Leader's Insight: So Many Christian Infants
Why are we so good at leading people to faith and so bad at prodding them to maturity?
by Gordon MacDonald, Leadership editor at large
I have been musing on the words of Martin
Thornton: "A walloping great congregation," he wrote, "is fine and fun,
but what most communities really need is a couple of saints. The
tragedy is that they may well be there in embryo, waiting to be
discovered, waiting for sound training, waiting to be emancipated from
the cult of the mediocre."
"Saints," he says. Mature Christians: people
who are "grown-up" in their faith, to whom one assigns descriptors such
as holy, Christ-like, Godly, or men or women of God.
Now mature, in my book does not mean the
"churchly," those who have mastered the vocabulary and the litany of
church life, who come alive only when the church doors open. Rather, I
have in mind those who walk through all the corridors of the larger
life—the market-place, the home and community, the playing fields—and
do it in such a way that, sooner or later, it is concluded that Jesus'
fingerprints are all over them.
I have concluded that our branch of the Christian
movement (sometimes called Evangelical) is pretty good at wooing people
across the line into faith in Jesus. And we're also not bad at
helping new-believers become acquainted with the rudiments of a life of
faith: devotional exercise, church involvement, and basic Bible
information—something you could call Christian infancy.
But what our tradition lacks of late—my opinion
anyway—is knowing how to prod and poke people past the "infancy" and
into Christian maturity.
A definition of a mature Christian is lacking. Best
to say that you know a mature Christian when you see one. They're in
the New Testament. Barnabas is one. Aquila and Priscilla are others.
Onesiphorous impresses me. And so is the mother of Rufus of whom Paul
said, "she has been a mother to me." That's a short list.
The marks of maturity? Self-sustaining in spiritual
devotions. Wise in human relationships. Humble and serving. Comfortable
and functional in the everyday world where people of faith can be in
short supply. Substantial in conversation; prudent in acquisition;
respectful in conflict; faithful in commitments.
Take a few minutes and ask how many people you know who would fit such a description.
How many? Apparently, Paul, pondered the question when he thought about
Corinthian Christians and said, "I could not address you as spiritual
but as worldly—mere infants in Christ."
As usual, I'm long on questions and short on
answers. Right now I'm wondering—assuming that Martin Thornton is
right—if we church people have forgotten how to raise saints. And if
the question is worthy, then what's been going wrong? Bad preaching?
Shallow books? Too much emphasis on a problem-solving, self-help kind
of faith?
Maybe the answer is deeper or more profound that
that. Perhaps it has to do with the penchant in churches (the last
forty years or so) to package everything into programs. You need
programs to make large churches go: kind of like the automakers need an
assembly line that stamps out fenders as fast as possible.
I suspect you can do evangelism programmatically.
And you can do infant-level discipleship in programs. Just put the
information in little booklets and get groups going. It can be done.
But mature Christians do not grow through programs
or through the mesmerizing delivery of a talented speaker (woe is me)
or worship band. Would-be saints are mentored: one-on-one or, better
yet, one-on-small group (three to twelve was Jesus' best guess). The
mentoring takes place in the streets and living-places of life, not
church classrooms or food courts. And it's not necessarily done in
Bible studies or the like. Mature Christians are made one by one
through the influence of other Christians already mature.
Additionally, mature Christians become mature by
suffering, facing challenges that can arouse fear and a sense of
inadequacy. Mature Christians learn to wrestle with questions that defy
simple answers. They learn to say strategic and tactical "no's" when
others are indulging themselves by saying "yes." Oh, and mature
Christians wrestle against the devil, you could say, and sometimes even
lose. But they learn to get up again. Could I add, while I'm on a roll,
that mature Christians are experts at repenting and humility.
Again, they learn this stuff under the tutelage of
one who has gone before them and is willing to open his/her life so
that it becomes a textbook on Christ's work in us.
But we have a rising (I daresay, a life-threatening)
problem in the modern church. Older people—above 50, let's say—don't
want to be tutors or mentors. Too busy, too distracted, too secretive,
too afraid. So a younger generation of spiritual infants is really
struggling because an older generation doesn't want to tell its
stories, doesn't want to get involved. They prefer Christian cruises,
Christian golf tournaments, and more Bible studies where information
can be piled upon information.
Forgive my generalizations, my edgy sarcasm. But I'm
prompted to let some my thoughts hang out because I'm meeting too many
infant Christians who tell me that they're looking for fathers and
mothers in the faith to help them grow up. And they're not finding
them. And many churches aren't cultivating them.
Result: we could lose a large part of a new
generation of Christians who couldn't get past spiritual infancy and
went somewhere else.
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Well guys, that's exactly why we are doing what we're doing! I am glad to be on the journey with you...what is your take on Gordon's thoughts about infant christians?
Monty
So, we began to throw out last night some of the new questions being asked of believers today that require a Post Modern apologetic. In your workbooks, you have some question to work through that have a Modern apologetic, and a converging apologetic as well.
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