It’s a strange and tragic truth that spiritual things can be unlearned.
Art Glasser
People, like trees, must grow or die. There’s no standing still.
Joseph Shore
Once you bring a baby into the world, you’ve got to raise it till it’s ready to fend for itself. But what’s the best way? There are as many methods as there are child psychologists, from Spock to Dobson and everything in between. Choosing the right approach is one of a parent’s biggest responsibilities.
In the same way, once people have been won to Christ, the local church has the responsibility to help them mature. But churches differ in their approaches to meeting this need. Which methods are most effective, and what are the keys to making them work? Dean Merrill, formerly senior editor of Leadership and now editor of Christian Herald magazine, explores three common approaches.
Have you noticed that the most essential parts of a process are often the most complicated?
It is far easier for an architect to sketch a dashing roof line than to work out the tedious schematics. It is always more fun to invite guests for dinner than to cook the meal and do the dishes afterward.
In ministry, when we invite a person to follow Christ and the answer is yes, there’s a surge of rejoicing all around. Darkness has given way to light; a new life has begun. The next stage, however — the crucial stage if this spiritual newborn is to survive — is the developing, forming, nurturing, establishing, rooting, confirming, and discipling of the new Christian.
As the previous sentence illustrates, we in the church use varying language to describe the task. But there is no question about the importance. From the moment Jesus stared down his most impetuous disciple and said, “Feed my lambs,” the value of caring for the spiritually young has been set. Church leaders agree that answering an evangelist’s public call is not enough. Becoming a member is not enough. Without subsequent feeding, the act of beginning becomes a dead end.
We cringe as we eavesdrop on John Wesley storming at his preachers, “How dare you lead people to Christ without providing adequate opportunity for growth and nurture! Anything less is simply begetting children for the murderer.”
And in our own time, we affirm Lyle Schaller’s premise that “it is not Christian to invite a person to unite with a specific congregation and then not accept that person into the fellowship of that congregation.”
The Daunting Task
Yet the task looms so large, so intangible, that we aren’t immediately sure where it starts, and especially where it finishes. What does it take to bring a person to spiritual maturity? What stages of growth can we anticipate? How do we guide the new Christian from A to B to C? Do we ever reach a point where we can quit?
Any parent knows the peculiar sinking feeling that hits, often within days or weeks of bringing the firstborn home from the hospital. The celebration quiets down, the grandparents say good-by, and in the silence late at night you’re suddenly struck with the awesomeness of what it means to raise a child to adulthood.
It’s up to us to do and be everything this new little life needs from now on. Yes, there’s a pediatrician to consult (for a fee), and miscellaneous friends and relatives with free advice, and later on a school system to help educate. But the buck stops right here, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till independence do us part.
As philosopher Michael Novak says, “The raising of children … brings each of us breathtaking vistas of our inadequacy.”
The rearing of spiritual offspring is, if anything, even more intimidating, since indicators are less tangible (no height-and-weight charts, no report cards) and our chances to do our work are scant compared to the twenty-four hours a day natural parents have. We all carry dreams of what we hope for: the eager, committed, young Christian who devours the Scriptures on a daily basis, begins changing his or her lifestyle to match what is read, participates fervently in public worship, seeks out a place of service in the church, prays freely and sees answers to those prayers, and speaks openly of his new allegiance to Christ without embarrassment.
But deep within, we know such pleasant results are not guaranteed, and if they fail to materialize, we assume it will be more our fault than anyone else’s.
So we mull over our parenting strategies. Is it better to jar the new Christian with a sense of all-things-new? Should we meet several times a week and require homework, for example? Or does that seem cultish? Shall we rather set an easy stride (after all, these are adults) and keep things comfortable?
A wide difference of opinion exists not only on the level of intensity, but also on where to begin. Some churches are firmly of the “learn and grow first, then serve” philosophy, while others lean strongly toward on-the-job training.
What follows are descriptions of three different “ways to raise a baby.” None would claim to be the only way. From these accounts, church leaders can study, imagine, and pick and choose in order “to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all … become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:12-13).
One Friend to Another
West Valley Christian Church in Canoga Park, California, is not one of southern California’s megachurches. It began in 1976 under the leadership of church planter Glenn Kirby and is now a congregation of four hundred. Single-family homes surround the church on three sides; to the west lies a public school playground.
