I'm Not in High School Anymore

I have some friends from high school who are precious and dear to me, and we speak often. One is a lawyer in Louisiana, one a nuclear engineer, one a manufacturing manager, and another a minister in Driscoll’s Mars Hill network. Three of these four also served in the U.S. Navy. I could not be more proud of these men and who they have become.

When we were in high school we didn’t fit in. I’m not saying that we were members of a group that could have been labeled “the outcasts;” I’m saying that we crossed so many social categories and boundaries that we were un-categorize-able. We were all strong academic performers, but we also played on many of the school’s athletic teams. We were deeply involved in the NJROTC program, but we made time for other activities like SGA, mentoring, and Quiz Bowl, and church life. We were weird in that we couldn’t be pigeonholed into what have become the standard categories for high school society (i.e. the nerds, the jocks, the freaks, the goths/emos, etc.).

Thanks be to God that we weren’t categorized as any of those things. We were able to see that friends could be made of all types of people, and that we could all work independently of a social group to succeed in school and society. We avoided, for the most part, what could be called the “usual high school drama.”

High school ended, and we went our separate ways. The men my friends have become, I think, have reflected their ability to not be pigeonholed; they have adapted, transitioned, and thrived in just about every way. (Can you tell I’m proud of them?)

I’m so thankful for the experiences that I had in high school, but I’m also thankful for my time at Mississippi College and at Baylor University. The point is that my friends and I have all grown up and left behind the would-be drama of high school to embrace the fullness of life. Since we largely avoided that drama to begin with, the growing up was perhaps less shocking and painful than it could have been.

Now consider a recent post[1] by Lutheran pastor the Rev. Erik Parker in which he likens Evangelicalism to a high school. He calls Driscoll, Piper, and Eldridge the “football team” because “the crowds love them, but most cannot see that they are also the bullies.” Myer and Osteen are the “rich kids,” and Rachel Held Evans is the valedictorian. In Parker’s metaphor the Mainline denominations are the “parents” and “teachers” who “brought them into the world.”

Parker’s central point is that Evangelicalism “needs” the Mainline denominations for their experience and wisdom. The Mainline needs Evangelicalism for its “drama to remind us how important this faith business” is.

Likening the Evangelical milieu to high school, especially when the Mainline is cast as the teachers and parents, is disingenuous and anachronistic. To do so is to portray the Evangelical movement as young, immature, and under the tutelage of the Mainline “adults” who try to mold the students into their own image. Evangelicals are not in the midst of some maturation process that will eventually graduate them to Mainline status; the Evangelical movement is not the Mainline precisely because it cannot become the Mainline.

The Rev. Parker wants to argue that the Evangelicals need the Mainline and vice-versa, but calling those same Evangelicals the students while his own tradition is the great teacher and parent causes “Evangelical” to lose its historical meaning completely.[2] His metaphor assumes that if Evangelicals would just grow up a little bit they would see their “drama” for what it is and merge with the other sober-minded Mainline Christians in our culture.

Further, Rev. Parker misses the irony that one cannot so easily stereotype Evangelicals into his or any other category. There are not “bullies” or “nerds” or “valedictorians” in the Evangelical camp; these believers flow into and out of and among any categories. The Mainline thinks in categories because it has, in many cases, an ordered hierarchy to clearly define those categories. Baptists, at least, have no such hierarchy and therefore are incapable of categorization. If a specific preacher, author, or believer acts in a way that resembles the jock, the nerd, or the freak, then so be it. Trying to cast the entire Evangelical movement as the children in a school with its drama, though, just doesn’t work.

One final note: the Evangelicals don’t need the Mainline in the way that Rev. Parker thinks. The Evangelical movement has been doing its own thing for enough generations now to understand that wisdom and calmness can be euphemisms for apathy and hollow spirituality. Evangelicals are also not blind to the “grey areas of faith,” nor are Evangelicals ignorant of the tensions these grey areas produce. Evangelicals live in these areas every day, just like Mainline believers.

