19: The Broken Discipleship Factory (Series Compilation)

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the On the Trail podcast. Today we have a compilation episode for you. We’re going all the way back to our very first series, the Broken Discipleship Factory. We hope you enjoy.

[00:10] Marcus: Yeah, no, really, when I was in seminary I was doing my doctoral ministry work. We call them “D-Mins.”

You have to be careful how you say that because you tell people I got a D-Min [demon] degree, but I have a doctor of ministry degree at Trinity. And one of our visiting professors was Bill Hull, who wrote a series of books on discipleship, The Disciple-Making Pastor, Disciple-Making Church, you know, that whole series.

And he was talking about this image of the church as a factory. What would its product be? And the idea was that, well, if a church was a factory, its product would be disciples that were called to make disciples. That’s what the church is all about. So, you know, if you think about it in engineering terms (and I’ve had a few different engineers on our board through the years) and I had asked, and they’ve all pointed out, if the church really was a factory and its product really was disciples, they’d be calling in an engineer to take a look at what’s broken in this factory that is producing the quality of the disciples that we’re getting.

It’s like, what is broken here that is keeping us from getting the quality of disciple that we’re after? And you stop and think about it, you know, the number one reason that most people don’t like Christianity is they don’t like the Christians. It’s also true that the number one reason people get interested in Christianity is that they meet a really good Christian, somebody who’s really authentic in their walk.

So, you know, it works both ways. And it’s not like there’s a guaranteed system that’s always going to produce wonderful results, but the reality is there is something that is not quite right about this system, something flawed. And in a sad sense, the church’s discipleship factory needs to be re-engineered.

And so that’s what we’re looking at here, what’s broken in it and what exactly needs to be re-engineered.

[01:55] Stephanie: Yeah, I had a professor in undergrad whose mission was stated, “In the last days Christians will be persecuted. I want to make sure we’re persecuted for the right reasons.”

[02:06] Marcus: Yeah.

[02:09] Stephanie: Oh, man. So I’m just curious because I think there are a lot of different ideas – I don’t think everybody has the same definition in mind when we say disciple.

So, what does it look like to you? What does disciple mean?

[02:26] Marcus: A disciple is somebody who is growing in their connection to Jesus. And as a result of that, they’re growing in their personal maturity. So the goal of the discipleship process is to create mature Christians. And so one of the things we’re going to look at is what does it mean to be an infant?

What’s it mean to be a child? What’s it mean to be an adult, a parent, and an elder as a Christian? And what does the church need to do in order to help people move from infant to child to adult to parent to elder, so that we are routinely and consistently moving people along this spiritual development track. That’s what we’re after here.

So when we talk about disciples, we’re talking about mature disciples. If you want a simple definition of a mature disciple, it’s somebody who lives with the fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, you know, all the rest – self-control and those things exemplify mature behavior. So we believe spiritual maturity will always create emotional and relational maturity as well.

[03:29] Stephanie: So transformation is what I’m hearing. Disciples are transformed into the likeness of Christ, and part of this journey of transformation is this maturity.

[03:45] Marcus:Right. Yeah. Discipleship is a process, and it is the goal of which is transformation – that we should be transformed into the likeness of Christ, which means we’ve got to get to a model, right?

You have to have a growth model, and which model you choose is going to determine what solutions you have to offer. Right? So if your model is skewed, if it is off in some ways, then the solutions for transformation that you offer to people are going to be skewed. So I’ll give you an example from history. There was a model in medicine for years that had changed dramatically in the 1800s when they discovered germs and bacteria.They discovered that disease could be transmitted by not washing your hands or washing your tools between surgeries.

Today doctors tend to wear white, and they wear white because it communicates that everything here is sterile, that we have cleaned everything thoroughly, and we put a high premium on things being clean. Well, in the 1700s, 1800s, doctors wore black. Why?

Because it hid the blood that was splattering all over them. And when these doctors who wore black were told you need to take time to wash your hands and sterilize your equipment in between surgeries, they said, “That’s stupid.” Why did they think that was stupid? They said, “We’re wasting valuable time. We need to get to the next person. Lives are on the line here. We don’t have time for personal hygiene issues.” Their paradigm said germs and bacteria and things like that aren’t important.They did not have a paradigm that recognized this is actually what we need to be focusing on.

So there were people who literally killed way more people than they saved in the surgery room because they were not following these proper guidelines – a model that took these unseen things like bacteria and germs into account. So, you can kind of see some of the parallels in the Christian world. If our model doesn’t take demons seriously, for example, (and those really do exist) you’re going to have some problems, right?

If it doesn’t take the Holy Spirit seriously, and He really is a factor in this, it’s not going to work. So, we’ve got to make sure that our model is correct, and that’s kind of the idea here. The discipleship factor is broken because we’ve been working with a flawed model for so long.

[06:15] Stephanie: That makes sense. That’ll preach.

[06:19] Marcus: Hopefully. That’s kind of the idea. The first attempt to explain this happened because Dr. Jim Wilder reached out to me and said that he wanted to write a book on four good ideas to neutralize Western Christianity. And he laid the whole thing out and I’m like, “Why don’t you just write this yourself? You’ve obviously already got this kind of figured out.”

He’s like, “I just prayed about it, felt like we should do this together.” I’m like, “Fine. I’m happy to do anything with you.” And so we worked on this book and put it all together in the process. I learned a lot of things and hopefully helped make this message clear.

The book is called The Solution of Choice. In a new book I’ve got coming out called A Deeper Walk, it starts with some of these same premises here, and it’s the idea that the discipleship machine factory got broken because the Enlightenment came in and skewed the model that we were using for making disciples.

And so part of what we’re going to do in the next several episodes here is talk about how the Enlightenment came about. Change, not just the course of culture, but change the way the church thought about what creates transformation. So we’re going to start there as a way of figuring out what’s broken here so that we’ll have a clear idea of what needs to be fixed.

[07:45] Stephanie: Yeah, I’m excited for it. So in our outline here, I see you have an ABCD, which isn’t quite the acrostic you’re known for, but do you want to dig into that in this episode?

[07:59] Marcus: All right. Yeah, let’s go ahead and unpack that. The idea here is that we have been using a model I call “traditional discipleship” for about 500 years.

And traditional discipleship was rooted in the Enlightenment, and it has a model that says truth plus choice plus power equals transformation. That is “believe right things.” Make choices based on those right things, and your life will change. And if you can’t do it, then you need to find a power solution.

That is, you’ve either got to get rid of powers that are blocking you from succeeding, or you’ve got to invite in Holy Spirit power. And so it’s very common for people to believe that if they just have enough truth and they make the right choices, their life will come together. And that if that isn’t working, that they must have a power issue.

And so, that’s where we’re going to be headed. So, traditional discipleship grew out of that model. And I summarize traditional discipleship practices with ABCD. So the practices of traditional discipleship are Academics. And that is based on this idea that truth is the core thing you’ve got to get.

We really emphasize making sure that our pastors know the truth, right? We send them to seminary to make sure that they can get their truth down and that they can defend their truth and they know what they believe, why they believe it. And so we put a big emphasis on making sure that our pastors know the truth.

And so Academics is big. Well, because of that, guess what pastors often feel the most comfortable doing?

[11:48] Stephanie: Right?

[11:50] Marcus: Passing on academic truth about the Bible, about God, talking about things in an academic setting, because that’s how we’re trained. The second one, the B, is Behavior. This is the idea of choices, and that it is not enough just to know the truth, I’ve got to do the truth, right?

I’ve got to put this stuff into practice. And so what does that look like? We’ve tended to put a strong emphasis on behaving like a Christian. Now that’s looked different in different generations, right? I’m in my sixties now. When I was a kid, behavior was pretty clear. You didn’t go to movies, you didn’t play cards, you didn’t drink, you didn’t dance.

You did right. There was a list, and everybody knew what the list was. And part of discipleship was “we got to get people to obey the list.” Well, today’s generation doesn’t buy any of that. But what we’re looking at is that we’ve got a different set of behaviors that says “this is what it means to be a good Christian.”

And what we tend to do is to be really good at getting people to do those things that mark them as belonging to the church. And it’s behavior then – which gets the focus on accountability and on making sure that I am behaving in a way that I look good to other people. So without meaning to, what ends up happening is that our discipleship system creates people who look good on the outside, but don’t necessarily have their heart in order, right?

Because they believe correct things and they’re making good choices. But there is still a pretty big gap here in their life that is not developing intimacy with God or spontaneous love for other people. And so that’s the A and the B. The C is just Church activity and there’s a lot of people who have sort of reduced discipleship to church activity.

