Making Sense of Confusing Christian Voices

A reader wrote to ask a question I thought was important, so I want to post a response here.

The gist of that multipart question:

How do I make sense of the mishmash of voices/teachings/ideas/admonitions I hear in the Christian Church today? How can it all be reconciled? A respected Christian pastor on the radio says one thing, while a famous Christian author writes something different. Denominations don’t agree. How do I know who is right and who isn’t?

That’s a difficult question. What I share below is what I believe. It’s how I handle that same question, because each of us needs to find a way to deal with the flood of information that bombards us daily. Even Christian information. We live in strange times awash in more information and data in one day than most people used to encounter in a lifetime. Making sense of it all is a monumental task.

1. Recognize that each of us is on a journey of faith—and we have not yet arrived at journey’s end.

One thing that bothers me most about Western Christianity is our mania concerning incompleteness. If we were to read a novel that had many interesting ideas woven through the narrative but which lacked a final chapter, many of us would tear out our hair in frustration. The fact that many wonderful events occurred in the book or that we learned intriguing things along the way pales against the angst of not knowing if the hero vanquished his foe or if the heroine overcame her circumstances.

Your story and mine are not yet complete. The final chapter hasn’t been written, nor all the events played out. We’re still journeying through the narrative of our lives.

And that journey is being orchestrated by God Himself.

Since God is writing our story, since He is planning our journey, we can be at peace with incompleteness if we allow God to do His work in our lives.

One of the Scriptures that brings me great comfort when I want to rush toward what I think is the right destination in my journey is this:

He [God] has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
—Ecclesiastes 3:11

My timing is not His timing. Only His timing is perfect. What God has done is too wondrous for me to grasp, so full and rich as to be beyond me.

And I can be at peace with that, if I choose to be.

Paul puts it this way in the New Testament:

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
—1 Corinthians 13:12

What’s around the bend in the river? That conjecture drives some people to distraction and worry. In some cases, it even causes people to abandon the journey.

But the real answer to what’s around that bend? God. Which is why worrying is fruitless. God is there in the parts of the path we can’t see, so we are sheltered no matter where we are in the journey.

2. Recognize that each person is on a different part of the journey of faith.

Something in our cultural makeup assumes that everyone must be on our same faith journey and be just as far along as we are.

Honestly, that’s just pride. And that pride manifests as judging people who don’t measure up.

Here’s a reality check: Every famous Christian you and I admire, every pastor, every teacher, every author, all of them are flawed. None are or were fully complete this side of heaven. Each was someplace along that pathway that defines the journey of faith, and the likelihood is that their stations along the way will not always align with ours.

Our problem is that we expect those waystations to align despite the fact that each of us is a unique individual with unique sins, a unique past, unique gifts, and a unique perspective on the journey. Our destination may be the same, but how we get there is unique to what God wants do through us for His glory.

When I encounter another Christian, the worst thing I can assume about him is that his journey has been identical to mine, that he’s gone just as far as I have, and that he’s standing alongside me on the path. When I do that, I completely mangle his story to fit mine. Or else I throw up my hands at his travel log of experiences and claim he’s on the wrong journey.

Again, that’s pride. It makes me the arbiter of all reality, places me at the center of the universe, and leaves God out of the business of managing other people’s journeys.

If you grew up in a loving home with a devoted father who loved you immensely, how weird would it be for some fellow believer to insist that you must have a problem with the fatherhood of God because everyone has a problem with their earthly fathers, and those problems taint our perspective of our heavenly one? How likely would it be that this insistent person had a problem with his own earthly father?

Yet this sort of thing is repeated daily a million times over on a million different scales within the Christian Church today. That insistent person made an assumption about your journey.

Now it may be that instead of a great earthly father, yours was a nightmare. If that’s the case, then this insistent person will seem like a breath of fresh air. Great! Thank God for that. But if not, then just realize that people are in different places on their journey. That seems so obvious, yet the confusion out there says we fail to understand that truth.

