Before taking on my pastoral role, I worked in the construction industry as a builder for nearly five years and there is an experience that has stuck with me. One day I turned up to work. It was the day after we had just poured the concrete for a large driveway, and my job was to put expansion cuts in the concrete.
Unfortunately for us, all we had to complete this job was a couple of old skill saws with concrete blades on them. For the rest of the day, we were hunched over, trying to keep the dust out of our faces, constantly refitting our earmuffs to block the noise, and struggling to push these skill saws with our hands along the concrete to make the cuts. It was a very tiring and uncomfortable experience.
About a month later, the next concrete job came. We had poured the foundations for a new house that we were building, and again, the next day when we turned up to work it was our job to put cuts in the concrete. This time, however, things were a bit different. The week prior, our boss had gone out and purchased an expensive concrete cutting machine. Instead of a full day of back-breaking labor, in just a couple of hours the job was done, and we barely broke a sweat. I just walked along gently pushing this machine with the brand-new blade and its built-in dust management system while I listened to some music.
This experience highlighted for me how important it is to be using the best tools for the job. Yes, there are other ways of getting the job done, but when we utilize the right tools, everything goes so much better. The results were far better, it took me a fraction of the time, and my back didn’t hurt for three days afterwards. I left that day thinking, why didn’t we always do it like this?
Discipleship, too, has been the victim of people not using the best tools for the job. The systems, structures, and programs that so many have put in place today to try to help people mature in their faith have been done without access to the right tools.
How discipleship is often done today
Christian discipleship, as we established in the first article, is the task of helping people to become like Jesus in every way—meaning we react like he does, we value what he does, we treat people the way he treats people, we become people who express the character of Christ in every situation.
Many Christians would affirm this, and many are dedicated to trying to see this happen just as I am. However, the practices and methods that so many church leaders and organizations have developed for making disciples have been shaped by a misunderstanding of how people grow and change, causing many to be working without the right tools.
One significant reason this misunderstanding has come about is due to a major intellectual and cultural shift that has taken place over the past four centuries—in particular, the eighteenth century, when a large part of the Western world went through a movement known by many as the Enlightenment, which reshaped much of what people, including Christians, valued. Reason, science, and rational inquiry were valued more than anything else, meaning that correct thinking and knowledge were esteemed to be the most important things a person could obtain—more than relational skills and emotional maturity, for instance.
Michael Hendriks writes, “Christianity followed Enlightenment culture and slowly became focused on correct thinking. In this new world, it became more important to be right than loving.” This shift in values also affected how discipleship was done. With reason and science being of most importance, discipleship became about simply changing people’s beliefs, thinking that this was also the way to change people’s character.
The underlying belief was, and for many still is, “To change our character, we need to change our thinking. New thinking produces new behavior.”
There is still much truth in this statement, and we would be wrong to totally dismiss it. However, this way of thinking has led to the typical church structures we see today, where the most “knowledgeable” and “gifted” people commonly take up leading roles. These people often then create programs, services, and gatherings that are centered around getting people to “think correctly” and where discipleship methods are heavily focused on right beliefs, while things like maturity and character formation are seen as simply a by-product. In this model:
We are told to stop lying, but not shown how to stop lying
We are told to trust God with our money and not be greedy, but are not shown how to
We are told to love and bless our enemies, but have never seen how to do that practically
Ultimately, this kind of discipleship produces people who know a lot about the Bible and God, but scarcely display his character.
I don’t want you to misunderstand me—knowledge and correct beliefs are extremely vital in the discipleship process; without them we will also fail to grow mature disciples. We should deeply care what people believe, we should greatly encourage people to engage in the above practices and be dedicated to knowing the truth. However, and this is what I want to stress the most, other ingredients that are just as vital are also needed to bring radical transformation to people’s lives.
How do people grow?
Meet Joe. Joe has been a pack-a-day smoker for over ten years. He has attempted several times to quit, but to the dislike of his wife, after two or three weeks Joe always falls back into his same old ways.
Joe knows how bad smoking is for him, he knows how much damage it is causing his lungs and body, and he knows that it will very likely shorten his life. Joe knows all the information, and if he could snap his fingers and make his addiction to smoking go away, he would. Yet, he just cannot seem to change.
One morning while Joe was having breakfast, his wife rushed in with the amazing news that she was pregnant. This was their first child, and at the idea of meeting their newest family member in just less than nine months’ time, Joe was filled with a great sense of love and joy.
That day Joe was driving to work, and he reached for his pack of cigarettes as he normally would any other day. But as he looked at the packet, and as he read the warning labels that cover it, Joe decided, that’s it. That pack of cigarettes went straight in the bin and Joe never smoked another cigarette again.
What changed? What was different about this time that made Joe able to experience this change in his life?
Joe had access to the most powerful motivator the human brain can experience. The deep loving (hesed) attachment that he had for his new baby empowered Joe to change. The information that he had known for a long time about the negatives of smoking became effective when combined with the right motivation. This is precisely what we, who want to create discipleship methods that are going to bring about radical transformation in our own lives and in the lives of others, need to remember.
