By Amy Butler
It has been over a year and a half since I graduated with my (last ever, I swear) academic degree, and I personally feel that I’ve shown great restraint staying out of the classroom for this long. But I just love school, and life seems so much better when I have a class to go to. So, I here confess that my protestations of “no more school for me!” have fallen by the wayside as of last week, when I took a three-day class at our local community college.
There was nothing remotely theological about the class I took; my objective was to get far, far outside my comfort zone and try something completely different. This particular class did the trick, but I couldn’t help making a few theological associations along the way.
Vocational hazard, I guess.
The particular class I took began with hours and hours of theoretical training, including many videos about the skills we would be required to learn. After significant time in the classroom it was time to get out on “the range,” to actually practice what we’d learned in theory in the classroom. And practice we did, for hours outside. The skills we were practicing were extraordinarily simple — very basic, beginner skills, the sort that anyone with any experience could do in her sleep.
They were so basic, in fact, and so repetitive that, though I was having trouble mastering them myself, I began to feel sorry for our instructors. Gruff and blunt yet unfailingly patient, they stood out there in the rain and, later, the relentless sunshine, and put us through our paces over and over and over again.
As I struggled to practice these very basic skills, the thought occurred to me that those poor instructors must be so terribly bored. For hours they stood out there, talking us through skills that must have seemed to them so ridiculously basic that they could perform them in their sleep. Not us, though. The whole class practiced the same basic skills for hours, until, on the last day we took our skills tests. And, despite our worry over the possibility of failure, all of us passed. Even me!
When I had a moment to break my concentration, this experience began to remind me of the church.
In my ministry context, many of the people who darken the door of the church are people who have never encountered the community of Christ in any meaningful or substantial way. It’s never safe to assume anymore that folks ever attended Sunday school, that they own Bibles, or that they even have any idea about the life of faith and the skills and practices one might cultivate to live that life to its fullest. It’s absolutely true that the gospel message is compelling, and if the church is being the church it will engage seekers in such a way that they come to know Jesus Christ. But I wonder some days whether we “church regulars” are aware of the degree to which new Christians need us, patiently, to show them the ropes — to give them the skills and knowledge they need to cultivate lives of discipleship.
Last week as I watched my instructors go patiently through the very basic skills in my class, I thought that we well-established church members could probably do a better job teaching and practicing the basics of discipleship with those who have come to be among us lately. We’re so quick, it seems to me, to rush toward new programs and church vision and all the big-picture planning that comes with a growing congregation. But what about learning and practicing the basics? What about teaching and learning the practice of prayer; Bible study; stewardship; sharing our faith; being active and committed church members?
We might just think that these are skills everybody knows by heart because they seem so basic to us. But those among us who are new to the faith don’t feel that these come naturally at all; in fact, they are facing the daunting task of learning these skills to a level of proficiency so that they, too, can play their parts in Christ’s community.
It’s up to us to offer a hand, to teach the fundamentals, to (patiently) practice and practice and practice, until the basic skills of Christian faith and practice become second nature to the new folks on the block, too.
I’m grateful this week for unfailingly patient instructors who were willing to go over and over basic skills until I got them down. And I’m thinking about how I might offer the same patience and understanding to those who are learning the fundamentals of Christian faith — until all the skills of discipleship become second nature to us all.