And that is “just come and be active at the church and everything else will take care of itself.” The idea is like “if you volunteer, if you participate, all the rest of it will kind of take care of itself.” I call this discipleship by osmosis. It’s like, you’re just sort of in the area.

I’ll stick that Spanish textbook under your pillow. I’m sure something will come your way eventually.

[11:52] Stephanie: Yeah, as long as you’re in the system, as long as you’re serving, and you’re around all these churchy things, you’ll be discipled, right?

[11:59] Marcus: Exactly. And also it looks like this, if you look at actual discipleship programs in churches, the two things they always include are evangelism and spiritual gifts.

And why? I think part of the reason evangelism is always so important is they want you to invite people to the church. And then when it comes to spiritual gifts, it’s because they need volunteers. And so a lot of churches are pretty good at discipling around evangelism and spiritual gifts, but then it gets really fuzzy after that.

They talk about becoming a self-feeder, right? Where you can read the Bible for yourself and feed yourself. And that’s good. That’s important. But when we get into the idea of maturity, all of a sudden things get really fuzzy on what it means to be mature as a Christian. So that’s part of the problem.

[12:47] Stephanie: Yeah. And you can just see people enter the church and then once they buy in and they start serving and serve for long enough, then they get asked to be some sort of leader, in a leadership position. And then they just keep working up the ladder and on the outside, everything looks good.

And sometimes on the inside, it is good, but no, you’re right – you want to get to the heart.

[13:11] Marcus: Yeah. And one of the things that contributes to the fact that so many Christian leaders struggle and fall is that they’ve got these struggles going on inside and they don’t know who to talk to about it.

They don’t know who to open up to. You know, if you’re not careful, traditional discipleship turns us into people more concerned with our image than with the reality of what’s going on inside. So the other, let me get to the D real quick while I say that, and that is D is for Discipline.

And I’m all for having a disciplined Christian life, but I found just personally, that when it comes to discipline, sometimes I’m super disciplined, and sometimes I’m incredibly fickle. Right? I think most people can relate to that. I’ve had people tell me, you’re one of the most disciplined people I know, and I’ve had other people tell me, your problem is a lack of discipline.

Both can be true, because there’s more going on here. When I’m in a good place, it’s easy to be disciplined. When I am struggling or when I’m tired and when that’s all not there, sometimes it’s harder to be disciplined. And I look at it this way – there’s some things you can do at an individual level.

There’s some things you need a counselor for. And there’s some things you need to do in a group, right? I need a group going through this with me if I’m really going to see change. Sometimes I need a counselor who’s going to help me get at the specific issue, so I even recognize what it is I’m supposed to be working on.

And then some of the stuff really is up to me. It’s really easy to say disciple means disciplined one, right? You see the words in it, disciple and discipline. And so people sometimes reduce discipleship to learning disciplines. And the problem is, once again, “Here’s the right thing you should be doing, now discipline yourself to do it.” And we’ve all tried that in 100 different ways to change our lives, and it just frustrates us because sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and we’re not always sure why.

[15:18] Stephanie: So what’s a sneak peek to the solution?

[15:22] Marcus: So sneak peek to the solution, basically, is that you can think about all these things as the spokes on a wheel.

We need discipline. Yeah, we need good behavior. Yes, we need truth. Yes, we need all these things. But at the hub of this wheel needs to be intimacy with Christ himself. In other words, there has to be intimacy with Christ himself and that has to be growing in a community.

There have to be people that I am bonding to. It’s no great mystery, right? Love God, love your neighbor. And so everybody knows it. Everybody talks about it. But what we’re talking about here is priority. That love has to be the hub around which all these other things are connected – out of which all these other things flow, or you get a really wobbly wheel.

[16:07] Stephanie: Was it George Bebawi who would talk about the cross being both vertical and horizontal?

[16:14] Marcus: It could be. Now, for those who don’t know, George is a former Cambridge professor who spoke at a Deeper Walk conference. He’s an expert in Semitics, but it sounds like something he would say. I honestly don’t remember off the top of my head.

[16:29] Stephanie: I love George.

[16:31] Marcus: Yeah.

[16:34] Stephanie: Very, very good. Wow. Was there anything else you wanted to accomplish with this episode?

[16:40] Marcus: Well, we’re going to dive in next week and take a look at what these four good ideas that neutralize Western Christianity are. And then we’re going to begin unpacking them in future episodes.

So the idea is that traditional discipleship has to give way to heart-focused discipleship. And heart-focused discipleship says, “What’s going on inside? What are the tools and strategies that I need in order to make sure that the inside is getting the attention that it needs so that I can experience this transformation from the inside out?”

And this isn’t just an individual journey. Again, this is something that is meant … The most powerful transformational tool in the universe is group identity, right? So belonging plus identity is going to provide an alternative model. To replace traditional discipleship.

[17:35] Stephanie: So enlightenment and the solution of truth.

[17:40] Marcus: There you go. That’s quite the topic, isn’t it? That should get everybody signing in. So, it’s kind of funny. Dr. Wilder introduced this topic several years ago when he did a webinar for a Deeper Walk. We used to do what we called “Life Model Mondays” where we would do a webinar on Mondays featuring Life Model content.

I remember he did a three-part series on voluntarism, and I had never heard of voluntarism. I have a doctorate degree, two masters, and I taught philosophy for one semester at a college. And I was like, okay, this is a really obscure thing. As it turns out, Jim’s brother is a PhD-level scholar in all things philosophical, and is especially good at Medieval and Enlightenment time period. They had been talking about this for quite some time back and forth.

So during the webinar, Jim introduced this idea that voluntarism is the idea that the will is the most central thing to being human. And he went back to the early Puritans. In some of their writings you see the strong emphasis on the will. In fact, when they would teach theology back in the days when Harvard was a Puritan school, the first part of their lesson was on will and understanding.

So think about it: how many theological debates have been about the will? Doesn’t God determine what happens? Do we have free will? What’s our job? What’s God’s job?

So there has been a lot of that underlying our theology for a long time. But he said that the emphasis on the will did not come directly out of the Bible as it came out of the philosophical conversations of the 1500s and 1600s during the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.

So to lay the foundation for understanding what we’re going to dive into today, we’re talking about how the Enlightenment actually impacted the church and how that is related to the discipleship model.

[19:59] Stephanie: Small potatoes.

[20:01] Marcus: Yeah, something simple, just to keep it light.

[20:03] Stephanie: And the Enlightenment, eh?

[20:06] Marcus: Yeah, well, very punny.

[20:11] Stephanie:  I am your daughter.

[20:14] Marcus: You’ve heard dad jokes long enough, right?

[20:16] Stephanie: Yep. So tell me more.

[20:20] Marcus: All right, the Enlightenment. Let’s start here with the scientific revolution when people like Galileo and Copernicus discovered that the sun did not go around the earth.

And this was a hugely upsetting thing because it basically said that the church is no longer the final arbiter of what is true and what is false. The church no longer can tell us, “This is true, just trust us.” Because they were [proven] wrong on [geocentricity], so it created this huge question of, “Well, what IS truth?”

How do we know what truth is? And so there was this explosion in philosophical thinking, specifically oriented around the idea of truth. And so it came to the idea that the ability to know what is true is a decidedly human pursuit. You don’t see lions and tigers and zebras going around trying to figure out what’s true, what’s false. It’s a human pursuit.

[21:30] Stephanie: You are very close to a Wizard of Oz reference right there.

[21:36] Marcus: I was, actually, now that you mention it. “If I only had a brain,” but you get the idea. So what happens here is that in this search, the question of truth became central to philosophy, and with this, the Church took a tremendous left turn in its disciple making. They agreed with culture that truth is the primary question.

Before this [shift], what we are suggesting is that at the center hub of the discipleship wheel is relationship. At the center hub of the discipleship wheel is a person – Jesus Christ. And discipleship is about strengthening our attachment to Jesus, growing that attachment,and at the same time growing our attachment, first and foremost with other followers of Jesus, and then eventually with all of the people in the world until it includes even loving our enemies.

So discipleship is kind of going out of the circle, learning to love Jesus, learning to love his people, learning to love those outside of that, even learning to love those who are actively persecuting us and attacking us for our faith. You’ve got to keep that at the hub though.

And so what happened after the Enlightenment was that when we made a left turn, we replaced that hub at the center of the wheel with truth. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with truth. We’ve got to make sure that our worldview is accurate. We want a worldview that reflects reality.

[23:08] Stephanie:  So truth is very important.

