The Wonder Years
The Romance of Deep Discipleship
Hello to you all, including our new subscribers this week. Great to have you along!
We’re wrestling with what it means to be a “deep disciple,” someone who apprentices with Jesus to become more like Him. That obviously means getting to know Him intimately, but it also means a journey into our hearts, stories, wounds, joys, sufferings, ideas, and desires.
The Story So Far (skip down below if you don’t need a review)
Because we’re months into our discussion now, I’m starting each week’s post with a summary of what we’ve covered. If you want a complete picture, jump back to this post and catch up in order as you see fit.
Theologian and philosopher Dallas Willard described modern Christianity as “The Great Omission”—we talk a lot about making disciples but struggle to do so. His concern was that a disciple intentionally engages in a lifelong journey of becoming more like Jesus - that, over time, we increasingly think, act, relate, and love like Him. However, he saw little evidence that modern Christian institutions consider themselves to be primarily character-forming communities. Nor does the average person find their churches, Bible studies, or even seminaries comprehensively spiritually formative.
There is substantial confusion in modern Christianity regarding the definition of a disciple. Often, it simply means an educated convert. Someone chooses to follow Jesus, they take a 12-week course on the basics of the Bible, and thus they’ve been “discipled.” It is then expected that they will immediately begin to disciple others in a like manner. However, this model is based on a reduced assumption of what it means to be human (and the West’s obsession with its version of multiplication). Our hearts aren’t formed solely through instruction. We are far more complex than that.
The costs of this lack of deep discipleship are extraordinarily high. Individually, we suffer from a quiet sense of disconnection from God, others, and ourselves. We wonder if this is all there is to the Christian life. Communally, this lack of depth results in ongoing social and national harm. This is why solving "The Great Omission" is essential to human flourishing. The world desperately needs deeply formed people.
Because people are wonderfully complex, we’ve found that deep discipleship engages both the conscious and unconscious parts of the human person. As I’ve confessed, this is where things get a little odd.
The unconscious layers of our hearts (our “operating systems”) include at least two vital forces: ideas and desires. Ideas are the assumptions, principles, and conclusions that power us, though we aren’t usually aware of their presence. Every culture and individual functions from sets of ideas. Our desires are those people and things we truly long for, though we sometimes struggle to become attuned to them.
Because ideas generally function underneath the surface of our consciousness, they’re often different from our belief systems. This is why we might claim God loves us unconditionally and yet operate from an idea that drives us to perform for God to earn His favor. We might intellectually know that we are beautiful and made in God’s image, yet our hearts may function from the idea that we are ugly, worthless, and tainted.
The transformational journey of dark ideas and desires to light is the essence of deep discipleship. We become more like Jesus by experiencing Him, though modern Christianity tends to intellectualize this adventure or miss it altogether.
Ideas and Desires
As we’ve explored the Discipleship Dilemma (that our spiritual journey involves intimately knowing Jesus yet also exploring our own hearts), we've wrestled with the concept of ideas and desires.
Ideas are the experienced realities that sit on the bedrock of our hearts. Sometimes, they align with our belief statements, but often, they don’t.
I’ve proposed that humans operate primarily from Six Core Ideas: identity, anthropology, value, power, purpose, and love.
Who are we?
What are we?
What are we worth?
What authority do we have?
What is our purpose?
Whom do we love?
Our hearts often answer these core questions differently than our minds. Deep disciples intellectually understand the answers from a biblical perspective, but they experience them in their souls over time. This eventually leads to us living lives of love, utterly secure in our identity, value, purpose, etc.
On Being Known
One of the other vital forces in our souls is our desires—those relationships, experiences, and things for which we truly long. As noted in the summary above, many people aren’t consciously aware of their genuine desires, Christian or otherwise. Some well-meaning people believe their desires are entirely wrong and are to be rejected.
Neuroscientist Curt Thompson remarked, “When each one of us comes into this world, we enter it looking for someone looking for us. Our deepest desire and highest hope is that there will be someone looking for us, and that this person will always be there for us and will pursue our hearts with a genuine desire to truly know us. Our greatest need as human beings is to be known, and to know that the person who knows us will be there for us.”
His conclusion is worth repeating. “Our deepest desire…is that there will be someone looking for us (who) will pursue our hearts with a genuine desire to truly know us.”
Our hearts most long for a friend, lover, family. We deeply desire someone who pursues us just because we exist and not for what we can do for them. We desire the joy of being enjoyed and long to return the same. We long to know and be known intimately, safely, and securely.
As children, our hearts’ desire to be known was probably formed or malformed in our family of origin. And, for better or worse, those experiences and relationships mapped onto other current relationships: our friends, our spouse, our kids, our God.
As we venture into deep discipleship and become more attuned to the desires in our hearts (and those of others), we are again reminded of how important it is to go back into our stories to gently seek an understanding of how our light and dark desires and ideas were initially formed.
Maybe It’s Boring
If Thompson is correct, that our deepest desire is to know and be known, to be pursued for our good, to reveal ourselves in a safe environment and to experience a loved one doing the same, it raises a number of challenging questions about modern Christianity.