West Valley’s emphasis on helping new Christians grow emerged almost unintentionally. The church has had a private school almost from the beginning, and it was the first school administrator who “kept after the rest of us about the need to give people some kind of big-picture approach to the Bible,” says Kirby. “He put together some material, and we went through it as a staff. Later on, I revised it, and in January 1980, we offered our ‘Bible History Overview’ for the first time in the adult Sunday school classes.”
Kirby was not yet to the point of thinking specifically about new believers. He and Gary Olsby, then minister of Christian education, simply wanted to give members a handle on the big, thick, black Book. So they spent nine months going from Genesis through to the early spread of the church, helping people understand who lived where and who preceded whom. Were members turned off by this large a dose of history?
“Most Christians don’t have the story line in their heads,” says Kirby. “They got excited as they began to acquire the overview.” Sunday school attendance, in fact, went from 150 to 210 during those nine months.
What next? Specifically, how could newcomers to the church get the same foundation? It was at this point that a Laubach-style “each one teach one” concept entered Glenn Kirby’s mind. Before long, he and Olsby boiled down the course to a blue, 61-page workbook, complete with maps, charts, and fill-in-the-blanks. The nine-month class became a set of thirteen (and later eight) lessons for informal use.
“We asked how many graduates of our Sunday school class would be willing to reteach the same material — not to a roomful, but to one or two others in their homes,” Olsby remembers. “That sounded easy enough, and fifty people said yes.”
So they were put to work. Many of them gathered their own students: friends or neighbors who responded affirmatively to the question, “My church has this eight-week Bible History Overview course; would you like for me to take you through it? We could even do it at your house if you like.” Those who lacked prospects were matched with recent visitors to the church or others who wanted to brush up on the Bible.
The course is a simple who-what-when-where. It does not attempt to cover the Old Testament’s Wisdom Literature or the writings of the prophets. Nor does it tackle the New Testament Epistles. It simply lays out a parade of people who walked with God (Enoch, Noah, Abraham …) and another parade of those who didn’t (Jereboam, Manasseh …), showing the advantages of the first over the second.
Week by week, in homes across the valley, interesting things began to happen. Some had more to do with evangelism than discipleship or Christian education. Rod and Rita White led five separate studies, four of which resulted in conversions and baptisms. One couple they touched were the Setsers.
“When Bonny and I came to West Valley,” says Bob Setser, “the Holy Spirit had just begun to make us aware of our spiritual needs. Bonny came from a totally nonreligious home, and I’d turned away from the church in my late teens. But we both felt a void in our lives and wondered if the Lord could fill it. After a few visits, Glenn Kirby asked if we’d like to do an overview study of the Bible with another couple as teachers. We agreed, and that’s how we met Rod and Rita. Over the next several months as the historical panorama of God’s plan was explained, the combination of the Holy Spirit’s work plus Rod and Rita’s guidance and testimony convinced us we were on the right track. Before we completed the study, we asked Jesus into our lives.”
Subsequently, the Setsers became teachers of the overview, and their first students, the Paladinos, also joined the church. The network of influence has by this time become extensive.
“This course was our evangelism program for several years,” the ministers remember. Now West Valley has developed a calling program and some other outreaches, but the overview continues to draw people toward a Christian commitment. The eighth week specifically stresses Peter’s appeal to the crowd at Pentecost (Acts 2:38), and the workbook says, “To become a Christian today, we should do the same things these people did.” This is often the point of conversion for those who haven’t reached it earlier.
After seven weeks of learning and informal conversation, this decision is not as threatening. “Sometimes a student may feel lost or be very shy,” says Olsby, “and initially the teacher must do all the talking. Other times a student can’t read very well, and the teacher must do all the reading from Scripture. But most sessions are a free-flowing discussion with plenty of time for personal questions.”
West Valley has since added a second course (taught mainly in Sunday school) that looks much like what other churches use first. “Basic Teachings of the Christian Faith” has eight lessons on prayer, the church, service, sharing your faith, dealing with temptation, and church history. A third course on spiritual gifts includes a diagnostic questionnaire to help people identify their gifts and put them to use.
