6: The Broken Discipleship Factory: Part 5

[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 six! Today we wrap up our first series, The Broken Discipleship Factory. Last episode, we looked at modernism and the solution of power. In this episode, we’re looking at postmodernism and the solution of tolerance. Hello, Father.

[00:00:39] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Nice to chat with you again.

[00:00:44] Stephanie: Always. How are you doing today?

[00:00:47] Marcus: Oh, I’m doing well. I’m starting to get a little tired. It’s been a long day, but I’m sure that will come out in the voice a little bit. How are you doing?

[00:00:56] Stephanie: Yeah, I’m good. I’m feeling accomplished, so that’s nice.

[00:01:02] Marcus: That is a good feeling.

[00:01:04] 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?

[00:01:13] 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.

[00:05:06] Stephanie: Yeah, well, and this would be a connection with relativism too. Yeah?

[00:05:11] 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.

[00:07:12] Stephanie: Yeah, that transformation we’ve been talking about.

[00:07:15] 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.

[00:11:55] Stephanie: The beginning, the origin, not the end goal.

[00:11:58] 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.

[00:13:01] 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?

[00:13:20] 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.

[00:14:18] Stephanie: Yes.

[00:14:20] 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.

[00:14:29] Stephanie: Oh, yeah.

[00:14:32] 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.

[00:15:23] Stephanie: Yeah.

[00:15:25] 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.

[00:18:18] 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.

[00:18:31] 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.

[00:21:05] 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.

[00:21:50] 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.

[00:22:30] Stephanie: Yes. I’m getting us off into a new series. So any final thoughts on this series, particularly on The Broken Discipleship Factory?

[00:22:42] 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.

[00:24:05] Stephanie: Amen and hallelujah.

[00:24:07] Marcus: Yeah.

[00:24:07] Stephanie: Well, we are at the end of our time. Next week, we have two exciting things. Firstly, August 2nd is the release of your new book, A Deeper Walk. We are very excited. Do you want to give a quick look at what that book is?

[00:24:27] Marcus: I’m not sure.

[00:24:29] Stephanie: We will talk more about it next week. You don’t have to dwell long.

[00:24:33] Marcus: We jokingly call it the one book to rule them all. And that is that A Deeper Walk is in some ways a summary of all of the other books that I’ve written. People come to our book table and they go, Hey, you guys got 15 books here. If I’m only going to get one, which one should I get?

Well, this is going to be our answer, right? If you can only get one, get this one. It lays out the whole deeper walk model, talks about spiritual warfare, about maturity, about attachment, about listening prayer, about emotional healing, about community and building community. It’s all in there. We got a little bit of everything in there.

So it would be hopefully the ideal book to be able to give to somebody you want to introduce to Deeper Walk. Hopefully it’s the kind of book that you’re going to read again, year after year after year, just to remind yourself of the basics of how all this stuff works.

[00:25:19] Stephanie: Yes, so then next week we will be starting our next series, which is going to be starting to look at the solutions more that we want, not the Broken Discipleship Factory, but the FISH model and such.

[00:25:32] Marcus: Yep. We’re going to be taking a walk through some of the key concepts from that book. So I’m looking forward to it.

[00:25:38] Stephanie: Me too. Well, this has been a great series, Dad. Thank you for your wisdom and thank you everyone for joining us today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God and our 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.