In my own context of teaching high school students and witnessing their drama, I’ve come to understand that “the struggle is real.” More specifically, I’ve learned that the best teacher I can be is the one who invests in the drama, not to chide, criticize, or tell the students to grow up, but because the love of God in Jesus Christ is found in how I respond to that struggle, that drama.

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[1] http://millennialpastor.net/2014/01/06/evangelical-drama-needs-Mainline-experience/

[2] The meaning of “Evangelical” is slippery at best. My dear friend Roger Olson holds out hope for the term, however, in spite of calls by others to abandon the word in favor of something more solid.

The Things at the Heart of Evangelicalism

My doctoral Project focuses on the use of catechetical methods in the local Baptist congregation to renew discipleship efforts among the more spiritually mature believers. I have been living and breathing catechesis, catechisms, and discipleship theories for months, and consequently I’m growing more and more convinced that Baptists need to re-appropriate some of the ancient practices of forming believers into the image of Christ.

My work has kept me aware of new books and programs on discipleship, especially those that seek to integrate the ancient forms of catechesis into evangelical churches. Since 2011, Christianity Today has published articles as a part of its “Global Gospel Project.” The Project seeks to “create a common ground catechism for today’s church.”[1] The editors and authors of the series “present and prepare teachings that reach across evangelical traditions and across the world.”[2]

The Project is about those theological foundations at the heart of all evangelical traditions. The focus is always on “beliefs and doctrines that unite evangelicals.”[3] The theological identities of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are addressed, as is the theological understandings of the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. The Project is an attempt to begin conversation among evangelical traditions that unites on those essential Christian beliefs common to us all. It an attempt, for better or worse, to describe an evangelical orthodoxy though conversation.

The editors of the Project understand it to be a type of catechism, an ecclesial concept that has great meaning and tradition for some evangelical traditions, but not for others. Shellnutt says, “While catechisms—doctrinal teachings in question-and-answer form—have educated Christians throughout church history, they've never looked quite like this.”[4] She’s right: if what Christianity Today is producing is not a question-and-answer framework of discipleship instruction, then it’s not, strictly speaking, a catechism.

What the “Global Gospel Project” resembles is a form of catechesis. The articles produced by Christianity Today generate a conversation that includes more than one perspective on the theological issue at hand. This act of dialogue is an act of discipleship that invites the learner into a stretching and challenging encounter with the Church and with more experienced mentors, in this case those mentors being the authors themselves.

I’m excited to see how the “Global Gospel Project” develops in coming months. The editors of Christianity Today have caught on to a need in our churches that is exactly what I have become passionate about: the need to establish more rigorous and doctrinally-specific discipleship actions. Their Project is an expression of this need, and I find the way in which the articles are written helpful and fair to both sides of a theological issue.

I do have some reservations about the Project, though. First, the publication of the NIV Vital Faith Bible as a companion to the Project is disappointing. With the great flood of issue-based and demographically marketed Bibles out there, publishing another edited version of the Scriptures is not something that should take the time or money of the Project’s leaders. I understand that the goal is to demonstrate that “all of doctrine rises naturally though Scripture,” but that the association of a particular theological system of evangelical orthodoxy with a specific version of the Scriptures over-standardizes the Project.[5] Until this point the Project has been about articles and interpretations that are associated with a magazine and are therefore removed from spatial and spiritual proximity to the Bible. As a pastor I cannot emphasize how difficult it is to separate the Scriptures from what Ryrie, Scolfield, or the other study Bible editors have added to them.

Related to this concern is the very foundation of a proper catechesis (or catechism, if we must call the Project thus), which lies in the participation of a new or immature believer in a community of faith that includes spiritual mentors to further the development of the disciple. Study Bibles render concrete and solitary those things that the Project (in its current form) would have us experience in dialogue within our evangelical faith community. A catechesis that is not a rigid, question-and-answer set of doctrinal statements must develop in conversation with real partners who have experienced the truth of God in their lives and can help others learn and grow. So far the Project has provided great conversation starters on theological topics, and I pray it will continue to do so. We must remember, though, that community is at the heart of all our theological considerations.