“Eventually, we want all our members to go through all three courses,” says Kirby. “Together they take a beginning person from salvation through to grounding in the faith and on to serving.”
The church is now using the one-to-one concept to try to accelerate older Christians’ spiritual growth. The elders and ministers meet in pairs each week for sixty-to-ninety-minute sessions emphasizing accountability. Partners set specific weekly goals (pray with my wife five times; memorize a portion of Scripture) and pray for each other. The following week, they compare how close they came to reaching their goals. Kirby and current minister of Christian education Steve Hancock hope to have all members in these long-term partnerships eventually. That’s likely; through the Bible History Overview, West Valley members have grown accustomed to a close, one-to-one approach.
“I admit we’re tempted sometimes to form more groups rather than keep finding teachers for one-to-one sessions,” Kirby says. “But we feel we’d be giving up too many benefits.” Among them:
— More and more people gain experience teaching.
— New teachers overcome their fears, because they’re already familiar with the material and can simply follow the workbook.
— The new believer builds a solid, close relationship with an experienced Christian.
— People are grounded in the flow of Bible history from Creation to the church.
— Instructors model how to live the Christian life and how to study the Bible, two keys to discipleship.
— It builds bridges into the church.
And the bonus is this: It seems to generate more Christians along the way.
Mainstreaming
A second approach to nurturing new believers might be called “mainstreaming,” to borrow a bit of jargon from the educational world. In recent years, many school administrators have backed away from the earlier practice of segregating students with special needs or handicaps. Instead of filling up special classrooms with atypical students, they have tried placing as many as possible in the same rooms with “normal” students, for two reasons: (1) to surround them with examples of what “normalcy” is, and (2) to heighten sensitivity among ordinary students for those with special needs.
Some church leaders are taking a similar approach to new Christians. Having set an environment that says, “We are Christians in process, and we all have a lot to learn,” they guide new believers into the mainstream of congregational learning as quickly as possible, with a minimum of special attention.
One such church is Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California. The church is not as massive architecturally as many readers of the book Body Life and others by Ray Stedman, pastor, might have imagined. Packed into the middle of a block, with less than 150 feet of frontage, the plain, 1,000seat auditorium extends back toward parking lots that hide behind adjacent houses. A one-lane driveway snakes along one side of the building and empties out on the other. “We’re as far as we can go on this property,” says Paul Winslow, a staff pastor since 1972, “but God provided a second building (seating 450) in Cupertino, ten miles south.”
So Peninsula Bible Church has taken to providing five Sunday services, two at one location, three at another. It has also parceled its pastors out all over the peninsula, with encouragement to develop the body of Christ not just at 3505 Middle-field Road, but throughout the region, from San Jose to the edge of San Francisco. More importantly, the leadership has honed a precise self-definition.
“We’re a church that ministers to believers,” says Winslow, choosing his words carefully. “The nonbeliever is never addressed corporately here; we don’t have revival meetings or altar calls, for example. All the evangelism happens ‘out there,’ in the world. And believe me, there’s plenty to do; we’re only forty miles from San Francisco, what many say is the most evil city in the world. Our area is also incredibly affluent: more Porsches and Mercedeses per capita here than in Germany. Stanford University is less than two miles away.
“How do we affect this peninsula for Christ? We’ve decided to pour all our efforts into maturing and equipping the believers. We’re not a center for evangelism but for teaching. Our goal is not for people to be won by the professional pastors but by the regular Christians — they’re the evangelizers. And when they lead someone to the Lord, they don’t hand them over to PBC for follow-up care. They involve them in the same processes that helped them grow when they were new Christians.”
Thus, the Sunday meetings are consistently geared to a single purpose: exposition of the Word. When Stedman, Winslow, or one of the others steps to the pulpit, he means to do one thing only: unfold and apply a passage of Scripture. One gets a glimpse of this when walking in the church’s front entrance: two imposing racks line the narthex walls from floor to ceiling, with slots for as many as a thousand different “Discovery Papers” — transcripts of past messages. A thirty-page index lists available titles. New Christians along with all the rest are surrounded by this abundance of Bible teaching.