[23:09] Marcus: Truth is very important. Truth really does matter. And unfortunately, we have a lot of Christians in some circles today who act like it doesn’t. “Can’t we all just get along?” becomes, “Who cares what’s true?”  and that’s not a good place to be either.

Truth is really important. It’s just that we moved truth from being one of the spokes on the wheel to being the hub of the wheel. It fundamentally distorted the nature of Christianity. All of a sudden, being Christian became about believing the correct things, and if you could check the box off all the things that you believed correctly, then you say, “Okay, I am now a Christian.” It gave this intellectual gloss to it.

I can remember growing up feeling like true spirituality was measured in how deeply you could think about your faith. I can remember your grandpa, my dad, thinking about, talking about how surprising it was to see these really intelligent Christians not being closer in their walk with God. But I could tell that he had been influenced by this kind of thinking, that somehow intellect was an advantage to spirituality.

But that’s only true if you think that spirituality is about truth and getting everything, getting your system accurate. But, if discipleship is primarily about attachment, then there is no advantage to having intellect in order to form a trusting, loving attachment to Jesus. In fact, the smarter you are, the easier it is to have doubts, the easier it is in some ways to question things. To rely on your own understanding gets easier because you’re used to figuring everything out.

If you grew up a smart person, you’re just used to the idea that, “I’ll figure this out,” Sometimes we confuse that with faith, but it isn’t faith to feel like you can explain it. It’s a form of our intellect trying to figure out Christianity.

[25:12] Stephanie:  It becomes brain power instead of heart power. And then also we’re getting power, which is…

[25:22] Marcus: We’re going to get to power in a minute. I remember when Jim said that the greatest compliment you can give anything in Christianity is  “Wow, that was powerful!” It comes from the same idea that, while we’re focusing on truth in this episode, just so people get the big picture of the four good ideas that neutralize Western Christianity are these four spokes on the wheel that were all made to be the hub.

And so the first spoke on the wheel we’re talking about today is truth. That was where the Enlightenment started with the question of truth. And the Church said, “You’re right. Truth is the central thing,” and all of a sudden we moved this question of truth to the center of Christianity.

When we did that Christianity became more academic. It became more intellectual. It also became much easier to divide, because instead of truth uniting people, all of a sudden it became much easier to divide over “Your truth is not quite pure enough to hang out with me.”

[26:16] Stephanie: Right.

[26:16] Marcus: So it does create a problem.

We’re not saying the truth is not important. You’ve got to believe certain things to be a Christian. Paul said that we’ve got to believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, that we’ve got to be able to proclaim that Jesus is Lord. There are belief elements to this. There are truth elements to this. But is that really it? Or was Paul talking about forming an attachment?

My personal favorite image for becoming a Christian is the vine and the branches. It’s the idea of being grafted into a vine so that you have a shared life. Now that is an attachment image that I have come into.

Think about adoption as an attachment image, that I’m now coming into this relationship, even being given the right to be called children of God. To be called the son of God is an attachment image. This is the idea for Deeper Walk. We’re not about, “Come here to have deeper thoughts or deeper ideas.” but it is literally about a deeper relationship.

Think about it, the word relationship isn’t found in the Bible, nowhere that I’m aware of. I’m not sure if either Greek or Hebrew has a word for relationship, but they use a lot of synonyms and images and metaphors. Perhaps the most common metaphor for relationship is walking with God, they walked with, together. This is another way of saying that they had a relationship.

[27:42] Stephanie: All the way back in the Old Testament, when Moses said to God, “I don’t want to go anywhere unless you’re going with me.”

[27:50] Marcus: Exactly. The presence of God is a major issue for Moses. And we see this throughout the Bible.

So, again, how did the discipleship factory get broken? The discipleship factory got broken back when the Enlightenment said that truth is the central hub around which everything revolves instead of attachment. And that was the beginning.

Next week we’re going to dive into this a little bit further. We’re going to be talking about voluntarism specifically; how not only truth, but also the will, became central to the idea of what it takes to be a good Christian. How does the will make me a good Christian?

Again, the will was a spoke on the wheel. Making good choices is a spoke on the wheel, but when you make it the hub, things start falling apart, that wheel starts to wobble, the machine doesn’t work right. And what happens here is that if your growth model is off, if it gets distorted, then the solutions that you’re offering to people for their problems are not going to be as accurate.

You can find yourself actually offering bad solutions or wrong solutions to people’s problems, with good intentions, but because the growth model that you developed on which you build discipleship is not truly accurate. That’s why we’re starting here. We want to make sure we get our model correct. We want to make sure that our model is as accurate as possible.

Someone might say, “Then aren’t you making truth the center?” We’re not making truth the center. We’re trying to use truth correctly, to use reason correctly. That is, we do need a rational faith, but that doesn’t mean that reason and rationality are the center of the faith. We can use our reason to understand that attachment is actually the centerpiece of the faith and that’s what we need to build on. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish here.

[29:49] Stephanie: Ah, so can you give us a summary of where we’re heading with the next couple episodes?

[29:56] Marcus: Absolutely.

We’re going to be taking a look at the four good ideas that neutralize Western Christianity. We started with truth in today’s session, then we’re going to be looking at the will.

After that, we’re going to be looking at power. And power is a touchy one because we tend to say that oppressed people simply need to be empowered. We’re going to talk about that a little bit.

There are also a lot of people who don’t know how to separate the Holy Spirit and a conversation from power. I think that the Holy Spirit is about relationship, wisdom, and attachment, but sometimes we reduce the Holy Spirit to being only about power.

And so we’re going to talk a little bit more about the Holy Spirit and what his job actually is in the Christian life, and how the emphasis on power has actually created some problems for the solutions that we offer. So, we’re looking at the truth today, we’re looking at the will the next session, then we’re going to look at power.

Finally, we’re going to look at tolerance, which is a Christian virtue. Tolerance is this idea that we love our enemies. You can’t love somebody if you’re not tolerant of them. But what has happened is we’ve taken tolerance and made it the end of loving our enemies instead of the beginning of loving our enemies. I think as a church, we have also tended to embrace tolerance, not so much out of a core value, but because we have lost confidence that we actually have a model that transforms anybody.

We don’t believe in transformation anymore because our model seems to have failed so many people. So there’s a sense that if nothing works and there is no transformation, maybe we should just not even try anymore. So we sometimes call tolerance waving the white flag of surrender, saying, “I guess there’s no point in actually trying to help somebody change if change isn’t actually possible.”

So that’s where we’re headed. Again, these ideas are based on the book, The Solution of  Choice: Four Good Ideas that Neutralized Western Christianity, and they are also unpacked a bit in my new book, A Deeper Walk, that has just come out from Moody Publishing.

[32:08] Stephanie: Yes, It’s coming out August 2nd, 2022! Huzzah!

So any final thoughts on Enlightenment and the Solution of Truth as we wrap up today?

[32:19] Marcus: Yes, I want to focus on this word solution. Let’s take the person who goes from church to church to church looking for a solution to the problems that they have. And it’s not uncommon. You go to one church and it’s all Bible, Bible, Bible. And that’s good. I hope that what we say is biblical. I hope that we offer biblical truth and biblical wisdom and perspective to people. But if you only share the Bible, and you never get to the spiritual realities behind the Bible, you’ve got a problem. If the Bible doesn’t lead to attachment, you’ve got a problem.

So they go to another church and this one’s all about power, power, power, power. Let’s cast out the demon of alcoholism. Let’s cast out this and you’ll be all better. Let’s just get the right person to lay hands on you and you’ll be all better. We look at power as this almost like a magic bullet that’s going to be the solution that you need. And let’s be honest, if the solutions that we offer as a church don’t work, we tend to blame the person instead of looking at our model, instead of looking to see if there’s something missing in our model. That’s what we’re looking at here.

Why this is so important is that a lot of what happens that damages people in the church happens because they are offered solutions that don’t work and then told that they didn’t work because there is something wrong with them. We don’t want that to happen. We want to minimize the amount of spiritual abuse going on in the church. We want to minimize the number of people who are getting damaged because their problem just doesn’t happen to fit the paradigm that the church is offering for its solutions.

And that’s where we’re headed as we move forward.

[33:57] Stephanie: Yes, I was just contemplating that whenever I see “voluntarism,” my Latin background brings up voluntas, which means the will, or a wish, or consent, or a desire, but it comes from the verb wolo, which means “to will,” or, anyway, so, that’s where voluntarism comes from. Yeah.

[34:23] Marcus:  Yeah. Wolo, which is volo, which, again, always makes me think of…

[34:26] Stephanie: Yes, that’s true, I pronounce it classically.