Finally, there is a clear and bright limit to the orthodoxy the Project can hope to establish among evangelicals. The catechesis of the ancient church established a Christian orthodoxy among converts, but today such unity (uniformity?) seems impossible. Even as we are able to talk about the doctrine of God or sin or even the interpretations and use of the Lord’s Prayer, we will inevitably run headlong into those points of disagreement that have led to the mosaic of belief that is evangelicalism. Issues on the Trinity, baptism, communion, and church polity would naturally appear in a catechism or a proper catechesis, but these topics would be difficult to properly and adequately address in the Project’s format.

This may be a good thing. Perhaps the articles in the Project will inspire local congregations to reaffirm their own specific beliefs about important doctrinal issues and their tradition’s stance on them. Perhaps the Project will develop enough momentum in evangelical congregations to begin a distinct emphasis on catechesis. That is certainly what is needed, and I pray that the Project will spark just such a fire.

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[1] Shellnutt, Kate, “The Global Gospel Project: A Big-Picture, Common-Ground Catechism.” Christianity Today (www.ctmag.com), 8/14/2013.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Kevin Emmert quoted in Shellnutt’s article.

Being "Born Again" is Enough: A Response to Brantly Millegan

Regardless of any cooperation between Baptists and Roman Catholics in social ministries and relief efforts there exists a gulf between the two traditions theologically. We share much in terms of Christian orthodoxy, yet our traditions are still miles apart in many crucial theological areas.

One such area is a theology of salvation and specifically how salvation relates to baptism. Brantly Millegan has recently posted an article that accuses “evangelicals” of missing the basic point of Jesus’ words “you must be born again.” He writes, “For most evangelicals, to be “born again” means only to have had a conversion experience in which one gives one’s life to Christ. That interpretation certainly goes far beyond what the verses [John chapter 3] actually say.” He continues, “While the term “born again” is vague enough to possibly mean simply a conversion experience, being “born of water and the Spirit” is obviously not, at least not exclusively – I’ve never seen anyone get wet from saying the sinner's prayer.” His sarcasm notwithstanding, Mr. Millegan is demonstrating an absolute misunderstanding of Baptist theology and the theology of Protestant Christianity.

Before I clear this up, I’ll allow Mr. Millegan to conclude: “To be “born again” means to baptized. This is not only the current Catholic interpretation of this text but also the interpretation given by the early Church Fathers – indeed all orthodox Christians prior to the 16th century Protestant Reformation…. if Jesus is talking about baptism and not simply a conversion experience – although any adult who is baptized must have put their faith in Christ – then Jesus is teaching something that evangelicals frequently deny, but that the Catholic Church has always maintained: that baptism is necessary for salvation.”

I do not have the time or the energy to re-engage the centuries-old debate between Catholics and Protestants concerning the theology of baptism. Rather, I want to clarify what is apparently Mr. Millegan’s fundamental assumption: that evangelical Christians see being “born again” as a personal salvation experience related to the “sinner’s prayer” and as having no relationship to baptism.

First, we have to address two troublesome words, “many” and “evangelicals.” I have commented before that using weasel words such a “many” and “some” and “frequently” are inappropriate especially when writing about things as important as what people believe about God. Further, the term “evangelical” has become so stretched by general media and even by those who would claim is as a self-descriptor that it is vacuous and nigh useless. Which evangelical groups see baptism as unnecessary? Please, demonstrate which theological traditions within Protestantism (of which evangelicalism is certainly a subset regardless of its boundaries) hold baptism in such low regard as to declare it unnecessary.

Second, saying that being born again could mean “simply a conversion experience” betrays Mr. Millegan’s central point. The presupposition of a conversion experience, a moment in which he would later assume means that an adult has “put their faith in Christ,” is more than something extra or reducible to “simply” trusting Jesus for salvation. The conversion experience that precedes baptism even in Mr. Millegan’s argument is the moment of faith. It is presupposed in baptism and is the foundational moment in the Christian’s faith life.

