It is a well worn aphorism that we don’t know what we don’t know. My sense is that there is such a collapse of the idea of discipleship in our Churches that we don’t even know what we don’t know about discipleship. We barely have the cateogries to understand how little progress we have made in our apprenticeship of Jesus.
The loss of any sense of what it means to grow as a Christian has left us vulnerable to a raft of alternative projects and visions. There is an old sermon illustration about how those trained to spot counterfeit currency don’t spend their time studying counterfeits. They study the authentic article, so that they are able to recognise counterfeit money when they see it. Without an original to establish a clear idea of how things should be, we are incapable of recognising when things are not as they should be. And so it is in our discipleship.
Nature abhors a vacuum. That is as true in the ‘unseen’ dimensions of creation as it is in the ‘seen’. And there is a vacuum left by the slow and imperceptible implosion of our understanding of what it means to be ‘transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory’ (II Cor.3:18). But instead of seeking genuine models of spiritual development, instead of re-discovering what it means to be trained to produce a harvest of righteousness (see Heb.12:11, also 5:14), we have succumbed to a host of inferior forgeries that we mistake as spiritual growth.
We craft endless ‘visions’ for our life together as Church, plans for outreach and Chuch growth, endlessly tinker with our services of worship, and then make inflated claims about out expereince of God’s presence, pursue charismatic giftedness in pursuit of authenticity and significance. And while we have invested vast amounts of energy and money into such pursuits, we have reamined spiritual infants, living on milk, lamenting our poverty of Biblical understanding, and barely recognising the need for doctrine. Yet we do not want to be ‘preached to’, at least not for more than 20 minutes at a time... We have accepted as normal the idea that the prayer meeting is the least attended meeting in the Church calender, and that people can be Christians for years without ever attending one, or praying out loud. We welcome erratic patterns of Church engagement with an understanding nod, widespread disenchantment with ‘traditional’ service structures of worship, and are impatient with Biblical components of worship such as liturgy.
Many have never pulicly owned to being a Christian, and few have actively shared their faith on any but a handful of occasions. A significant number (likely a majority) readily confess that they dn’t understand their faith well enough to confidently share it with others. Hardly anyone in our Churches has actually led someone else to faith.
We are beset with recurring patterns of sin; and with a failure to find our joy and satisfaction in Christ. We are inexperienced in many of the spiritual disciplines, not even sure what some of htem are, or why we should do them; and have little grasp of a specifically Christian understanding of life, worship or spirituality. And the little grasp we do have simply adds to our frsutration because we have even less experience of the Spiritual power available to make it a reality. We struggle to see how anyone could seriously be expected to live in the way the Bible teaches us to.
And yet in spite of our manifest inexperience of the momst foundational elements of Christian life and spirituality, we still think we know what it means to be a Christian. We think we are making progress. We think we are maturing. The truth is that those of us who have grown up in such an impoverished context, and for whom this has been the extent of our spiritual formation, are not well equipped for discipleship and mission. Indeed, we barely know enough to realise how ill-equipped we are.
