Chapter One
The Four Failures That
Undermine Deep Discipleship
In his bestselling book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks tells the story of a woman who for decades lived in a family system that kept her stuck and immature.1
Madeleine arrived at St. Benedictâs Hospital in 1980 at the age of sixty. She had been born blind and with cerebral palsy. Throughout her life, she had been protected, looked after, and babied by her family. What shocked Sacks, the neurologist responsible for her care, was that she was highly intelligent, spoke freely and eloquently, but could do nothing with her hands.
âYouâve read a tremendous amount,â he noted. âYou must be really at home with Braille.â
âNo, Iâm not,â she said, âAll my reading has been done for me. . . . I canât read Braille, not a single word. I canât do anything with my handsâthey are completely useless.â
She held them up. âUseless godforsaken lumps of doughâthey donât even feel part of me.â
Sacks was startled. He thought to himself, The hands are not something usually affected by cerebral palsy. Her hands would seem to have the potential of being perfectly good handsâand yet they are not. Can it be that they are functionlessââuselessââbecause she had never used them? Had everything been done for her in a manner that prevented her from developing a normal pair of hands?â
Madeleine had no memory of ever having used her hands. In fact, Sacks notes, âShe had never fed herself, used the toilet by herself, or reached out to help herself, always leaving it to others to help her.â
She lived, for sixty years, as if she were a human being without hands.
This led Sacks to try an experiment. He instructed the nurses to deliver Madeleineâs food to her but to leave it slightly out of her reach, as if by accident.
He writes, âAnd one day it happenedâwhat had never happened before: impatient, hungry, instead of waiting passively and patiently, she reached out an arm, groped, found a bagel, and took it to her mouth. This was the first use of her hands, her first manual act, in sixty years.â
Madeleine progressed rapidly from there. She soon reached out to touch the whole world, exploring different foods, containers, implements. She asked for clay and started to make models and sculptures. She began to explore human faces and figures.
Speaking of her hands, Sacks writes, âThey were, one felt, not just the hands of a blind woman exploring, but of a blind artist, a meditative and creative mind, just opened to the full sensuous and spiritual reality of the world.â
Madeleineâs artistry developed to the point that, within a year, she was locally famous as the âBlind Sculptress of St. Benedictâs.â
Who would have imagined that such a great artist and astonishing person lay hidden within the body of this sixty-year-old woman, who had not only suffered from multiple physical limitations but who had also been âdisabledâ by those who had thought they were caring for her?
Itâs a striking story in its own right but also illustrates a disturbingly similar dynamic at work in our churches. Too many people have been âbabiedâ in their discipleship, to the point that they have become nearly disabled spiritually. As a result, they accept without question a faith that promises freedom and abundance in Jesus, and yet they never seem to notice how they remain imprisoned, especially in unbiblical ways of relating to themselves and others. They shrug their shoulders as if to say, âItâs useless. I canât do anything about that. Itâs just the way I am.â
This problem, which I refer to as shallow discipleship, isnât a recent one, but it has worsened and deepened over the years.2 When I first came to faith forty-five years ago, a popular phrase used to describe the church was that we were one mile wide and one inch deep. Now, I would adjust it to say we are one mile wide and less than half an inch deep.3
Thatâs not to say that there havenât been any attempts to turn this dynamic around. In fact, as Iâve worked with churches across the world, Iâve witnessed many heartening efforts to address our plightâprayer meetings for revival, intentional community life, renewed emphasis on Scripture reading, greater engagement in spiritual warfare, dazzling worship services, rediscovery of the supernatural power of God, increased involvement with the poor and marginalized, and more.
All are valuable. But none successfully address the fundamental question: What are the beneath-the-surface failures that undermine deep discipleship and keep people from becoming spiritually mature?
Over the last twenty-five years, Iâve had a chance to reflect long and hard on this question and on the discipleship systems that have kept people immature for so long. Iâve done this as the lead pastor for a local church and in my work around the world with different denominations and movements, in urban, suburban, and rural areas, and across racial, cultural, and economic divides. In the process, Iâve become convinced that implementing a robust and in-depth discipleship for our people requires that we address at least four fundamental failures:
1. We tolerate emotional immaturity.
2. We emphasize doing for God over being with God.
3. We ignore the treasures of church history.
4. We define success wrongly.
Itâs vital that we understand the background and implications of each failure. Why? Because apart from a clear understanding of the depth of our situation, we will not stick with the long-term solution required to fully address the widespread damage these failures are causing in our churches.
So letâs get started, beginning with the roots of a discipleship system that too often results in people who are less whole, less human, and less like Jesus, rather than more whole, more human, and more like Jesus.4
FAILURE 1: WE TOLERATE EMOTIONAL IMMATURITY
Over time, our expectations of what it means to be âspiritualâ have blurred to the point that we have grown blind to many glaring inconsistencies. For example, we have learned to accept that:
âą You can be a gifted speaker for God in public and be a detached spouse or angry parent at home.
âą You can function as a leader and yet be unteachable, insecure, and defensive.
âą You can quote the Bible with ease and still be unaware of your reactivity.
âą You can fast and pray regularly and yet remain critical of others, justifying it as discernment.
âą You can lead people âfor God,â when, in reality, your primary motive is an unhealthy need to be admired by others.
âą You can be hurt by the unkind comment of a coworker and justify saying nothing because you avoid conflicts at all costs.
âą You can serve tirelessly in multiple ministries, and yet carry resentments because there is little personal time for healthy self-care.
âą You can lead a large ministry with little transparency, rarely sharing struggles or weakness.
OUR FOUR FAILURES
1. We tolerate emotional immaturity.
2. We emphasize doing for God over being with God.
3. We ignore the treasures of church history.
4. We define success wrongly.
All of these are examples of emotional immaturity in action, and yet we donât see them as the glaring contradictions they are. Why? Because we have disconnected emotional health from spiritual health. Where did we get the idea that itâs possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature? The answer is multifacted, but let me focus here on two significant reasons.
Reason 1: We No Longer Measure Our Love for God by the Degree to Which We Love Others
Jesus repeatedly focused on the inseparability of loving God and loving others. When asked for the one greatest commandment, Jesus identified twoâlove God and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:34â40).
The apostle Paul made the same point in his first letter to the church at Corinth. He warned that great faith, great generosity, and even great spiritual giftsâwithout loveâare worth nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1â3). In other words, if those around us consistently experience us as unapproachable, cold, unsafe, defensive, rigid, or judgmental, Scripture declares us spiritually immature.
The most radical expression of Jesusâ teaching about love was also one of his most fundamental principles: âLove your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. . . . If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?â (Matthew 5:44, 46). For Jesus, enemies were not interruptions to the spiritual life, but often the very means by which we might experience deeper communion with God. That is one of the reasons he issued stern warnings such as, âDo not judge, or you too will be judgedâ (Matthew 7:1).5 Jesus knew how easy it would be for us to avoid the difficult work of loving people.
Jesus radically reversed the teaching of first-century rabbis who stressed relationship with God at the expense of relationship with others. If you were in worship and realized someone had something against you, the rabbis ta...