On weeknights, Discovery Seminars are held at the church: two-hour classes that require tuition and run the gamut from “Friendly Toward Jesus?” (Peninsula’s sole accommodation to new Christians, offered spring term only) to “Modern Church History” to classes on hermeneutics. Other electives covering books of Scripture are offered on Sunday morning, although space is a constraint.
“The whole church gravitates toward studying and applying the Bible — it’s in the air,” says Winslow. “If you don’t enjoy that, you start to feel uncomfortable here. We don’t have enough of the other usual trappings — a large music program, gymnasium, or social activities, for example — to hold you. You get bored if you don’t get into the Word.”
One reason this works at Peninsula Bible is that its Silicon Valley constituency is highly educated, eager to read and learn for themselves. They take notes during the preaching, snap up the Discovery Papers on their way out, and may stop to buy a book in the church bookstore.
Not everyone, of course, can find his own way to grow. Pastor Ron Ritchie, who ministers to singles each Sunday in the upstairs room of the Menu Tree Restaurant in Mountain View, knows the difficulty.
“Sometimes I’ll wake up at three in the morning,” he says, “and the Lord will say to me, ‘Ron, where’s Bill?’ Then I remember I haven’t seen him in a while; he’s fallen through the cracks. I look him up as soon as I can and give some personal attention.
“In that sense, caring for the new Christian is the responsibility of us all,” he continues. “There’s no program, no delegation. But if you find the Lord at PBC — and don’t move out of the area — I can guarantee there will be more ‘food’ than you can eat. That’s our whole purpose as a church.”
What are the pros and cons of mainstreaming as a way to care for the spiritually young?
Its advantages are that it sweeps up new Christians in a mass movement of sorts, a large band of pilgrims all headed the same direction. They aren’t made to feel a breed apart, rookies to be given unusual treatment. They quickly rub shoulders with Christians of all types and experience, learning what they can from a multitude of sources.
Such an approach largely dismisses questions about sequence. If you happen to drop in at the point where Ray Stedman is in the eleventh week of 2 Corinthians, that’s just the way it is. The Word is alive in all its parts, and nothing will be harmful for you; the Spirit can be trusted to guide you and personalize the message as needed. Eventually, all the bases will be covered.
Some church leaders will endorse the previous paragraph, while others will not. All can probably agree that mainstreaming does require a sizable amount of weekly Bible presentation with practical application, else the bases will not be covered for a long time, and new Christians may falter. Certainly mainstreaming should not be viewed as an easy way out, and its best practitioners do not do so in the least. Their desire is rather to keep from overcomplicating the new life in Christ, to make it as natural and as accessible as possible.
The Short Course
Many churches include some kind of brief, church-based orientation class in their overall ministry to new Christians. We turn now to those for whom such a class is the prime element.
“When you finally get up the courage to try church — and you haven’t been there in years — it’s scary,” says Don Bubna, former pastor of Salem (Oregon) Alliance Church. “Every human being has at least some tinge of fear at being rejected by a new group. You might manage sitting through a morning worship service all right, but beyond that, you’re not at all sure you’ll survive.”
That’s why Bubna created “The Welcome Class,” a freewheeling, no-demand “guided happening” every Sunday morning, year round. The only qualification to attend: you had to be a newcomer or visitor to the church. People were welcome to stay as long as they wished, although they’d notice after three months that the topics started to recycle. It was their special zone in which to relax, breathe, laugh, find out what the Christian life is about, get close to the church’s leadership, and begin to put down roots.
Bubna got the technique down to a science. He first experimented with it while pastoring a small church in San Diego in the early sixties. When he went to Salem, the class became a permanent fixture. As of this writing, 80 percent of the eleven hundred people who regularly attend Salem Alliance have gone through this portal. Bubna calls it “the single most significant contributor to two decades of growth.”
A typical morning would begin with thirty-five to fifty people entering the pastor’s study (actually a large classroom that he enjoyed throughout the week in order to host the Welcome Class on Sundays). There they found an incomplete sentence on the chalkboard: “You would know me better if ____” “Some of the best advice I ever had was _____” or “Something I learned from a tough experience was _____.” (On some Sundays, people were given the option of asking anything about the church’s practices or beliefs.)