Third, what is really going on here is a difference of theologies between Roman Catholics and Baptists (and most Protestants, but I will only speak to my own tradition of Baptist life). When Mr. Millegan concludes that “baptism is necessary for salvation” he demonstrates the traditional Catholic understanding of baptism as a means of grace, a sacrament that imparts some measure of God’s salvation upon the one being baptized. Truly, in Roman Catholic theology to be unbaptized is to be unsaved.

Baptists do not see baptism as a sacrament that is an actual mechanism of God’s grace. Instead we understand baptism to be an ordinance, an outward sign of an inward grace, an act carried out in obedience to the Lord in whom we have personally believed and trusted in our conversion experience. We do not hold that the baptismal waters or the words said in them are a means of God’s grace. Baptism is a sacred act performed by those who have “simply” had a conversion experience in the presence of others who have shared that experience and who commit to disciple the new believer within a community of Priests called the church.

Mr. Millegan doesn’t understand that baptism is necessary for Baptists, just not in the way he means it. Every person who believes in Jesus for salvation should be baptized, not out of necessity but out of obedience and imitation. The good news is that were someone to die on the way to the baptistery, no Baptist would hesitate to proclaim their salvation if the deceased had put their faith in Jesus Christ.

Finally, I understand Mr. Millegan’s sarcastic lampooning of those who overuse the “sinner’s prayer.” I, too, detest the boilerplate salvation strategies that my spiritual relatives have developed. What I cannot agree on, though, is Mr. Millegan’s complete misunderstanding of Protestant theology. Baptists, at least, believe in salvation by faith alone, through Christ alone. We do not diminish the “simple” conversion experience and over-emphasize the symbol of death, burial, and resurrection that is baptism. We are a people who come together in the common bond of having been born again through the Spirit of God, marked with the waters of baptism, and remembering our Lord through the Supper.

Even after 500 years we are still miles apart theologically, and for good reason. I pray that this relatively insignificant misunderstanding will motivate Baptists to teach and re-teach the theology of our tradition, to dwell in the Scriptures, and to preach sermons that call men, women, boys, and girls to have “simply” a conversion experience. That’s enough for us to do.

Evangelism and Evangelical: An Answer to George Bullard

George Bullard, a blogger for Associated Baptist Press, has written a post addressing the use of the words “evangelical” and “evangelism” among what he calls “moderate to progressive” congregations. He concludes his article with these questions:

“Is it [the dropping of “evangelical” and “evangelism”] a type of cultural and religious prejudice or myopia on the part of moderates to progressives? Are they no longer evangelicals themselves–people of the Good News of Jesus the Christ? What do you think is going on here?”

Since Mr. Bullard asked, I’ll answer.

I am involved with two of Mr. Bullard’s “moderate or progressive” churches in central Mississippi. These congregations do indeed seem to be outposts of a particular version of Baptist life among a sea of Southern Baptist churches in the area. They both support women in ministry, progressive social programs, and have a very high regard for orderly, well-done worship based upon the liturgical tradition of Charleston Baptists.

Mr. Bullard claims that such churches have all but eliminated the word “evangelism” and are on the way to eliminating “Evangelical” from their identities.[1] The churches he is imagining have been “turned off by the aggressive models of conservatives who engage in what a friend of [his] calls “confrontational evangelism.” The position taken is we do not want to be like them.” In this regard, Bullard is exactly right. “Evangelism” stirs in my mind images of street-corner condemnations and proclamations of Jesus’ love and salvation to people who are just on their way to class. It reminds me of the various strategies and methods employed by congregations to spread the Gospel: “Here’s Hope: Jesus Cares for You,” “Celebrate Jesus 2000,” “What Now?,” “Who Cares?,” “GPS,” FAITH, Friendship Evangelism, etc.[2]

