Building the Airplane While Flying It
Are Discipleship Instructional Models Truly Spiritually Formative?
Hello, deep disciples! And thanks to our new subscribers this week. Great to have you along.
For the last few weeks, we’ve been wrestling with the role of instruction in our spiritual formation. If our lives are centered around the community journey of becoming more like Jesus from the inside out, how does instruction actually shape our inner lives?
If you’re new to the Soil & Roots column, the big issue we’re trying to address is what theologian Dallas Willard called The Great Omission. Though we talk a lot about making disciples, modern Christianity struggles to help form them.
Where is this internal freedom the Bible promises—and that so many of our Christian ancestors apparently experienced? Are we being formed to love like Jesus?
Many of us try to cover this longing with distraction. We keep ourselves frenetically busy. We pour ourselves into work, sports, entertainment, or even church activities.
Often, we don’t come to grips with our disconnection until something goes terribly wrong. We hit the Wall. We face a crisis. We begin to doubt beliefs we’ve held tightly. Things we thought were unquestionably true don’t appear to be so true anymore.
Or we drift into a vague spiritual malaise. We go through our religious motions because not doing them would make us feel guilty.
Over time, we’ve discovered that the journey to become more like Jesus is best taken in five-element ecosystems—small groups of like-hearted people who sojourn with us. When we face the Wall, these five elements help us navigate its doubts, dissents, and dissolutions as we press through to the other side.
Instruction is essential in that journey—but it’s often overemphasized today to the detriment of the other four.
Back to Elementary School
In other writings, I’ve put adjectives in front of each of the five elements:
Intensive time
Specifically designed habits
Immersive communities
Appropriate and transparent intimacy
Repetitious and increasingly complex instruction
That last phrase tends to raise eyebrows. What do I mean by repetitious and increasingly complex?
Let’s go back to elementary school.
When I was in second grade, my teacher—whose actual name was Mrs. Library—taught us multiplication tables. In week one, we learned:
1 × 1 = 1
1 × 2 = 2
…all the way to 1 × 12 = 12.
The next week we started the twos:
2 × 1 = 2
2 × 2 = 4
…again up through 2 × 12.
Here’s the key: each week, we reviewed what we had already learned. We didn’t abandon the ones to move on to the twos; we added the twos to what we already knew. By the end of the quarter, we had learned all our multiplication tables up to 12 × 12, building on the foundations instead of discarding them.
College works this way, too. As a freshman, you take “Introduction to…” courses. By senior year, you’re in advanced seminars that build on what you’ve already learned.
Whether it’s academics, a sport, a trade, a language, or parenting, we learn almost everything by repeating the basics and then slowly building on them.
What About Instruction for Adults?
If many formative processes in life are based on repetitious and increasingly complex instruction, is that what the average adult Jesus-follower experiences?
Is our spiritual life shaped by an intentional, formative curriculum that consistently reinforces the fundamentals while guiding us into deeper, more complex truths about God, others, ourselves, and creation?
Or does our instructional life feel more like an à la carte buffet?
We pick whatever sermon series our church is currently offering.
We choose a Bible study or book that interests us.
We opt into a small-group curriculum that sounds relevant.
In any given year, we may learn helpful things about God. But often those things are not interconnected. They aren’t part of a thoughtful, long-term plan for our formation. Many of us would concede that our instructional experience is largely self-directed.
It’s likely trying to build an airplane while flying it - we pull in bits and pieces without considering the whole.
If repetitious and increasingly complex instruction is how humans are best formed, and most of us aren’t experiencing that in our communities, we have to ask: why not?
There are many reasons, but let’s explore two.
The “Professional Christian”
The first reason is bound up with a deeply Western idea: there are “professional Christians” and “regular Christians.”
The professionals—pastors, professors, theologians, and missionaries—usually attend Bible college or seminary. Then they graduate and land in a community full of people at various points in their journey with Jesus. Some have walked with Him for years, others for not very long, and some are still deciding whether they want to.
How is a single professional Christian supposed to design an instructional journey that serves all of those people at once?
The short answer is: we’re asking the wrong question.
The deeper question is this:
Why have we structured things so that a handful of professional Christians carry the primary responsibility for teaching everyone else?
Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, in The Trellis and the Vine, argue that most pastors end up in one of three roles: the service-providing clergyman, the CEO, and the trainer.
The service-providing clergyman is the classic village pastor. He feeds the flock through sermons and sacraments, runs the weekly gathering, handles weddings and funerals, visits the sick, and offers counseling.
The pastor-as-CEO leads staff, manages budgets, sets vision, and steers the organization. Most large-church pastors and almost every celebrity pastor fit this model. There are strengths here—efficiency, scale, clear direction—but deep, personal discipleship usually isn’t one of them.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, the needs of a large church institution generally work against individual spiritual formation.
The third role is the pastor as trainer. In this model, the leader comes alongside ordinary followers and trains them. They imitate the life of a disciple up close, pouring themselves into a relatively small number of people, expecting them to grow, mature, and eventually help form others.
But most of us don’t expect this role. If we primarily view our leader as clergyman, we expect services from him. If we view her as CEO, we expect good leadership and efficient operations. In either case, there’s usually no shared expectation that the relationship between leaders and people will be one of intensive, personal formative training that includes repetitious and increasingly complex instruction.
Given the enormous pressure on church leaders to grow attendance and keep the organization running, it’s hard to imagine the “pastor as trainer” model becoming widespread without a significant shift in expectations.
We Don’t Expect (or Even Want) It
The second reason cuts even closer to home.
Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven makes a provocative claim: many Western Christians have fundamentally wrong or incomplete ideas about the afterlife.
Alcorn suggests that many of us assume the afterlife as an eternal, disembodied existence on some ethereal plane—floating on clouds, plucking harps, far away from Earth forever. In that framework, the point of Christianity shrinks down to escape. Say the right words, get your ticket punched, and hang on until God evacuates you from this doomed planet.
We might feed the homeless or fight human trafficking (and we should). But the idea that we are meant to be formed into people who love like Jesus—people whose lives reshape cultures and steward creation—doesn’t really register. Why cultivate deep character here if the goal is to leave here?
Yet the disciple's final destination is not an eternal escape from Earth but the reuniting of Heaven and Earth. In this renewed, transformed creation, God’s place and humanity’s place overlap again.
Dallas Willard put it this way:
“The life we now have as the persons we now are will continue in the universe in which we now exist.”
If that’s true, then who we are becoming right now matters forever.
Ooh, Heaven is a Place on Earth
Imagine you have a second-grade daughter learning math.
She comes home one week and says, “We reviewed addition and subtraction.” Great.
The following week, she reports that the teacher jumped into long division. The week after that, they went back to “how to read numbers,” which sounds like kindergarten. Then they skipped ahead to geometry, then trigonometry, then fractions, then counting by tens.
You’d be baffled. Where is the progression? Where is the gentle deepening built on a solid foundation?
You would demand an explanation because you expect your daughter to need both basic and advanced math skills in the future.
Unless…you did not expect that she’d ever need math beyond second grade. If you believed her future didn’t really require formation in this area, you might be fine with a grab-bag sampler of topics. The point wouldn’t be to form her into someone who can actually use math; it would simply be to expose her to random bits and hope something sticks.
I’m not convinced that’s very different from how many of us experience adult Christian education.
Our theology gets formed by sermon series, scattered Bible studies, inspirational quotes, social media posts, and out-of-context verses. We wander through the Costco of Christian content, taking samples from whatever stand smells good.
If our underlying expectation is that nothing we do here—beyond evangelism—really matters for eternity, then this buffet approach makes perfect sense. Why long for a carefully designed, progressively deeper instruction model if the present world is just a waiting room?
But if we are destined to spend eternity in a New Right-Here—if who we are becoming now really does stretch into eternity and has lasting impact on others, ourselves, and creation—then it makes sense to seek a formative, multi-year, thoughtfully crafted journey that reinforces the basics and gently leads us into the deeper waters of the faith, guided by people who actually know us and whom we know in return.
In the end, repetitious and increasingly complex instruction isn’t about cramming more information into our heads; it’s about slowly, patiently forming the kind of people who can live well with God, each other, and ourselves forever. If our eternal future is a renewed world with a renewed King and renewed hearts, then pursuing deep, intentional formation right now isn’t extra credit—it’s simple preparation for our current and future reality.
Duc In Altum!
Brian
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