While thinking of your answer, the pastor, his wife, or associate teacher Darrel Dixon would put a cup of coffee or tea into your hand and introduce you to someone else nearby. Soon the session began with the gregarious pastor saying, “I’m Don Bubna, and you’re the Welcome Class. This is a gathering of new people and visitors who meet each week to discuss things Christians commonly believe.
“It’s a place where people are important. That’s why we take time each week for each of you to introduce yourself. The open-ended statement on the board will also let you tell us a little more about yourself — if you want to. You may complete it seriously, humorously, philosophically — or just pass. Who wants to be first?”
Often one of the leadership team broke the ice, being careful not to sound too theological. Soon the comments were flowing freely, and if somebody said he was from Spokane, others were welcome to find out whether he knew their cousin who lived there. It was common for someone to spill the news of a sick child, a job loss, or a family concern. Would the person like prayer about that? Someone was promptly invited to lead out.
Then came the Scripture for the day, with Bibles handed out for those who needed them. Bubna did not assume people knew how to find Psalms or Acts; he guided them by saying things like “about three quarters of the way back in the book.” Everyone read the text silently and then framed a comment about it. There was no lecture waiting to be unleashed, however. The teaching was done via discovery, with plenty of give-and-take and frequent life application.
Says Tom Riordan, a lapsed Catholic whose wife talked him into attending in late 1983, “The format was essentially educational, but it worked on such an intimate level that at times it was, for me, really moving. I would get caught up in what was happening, and the more I opened up, the more I gained.” He eventually came to realize his commitment to Christ was still unformed, and Don Bubna led him to solid commitment in a restaurant the following March.
Tucked away in Bubna’s notes, of course, was an agenda. “We were teaching basic Bible doctrine, but we never called it that.” The five areas to be covered: Scripture, God, our human predicament, Jesus Christ, and the church — what it means to be the people of God. The last topic took as much time as the other four put together.
Sometimes the Bible study wrapped up early, leaving time for general questions such as “Share one thing you’ve been learning about God,” “Tell us where you are in your pilgrimage of faith,” or “What were the circumstances that surrounded your coming to commitment to Christ?”
Certain logistics are important, says Bubna:
1. The right location. He feels the pastor’s study carries a certain sense of privilege to it that attracts some people.
2. The presence of the church’s preaching pastor and his wife. “New people want some kind of identification with them. This also provides personal contact with those who most likely will merge into the congregation before long.”
3. A solid associate teacher to provide continuity when the pastor must be out of town. Darrel Dixon had been on the scene in the Welcome Class for more than ten years.
4. A visiting elder each week, who is always introduced. This furthers the exposure of leadership and sets up more relationships.
5. Periodic promotion. Although newcomers might enter the class at any point, special letters of invitation were mailed just ahead of the first Sunday of each quarter to those who had recently signed a friendship pad in the main service. It told them where to find coffee, a sweet roll, and comfortable give-and-take with the pastor next Sunday morning.
The class was also occasionally announced in the bulletin and from the pulpit. But most new people were brought or referred by friends, previous attenders of the class who liked it and wanted others to experience it for themselves. Visitation teams also followed up first-timers with a personal presentation of the gospel in their homes.
Along the way, those who professed faith in Christ were invited to separate baptismal classes, two or three sessions that prepared them to give their public witness at the time of baptism.
Eventually, members moved out of the Welcome Class to other kinds of learning: adult electives, home Bible studies, or intensive, ninety-minute discipling classes on Wednesdays. Yet even these retained the discovery approach, the warmth, and the humor of the Welcome Class. Don Bubna’s goal in each structure was to live out the words of Romans 15:7: “Welcome one another, therefore, as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”
The short-course approach to forming new believers is an easily grasped, conventional strategy, particularly in our current era of adult education. Many North Americans are well conditioned to taking courses in order to learn whatever they want to know. And they give such courses a measure of seriousness.
Such structure tells people there is a body of information to be covered here, enough that it will require more than one sitting. Yet it isn’t endless; you can finish on a certain date and feel you’ve accomplished something.
The class also tells the congregation each week as they read the church schedule in the bulletin that early discipling is going on. It keeps veteran Christians in touch with the fact that, among other things, this church is a continual “nursery.”
