What if We’ve Had It All Wrong?
By Keith Watson
To my knowledge, and I did Google it, no newborn baby has ever walked. A newborn with the ability to walk has never been seen. Almost everything takes practice. A baby’s muscles must develop and grow. They have to learn movement control, balance, and probably a hundred other things in order to walk. Even as those things develop, toddlers toddle. They wobble and fall. Walking takes practice.
My children have all participated in sports – football, soccer, baseball, basketball, running, and horse riding. When they started their sport, don’t tell them I said this, they were bad. They couldn’t pace themselves running. They couldn’t make shots or dribble in basketball. They didn’t know how to throw or catch or saddle a horse. Thank God for patient coaches! In each sport, someone had to teach my children all of the “how to’s.”
I want to press this a little further – I promise I am going somewhere!
My children’s coaches did a lot to get them going and able to participate in their sport. They explained the rules. Along the way they told them things to do and not to do. They had plays drawn up showing them what they were to do at their position on specific plays. Then they practiced. They practiced and they practiced and they practiced, running the same plays and receiving instruction. The practice was for the games, but even in the games the coaches continued teaching, showing, helping them. It took years of watching the coaches, watching other players, practicing, and receiving instruction before they were really good at their sport. Next time you watch a professional athlete at the top of his or her sport, imagine the years of practice they have put in.
Here’s where I am going – why do we think our Christian walk is any different?
Over the years I have heard (and said), “I don’t _____________ (share Jesus with others for example), because I don’t know how to,” or “I am not good at it.”
This is a valid reason! If you don’t know how to pray, you won’t pray. If you don’t know how to study your Bible, you can’t study your Bible.
In my growing years as a Christian, this deficiency in ability has primarily been met with a new “how to” class. Typically, these classes are set up like our high school or college classes. An instructor communicates information, gives us handouts, we take notes and we’re sent out to “do” the thing we learned. Often, in good faith we leave our classroom encouraged and we try to do the things. But it doesn’t go as well or produce the results that we thought it would after the classroom teaching. So soon we give up. Often blaming ourselves, “I tried but I just couldn’t. I’m just not smart enough.”
What if we’ve had it all wrong?
What if it hasn’t been our learning that is to blame, but the teaching?
I don’t mean that we have had poor teachers in the classroom, necessarily. I mean, what if we have been lacking some of the most important parts of learning – watching and practicing?
I think we have!
We just complete a sermon series titled, Like Jesus, where we saw how Jesus made disciples out of fishermen. Those men, by his grace, changed the world! In that series we saw that Jesus used primarily 2 teaching environments, the classroom environment and the practice environment.
The classroom environment can be seen in the many times throughout the gospels that Jesus gives his disciples oral instruction. It is like a classroom. Jesus teaches them by telling them truths, explaining what he is doing, and what they are to do. Sometimes, even as Jesus was teaching the multitude he would turn to instruct the smaller group of disciples. I have already mentioned it, but our churches are generally really good at the classroom environment. We have Sunday school teaching, Sunday morning preaching, and other learning and Bible study opportunities. These are good and needed. Jesus used classroom environments.
Jesus also used practice environments. The disciples watched Jesus in his ministry and when the time was right, Jesus included them in the ministry. This ranged from gathering and distributing supplies and controlling crowds to the ministry of healing and casting out demons. It seems, that like my children in their chosen sport, the disciples learned more and more over time by both receiving instruction and practicing what they were learning. Eventually Jesus would say to them in John 20:21 as he prepared to leave them, “as the Father has sent me, so I am sending you”.
For decades the Western Church has been trying to send out Christians to do the work of a disciple with plenty of classroom knowledge but no practice! Could you imagine giving a college student who had never played softball a 2-hour class on softball and then putting her in a college game? She would almost certainly fail miserably.
In 2024 New City leaders began working on a Discipleship Pathway. The pathway is meant to help followers of Jesus identify where they are and how they can grow to be disciples of Jesus who make disciples of Jesus in obedience to Matthew 28:16-20. Within the pathway you’ll find recommendations for growth that include the environments that Jesus primarily used, classroom and practice.
Our classroom environments include Sunday morning preaching, Sunday School classes, New City Men’s and Women’s classes, and other leadership training and equipping times. Doctrine, theology, apologetics, ministry philosophy and other valuable learning takes place in these environments.
We also want to make sure we focus on our practice environments like MCs and DNA groups as well. In these environments we see spiritual disciplines like fellowship, prayer, disciple making, serving, and generosity demonstrated by others and we are invited to practice these disciplines with them. Through watching and practicing with others we learn to share the gospel, fellowship with others, pray, serve, be generous and more.
In these classroom and practice environments we learn and grow together in being with Jesus, becoming like him, and doing what he did and is still doing! Making disciples in the way of Jesus includes both. We need both, and without both, we will never become the disciples that Jesus desires.
We would love to help you find your place in the pathway and walk with you in growing to be a multiplying disciple!
Its probably time that you take the next step!