The greatest Christians we can cite were at one point lost. At one point they struggled with the lordship of Jesus in all aspects of life. At one point they got some doctrine wrong. People like Martin Luther, Charles Spurgeon, Amy Carmichael, Gladys Alward, Watchman Nee, A.W. Tozer, Corrie Ten Boom, C.S. Lewis, Jack Hayford, Chuck Swindoll, and Francis Chan were at some point wrong more often than right. But each learned and grew in God’s grace.

Can you imagine encountering Martin Luther as a young man today? He’d probably seem like a basketcase. But look how his journey unfolded!

How arrogant we can be when we judge by our standards rather than nurture by God’s!

3. Make peace with paradox, mystery, and the dim mirror, but never give up wanting to understand more.

One aspect of Western Christian I am increasingly willing to move off center stage is scientific rationalism. We in the West approach every part of life with the scrutiny and logic of Mr. Spock. Problem is, as any fan of Star Trek will tell you, Mr. Spock often missed the point, and instead those wacky, paradoxical humans saved the day.

We want to shoehorn our faith into systematic theologies and logic. We want God to conform to manmade standards. We hate thinking that Paul is right about the dim mirror. We want our faith to make sense at all times and in all places before all people.

But consider this: Jesus Christ is both fully man and fully God.

Or another: The infinite God of the universe dwells in finite believers.

Or another: You will live forever.

Mind blown? Well, it should be.

Our problem in North America 2011 is that we’ve stymied our willingness to wonder. And when you kill wonder and mystery, all that’s left is bitter argument.

It’s okay not to know it all. God is not going to slay us if we can’t resolve some of the paradoxical or mysterious aspects of the Christian faith. He’s not going to keep us out of heaven if we don’t understand the nuances of infralapsarianism. You and I can rest assured that even if we don’t fully get it, God does, and that’s just fine.

That said, God doesn’t want us to be mired 24/7/365 whimsically pondering how the stars speak forth praise. Sometimes, Mr. Spock’s logic saved the Enterprise from certain doom. Growing some head knowledge about our faith is just as needed as heart knowledge and a place for mystery, wonder, and awe.

So it’s okay if not everything you and I hear aligns. Again, our journeys are different and so are those of the people who speak to us. And sometimes, while two voices seem to be at irreconcilable odds, they may not be, especially as we gain a bit more wisdom down the path of our journey. It’s amazing what a little experience can do when it comes to making the seemingly impossible possible.

4. Get discernment by learning how to properly apply revelation from God.

This is the more nuts and bolts part of the post.

God speaks to us in the following ways:

Through the general revelation of His created world.

Through the special revelation of the Scriptures.

Through the personal and intimate revelation of His Holy Spirit indwelling us.

Where Christians go astray is when they downplay one of those three or punt one entirely. Yet all three are critical for proper discernment of truth. One will never contradict the other, and all three work together to reveal truth.

In Romans 1 we read that men are without excuse before God because of the revelation inherent in the created order. When we look at the world around us, it speaks of God.

That should blow our minds. That it doesn’t blow the minds of some Christians is one reason why people lose their ability to wonder. And wonder is an essential part of faith that keeps us from falling into easy arguments.

The Scriptures have been given to us to show the part of God’s story that can’t be fully explained by the created world. They are not only a far richer source of truth than the created world—and more obvious in their implications, too—but the Scriptures form the backbone of our practice of the Faith itself. They reveal who Jesus is and show us how we can know Him. The Bible is our essential equipping tool:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.
—2 Timothy 3:16-17

But while it is one thing to equip a person for ministry, it is quite another to direct him. This is why we have the Holy Spirit in us. The Holy Spirit is not only our seal of salvation, but He is the one who makes sense of what we know from the Bible in such a way as to apply it correctly. The Holy Spirit’s revelation takes the general purpose instructions of the Bible and shows us how to apply them in specific circumstances not specifically addressed in the Scriptures. The Holy Spirit makes sense of the spiritual world for us and leads us in everything.