[34:29] Marcus: Exactly. Which makes me think of a Rolo, which is a candy, so I have a problem with that. Everything reminds me of food. I’m sure that’s a problem.

[34:37] Stephanie: Yeah. Your willpower.

[34:42] Marcus: I have a problem with willpower.

Wolo. “I will.” All right. Well, yes, but you’re right. That’s where voluntarism comes from. It comes from that volo, volantis, you know, family of Latin words, meaning “the will” or “to choose.” It does not mean wishful thinking.

[35:03] Stephanie: Yeah, it’s not, “I wish it would happen” so much as “I will it to happen.”

[35:09] Marcus: So are we ready to dive in?

[35:11] Stephanie: Yes. Yes.

[35:13] Marcus: All right. voluntarism. Yeah. So, again, I got this word from Dr. Wilder when he was doing some webinars for Deeper Walk several years ago. And as we started working on The Solution of Choice together, we took a little bit deeper dive into this, and began to understand that some of the Puritan theologians like William Ames wrote that their theologies really started with the will and the idea that man is what I choose is central to the faith of the choices that I make. And again, we’ve argued that discipleship is like a wheel and that at the center of this wheel is our attachment with Jesus and then our attachment with his people and moving out from there.

And then that the spokes on the wheel are things like truth. and choices, and power, and tolerance, but that they are not meant to be the hub of the wheel. And when they become the hub, bad things happen. The whole thing gets off balance. And so we see this a lot in that Christianity, when, because of this emphasis on the will, started becoming somewhat reductionistic and making everything a choice. So we started focusing on salvation as a choice—like decision. Make this decision for Christ. And when that happened, evangelism became very much like sales, like the whole goal is that we got to get people to make this choice, we got to get them to make this decision, and I remember.

You know, I was a part of the Billy Graham crusades. It came to Indianapolis in the year 2000, and I was one of the counselors who went down and met with people. But their own studies showed that something like only one out of seven people who went forward and made this decision for Christ actually showed any evidence of following through with it. In only one out of seven could they record or find any evidence that there was actually life change that followed.

So it’s not that decisions don’t matter, and it’s not like there’s not a decision involved, but if you stop and think about it, becoming a Christian is much more like getting married And it may involve a decision, right? There are choices I have to make here, and there is an act of the will that happens. But what I’m doing is I’m forming an attachment with my wife, in this case, that begins here. And it is supposed to now grow and expand, and so the attachment makes us one, and it’s not just an act of will that makes us one. And so we also think philosophically, “What is the will?” and “ What do we mean by the will?”

And one of the things that I know Dr. Wilder has often explained is that a lot of our thinking about this actually comes from medieval philosophy and medieval theology, which talks about the human makeup very much like we talk about sunrises and sunsets. And that is, it uses anthropological language. It uses words like the will and the emotions and the intellect and breaks it down that way. And if we break this down the way that the brain actually functions, we’re going to get a very different view of who man is and what it means to be human. And so part of what we’re trying to do here is to actually create a new anthropology as a foundation for discipleship.

But that is, we need to start looking at what it means to be human a little bit differently than the medieval people did, because today almost nobody goes along with that anthropology unless they’re just inheriting it and have never thought about it.

[39:03] Stephanie: Right. Well, and I know Jim talks about how brain science shows that we don’t just have one will, which is where it definitely falls apart. It’s not like we just have to get our one will in line, but we have multiple wills.

[39:18] Marcus:  Yeah, I think we can all relate to that, right? It’s like part of me wants to do this, and part of me wants to do that. Part of me really wants to go take a nap. Part of me wants to go golf. Part of me wants to study.

Part of me knows I should really… You know, I can have multiple wills going on at the same time. So now it becomes a question of which will is the strongest part of my brain. Also, based on the brain science, one of the things he said that was really fascinating was this idea that if you compare your brain to a tree, then attachment is like the roots of the tree. It’s really stable. It’s really solid.

Whereas choices are like the leaves on a tree, right? They’re a part of our brain, which is really fickle and head it is just like the leaves can fall off, they can blow, they can change, they’re doing all kinds of stuff, but it’s much easier to change what’s happening with leaves than it is to change that anchor point of our attachment.

And so the idea is that if I am attached, deeply attached to a holy God, then it’s going to start forming me into a holy person and all of a sudden making holy choices is going to be a whole lot easier. But if I reverse that process, and I say, “I am going to become a holy person by making holy choices that will eventually form an attachment with a holy God,” the whole thing’s going to fall apart, because it’s just not the way it’s designed to work.

[40:42] Stephanie: Yeah. Can you dig in more on the definition of attachment?

[40:47] Marcus: Yeah, sure. So when we’re talking about bonding, at the deepest part of the brain is a craving or a desire to be bonded to somebody else, to be connected, right? So when a baby comes out of the mother’s womb, the first thing that baby is looking for is not food.

The first thing that baby is looking for is attachment. And if you stop to think about it, that baby has been attached by an umbilical cord, literally, for eight or nine months here. And now that they’re out in the world, safety and security comes from feeling connected, right? So feeling like I am bonded and I am safe and I am with somebody.

So our earliest attachments are formed through smell and through touch, and then after that through sound, and then eventually through sight, and then it just grows, and then our attachment grows deeper and deeper. And so attachments will either be fueled by fear or they’ll be fueled by joy.

And so what I found is that in discipleship, a lot of us are trying to overcome a fear bond with God and transform that into a joy bond. Because we started off not feeling safely attached to him. We felt like it was all based on a choice that I had made and I might change my mind about that choice.

[42:12] Stephanie: Or maybe you made that choice out of fear.

[42:15] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. So my own story was when I was three years old, I had a nightmare about hell and went to my mom’s room, you know, your Grandma Warner, and asked, “What do I have to do to make sure I never go to hell?” which is a very different question than “What do I need to do in order to become a child of God? What do I need to do in order to be attached to God in a positive way? I want to have a relationship with this wonderful person, right?”

It was completely fear based. And so, I find that with a lot of our Christianity, if our attachment to God is primarily based in fear, it creates a problem.

And I get this question a lot, too. It’s like, so why does the Bible say that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord? What is this fear of the Lord talking about if we’re saying we want to have a joy-based relationship with God over a fear-based relationship? And I say at this point, we are talking about wisdom and what wisdom is. When the Bible is talking about the fear of the Lord, it’s talking about which path leads to what is good.

And so, if you define wisdom as taking the path that leads to God’s blessing and to what is good, and you define folly as taking the path that leads to evil and what’s going to mess your life up, he said that in that sense, the foundation of it is the fear of the Lord. And that is, I want to make sure I do what is pleasing to God and get on that path that he’s going to bless. And so in that sense there is a “fear of the Lord” thing.

So we sometimes try to soften that to “Well, it’s respect for God” or something like that, but honestly, I think it has to do with the fear of the consequences of getting this thing wrong, and taking seriously: “So wise people understand that choices have consequences and wise people understand that there is something to all of this.”

So as we talk about choice today again, we’re not saying that choices don’t matter and that choices are irrelevant. We’re just saying that it’s not supposed to be the hub on which everything else is built.

[44:16] Stephanie: It just reminds me of Grandpa talking about if you do things God way, you get to watch what happens. If you do things your own way, you get to watch what happens.

[44:28] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. No, that’s the fear of the Lord, and so it’s not that I’m afraid of God, but the fear of the Lord teaches me that there are real consequences to the path that I get on. And so wisdom starts with making sure I stay off of that.That’s why Psalm 1 starts off, “Blessed is the man who does not.”

It’s like, “blessed is the man who does not walk in the way of the wicked or stand in the way with sinners or sit in the seat of the mocker, but his delight is in the law of the Lord.” So, partly it starts in fear, but then it ends with delight. Right?

It’s like out of the fear of the Lord, I want to make sure I don’t do something that’s going to ruin my life, but as I push into this, I find delight in the Lord. I find delight in his law, and I begin to trust him. And so I think that the idea of attachment in Scripture, in my way of thinking about it, is primarily connected to this word “trust,” right?

And that is, a joy-bond with God is one that trusts him to be a safe and secure presence in my life, versus a fear-bond with God, which never gets past this idea of “I just don’t want him to ruin my life.”

[45:35] Stephanie: That’s really helpful. Thank you.

[45:37] Marcus: Yeah.

[45:38] Stephanie: So the solution of choice, how do we see this playing out in our broken discipleship factory?

