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.

Pastor and author Gordon MacDonald is chair of World
Relief and editor-at-large of Leadership.