Ultimately, these bedrock desires are met in God's most beautiful, satisfying, thirst-quenching embrace. Yet it doesn’t appear our hearts are getting that message.
One seminary president summarized a recent Barna study on biblical illiteracy:
“Fewer than half of all adults can name the four gospels…60 percent of Americans can’t name even five of the Ten Commandments. According to 82 percent of Americans, ‘God helps those who help themselves’ is a Bible verse. A Barna poll indicated that at least 12 percent of adults believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. A considerable number of respondents to one poll indicated that the Sermon on the Mount was preached by Billy Graham.”
The Christian media machine’s answer to this plague of biblical illiteracy is predictable: produce more Bible teaching. We just need to pump out more and more information so people get the message. We need more celebrities, more memes, more videos, more courses, more programs.
Is this lack of interest in the Bible really about a lack of available teaching? I’m not so sure. People worldwide have more access to the Bible and related instruction than any other generation in human history. Technology has given us unprecedented, unlimited access to biblical teaching.
If God has designed us to know and to be known, and He is the being most interested in pursuing and knowing us (and us Him), and He joyfully and vulnerably reveals at least parts of Himself in His book, why would we have so little interest in knowing Him?
Academic responses to this question abound: prosperity, a lack of prosperity, too little information, too much information, too many distractions, too little discipline. The list goes on and on. And the catch-all answer to explain anything that doesn’t go the way we think it should - sin. I could be wrong, but I’m not sure any of those fully answer the question.
I fear that our lack of interest in knowing God has more to do with flawed modern unconscious ideas about Him and Christianity, both inside and outside the church.
I suspect many of us operate from the unspoken assumption that the Christian journey is about knowing and doing more. We need to know more Bible and do more stuff. We need to learn more commands so we can do more commands. That’s how we interpret the Great Commission, right?
To put it bluntly, that’s just boring and mechanical after a while. We are human beings, not human “doings.”
Where’s the romance? Where’s the passion, the intimacy, the pursuit, the wrestling, the exploration, the story, the drama? Where’s the restful satisfaction of our deepest, good desires to know and be known? Surely, our profound heart longing is more than information and execution.
Suppose I find a marriage in which the husband and wife have stopped pursuing each other and intentionally getting to know one another deeply and intimately. In that case, I’ll find a dead marriage. If modern Christianity no longer embraces the idea that we are pursuing God while He is pursuing us for our good and the sheer joy of being known, we’ll be left with a lot of facts but little energy, vibrancy, and transformation.
Maybe widespread biblical illiteracy isn’t due to a lack of availability but a lack of understanding and expression of an intimate, soul-satisfying, passionate, restful, raw, secure love.
The “I’s” Have It
In his book Seeking God, Trevor Hudson proposes modern Christianity functions from three discipleship models.
The first model, Instruction, is by far the predominant one. We supposedly grow to love God by accumulating more information about Him. But instruction rarely leads to transformation.
The second, Inspiration, is when we jump from spiritual high to spiritual high through worship or other non-normative experiences. As Hudson notes, these have their place but don’t provide lasting bedrock formation either.
He refers to the third model (the least found but most faithful to genuine discipleship) as “Interaction.” Hudson writes, “While (the disciples) acquired more information about (Jesus), and were inspired by his example and his words, interacting with him was the way they came to know him.”
I don’t care for the word “interaction,” but I’ve been unable to come up with a better description that begins with the letter “i.” I understand what Hudson is expressing, but the word lacks the passion, relationship, community, pursuit, and romance central to embracing deep discipleship. Perhaps a word like “intimacy” or “immersion” might work.
I Wonder as I Wander
Either way, he’s on to something. Perhaps so many of us don’t care to engage God through His first book because we have little expectation to be wooed, pursued, and explored by it and through it. We may expect to read it, but we don’t expect it to read us. No one told us it would chase, astound, and wreck us if we let it. If we function from the idea that Christianity is about accumulating knowledge and doing more stuff, we’ll read the Bible like an instructional encyclopedia.
In other words, I fear much of modern Christianity has lost its wonder. We’ve grown up and lost the love of pursuing and being pursued, of knowing and being known, of being in love and being loved in return.
We’ve lost our wonder years and don’t remember how to return. And so those inside and outside the church, already so tired of being adults, expect nothing more from our faith.
But if spiritual formation is anything, it’s a wonder.
G.K. Chesterton wrote:
“Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are free in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in the monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in the monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God made every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
Duc In Altum!
Brian
This Week on the Soil & Roots Podcast
We would do well to survey the beatitudes or the fruits of the spirit to develop a list of characteristics of someone practicing deep discipleship - someone who allows themselves to be filled with wonder. However, this is Soil and Roots...so let's dig beneath the surface to uncover some gems that don't always make the Top 10 lists.
Let's start with Courageous Curiosity. God asks a lot of questions. Why? Is it because He doesn't know the answers? Or is He revealing a path towards a deeper relationship experience with Him, others, and ourselves?
Listen here:
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