So, to be discerning, we must do the following:

Be observant of the natural world.

Study and know the Scriptures.

Learn to listen to and obey the voice of the Holy Spirit.

Most churches and denominations do one of those three well, are passable in a second, and tend to forget the third. We’re not allowed the “luxury” of not handling all three fully and properly, though.

Oddly enough, our failures to heed all three contribute to the host of conflicting voices in the Christian Church. When one teacher is talking about the Bible being the only genuine source of revelation and another teacher stresses we have to learn to listen to the Holy Spirit, it sounds like a clash. It’s not, though. It’s just men failing to live up to the entire calling of the Lord.

This lack tends to force us into piecemeal study of forms of revelation and how we should use them. That’s not optimal, but finding a church in North America that handles all revelation well is not easy, sad to say. It should be easy, but we Westerners tend to latch onto what appeals to us most and forget everything else. That failing explains in part the thousands of different Christian denominations out there. If we understand this, we can make peace with it, even if it’s not ideal.

5. Know that God loves you and will keep you.

I think the greatest fear in those who ask the questions that start this post is that God is somehow not good enough to protect them and keep them unto salvation and knowledge of Him.

But God does love you and me. This is what the Paul writes:

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
—Philippians 1:6

And this is what the Lord Jesus says to you from His own lips:

“And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
—Matthew 28:20b

He will never leave us or forsake us. He is faithful when we aren’t. He loves us even when we see through a dim mirror and miss our turn on the path. He will see us through to the end.

Do we believe that? If we do, then we will not fear, even when the voices around us grow confusing.

I hope this helps.

Lastly, humility must permeate it all. If we recognize that we are dust (and others are too), it helps us put all of learning into perspective. Our teachers will often fail, but that’s okay because the riches of God are so vast that no one teacher will ever enlighten us. That’s God’s work, because He is not limited. Draw close to Him, and learn from His Son by the Holy Spirit, and your path will be made straight.

How the Church Can Improve Christian Education, Part 3

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:

How the Church Can Improve Christian Education, Part 2

In Part 1 of this limited series on how the Church in America can improve Christian education, I showcased two videos by Sir Ken Robinson, a British education expert who seems to be all the rage among the intelligentsia. Included in that post were two videos, which are important for understanding what follows, so I encourage everyone to watch them, especially the first from RSAnimate.

Okay, now that you’ve watched the video(s)…

Robinson states truths that are quite obvious to anyone who has worked in education. One truth is that all learners are different. Another truth is that nearly all children start out with a capacity for creative problem solving, often exceedingly creative. Combining these ideas, Robinson leans toward the kind of educational theory that asks educators to work harder to differentiate learning in learners. It all comes down to accommodating the learner with as many opportunities for self-direction and self-discovery of knowledge as possible.

But there’s a problem with that philosophy.

Certain kinds of rationalistic knowledge can be arrived at rationally. A great deal of how our world works can be deduced through experience, with a little mentoring added in. This kind of learning style has been advocated for years, going back all the way to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile and continuing to the modern day in theorists like John Holt. In short, Robinson advocates nothing new. In fact, that path is well worn in some educational circles.

Christian education, however, can’t be addressed solely through this method. While Romans 1 states that from creation we can deduce some truths about God, we can’t deduce all by observation. General revelation (creation) and special revelation (the Bible, the voice of the Holy Spirit) exist together because of this.

So while it may be possible to observe the world and make deductions about mathematics from it, coming to truths about Christian doctrine requires book learning. At some point, teaching the Christian faith must have some rote element.

That element has been problematic for years, though. Go back a couple centuries and rote knowledge of the Faith was about the only kind one could find. The way we taught our children the Faith felt mostly like a lecture, wherein we drilled the same core truths into everyone. Duncecap For a long time that method worked, mostly, no matter what Sir Ken Robinson thinks. We did a good job of schooling everyone in basic theology and doctrine.