[45:47] Marcus: So the way this plays out primarily is that when you go to, you know, Church A, Church B, Church C, you’re looking for a solution to your problem. Let’s just say that you’re struggling with a pornography addiction or you’re struggling with an anger issue. And you go to Church A and they give you “The Solution of Truth.”

And they’re going to say, here’s the Bible. It says “Don’t do that!” Right? And so then you go to church B, it’s “The Solution of Choice”, and they’re going to say, “Well, we already know the Bible says don’t do this. Now, we need to make sure that you’re going to choose to not do this anymore. So we’re going to give you an accountability partner, and you’re going to report to him every week on your behavior.”

And that accountability partner will kind of force you to make good choices on this issue, you know. And that’s fine because at one level we want to make those good choices. But really, we would like to move past. Like let’s take the porn thing. It’s like at some point I want to move past where I am craving this and just have to keep that craving under control to where I am actually healing and being transformed and changing when it comes to this and I’m actually developing a protector mindset that says, “Even if somebody were to offer this to me, I would not accept it because You.” It’s like me being a protector rather than a predator.

And so, yeah, so you go into all of this and we understand that if it’s all about choices, then it is enough for me to just say no, right? It’s the same thing you think about love. Like if I go to work or to school or to someplace, and I really hate some people. Right. Or I really despise those people.

You know, is it enough for me to continue despising and hating them, but choose to be kind to them once in a while? Is that loving your enemies? Take it another step further. It’s like, yeah, I mean, if I’m talking about, you know, as a parent with kids or as a kid with parents or as a husband and wife, you don’t want to wake up in the morning and have to decide whether or not to love your kids.

Right? You don’t wake up in the morning and decide whether or not you love your parents. You don’t wake up in the morning and decide whether you love your wife or not. You know, that should be there. That attachment should be there. And that it makes all these other choices easier.

[48:11] Stephanie: Sometimes choices then are, you know, if you are waking up and realizing you don’t have that attachment, then there’s a place for choices as you are getting back onto that path. Right.

The end goal isn’t, “Oh, I made the choice to be kind.” That’s just a tool. It’s not the end goal. Yeah. It makes me think of when we talk about counseling and like getting to the root of a heart issue and how so many times people go to counseling and it’s just fruit picking, like, Oh, I’m going to manage my anger.

I’m going to manage my depression. And we’re like, we would much rather you manage that than not manage it. But we want to go deeper.

[49:00] Marcus:  Right.

And so, yes, this is a good thing to learn how to manage these things. But we want to find true healing. We want to find true attachment. We want to try.

Right. So we do want to make good choices, but that isn’t the—but that’s again, that’s a spoke on the wheel.

It’s not the hub. And what has happened, because our voluntarist thinking is so pervasive, is that we have tended to reduce everything to a choice. So not only would touch reduce salvation to simply making a choice, but we have reduced love to a choice. And how many times have we heard people say, “Love is a choice”?

I’m like, yeah, not really. Love is an attachment. Right? And based on that attachment, I’m going to make choices and their choices that come out of it and choices get woven into this. But again, I can be fickle in my choices, but hopefully that attachment is secure. Same thing with joy, you know, when we teach on joy.

This idea that there are choices you can make that are going to make the experience of the attachment better. There’s choices you can make that are going to make the experience of joy more likely. But you can’t just choose, you know, joy anymore than you just choose to be happy. So, like

[50:05] Stephanie: You talk about closing the joy gap.

[50:07] Marcus: Yeah, shrinking the joy gap. There are things that you can choose to do to build habits into your life. But that doesn’t mean that you can simply reduce what’s going on to a choice. And this is confusing. I mean, for me as a pastor, I remember preaching on 1 Corinthians 13, and simply reducing it to a list of choices that people make.

So I totally bought into the “love is a choice” thing. And was like, okay, so love is patient. Therefore, choose to be patient. Love is kind. Therefore, choose to be kind. Love is, you know, never failing. So choose to never fail. Really? You can make that choice? You know, I’m not sure I can make the choice to never fail.

There are some things that you can choose to do because they’re loving choices. But that isn’t the same thing as saying that love is a choice. So we come down to this where, again, if a church is offering a solution that says make better choices and here’s an accountability partner to help you make better choices, and that’s the extent of the help that you’re getting because that’s all that the model has to offer, right, then you can begin to see why that would get frustrating to people.

And when it works, right, when an accountability works and it’s truly life changing, I’ve talked to people who’ve come up to me and said, I don’t know why you’re bashing accountability. You know, it changed my life. I usually ask him, I said, if you look back on that, I said, was it the relationship and the attachment that you formed with those people and that person? Or was it the fact that they were asking you every week, “Did you fall?”

And without exception, they’ve all been—you know, it was the relationship and the attachment that actually had the power, you know, much more so. There were a lot of weeks they never even asked, you know, “How’d you do? Just knowing I was going to be with my people was what kept me on the journey.”

And so that’s kind of what we’re getting at here, is we want to broaden off the model that the church is using to create transformation so that we don’t reduce it to simply— otherwise it’s like telling an addict, just say no. Right? And that’s the ultimate voluntarist, you know, thing is, you know, just say no.

Like, that’s the only thing going on is you’re making a choice. There’s just a whole lot more going on in that situation.

[52:21] Stephanie: Yeah. I was flipping through The Solution of Choice and and just noticed a callout that I really liked. It says, “When choice is invoked in Scripture, it is generally calling people to remember who their God is and who their people are and to choose to stand with him.”

[52:39] Marcus: Absolutely.Absolutely.

You get lots of—you do find choice in the Bible, but it is a relational choice just as much. Yeah.

It’s the choice to live out of the attachment. So even like “Live a life worthy of the calling you’ve received,” you know, is similar to, you know, “make the choice to live out of the attachments that you formed with God and his people.”

Yeah. That’s really our calling.

[52:48] Marcus: No, it’s true. And with my dad being a missionary anthropology professor as part of what he did, he often talked about culture as having a worldview at its center and that was basically the model that told you what was possible and what was likely and how things worked. Then out of your worldview came your values and then your values drove your behavior.

And he talked about this as a discipleship model, right, that is in discipleship you think about it this way. It starts with belonging, these are my people. But as I’m molding these people, we have to come to a worldview agreement and what that is.

So, often we bond around our worldview, and then that worldview produces values, and then those values produce behavior.

You don’t do it the other way around. That was one of the things he used to say about legalism in the church. They tried to make people act like Christians, whether they actually had the worldview and the value system of a Christian or not. And so they separated behavior from what was underneath and what was underneath that was belonging, worldview, values, and then comes behavior.

So yeah, it’s quite a legacy he left, and that model has stayed with me and been a profound influence on what we’re doing and why we’re even talking about voluntarism and this thing now, right. We’re dealing with worldview issues to get this stuff right.

[54:27] Stephanie: Yeah, And the worldview we’re looking at this week is modernism.

[54:31] Marcus:  Yes. Modernism. It’s kind of connected to Nietzsche. I don’t know how you say his name. I always say it wrong. The idea is that the Enlightenment gave rise to voluntarism which gave rise to modernism. Modernism is the idea that what counts is power, the ability to make things happen.

We were less concerned with what is true than we were with what works and what makes things happen. And so the idea of power as being the centerpiece of life was something that happened in modern culture before it moved into the church. And the church’s version of power and putting power at the center of things was largely in spiritual warfare, in the Holy Spirit.

And it makes sense because, you know. If the world’s telling us that what really matters in life is how much power do you have to make things change, then the church was like, well, we have the ultimate power source there is. You know, so when the culture had said, truth is what really counts, the church was like, we have the greatest truth there is. Let’s make truth the center, we can do that.

Then they were like, no, it’s the will and making good choices that counts. So we said, well, nobody has a better ethic system than us. We can tell you what the best choices are. So the church went with that. Then it was power that counts. And to this day, we see this as the primary solution offered by the world to oppressed people, it is to empower them. And on the surface, that sounds absolutely perfect, but if you simply empower broken and bittered people, what happens?

[56:18] Stephanie: You change who is now going to get oppressed.

[56:21] Marcus: Exactly. You’re just flipping the dial on who’s the one getting oppressed. And that’s why if you look back on these movements that have empowered oppressed people, if there was nothing else, if no attachments were formed first, if they didn’t learn to form relational attachments with other people, then the newly empowered people just turned that on. And the history of the world is filled with millions of people being killed because they thought power was the solution.

And in the church, you know, we look at power and we say, well, the Holy Spirit is clearly the ultimate source of power. And what we have tended to do is take this model of transformation that says that truth plus choices equals transformation and said, the reason it doesn’t work is that we don’t have the Holy Spirit.

And if we just have the Holy Spirit’s power, now all of a sudden I will have the power to make those choices. That’s the way it tends to get taught,right. Of course, knowing what the Bible tells you, you’re not able to do that in the flesh. And of course, you can’t make those choices in the flesh, but with the Spirit’s power, now, all of a sudden, you can do all those things.

[57:32] Stephanie: Well, it’s like Star Wars theology.

[57:34] Marcus: Yeah, right, right.

[57:35] Stephanie: Holy Spirit is just a force. We just need to tap into the force, and through God we have all this power available to us, and we miss the personhood of the Holy Spirit.

[57:45] Marcus: Yeah, it’s somewhat reductionistic, right? It reduces the Holy Spirit to power. And I think that what we need to understand is that the Holy Spirit is also about wisdom and attachment and relational connection.

He is the Spirit of love, right? So it’s his presence that is driving attachment. That’s why the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,patience, longsuffering, and all these. We look at these lists of the fruit of the spirit and you begin to understand, okay, the Holy Spirit’s influence in my life should be creating this.

Well, does that happen primarily through power? Or does it happen primarily through the wisdom that he gives us as we are walking with him? So as we keep in step with the Spirit and he guides us in our steps, then we are going to be wiser about that. But, you know, almost anybody can tell you, the Holy Spirit doesn’t just take over and suddenly force you to become mature.

It’s as we build that relationship that we grow in our maturity. And so the relationship with God will always result in a growth in maturity.

[58:57] Stephanie: Some of this goes back to the last episode. I think you were talking about trust and how important trust is to attachment, and part of trust is a journey, is the relational attachment.

The journey of walking with God and the Holy Spirit is establishing trust, and that generally doesn’t just happen in a flash. You don’t learn to trust somebody from one thing.

[59:24] Marcus: Yeah, no, you don’t start off with ultimate trust, and we don’t start on our walk with God with ultimate trust. I sometimes look at the children of Israel coming out of Egypt, and one of the things that the years of working with deeply traumatized people taught me, is that they have one thing consistently true about them. Deeply traumatized people do not trust readily or easily.

And most of them have serious trust issues with God. And so that made me think about the children of Israel who had been enslaved and mistreated for 400 years. I’m thinking, how much abuse did they go through? What kind of trust issues did they have? What did God do to try to grow a trust relationship with them?

And I remember thinking to myself, oh, those poor people, they’ve been through enough. Why didn’t God just take them to the land flowing with milk and honey and give it to them and tell them to rest and to immediately come enter into my rest. No more battles. You’ve had a hard enough life. Now that seemed reasonable to me, but that’s certainly not what God did, is it?

No, he took him to boot camp. He said, Hey, you actually have been battling for survival, but now we’re going to teach you how to fight battles that are actually going to take ground from the enemy. In a sense, he’s like, we’re going to teach you how to live a victorious life, not a battle free life.

[01:00:44] Stephanie: Well, they had to get out of the slave mindset. They had to detox from, you know, the worldviews and the abuses and such that they had. So God took them into the wilderness and was teaching them this is how the world really works and this is who I am to you. And this is how you can be victorious and safe with me if you trust me, but he had to give them things that they had to trust him over.

[01:01:11] Marcus: No, exactly. And so what we find God doing is he’s actually working on building their attachment with him. And you can make the argument that what they wanted was his power and what he wanted was their love. And they were kind of at odds with each other.

And so he took them into this boot camp, and he stripped them of their old identity, that slave mentality, that orphan mentality that says, I’m on my own. I just need to do whatever it takes to survive. If your power will help me to survive, great, give me your power. And he needed to strip them of that identity, that mindset, and he needed to build up a new one, just like what happens in boot camp.

You strip down the civilian mindset and develop the military mindset. And this new mindset was trust me. And so to develop their trust, he had to take them through trials to see that he was trustworthy. And that’s what he did, he didn’t take them to this posh resort, he took them out into the desert.

And at first I was just really discouraged by that because I was kind of hoping the Christian life was a posh resort. But the encouraging thing is no, God’s dealing with reality here. And the reality is that until Jesus returns, until there’s a new heaven and a new earth, we live in a world at war. This is part of a kingdom worldview that in this world at war, we do have to rely on God’s power to get us through these things.

But it’s primarily that we have to trust his character as much as his power. I find that more people struggle to trust God’s character than struggle to trust his power. So then we come back to this thing about the solution of power.

The way this plays out in the local church is if you come to a church with your problem and the solution that they offer you is going to tend to be, well, let’s get rid of a demon or let’s get you anointed with more of the Holy Spirit.

And the assumption is, that will take care of it. And so the problem, of course, with all of these things is that there are a certain number of people for whom that’s all it took. There are some people who, as soon as they got the Bible teaching they just changed the way they were thinking, that was enough, and it worked.

And so you collect these stories as evidence that your model is correct, but it just avoids all of the stories of people that it was not able to help.

And it’s the same thing that you get these high accountability models and they get filled with stories of how that worked, and you’re like, therefore our model is correct. But again, it just sort of ignores all the ones that weren’t actually able to help.

[01:03:52] Stephanie:  It goes into, like, the hammer and nail scenario of, yes, this hammer is really good at hitting nails, but not everything is a nail.

[01:04:02] Marcus: Right, exactly.

[01:04:03] Stephanie: Yeah.

[01:04:04] Marcus: And it is the problem that if the only solution you have is a hammer, then you’re going to tend to see everything as a nail. And that’s what we’re talking about here. We’ve got to deal with reality as it is. So, is there power in the Holy Spirit? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I’ve seen hundreds of people set free from things related to demons, but here’s the thing. I’ve never seen anybody get rid of a demon and become instantly mature, right?

[01:04:54] Marcus: Neil Anderson used to say this really well. He says, it takes only a few seconds to get free. It takes a lifetime to grow maturity. Because maturity is the attachment part of this. It’s the trust part of this. It’s the connection. Now getting free allows that to develop. There are some people who are already more mature and already have a deeper connection with God. So getting rid of something demonic can have a much more profound impact for them because that really was the main obstacle in their way that they needed to get rid of.

There’s also people the same way. They are already relatively mature people, so when the Holy Spirit comes upon them, boom, they can just go and they can take off. So with the Holy Spirit’s anointing, I find this pattern in the Bible. For the most part, when it talks about the Holy Spirit coming upon someone, the anointing, that tends to be for power.

And suddenly they’re able to do things they couldn’t do before. Whether it’s Samson, who can now, you know, beat people up, or whether it’s the apostles who can now speak in tongues, or whether it’s somebody who can prophesy or whatever, but they can do things they couldn’t do before. They now have power because the Holy Spirit came upon them and anointed them.

But when it talks about the infilling of the Holy Spirit and this Holy Spirit being inside of somebody, that usually connects to the idea of wisdom, that they now have words from God. That they have thoughts from God. There is now God guiding them. And so it’s almost synonymous with being wise to say that somebody is filled with the Spirit.

And we look at those, and I think a lot of us are looking for the next anointing and the next powerful thing to happen in our lives. Yet, that will not necessarily make us more mature. And all you gotta do is look at some of the churches that practice the most power.

And say, well, the Holy Spirit is always doing something powerful in this church or that church, and then looking at the people and say, are they producing more mature people as a result? And the answer is not generally yes, right? If they are, it’s not because of the power that’s taking place there.

So what we’re trying to show people is that power is a good thing. It’s another spoke on the wheel. It’s important. Like, truth is important, good choices are important, but the central thing has to stay attachment. It has to stay our connection to God. Because if we make power the main thing, we are going to skew the whole model, and we are going to find ourselves going in directions and offering solutions that actually end up traumatizing people.

And I’ve met with a lot of people who went to churches like this where somebody tried to cast a demon out of them or somebody prayed for them to be slain in the spirit or something like that. And they had this experience and because they had an experience, they got treated like, well, you should be all fine now and they weren’t all fine. And so it just led to, well, therefore you must be the problem, not our model.

[01:07:35] Stephanie: Yeah.It’s very unfortunate. But I’m glad we are building our toolbox here, seeing that these things are good and also that there’s more to the model than just them.

[01:07:50] Marcus: Yeah. So like I said, these are all good. Truth is good. Choices are good, the Holy Spirit power is good. It’s just that we have to be careful to avoid reducing Christianity to any of these things. Especially at the cost of our actual connection with God.

[01:08:05] Stephanie: It’s the most important thing. All right. Any final thoughts for this episode?

[01:08:11] Marcus: Well, that’s the main thing. I think when I think of intimacy with God, the word that pops in my mind is that Hebrew word yada, which is probably best known from Seinfeld, like yada, yada, yada.

[01:08:20] Stephanie:  I know, I know, I know.

[01:08:22] Marcus: Yeah, I know, I know, I know. But in this case, Yada is the idea of knowing God and us knowing him. I sometimes think that word could be accurately translated as intimate, be intimate with God. So to have a deeper walk with God is to grow our intimacy with him.

And part of it is understanding that while we’re seeking solutions to the problems in our lives, we have to realize that ultimately everything that we go through is designed to grow our attachment to God and to strengthen that attachment so that no matter how hard things get, that attachment becomes unwavering. So that’s kind of the thought for today.

[01:09:03] Stephanie: Oh man, so last week we were talking about modernism, and now we’re talking about postmodernism. Do you want to walk us through that transition?

[01:09:12] Marcus: Yeah, sure. You know, I sometimes feel like World War I was a bigger turning point in history than most people give it credit for. The 1800s were dominated by the philosophy of modernism, and that was this progressive idea that the world is getting better and better and that science was going to come up with an answer for everything.

And so people couldn’t wait for the future because they figured now that we’ve gotten rid of the superstition of Christianity and all this religious nonsense, we’re going to get more scientific, and science is going to create this utopia. And you did get a lot of utopian philosophies beginning to be developed as people were looking for what fit really well with the philosophy of Hegel, who talked about the dialectic, like there’s a thesis and there’s an antithesis that merges into a synthesis.

And it was this idea of constant progression, of constant moving forward. And then Marx came along, took Hegel’s ideas, and he said the poor and the rich, the proletariat and the bourgeois — they’re the thesis and the antithesis, and it’s going to emerge into a classless society, and that will be utopia.

And so you had this Marxist dialectic thinking going on, and then you had evolution coming in at the same time saying survival of the fittest and therefore only the strongest are going to survive. Therefore, things are going to keep getting better, that it’s always evolving to someplace higher.

And so during this time period that Marxism was being developed, that evolution was being created, that Hegel’s philosophy was dominant in the universities, this idea that life was getting better and better was taking over and this optimistic attitude about the future. And then World War I hit and all of a sudden we saw this complete collapse of all these so-called Christian societies, all these people at their best. We thought that these were the greatest cultures that humanity could produce, and they just turned savage on each other and then we saw horrendous things happening.

And it was shortly after this that you began philosophically seeing existentialism begin to become a thing, like what is the meaning of life? You know, death is the destiny of us all. Why does anything matter? Life is not going to get better and better. If anything, life’s just going to get worse and worse. And out of this came postmodernism. So modernism was characterized by this idea that if I can just accumulate enough power, I can create utopia with it.

And postmodernism is basically kind of giving up on some of that and the idea that it became more focused on words and vocabulary and change through vocabulary versus change through accumulation of power. It’s more complicated than that, but what postmodernism essentially did is it kind of gave up on the idea that we’re going to create some sort of utopian society.

And the way that this parallels the church and the way that this impacted the church was that the church also, during this time, was beginning to get to the end of its power solution. The church was a little bit later on its power solution. So the big wave of Holy Spirit movement was in the fifties and the sixties and the seventies and then a third wave, as they call it, came in the eighties and nineties moving forward, but in culture itself, postmodernism was beginning to creep in that essentially said truth doesn’t matter. I like the way Tim Keller put this. He said postmodernism is the first philosophy in the history of the world that has denied that there is a truth external to me to which I must conform my life.

[01:13:19] Stephanie: Yeah, well, and this would be a connection with relativism too. Yeah?

[01:13:24] Marcus: Yeah, definitely connected to relativism and this idea that whereas every generation, no matter whether it’s Christian or not, the culture has said, there is some external thing to which I seek to conform.

Postmodernism now says truth is whatever is inside of the individual. So my truth is what defines what is true, and your job is now to conform your life to my truth because nobody believes there is any such thing as ultimate truth anymore, which is a completely illogical system, and it will collapse.

It is not something that can endure long term because it will collapse on itself because there has to be an agreed-upon truth at some point in some level in order for culture to survive. So, it’s a problem. But what grows out of this idea that there is no truth and that I have to respect whatever your truth is inside of you is that tolerance has suddenly become the core value of the postmodern world.

It used to be, in a Christian dominated culture, that tolerance was the idea that said that even though I don’t agree with you, I can still do good to you. I can still be kind to you, but I disagree. We have now moved to the point where tolerance demands that I affirm whatever truth you happen to believe. You’re almost not allowed to disagree with certain people unless you’re disagreeing with the opponents of postmodernism. It’s a real challenge.

So it has changed the landscape now in which we are trying to do Christianity, and it happens to coincide with a generation, really beginning with your generation — the millennials — one of the first generations that began to become really disillusioned with the church and very disillusioned with the idea that the solutions that were being offered with the church didn’t really seem to be producing life change.

[01:15:27] Stephanie: Yeah, that transformation we’ve been talking about.

[01:15:29] Marcus: Yeah, they weren’t seeing it. And you’ve got all these stories of people who are like, my parents are one way at church, and they’re another way at home. And Christians are one way in public, and they’re another way in private.

There’s always been a challenge of hypocrisy with the faith, which we can talk about as well at some point, but there became this more broadspread disillusionment and questioning whether the church’s stance on things culturally was correct or not.

Are we on the right side of the political spectrum? Are we on the right side of issues of social justice? Are we on the right side of the things that we’re saying? How do we know that we’re right? And what about this? And, theology was more highly set aside, and it was more like, let’s just tolerate everybody the way they are.

So one of the things that happens with that is when you say that tolerance is the best that we can do, it’s also a way of saying that there is no hope of change. So, in our book, The Solution of Choice, we say it’s a little bit like waving the white flag of surrender and saying the church actually doesn’t have a model that can change anybody, so let’s just accept everyone the way they are with no expectation of change.

So, we need to talk a little bit about what is tolerance — in what sense is it a Christian virtue, in what sense is it a good idea? Because it is. We’re talking about four good ideas to neutralize Western Christianity.

So to understand it, it helps me to go back to the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus is talking about loving your enemy. And in the context there, I find it interesting that he’s talking about people groups. So our culture today, this postmodern world, is all about identity groups.

And I talked to somebody out at the University of Washington who was saying, our campus is not so much a bunch of individuals as it is a bunch of identity groups. And all of them are in a battle and to be highest in the pecking order means you have to be the most oppressed. He said it is really a challenge  reaching out with the gospel into this world of identity groups.

Well, in Jesus’ day, there were all kinds of identity groups as well, for example, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. You had Samaritans, you had Romans, you had the average Jewish people. And one of the things that Jesus said is ‘you people in your group identities, you won’t even talk to each other.’

Well, that’s starting to sound pretty familiar today, isn’t it? Right? It’s like, I belong to this group of people. Therefore, I won’t even talk to you because you belong to that other group.

And the idea of loving your enemies was not the idea that everybody had to agree with each other. But even if I completely disagree with you, if I think you’re a tax collector and you’re siding with the Romans and how could you side with the Romans? I’m a zealot, and we want to kill all the Romans. Because you’re a tax collector and I’m a zealot, I won’t talk to you. In fact, I will spit on you. I will be mean to you because my people group and your people group couldn’t be more opposite.

And it’s in that kind of a context that Jesus is talking about loving your enemies. And, he said it starts really simply with greeting one another. Can we have a civil greeting here? And then it went on from there to do good. If you would do a good thing for somebody in your people group and you have the opportunity to do that same good thing for someone in a different people group, you do it.

And I think of a friend of mine who’s an Anglican bishop. And he’s got a story about holding a guy who’s dying of AIDS that he contracted through his gay lifestyle. And yet he formed a bond and an attachment with him that suffered with him through the end of his days, and literally he had been abandoned by everybody. And he was the only one who was still there.

And he was showing the same kindness to this guy who wasn’t a Christian. He wasn’t in his people group, he wasn’t one of his people in that sense. But he was not just showing tolerance to this person, he was actively loving this person. And yet nowhere in there did he ever agree with him about what he had done with his life, and yet I guarantee you this man felt loved. He did not feel condemned. And he felt like he was the only one who loved him. And so we’re talking about tolerance as the first step to truly loving somebody.

[01:20:20] Stephanie: The beginning, the origin, not the end goal.

[01:20:23] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. And it begins with, can we greet one another with civility? Can we do good to people, even if they aren’t from our group? And then eventually do I come to care for these people? And there are some remarkable stories on this front as well.

You know, Jim Wilder had a colleague in Africa who had to try to help his Catholic parish come back to life after the Rwanda massacres. They literally had people from both tribes as part of the parish. How do you rebuild that? You talk about love your enemies and people groups and identity groups, and how do you rebuild this?

And that was partly what was stirring this idea that at the hub or the centerpiece of Christianity is this attachment, this love of God that flows through us that forms attachments even with people who hate us. And it’s a truly remarkable concept. I’m not sure if I’m doing it full justice, but we get the idea.

[01:21:32] Stephanie: It just makes me think of the ministry of reconciliation. And also in The Solution of Choice, you and Jim talk about how tolerance is much more hopeless than mercy. Do you have comments on that?

[01:21:52] Marcus:  Well, yeah, in the sense that if the best I can do is tolerance, then that means there’s no hope for anything to actually transform or change. But mercy is seeing that somebody needs exactly what I have to offer. And I have exactly what you need in order to have the life that you want, right? And so mercy says, even though you’ve done me wrong, even though you’ve done me harm, even though you’ve called me names, I will still show you mercy, and I will still do the good that is in my power to do for you.

These are difficult and high-level transformational things we’re talking about here. But I like the fact that one of the things that Jim Wilder said in a conversation was that you can measure the effectiveness of your discipleship methodology by how effective it is at transforming people into those who love their enemies.

[01:22:53] Stephanie: Yes.

[01:22:55] Marcus: I’m like, wow, that’s the standard. And he said, that’s probably a high enough standard to keep us busy for a lifetime.

[01:23:03] Stephanie: Oh, yeah.

[01:23:07] Marcus: So as we’re talking about these four good ideas to neutralize Christianity, Western Christianity, we’re talking about how the discipleship factory got broken. The discipleship factory got broken because our model changed through the influence of culture. And as this model changed, we stopped making attachment being the centerpiece. We started making all these other good ideas the centerpiece, and that skewed the solutions that we’re offering to people to give them real life change.

So, where we’re going with this whole thing is we’re wrapping up this series, right? So, as we’re bringing this whole thing to an end, our goal is to say that as a church, we need to stop being the thought followers, and we need to start becoming the thought leaders.

[01:24:00] Stephanie: Yeah.

[01:24:02] Marcus: And instead of constantly just reacting to whatever’s going on in culture and assimilating to that, we kind of need to get ahead of the curve. And one of the ways we do that is when we understand joyful attachment. Let’s just say that at the heart of this is joyful attachment versus fear-based attachment.

What would happen in this world if churches everywhere became centers of joyful attachment? How much joy could we bring to low joy areas of the world? How much joy could we bring to low joy people? How much transformation could we see?

And that’s why in their book, Joy Starts Here, Jim and his colleagues talked about the transformation zone. This is why in his book with Michel Hendricks, they write about the soil that creates transformation. I think one of my favorite illustrations in that book was Michel Hendricks talking about growing tomatoes and how one year he put a lot of fertilizer in, he did a lot of soil prep, and his tomatoes just boomed.

And the next year he did everything exactly the same except the soil prep. He didn’t put in the fertilizer. He skipped that step, and his tomatoes grew, but they were really weak and anemic, and there’s a metaphor there. And that is that we often lack the transformational results and discipleship that we’re looking for.

We don’t get those mature tomatoes. We don’t get the mature Christians. We don’t get the booming fruit unless we have the right soil, and the soil is the relational context of discipleship. It is the group that I am in.

I have to be a part of a group where there is joy in being together. We are happy to see each other. I’ve got to be part of a group that supports one another, even in our struggles, so that we endure hardship well together, because we know we’re never going through anything alone.

And it’s one of those where we have a clear sense that these are my people, and it’s like my people to be a kingdom people, and it’s like my people to swim upstream and go against the tide. It’s like my people to be kingdom first and not culture first. And you just go on down the line here that as you build this out, that when that soil is healthy, discipleship happens almost automatically.

But if you get the soil healthy, it’s like the catalyst that makes everything else that we’re doing in the discipleship process just boom and take off. And I love that picture that Michel had in that book, The Other Half of Church. And really, honestly, I think as Jim described it to me, that book was intended to be sort of the bridge between The Solution of Choice and the rest of what Deeper Walk does. And I think it fits really well. It’s a good way to wrap up what we’re talking about here.

[01:27:02] Stephanie: Yeah, good book. I was just wondering if you could dig a little bit more into joy and give a definition of it. We’ve talked a lot about joyful attachment and joy versus fear bonds and such.

[01:27:15] Marcus: So fear, let’s start with fear. Fear is only interested in damage control. And so when I’m in a relationship that is fear bonded, the only thing I’m concerned about is limiting the damage in my relationship. So if I’m fear bonded to one of my kids, I make all of my choices about how I handle that child based on my fear of what will happen if I don’t.

So if you’re a child and you’re fear bonded to your parent, you’re making all of your decisions based on how do I do damage control in this relationship and  what will happen if I don’t. So we start there. If I’m fear bonded to God, then all of my decisions are just how do I keep God from messing up my life, and I never really move past that.

A joy bond is the idea that I am happy to be with you. I am happy to see you, so when you walk in the room, something in me lights up. So joy is that positive energy inside that creates a twinkle in my eye, like it’s you. That’s why we say joy is not a choice.

It’s like, if you walk in the room and I have to go, okay, pretend to be happy now. That’s not joy. But if you walk in the room and I’m like, oh, it’s Stephanie! That’s real joy. That’s what we’re after. If I have a joy bond and joy attachment, the more of that kind of joy that I have in my life, the more emotional capacity that I have.

So to grow my joy, I have to have a joy bond with God, which means I have to be dealing with those issues of fear in my relationship to God and transforming each one of those from fear to joy over and over again with each issue that’s got me stuck there. It also means I’ve got to be transforming my relationships here on earth from fear to joy as I learn to be a person of love and greater attachment.

That’s why love and joy and peace are so intimately connected as fruit of the spirit, because love is attachment. It’s joyful attachment. And when I’m with someone I love, joy is the result. And when I’m with somebody that I love, and we’re done with the high energy joy, we can just relax and rest and be happy to be together without a lot of high energy, and that’s peace.

Or, like when you’re in Kentucky and I’m in Indiana, there’s times when you can have joy without us being there, or you can have peace, because of our connection, our attachment, even if we’re not there right now, because that attachment transcends actual presence and being there in person.

 

[01:29:50] Stephanie: Yeah. Just reflecting on memories or the thought or anticipating being together can create that joyful connection. I do also think it’s important to note that joy doesn’t always manifest as happiness, like joy is the relational happy-to-see-you-ness, but you can be joyful or have a happy-to-be-with-you feeling while you’re with someone who is crying. You can be happy to be with each other in suffering.

And maybe you’re not dancing around and being like, I have so much joy, but you can still have that happy-to-be-with-you bond.

[01:30:36] Marcus: Exactly. That’s like a parent with a child who’s afraid of a storm. I could be perfectly happy to be with my child and actually feel joy that I’m with my child because I know that I have exactly what they need right now.

So they may be going through fear. I may be having feelings of compassion and other things, or I can share sadness. But what joy does is it gives me the capacity and the strength to share that sadness, to share the fear, to share the emotion that they’re going through but still be able to bounce back from it.

I’m sure we’ll have a whole series on joy at some point here.

[01:31:17] Stephanie: Yes. I’m getting us off into a new series. So any final thoughts on this series, particularly on The Broken Discipleship Factory?

[01:31:30] Marcus: Well, I hope that we’ve caught the point here that the reason the discipleship factory was broken was that the model got skewed, and the model got skewed because we kept putting the wrong thing at the hub of the wheel.

We took good things — truth, making good choices, power of the Holy Spirit and tolerance of people that we don’t agree with — and we made them the central thing. We made them the hub around which everything else revolved. What we’re arguing instead is that it should be attachment with God and attachment with others. It’s this joy bond with God that’s at the heart of what this is all about.

And when we understand then that wisdom is basically what the Bible says is wise: To trust in the Lord with all of your heart and to lean not on your own understanding. When you stop and think about that, a joy bond trusts, and a fear bond says, this is all up to me. I’ve got to do this on my own.

And so we want to grow our joy bond with God, our trust in him. And that’s what we’re after in all this, and you can’t do it just by holding people accountable to choosing to trust God. It has to be built as we strengthen our bond and our attachment with him and find increasing joy with him as we go through all of the various hardships and trials of life.

[01:32:54] Stephanie: Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to, like, comment, subscribe, and share with a friend. Do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.