“When a Christian isn’t doing what he or she is made for, they become restless, just sitting in rows, staring at the back of each other’s heads.” - Peyton Jones in Reaching the Unreached
We’ve been exploring the ways that the church has been an elephant tied to a rope. In other words, a powerful force restrained more by its mentality than anything external. You can read part 1 here. In that article, we explored the way the church caters to one person preaching from the front, and it’s not just a case of being anti-preaching. It’s a matter of discipleship.
When we talk about discipleship, we talk about it in terms of our current education system’s goal of knowledge transfer. The person in charge speaks. The audience listens and is expected to remember what they heard. In our current school system, this doesn’t translate into any skills. Even more concerning is that, just like with our current school system, most people don’t remember what is taught.
Part of it is because there’s no present-tense active expectation of obeying what we “learn”. We approach the Bible as something that God did a long time ago. We say that we believe God is active, but our actions say something different. We are just playing games. If we truly believed God was active, then we would get active. Teaching the Bible would become much more significant, and we would read his word as if our next steps actually mattered.
And we don’t believe it matters, or else we would do church and gather differently. Sunday morning has become a show. For some, it’s an idol. It caters to narcissists and consumers who feed off each other like parasites.
Instead of waiting for Sunday morning to hear a new teaching that will tickle our ears, we would examine ourselves to see if we obeyed what we already knew. It’s about huddles and not rows. Instead of sitting in rows and receiving from one person, we would be gathering in huddles to motivate and encourage each other. This is because the environment of the gathering is just as important as the content of the gathering.
“A primary responsibility of educators is that they not only be aware of the general principle of the shaping of the actual experience by environing conditions, but that they also recognize in the concrete what surroundings are conducive to having experiences that lead to growth.” - John Dewey
This is basic educational theory. The circumstances surrounding our education are just as important as the content. They form an implicit curriculum. When we see church as an auditorium, then it’s divorced from real life. Most of our lives are lived in the living room and at the office desk. Auditoriums are for special events. When the primary vehicle of our spirituality is in a place set aside for a special weekly event, then the implicit curriculum is that faith is not for everyday life.
If the medium is the message, then the message is that faith is for Sunday morning and consists of singing songs, listening to a speaker, giving some money, and possibly volunteering to keep the whole thing going. This is not what Jesus died for. It’s not something that gets me up in the morning. It’s not a vision that can rally people towards extraordinary sacrifice and dedication.
In his book Dedication and Leadership, former Communist turned Catholic Douglas Hyde talks about how the average Christian doesn’t make himself available for the cause of Christ the way communists did in his day. Here’s his take on the low expectations we have for the vast majority of the body of Christ:
“Dedication and willingness to sacrifice must be developed within a person, then drawn out of them, not forced in. The Communists have had to find ways and means of doing this. In the process, they have discovered that it is good psychology to ask for a lot. It is bad psychology and bad politics to ask for too little…The paradox I repeat, is that the Communists show a faith in their people, which Christians, who are supposed to be the great defenders of the human person, are too often not prepared to show. They ask for a lot, and they get the big response they expect…To the Christian, there is an element of sheer tragedy in this—that people with such potentialities should give so much energy, zeal, and dedication to such a cause, whilst those who believe that they have the best cause on earth often give so little to it. And their leaders are so often afraid to ask for more than the merest minimum.”
The environment of our gatherings plays a crucial role in whether we follow through with obedience and multiplication. These are the things that matter. The common evangelical environment of an auditorium trains us to look towards the stage and the pastor instead of looking at Jesus and listening to the Spirit. This keeps us in the role of professional pew-sitters.
So we remain passive. We don’t have the capacity or vision to multiply, which is what Jesus commanded us to do. The elephant remains tied to the rope.
So good!
Great word!