Pressing through the Wall

The role of inner turmoil in discipleship

Hi everyone -

Welcome to our new subscribers! Thanks for joining our growing community here on Substack as we explore deep discipleship together.

And thanks for your comments and questions. It sounds like many of you are having some wonderful discussions and explorations about modern-day discipleship in your homes and communities. I’m very much enjoying engaging with you and learning a lot from you.

I’m sharing a series of thoughts on “The Great Omission.” If you’re new to the series, you may consider heading back to the post entitled “The Need for Deep People” and quickly catching up.

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The late Dallas Willard surveyed modern Christianity and concluded we have lost the art and commitment of genuine disciple-making. We talk a lot about making disciples (usually in the context of modern-day, conversion-based evangelism), but struggle to actually do it.

Willard defined a disciple as an apprentice of Jesus - someone whose life is organized around becoming more like Him over time. So the discipleship journey is not just taking a 12-week course on the basics of the Bible, meeting with a mentor for six months, or showing up to church for a few decades (all of which are good things).

It’s a life centered around the ongoing formation of our hearts.

Willard eventually categorized our situation as “The Great Omission” because he couldn’t find a church or denomination that had a vision, program, or community dedicated to the effective formation of our character. He wasn’t even sure how many Christian groups were making it clear that “being conformed to the image of Christ” was something to which we should aspire.

So while Christian groups may measure conversions, baptisms, or numbers of involved people, we don’t find many who measure deepening marriages, a reduction in anger, an increase in forgiveness, a growing depth of sacrificial love, relational healing, or radical generosity.

Last week we introduced a new element into our discussion: The Critical Journey. The book theorizes that our spiritual formation may be broken down into six stages.

The modern church is fantastic at educating us and guiding us in and through the first three (being introduced to God, learning more about Him, and entering a life of service).

However, we find virtually no education, resources, or mentors to help us in stages 4, 5, and 6 (journeying inward, journeying outward, and living a life of love).

In and around Stage 4, we find the Wall - an event, circumstance, question, or crisis that disrupts our inner status quo and sends us reeling. The comfortable structures, relationships, beliefs, and doctrines that we gladly embraced in stages 1-3 aren’t so comfortable. In fact, they don’t seem to be holding us up anymore.

Questions we thought were answered come roaring back, but this time the stakes are higher. Questions about God, ourselves, our beloved institutions, our identity, our value, and our roles claw their way to the surface and force their way into our consciousness.

Perhaps the best way I can describe the Wall is to briefly share my somewhat recent experience with it.

I started following Jesus when I was six years old. I would have described my life with Him as a slow, steady, consistent relationship based on a firm belief system (a solid worldview as it were) and a relatively positive and progressing family life and career.

Then came 2020. Through a series of remarkable events, Jessica (my wife) and I lost our careers, our community, many of our friendships, and our sense of security. Our dreams and plans were dashed, and we found ourselves isolated, confused and lost. I have historically been a healthy person, but even that started to fail.

Those circumstances don’t in and of themselves constitute the Wall - it’s the impact the crisis has on our inner lives that defines it. And, in my case, my inner life imploded. Depression, loneliness, staggering confusion, apathy, a growing sense of worthlessness. Asking question after question - none of which seemed to have any valid answers. Many of you share some version of this story.

And, as we introduced last week, we have options when we come across the Wall.

Some of us retreat to earlier stages, suppressing the questions and angst the Wall brings, pretending it will just go away. We return to what was comfortable, even when it no longer is. We may feel guilt and shame for experiencing doubt, confusion, and disillusionment, and we fear our communities and institutions will reject us if we come clean.

Some of us, in our anger and confusion, become “dones.” We love Jesus, but we’re done with the communities, institutions, and programs with which we once loved and were deeply integrated. They have failed us. It’s just too painful to go back.

Some of us “deconstruct.”

Deconstruction takes any number of forms, though “doctrinal deconstruction” is when we cite our belief system as a cause of the Wall, so we begin to change and modify it. We are deeply wounded, and we find some of the more difficult sections of Scripture to only compound our wounds. Questions about the prevalence of evil, the goodness of God, His justice and holiness, are far more poignant and pressing, and changing what we don’t like about God seems to be an easy solution.

We may change churches, denominations, or religions. We search and search for a community (any community!) that will take us in our weak and confused condition. Screw doctrine - we just need some people to be nice to us.

And for many of us, we simply go numb. We’re too entrenched. To raise questions, to become more aware of God and ourselves, to dig into our stories is just too risky and potentially painful. So our hearts suppress and ignore the impact of the Wall.

To our families, friends, and associates, we may look and act the same. But inside we’re slowly growing cold and dark. The darkness will find its way out at some point, but we will suppress it for as long as we can.

These options are common, though they all avoid the profound importance, growth, and blessings of the Wall.

This is why the Journey Inward (stage 4) is such a crucial stage of our spiritual formation. To dive into our hearts with God and a trusted friend is an opportunity to experience God in a far deeper, far more experiential way. To ask God (to beg Him!) to meet us in our questions, our confusions, and our disillusionments is an act of humility, weakness, and dependence that serves to move us closer to Him.

Though I had come up against the Wall before, this time I finally decided to press into it. I’m not going to sugarcoat it - it’s painful. I entered into my heart with the Spirit and one or two deeply trusted friends and began to ask questions I had long avoided.

Do I really believe what I say I believe? Why is there a pattern of harmful relationships in my life? Am I too trusting? Not trusting enough? Is my identity really in Christ, or do I just say that because it’s the “right biblical” thing to say? Do my core, often hidden ideas about God match up with what He has revealed about Himself? Or, despite my stated beliefs, am I living by a set of unconscious assumptions that are more Brian than Jesus?

A.W. Tozer wrote, “That our idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.”

In many circles of modern Christianity, this type of inner exploration is ignored, frowned upon, or outright derided.

At Soil & Roots, we call it the “Discipleship Dilemma”. To become more like Jesus, we seek to know two hearts better: His and ours. It’s a theological concept called “double knowledge” which we’ll dig into more shortly.

However, many of us are part of communities and cultures that assume exploring our own hearts and stories is a waste of time, selfish, or even un-Christian. So while uncovering the true ideas and desires that drive our hearts is necessary in our spiritual formation, we are consciously or unconsciously instructed to avoid such exploration.

Thus the dilemma.

The Wall is a time of extraordinary heart formation if we press into it. It invites us to slow down, mine beneath the surface of our Christian euphemisms, and discover a more authentic Jesus and a more authentic us. Instead of ignoring lingering questions or doubts (or feeling ashamed of them), we sense God’s quiet invitation to talk about them with Him.

Perhaps we find deeper, better answers to our questions. But perhaps not. That isn’t always the point of the Wall. The point is to experience Jesus in the midst of what can only be considered a form of suffering and, through that experience, become a little more like Him.

Duc in Altum!

Brian

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Dr. Jim Reiter joins me for Episode 98 of the Soil & Roots podcast, and we discuss the book mentioned above, The Critical Journey.

Jim has been a pastor and church/denominational leader for many years and has keen insight into modern Christianity and the role of the modern church.

We have a fascinating discussion about the stages of formation, how the modern church does or does not help us along our journey, and the impact of The Great Omission on culture in general.

Find the episode on Spotify here.

Watch on YouTube here.

Or just click here.