Somewhere along the line, though, the Church got away from a disciplined methodology for making disciples. Post-19th century, the way we disciple people has become a haphazard mess because we rebelled against any notion of standardizing the way we teach people the Faith. Instead, we’ve left most people to attain depth in the Faith on their own, treating most Christian education as a supplement to what people, even children, are getting elsewhere. The problem is that they are either not getting that instruction elsewhere or the instruction they are receiving is wholly undermining what they should be receiving.

The result? Christians today are staggeringly ill-informed about what they are supposedly to believe about the Christian Faith. When a “mature” Christian can’t lay out a solid presentation of why Jesus is the only way to God, when he or she can’t explain why the doctrine of the Trinity is important, we’ve got a serious problem on our hands. And much of that goes back to a total lack of solid rote teaching.

But poor rote-style teaching is not the only problem. While we may admire Christians of the past for their head knowledge, heart knowledge matters too. And more than that, today’s Christian faces challenges unknown to his ancestors in the Faith, challenges that require bold, creative thinking to resolve.

Learning by rote doesn’t fully work because Christianity is not merely a rationalistic or philosophical exercise. While critical doctrines underlie it, our Faith is not entirely cerebral. Unlike its secular counterpart, Christian education doesn’t come down to knowing what a cosine is or how best to tune a car engine. It’s foundationally relational and spiritual. Adding to that complexity is God’s wisdom in making each of us unique in our spiritual giftings.

That each of us is uniquely gifted to serve the Lord, that each of us has a personal experience of God that must also fit into a corporate understanding of Him rooted in unwavering truths, presents an enormous educational challenge that dwarfs the challenge Robinson discusses. The problem of education within the Church is so multifaceted that—as I believe—we’ve punted any attempt to make it work at all.

The upshot of the problem in the American Church:

Our people don’t know or understand the basics of the Christian Faith.

Our people don’t know what their personal giftings are.

Our people don’t know how to use their giftings.

Our local church leaders have abandoned their role of helping others to identify their gifts and use them for the building up of the Body of Christ.

Our local church teachers have seen so little advancement in their pupils that teaching becomes a purposeless, dispiriting chore.

Parents in our local churches have no idea how to address the Christian educational needs of their children (and feel even less capable when even the “experts” in the churches achieve such modest results).

Our church leaders address these problems with a “business as usual” approach, even when that approach achieves few results.

Our churches lack a cradle-to-grave plan for education.

A further major hurdle exists, and it’s the backbone of Robinson’s ideas—and a major headache for Christian leaders.

One of the greatest failings of the modern Christian Church, particularly its Evangelical branch, is a wholesale distrust of creative people. We love our doers, our teachers, and our pastors, but someone who creates artworks we may not immediately grasp or who has creative, nontraditional ideas about how to solve pressing church issues gets the evil eye from us. As a result, we’ve driven too many of these folks out of our churches at a time when we desperately need them to help us address needs within the Body in a more proactive way.

Watching Ken Robinson’s explanation of how to right the ship of public education can give us hope. But there’s a gotcha. Robinson’s call for a massively individualized approach to education makes the work of the teacher even more difficult. A 1:1 type of teaching style asks teachers for a huge investment of time to give each student unique direction that best matches that student’s unique gifts.

In light of this, the following questions loom for the Christian Church in America:

Are we prepared to teach a systematic doctrine tailored to a cradle-to-grave plan?

Are we prepared to address the unique needs of each student as God deals with that student individually?

Are we prepared to identify the unique giftings of each student and tailor his or her spiritual direction toward the best use of those gifts within the Body of Christ?

Are we willing to reach out to the creative people we’ve often pushed away?

If we say yes, then we have to be prepared to question every aspect of how we live. If we don’t make the changes to our lifestyles that free us to dedicate the time and energy needed to fix these problems, they will continue to fester, undermining the growth and the effectiveness of the Church.

The secular world WILL address those problems in time. The question is whether the American Church values educating its own as much as the secular world does.

Stay tuned to the next post in this series for solutions.