However, if the class is not more than a class, the new life in Christ can be reduced to gray academics. That’s why the style of the “Welcome Class” is especially noteworthy. Bubna worked hard to join fellowship with learning, the heart with the head.
The problem of sequence is not entirely solved. Those who enter midstream end up getting some first things second. That is partly why these are short courses. Students don’t have to wait a long time to fill in the missing blanks, and as we have noted before, the question of whether sequence is important is debatable anyway.
The short course, in the end, is neither the most daring nor the most demanding form of nurture for new Christians. But it is practical, manageable, and can be significantly effective.
An Untidy Operation
The one-on-one, mainstreaming, and short-course approaches are just a few of the ways congregations care for the infants in their midst. Some churches use “covenant groups,” intense “Timothy-ing” in a small-group setting. Still others rely on a full-blown school, offering an array of courses in the Christian life with professors, credits, and electives. The styles and techniques vary according to pastoral temperaments, congregational strengths, and regional needs.
Perhaps we should accept the fact that forming new Christians will never be a tidy operation. We will always have questions about whether we are doing enough of the right kinds of things. We will probably go on wondering about the proper sequence, or whether sequence matters. We are forced to live with residual levels of uncertainty.
Yet we can take comfort in the thought most pediatricians pass along to anxious parents: “Don’t worry quite so much. The kid won’t break. With a reasonable amount of love and attention, she’ll be fine.”
Part of the task of helping new Christians grow is the work of discipleship, working intensely in one-on-one relationships. Yet the pastor’s heavy time investment in this process can lead other church members to feel slighted. Thus, in the second part of this chapter, E. Stanley Ott, associate pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in West Lafayette, Indiana, describes the keys he has found to discipling individuals without appearing to play favorites in the eyes of the rest of the congregation.
Whether my church has one hundred or one thousand, I cannot focus on them all. I want to build disciples, so I spend intensive time with a fraction of the people to whom I minister. A few mouths get the biggest slices of my time-and-energy pie. And that opens me to charges of favoritism.
It’s easy for others in the congregation to become jealous of the few who associate most closely with me. I am their pastor, too, they rightly reason, yet I spend less time with them. And they may have been here longer, and perhaps been even more committed to the church.
The pastor indeed carries pastoral responsibility for the entire fellowship. I accept the reality that everyone in the congregation must in some way sense my personal interest and support. I’m not free to neglect the preaching, administration, and other efforts for the “many” to minister to the “few.”
But I’ll be most effective by focusing on a few. Here are several tactics that allow me to do that while neutralizing the feeling that I’m playing favorites.
I do not make public statements about my few. I don’t even say I have a few. That would be like saying, “I heard a great joke today, but I’m not telling you!” People will feel left out and resentful if I play up how wonderful my relationship is with a handful of trusted parishioners. I may not even identify to a person among the few that I am focusing on him or her. I don’t need credit for offering a little more of myself to someone.
I do not focus on the few in a public setting. I define a clique as a group of people you can pick out in the midst of a bigger group because they clump together. So I use the motto, “Ministry in public, friendship in private.” In a public setting, such as Sunday morning, the few and I disperse to minister to others. We know we will see each other at other times for personal interaction.
I give the whole congregation plenty of opportunity to be with me at a more personal level. I find numerous ways to say to the congregation, “Come be with me.” People who want to get near me can do so in an evening Bible study, one-night seminars, and the occasional Sunday school class I teach. This invitation is offered to the whole congregation, and to members individually. I particularly welcome long-time members, the “old guard.” They need to feel included in my ministry, too.
I minister to the many with the few. Of the thousands of people who crowded around Christ during his ministry, he concentrated on a mere twelve. But he sent them to minister. I love the comment of George Williams, founder of the YMCA in the last century: “We had only one thing in mind and that was to bind our little company together in order that we might better lead our comrades to Christ.”
Not too long ago a man asked me, “Stan, I want to grow in my spiritual life. Would you meet with me?”
I said, “It would be a privilege to grow in Christ together. When I visit the hospitals on Friday afternoon, would you join me?” He agreed. For months we saw God at work in difficult situations in the hospital. After our visits, we would talk and pray together. Later this man went on to do some visitation by himself, and now he helps coordinate some aspects of our visitation. What began as ministry to one person has developed into ministry, through him, to many.
Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today
