T.M. Moore writes about Discipleship Without Learning at the Worldview Church:
Our Christian educational activities may be unprecedented in their scope, but they are unimpressive in their results.
The day we see quizzes and papers become a regular part of Sunday School (we call it school, don’t we?) is the day I’ll begin to think we’re overcoming the very real problem he has described there.
But there are reasons things are as they are. Four of them come to mind.
1. We live in a culture that is unimpressed with learning except that which contributes toward earning a living.
2. Our Christianity is such that we can get along with the little knowledge we have, and feel fine about it. As long as we can ride somewhat successfully through the hard spots in our own lives, we can manage to insulate ourselves from the hard questions others face or that our culture brings to us—and thus we don’t really have to think deeply about much of anything.
3. When life becomes a really rough ride, and making it through successfully becomes really difficult, we doubt that there is any advantage or help to be gained through deep discipleship of our minds. We also doubt that such discipleship would be helpful as advance preparation for future bumps in the road.
In a word, we don’t really believe it’s valuable for the growth of our souls.
4. Where we do confront the questions of our culture, we do so with surface-level thinking. This is associated with number 1. Americans—Christians included—are much more at home with the quick slogan than the carefully considered thought. Furthermore, we think this is the normal and proper way to handle tough questions and issues. I suspect that has to do with being trained by way of political sloganeering and news-show sound bites.
I know of significant exceptions to all of the above, but in general these seem to be characteristic of American Christian culture, and strong contributors to “discipleship without learning.”
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I grew up in the Catholic church and (in hindsight) one of the greatest things they do is teach the core. One of my top priorities at home is teach the core aspects of the faith to my kids. I’m not Catholic (and at the risk of opening up a can of interfaith worms) but why can’t non-Catholics manage to do this very well?