, it’s distracted. Increasingly, we can’t focus on tasks. Studies are showing that multitasking is a lie that leads to poor outcomes. We simply cannot juggle multiple projects  and do any of them well.

Worse, studies are showing that the techno-world we live in that depends on cell phones, computers, and other tech gadgets is rewiring our brains to make us even less attentive. One particularly dreary experiment with e-readers showed that a person using a Kindle (or similar device) so often jumps out of a novel’s text to pursue other data hyperlinked within the text that comprehension of the novel’s story plummets by half.

Considering Jesus’ call to us to make disciples, do we devote any time and effort to His call? Do we even know the Faith enough to be called disciples ourselves? If eternal life is knowing the Lord, are we sure we’ve spent enough time to actually know Him?

At some point, enough is enough.

If keeping up in this techno-world means we can’t keep up with the call of Jesus, then the techno-world has to go. I’m increasingly convinced that Christians have to withdraw from the elements of the techno-world, refocusing on what is good and true and worthwhile.

I’ve cut my Facebook presence significantly. Our household has one cell phone for emergencies, and that’s how it’s used. I can’t recall the last time I made a call on it. I don’t spend as much time on blogs or even blogging.

Each of us will need to examine his or her own life to find what needs to be cut or curtailed. We need to also go back to activities that keep us focused on a task for hours. Education demands that we have that kind of focus; we simply can’t flit here and there and learn anything as vast and comprehensive as the Gospel story and a godly worldview unless we stay attentive.

The next step is to use that extra time for what really matters: knowing the Lord and serving His people.

5. We must alter our entire perspective on our lifestyles.

What is the purpose of life? A lot of us, even Christians, don’t know because we’re not being educated for a genuine purpose.

For most of us, life consists of getting up to go to work, spending most of the day focused on a task that makes money, spending some time with our kids (if we have kids), and pursuing leisure. If the studies are to be believed, kids and leisure are losing out to work and its extensions.

If knowing Jesus is the be all and end all of life, then how are we getting people there? Will more money to buy us more stuff help us? Will our slavish devotion to our jobs get us to that goal of knowing Jesus?

The Bible says we should set aside those things that distract us from our mission. What does a life reconfigured to the task of making disciples (and being one ourselves) look like? Sadly, I’m not sure our leaders have that answer.

In keeping with what I wrote in #4, I think we must start with putting educating ourselves in the truths of God so that we can better know Christ at the top of the list, necessitating making hard decisions about anything that gets in the way.

This has ramifications for our employment, housing, childrearing, personal relationships, and so on.

What those ramifications are and how we must address them is not easy, because each church out there will be different, as will the people that comprise it. Any betterment will look different from church to church and person to person.

Still, change starts by asking the same question: How then shall we live?

Do we need to live in a big house? Is our big house a distraction from knowing God? Do we spend too much time trying to keep that house looking perfect? (On the other hand, perhaps having a house that is too small distracts us, so we’ll need a bigger one. What is God saying we should do?)

Working 10 hours a day at a job will leave us little time for the work of making disciples. It just won’t, not with all the other things we attempt to cram into our lives. And Americans are nearly at that 50 hours per week level for work. Add in increasingly long commute times and the fact that our computers and phones keep us connected to work all day all the time, and what’s left for the mission of the Lord? Frankly, I’m amazed that ANY church life exists outside of Sunday mornings, much less anything devoted to learning more about our Faith and Lord.

Christians have to find ways to avoid getting sucked into the mindset that everything depends on our jobs. We just don’t believe that God will provide for us. We also don’t believe that we can live on less.

6. We must alter how we view community.

The Body of Christ grows because it is a body.

We in America, with our rugged individualism and self-made man mentality, hate that idea of being a body. Yet it is inescapable that cultures that are vital are so because of the depth of their community attachments. This especially holds true when it comes to transmitting the core values of a culture to the next generation. The stronger the community’s attachments, the more of that community’s values the next generation receives.

We don’t assemble much anymore in our churches, at least not apart from Sundays. Small groups aren’t doing as well as they once did. People aren’t meeting in each others’ homes. Heck, one book I read said that people are afraid to go into another person’s house.

But we must. None of us is an island, and our community of faith weakens when we don’t get together. No matter how fantastic we might think our insular homeschooling efforts are, adding even one outsider’s experiences broadens our kids’ knowledge. Yet somehow, we don’t see similar value in what someone else knows about Jesus. Worse, we don’t see how having that person in the midst of our community adds anything to our individual growth.

I want my kid to see how other Christians live. I had that experience as a kid and it changed me for the better. I may consider myself a fine upstanding member of the Church Universal, but if my kid only sees me, he is not getting the fullness of the reality of the Church. He’ll be worse off for that lack.

And the weird thing is, I will be worse off too. Iron sharpens iron, and if there’s no other iron around consistently, the sharpening won’t happen. I won’t know as much about the Faith as I should if your knowledge of the Faith isn’t added to mine. If we don’t get together, then we will all be diminished.

I could make recommendations here, too, but the reality is that each of us has to find the best ways to improve community. If that means developing a Christian commune, then great. If it means getting a dozen families to commit to meeting twice a week for dinner, then great. We have to see what the Lord is doing and then do it without excuses.

7. We must repent.

No great change in the Church happens without seeking the Lord and repenting. And when it comes to educating the Body of Christ, we have a lot of repenting to do.

What if our church leaders called for a time of repentance for our lacks in educating ourselves in the ways of God? I hear all sorts of call for repentance for allowing same-sex marriage or abortion to persist in this country, but I’ve never heard a Christian leader call for us to repent of our own ignorance of the Lord.

So how about we repent of our lackadaisical attitude toward what comes down to genuine life or death? Because it seems to me that the main reason people go astray in life is lack of knowledge of or about Christ. Fix that, and a whole lot will fall into place.

***

I struggled enormously to complete this series. The struggle came mostly because people want specific answers. They want to be told how to do this or that. A lot of specifics banged around in my head too. I wanted give granular answers.

But the one thing I believe God showed me about fixing this problem of ignorance of Him and His ways is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. The only best answer is to listen to the Holy Spirit and do what He says to correct the problem of education right here, right where we are, with the fixes that meet our individual church’s needs.

Obviously, it starts with catching a vision and working toward a cradle-to-grave educational plan. But from there it will diverge to meet the needs of each church community.

The one thing I know will test us in this is that we’ve opened a kind of Pandora’s Box in how we educate people. Getting the escaped pieces back into the box is ridiculously hard, which is why no one is attempting a fix. Still, it has to be done.

The cost of fixing the broken educational system in our churches is enormous—though I’m not talking about money. Honestly, money is the least of it. Time and availability are the two commodities most lacking. If making disciples is really important to us, then we’ll find both. And if we don’t, we can’t expect our lampstand to stay where God once put it.

The complete series: