2: The Broken Discipleship Factory: Part 1

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On The Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Welcome to episode two! Today we start our first series.

We’re talking about the broken discipleship factory. That’s a catchy title, Father.

[00:00:33] Marcus: Yes, it is. I mean, who doesn’t want to talk about broken things?

[00:00:37] Stephanie: Explain this image of a discipleship factory.

[00:00:42] Marcus: Yeah, no, really, when I was in seminary I was doing my doctoral ministry work. We call them “D-Mins.”

You got 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.

[00:02:25] 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.”

[00:02:37] Marcus: Yeah.

[00:02:39] 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?

[00:02:53] 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.

[00:03:54] 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.

[00:04:08] 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 immediately 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.

[00:06:36] Stephanie: That makes sense. That’ll preach.

[00:06:40] 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.

[00:08:02] 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?

[00:08:17] 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 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 truth.

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

[00:09:47] Stephanie: Right?

[00:09:47] 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.

[00:12:06] 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?

[00:12:13] 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.

[00:13:00] 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.

[00:13:23] 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.

[00:15:29] Stephanie: So what’s a sneak peek to the solution?

[00:15:33] 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.

[00:16:17] Stephanie: Was it George Bebawi who would talk about the cross being both vertical and horizontal?

[00:16:24] 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.

[00:16:38] Stephanie: I love George.

[00:16:39] Marcus: Yeah.

[00:16:39] Stephanie: Very, very good. Wow. Was there anything else you wanted to accomplish with this episode?

[00:16:48] 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.

[00:17:39] Stephanie: I love it. Oh, well, thank you, Dad. And thank you, listeners. Thank you for joining us on the trail today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk podcast and share with your friends. You can find more at our website, deeperwalk.com

Thanks again, and we’ll see you back next week.