It is the loving (hesed) attachments that we share with others that have the most profound impact on our character. In fact, without a loving attachment, our character will remain the same. Jim Wilder puts it like this: “Identity is a rather protected brain function. We do not easily allow any other mind to change who we are. Access to establish or change identity is limited to those who are attached with us. Thus, our significant attachments (the people we love) shape our character. Attachment love (what Scripture calls “hesed,” as noted in chapter 1) is the key to access our character. No hesed means no access. Attachment is the foundation for developing character.”
Who we love, then, has a greater impact on our lives than anything else. This helps us understand why Jesus tells us to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37) or why Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). Jesus knew that it was love (hesed)—a deep unbreakable attachment to himself, God, and each other—that would be the foundation for transforming his disciples.
Possibly the most central task, then, of anyone wanting to grow as a disciple of Jesus, or anyone wanting to help grow others, is to learn how to form loving (hesed) attachments to both God and God’s people in a healthy way.
Sadly, however, many Christians today haven’t learned these skills and are missing out on the most powerful motivator that God has given us. Being so focused on knowledge and correct beliefs has stopped us from utilizing the most powerful tool for transformation.
Wilder again summarizes well: “We are transformed by who we love more than what we believe. We should neglect neither but make attachment love our priority. The means and mechanisms for developing a Christlike identity in a human brain are tied, at every level, to the need for loving attachment.”1
So, what is attachment love? How can we grow it? Why is it so much more effective in producing transformation? Did Jesus really know about this? This is what we will be exploring in much greater detail in future articles, but for now, I want to tell you one final story.
Learning our character
Meet Bill. Bill grew up in a loving home with his mom, dad, and two other siblings. Bill had a very good relationship with his parents, and in particular, with his dad. Bill loved his dad more than anyone.
Bill’s dad was overall a great guy. He loved Jesus, treated other people nicely, gave to the needy, coached Bill’s football team, and always worked hard. But one flaw about Bill’s dad was how angry he would get when he was driving. When someone drove too slowly, or too fast, or didn’t indicate properly, Bill’s dad would fire up. He would yell, swear, and burn hot with anger.
Later in life, when Bill had grown up, he too was a great guy. He was strong in his faith and treated others with respect and generosity. But just like his father, when Bill got behind the wheel, if anything held him up or he didn’t like the way someone else was driving, that same fire would come out.
Bill’s character had been shaped by the example that his father gave him, both the good habits and the bad habits. Bill had learned how to act, whether he liked it or not, by learning from the person he loved more than anyone else.
“We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become.”1
Learning new behaviors (a new character) is not like learning math or sciences. As we go about life, we are constantly watching and learning from those around us, or more accurately, those we love. As children, we see our parents doing and saying things and we begin to imitate them, without even thinking about it, and it’s much the same for adults. As we go about life, we watch “our people” (those we deeply love) interact with others, react to different situations, and deal with problems. The examples that “our people” set, the way they behave in different situations, gets imprinted onto us and we start to imitate them. To put this simply, our character is learned by watching and imitating the character of those whom we love (our people).
I think Jesus knew this—that our character isn’t simply learned by focused, conscious thought, as if we were learning math or science, but rather by absorbing and inheriting the behaviors of “our people” (including God) as we do life with them.
What do you think impacted the disciples’ character more, being told by Jesus, “Do not resist an evil person” (Matthew 5:39), or being with Jesus when he healed the man’s ear who had come to arrest him and take him to be crucified? (See Luke 22:50-51). My suggestion would be the latter.
Why do we learn character and identity differently? Why doesn’t everyone I watch affect my character? Is this only possible with humans, or can we learn our character from God? How do we even practically do this? Again, we will seek to develop these ideas in future articles.
Discipleship is deeply relational
Hopefully you can begin to see what might be missing from so many discipleship models today. Discipleship is an extremely relational process. It requires more than just knowledge and truth to work, and it becomes so much more effective and transformational when we can recognize and use all the tools that God has given us.
I strongly believe we will see much more fruit in our own lives, and in the lives of those we disciple, if we can create discipleship methods focused on teaching and modeling to people:
- The relational and emotional skills needed to form strong, healthy, loving attachments to God and God’s people;
- How to effectively and regularly connect with “our people” who are more mature than ourselves and whom we can learn to imitate; and
- How to continue growing our knowledge of the truth as part of a healthy hesed community.
If we continue to let knowledge and correct thinking be valued above everything else, as many of us have done, and churches continue to center all they do around helping people “think correctly,” then we will continue to see the same results as we always have. But if we can develop methods that utilize all the tools available to us, if we can become communities that intentionally and lovingly do life together, radical transformation will follow.
The questions I want to leave you with, and again I’d love to hear your responses, are:
How has your church, group, organization, family, etc., attempted to make disciples?
What programs and/or methods have you seen developed?
How did they go?
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