I’ve been sharing a few thoughts from a provocative article that appeared in Atlantic Magazine: The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart. The first two blogs talked about the intolerance of some people in many churches toward any message of social justice, despite that the Bible has a huge emphasis on it.

Today, I’ll look at what the article gives as the root of the problem, and it will be no surprise that I latched on to this part of it.

“What we’re seeing is massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis failure,” James Ernest, the vice president and editor in chief at Eerdmans, a publisher of religious books, told me. Ernest was one of several figures I spoke with who pointed to catechism, the process of instructing and informing people through teaching, as the source of the problem. “The evangelical Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness.”

This is a classic case of building the church (read, buildings, bodies, bucks) without building the people. This despite the fact that, as my Navigator friend Ron Bennett writes:

Jesus said, “You make disciples (Matthew 28.19). I’ll build the church (Matthew 16.18).” We have it exactly backward. – Ron Bennett in The Intentional Disciplemaking Church

The Atlantic article goes on to point out:

“Culture catechizes,” Alan Jacobs, a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University, told me. Culture teaches us what matters and what views we should take about what matters. Our current political culture, Jacobs argued, has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing—television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts among them. People who want to be connected to their political tribe—the people they think are like them, the people they think are on their side—subject themselves to its catechesis all day long, every single day, hour after hour after hour.

On the flip side, many churches aren’t interested in catechesis at all. They focus instead on entertainment, because entertainment is what keeps people in their seats and coins in the offering plate. But as Jacobs points out, even those pastors who really are committed to catechesis get to spend, on average, less than an hour a week teaching their people. Sermons are short. Only some churchgoers attend adult-education classes, and even fewer attend Bible study and small groups. Cable news, however, is always on. “So if people are getting one kind of catechesis for half an hour per week,” Jacobs asked, “and another for dozens of hours per week, which one do you think will win out?”

I agree wholeheartedly with these observations. Moreover, it’s not just “teaching” that people need, it’s training. Theology, yes, but also skills: how to spend time with God, how and why to memorize scripture, how to share one’s faith in the world we live in today. Churchgoers are often told either implicitly or explicitly: just give us an hour on Sunday morning, and experience life change! It doesn’t happen like that. Not in the Christian life, not in any other endeavor. My kids will tell you that I told them more than once, “Real skill takes real time.” I played a round of golf the other day with a friend who used to be an excellent golfer. But right now, “used to be” is the appropriate term. He said, “I’ve got to play more than nine holes a month if I expect to get my game back.”

Dr. Jacobs, quoted above, went on to say:

That’s not a problem limited to the faithful on one side of the aisle. “This is true of both the Christian left and the Christian right,” Jacobs said. “People come to believe what they are most thoroughly and intensively catechized to believe, and that catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consume them. The churches have barely better than a snowball’s chance in hell of shaping most people’s lives.”

And the media not only teaches content but also behavior, looping us back into the problems we discussed the past couple of days. For example,

The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. – Peter Wehner, emphasis mine

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ. (Ephesians 4.11, 12, ESV)

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. (2 Timothy 4.1 – 4, ESV)