A Biblical view of learning (1)

But that is not the way you learned Christ! – assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus…
- Ephesians 4:20, 21

Where are the disciples?
Looking at the vast array of Christian educational activities available through churches and other Christian entities, and the large number of people regularly engaged in these activities, one might be tempted to conclude that the Church in America is serious about discipleship.

That would be a conclusion difficult to support on Biblical grounds.

It was not quite two years ago that mega-church pastor Bill Hybels announced to a bemused evangelical world that, while he and his associates had been feverishly at work building their church and sponsoring many education and discipleship programs for the 20,000 people in their care over the past many years, they had to admit that, for all their effort, they hadn’t made many disciples.

Hybels may as well have been speaking for the great majority of Christian churches in America. While there are exceptions, I’m sure, and while practically every church can point to real disciples who have been reared in their midst, the picture as a whole is not all that encouraging.

So much for so little
We are the most Christian-educated generation of believers in Church history. The Church in America features more opportunities for studying the Bible and other Christian subjects than at any other time in the history of the Christian movement. Sunday sermons, Sunday schools, Bible study groups, radio and television teaching, seminars and workshops, conferences and retreats abound throughout the year. Add to that the many and increasing opportunities for formal Christian education – day schools, home schools, colleges and universities, and theological seminaries – and the plethora of educational resources available in book stores and online, and it seems hardly possible to imagine a community more educationally-saturated than the contemporary American Church.

But for all that study there seems to be little in the way of real learning. Millions of Americans profess to be born-again and evangelical in their faith; most of these participate in at least one, and often more, of the many educational opportunities available to Christians today. But the evidence that all that studying and educating has produced believers like those who, in the early Church, turned their world upside-down for Jesus Christ is paltry.

Today the Church in America exists on the margins of moral, social, and cultural change. Our indifference and ineptness as followers of Jesus Christ have made the Church, not the joy of the earth (Ps. 48:1), but a byword in the mouths of our neighbors.

Our Christian educational activities may be unprecedented in their scope, but they are unimpressive in their results. And, to date, the leaders of the Christian education enterprise in America seem either unaware or unconcerned about the state of learning in the American Church – an observation confirmed by the fact that every year educators continue to offer more and more of the same old same, with little sense of a need for change in what we’re doing or the way we’re doing it.

But as a Church, American Christians are not learning Jesus; we are not making disciples according to the mandate of our Savior or the example of our forebears.

There are many reasons for this, I’m sure. But one stands out in my mind as readily fixable, as it were: We are operating on a faulty definition of what true learning consists of, so that we are too easily satisfied with merely maintaining the numbers of people in Christian educational activities without any manifest desire to determine whether or not they are learning to be disciples.

The Bible has much to teach us about the nature of true learning – what it is, what we must do to achieve it, and how true learning comes to expression in the lives of the followers of Jesus Christ. Over the next six installments I intend to examine, if only in an introductory manner, the Biblical teaching on this important subject, with a view to urging readers to adopt a truer and more effective approach to the Church’s primary task, that of making disciples.

I hope to encourage a lively discussion; readers’ thoughtful and edifying responses will be welcome, and could play a vital role in beginning to reform the paradigm of Christian education currently at work in the churches.

This much is clear: Whatever we have been doing in our varied and impressive Christian educational enterprise has not equipped the Church to fulfill her calling as salt, light, and leaven in a culture and society whose drift from divine truth has continued apace for over two generations. Either we reconsider our efforts in this important field, or we will consign the Church in the future – the Church of our children and grandchildren – to even greater marginalization and irrelevance than that with which we have saddled ourselves today.

I, for one, am not content to contribute to that scenario.

For more insight to this topic, get the book, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, by Douglas Wilson, from our online store.

Or read the article, “Ever Learning,” by T. M. Moore.