Mr. Bullard says, “To engage in “evangelism” is to proactively express the Good News. That’s an extremely warm and faithful activity for those who call themselves Christians or followers of Jesus the Christ. It is not something that ought to be diminished, marginalized, or eliminated.” Unfortunately for many Baptists in Mississippi, evangelism means something more than this warm activity of proclaiming the gospel - it smacks of manipulation, bad salesmanship, and the marketing of the Gospel.[3] What is going on here is that so many of the aforementioned approaches to sharing the Gospel have been modernistic and industrial in nature that they did nothing to make true disciples, only shallow converts. What is happening here is that the word “evangelization” has become as baggage-laden as “Evangelical;” both represent the confusion of our calling to be and make disciples with social influence, political relevance, and the ideas of market competition.

I don’t need “evangelism.” I don’t need “Evangelical.” I am convinced that the making of disciples is more complicated than sharing the Gospel via the Roman Road or handing out tracts or flyers. I am convicted in my soul that broad generalizations about churches miss the point that we’re dealing with people, not customers, not clients, not students. We are not “in the business” of making converts. We are called to be the Body of Christ in our city, to be known by our love for one another and the world, and to be witnesses of what Jesus Christ has done for us to all we meet.

At the heart of all of this is the way in which we use words. “Evangelical” has all but lost its usefulness already by becoming too amorphous to describe any church or individual with specificity. So, too, has “evangelism” become cumbersome thanks to its use as something to be done. One does not “do” friendship evangelism; we make friends and meet people because it is good that we do so. Our sharing of the gospel is made real in the way we carry on our lives within that friendship.

What is going on here is that the “good old days” of the evangelical movement have long passed away. What has replaced it is a less-defined atmosphere of Protestant Christianity that still evangelizes, still preaches the Gospel, and still shows the love and grace of God to the entire world. What is missing is the objectification of that Gospel. My little congregation tries to live the Gospel without explicitly training anyone in a certain method of evangelism or starting anything resembling a crusade.

This is not the cultural or religious prejudice or myopia of which Mr. Bullard speaks. It is an attempt to live the Gospel rather than to sell it. It is an intentional decision not to contribute to the confusion over the term “Evangelical.” Being a Baptist is confusing enough.

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[1] I cannot go on without accusing Mr. Bullard of using inappropriate generalizations in his article. “Some” and “many” are indicators of speculation and assumption and shouldn’t be used to describe movements, traditions, or people without evidence.

[2] These are all strategies and evangelism plans I’ve lived through at various SBC churches.

[3] See Wigg-Stevenson, Tyler, “Jesus Is Not a Brand.” Christianity Today, 53 no 1 (January 2009), 20-26.

Baptist Pharisees and the Nones (1 of 3)

     When I taught Mathematics at a very conservative classical school in Madison, MS, I was constantly being reminded that our mission as a faculty was to nurture disciples rather than create little Pharisees. The struggle was between the imposition of context-less rules to be followed in the name of Christian decency and the desire for every student to submit to the living Spirit of God in daily life.
     I'm pleased to say that at least some of our students survived that daily struggle and ended their studies as well-adjusted young men and women who could actually think and act in accordance with the Spirit without marching to the beat of the hyper-conservative social teaching of the school. Many, however, became the very legalistic, Pharisaical people we didn't want them to become. They demonstrated haughtiness, were caustically judgmental, and saw every action taken by the "world" as an affront to their pre-determined worldview and Christian sensibilities.
     Although the issues related to running a Christian school, let alone one that pretends to be a classical school, are much broader and deeper than a single desire to make better disciples, the local congregation is, at its heart, concerned with recruiting, shaping, and sending disciples into the world. The temptation to make Pharisees rather than disciples is as strong and real in the local congregation as it is in any school.
    What do I mean by "Pharisees?" Certainly the local church is not forming people to adhere to the ancient customs of the Jewish religio-political faction known as the Pharisees. This group played in constant opposition to Jesus and the disciples following him. The Pharisees churned out in churches today are not reverting to a Jewish hyper-legalism; instead the disciples we create today carry the attitudes and character of 1st-century Pharisees while wrapped in the trappings of Evangelical Christianity.
     I would like this brief essay to serve as the beginning of a three-part posting on the nature of discipleship in Baptist life, especially in the South. The remainder of this post will be a review of the work that sparked my interest in the subject, then to entries to follow on the nature of the local church's discipleship programs and my own vision of a new (and old) framework of disciple making, respectively.

Review of "Defeating Pharisaism" by Gary Tyra
Tyra, Gary. Defeating Pharisaism. Colorado Springs, Colo.: Paternoster, 2009.

     Tyra, a Pentecostal minister and professor of Biblical and Practical Theology, has noticed that Evangelical churches have abandoned the principles of disciple-making that he believes to be the historical, authentic methods in favor of something else. The loss of effective discipling strategies has left a vacuum in the church that has been filled with what Tyra calls a modern-day "pharisaism." It is not that the church has intentionally turned to programs, strategies or ministries that form legalistic, separatist disciples; rather the local church has opted for less-demanding and less-transformative discipleship ministries that leave the people of the congregation largely to their own spiritual devices.
     Tyra identifies several characteristics that define the modern (as well as the ancient) Pharisee:

Legalism is the belief that our righteousness before God is earned rather than received as a gift. Dogmatism refers to an arrogant, stubborn assertion of opinion of belief. Sociological pugilism is a tendency toward being confrontational, combative, adversarial, and hostile in the way one relates to those not a part of the in-group or clique. Judgmentalism is a willingness to criticize and condemn those who approach the religious life differently than we do. Separatism is the felt need to separate ourselves from anyone who does not practice a piety similar to our own...Trivialism is the tendency to focus on minor, relatively unimportant issues while ignoring the truly consequential ones. Hypocrisy is saying one thing while consciously doing another, pretending to be more spiritually mature than we really are (5). 

     Tyra's list of characteristics common to ancient and modern pharisaism is broad, but there is a weakness in his use of legalism. While the modern pharisee certainly uses the Bible in such a way as to be legalistic, and while it is most certainly true that Evangelicals in the South especially have crafted a culture around the legalistic, literalistic interpretation of the Scriptures, Tyra must more clearly parse the differences between the ancient and modern understanding of righteousness and "earning" God's favor. One thing that Evangelicalism has done well since the Reformation has been to teach that salvation is a gift of God not earned, but rather freely given and accepted. When Tyra connects the legalistic interpretation of the Torah popular among the ancient Pharisees with the modern legalistic interpretation of the Scriptures something important gets lost.
     Tyra himself points out that "Some Pharisees tended to believe that a right relationship with God could be achieved and maintained by mere human effort and by isolating themselves from everyone who did not share their commitment to ritual purity" (48). This legalism was motivated by a desire to not offend God in any way, thus avoiding another occupation and exile in a specific, Temple-based religion context. The modern "Christian Pharisee" has no such illusions of works-based salvation or righteousness. Instead, Tyra claims that "the legalism of the Christian Pharisee ironically produces spiritual insecurity rather than peace and joy and spiritual fatigue rather than a divine sense of empowerment" (67). The very real legalism of the modern Christian Pharisee is not a parallel to the ancient Pharisaical belief that there is a direct correlation between the purity of Israel and God's blessings and judgements upon the same.

     Tyra's use of the ancient Pharisees as the antagonists in Matthew's gospel is excellent, and is backed up by sound scholarship and his own research. By assuming the tension between the disciples of Jesus and the adherents to the strict code of conduct of the Pharisees, Tyra has reinforced the "historical model" hypothesis of Michael Wilkins (see his "The Concept of Disciple in Matthew's Gospel"). If the disciples are held up as the struggling-to-understand followers of a new Way, the Pharisees are portrayed as an anti-model, a foil of the disciples in every way.
     Herein there is another distinction that must be made. The Pharisees that are caricatured in Matthew's gospel are not functioning from within the Jesus camp. Inasmuch as the disciples acted in legalistic, separatistic ways while they followed Jesus they could be considered the first "modern" Pharisees. The people within modern Evangelical churches who are acting in Pharisaical ways are doing so from within the Jesus camp, most of whom would readily testify to their own personal encounter with the risen Christ as the starting point for much of what they believe. While Tyra does a sound job of contrasting the "crowds" with the Pharisees, the inclusion of the Twelve and any mention of those moving closer to the Jesus Way are absent. We are left to believe that the option was either the Pharisaical interpretation of Judaism or a seat among the crowds following Jesus and hearing his teachings. It would have been more appropriate to at least connect the pharisaical tendencies among the first disciples with those patterns of life found in authentic Pharisees rather than relying on the "good guys/ bad guys" contrast between the teachers of the Law and the crowds.

     After the thick chapters on the Sermon on the Mount, its place within Matthew's cannon, and the nature of Matthew's gospel in total, Tyra attempts to demonstrate how discipleship needs to be transformed into something more authentic in the local church. By the time I arrived at these chapters, I was worked into a froth of agreement and excitement, ready for the author to make bold statements about the dearth of biblical and theological knowledge among the laity in our churches, and especially for him to lay the blame for such erosion at the feet of our modern, business-oriented approach to making disciples.

He blew it.

     Tyra introduces the third section of Defeating Pharisaism, the section most aimed at application and the modern Evangelical congregation, this way:

During the heyday of the church growth movement, when churches were encouraged to imitate the structures and practices of successful secular corporations, we pastors were advised to continually ask ourselves two key questions: (1) What business are we in? and (2) How's business? Some excesses surely occurred; and it is appropriate, I believe, for pastors to rethink the goal of trying to run their churches as if they were just another enterprise dotting the commercial landscape. And yet it also seems to me that, aside from the "business" rhetoric utilized, these two questions - the questions of purpose and efficiency - remain valid...Throughout this book I have been insisting that a careful reading of the first Gospel reveals that Jesus took the "business" of disciple-making very seriously and that leaders of contemporary evangelical churches should do likewise (193-194). 

     The church growth movement is in no small way the cause of the swelling numbers of shallow disciples in Evangelical churches. By emphasizing growth rather than depth the pastors who have come before my generation have bequeathed congregations that have no identity other than their own self-sustenance and no missional desire other than the one that brings more people in the door and feeds the cycle of growth anew. Further, the "business rhetoric" used in the local congregation is antithetical to the case for slow, personal, deep discipleship Tyra made in previous chapters. The inclusion of "business" in the disciple-making paradigm that Tyra present in later chapters does not fit. At no point does the author mention the business of making disciples that in any way relates to the 20th century numbers game that became the ethos of Evangelical ministry. It appears that the inclusion of this language, even in the third section's introduction, is a poorly-chosen addition to the otherwise masterful argument Tyra makes in modeling the local church's disciple-making strategy on the Sermon on the Mount.

     I was disappointed by the inclusion of the church growth language in the application section of Defeating Pharisaism, but not so much that I discounted what is otherwise an excellent work for the scholarly pastor who is looking for a way to embrace the ancient/future desires among our Evangelical congregants to do deeper in their discipleship and spiritual formation.
     I recommend pastors in Southern Evangelical churches read Defeating Pharisaism. Tyra's analysis of the Sermon on the Mount makes the work well worth the read, and if a pastor can apply such thinking to the practice of making disciples in their local congregation, then all the better. Tyra's primary recommendation for the re-invigoration of disciple-making is that "what is ultimately needed is not simply a specific disciple-making experience (no matter how powerful) but a disciple-making environment - an ethos that makes it easy for authentic Christianity to thrive while choking the life out of any Christian Pharisaism present in the congregation (220). Tyra's is not a call to a new "discipleship training" program or an adult RAs or GAs; it is a call to make the nature of the congregation one that makes deeply faithful disciples who increasingly walk with God and demonstrate a love for others. The rest of the church's ministries surely hang on our ability to foster such an environment.