I recently came across this post lamenting the disappearance of apprenticeship-based learning. I was never the best at tennis, but I remember that I got to a point of learning where a group setting was no longer ideal. I had a private coach because that was the most effective way to really progress.

This idea of 1:1 teaching/learning by doing used to be the norm, especially in the marketplace. The piece begins with the assertion:

Once upon a time, we learned only by doing. A quality education meant finding an expert to take you under his or her wing. Whether you wanted to be a blacksmith or a shoemaker, the ultimate break was ultimately a relationship. In exchange, your capacity would be stretched. You would learn in real-time, soaking up the knowledge through trial and error. You would learn the trade in practice rather than theory. You would also build a network and gain respect based on your performance rather than any sort of degree.

Though the article’s focus is not the Christian life, I can’t help but think of the parallels. We often think of “the Great Commission” in terms of evangelism, but what does Jesus really say we are to be about? Consider Matthew 28:18-20:

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Discipleship is at the core of who we are and what we are to be about. We have been entrusted with the Gospel and we are to pass it along. But this raises the question about how this is best achieved. Are disciples best made in a class-room setting? Knowledge is certainly a part of discipleship but it is not the totality. We often seem to believe that once we pass along a certain amount of knowledge, we have done our part.

But the best way to learn tennis is not in a classroom. You have to get out on the court and play. You have to learn from your mistakes and this happens best when you have someone there with you every step of the way, someone who knows your tendencies and who can call you out when you fall back into old patterns, someone who can correct your swing and urge to you continue when you feel like quitting.

This seems to be exactly the idea the New Testament presents of the community of faith growing together in real-life time. Paul urges older men and women to mentor younger people (Titus 2) and to gently correct one another when we fall into sin (Galatians 6:1-2).

All of this has prompted a series of questions I’ve been thinking through. Are disciples best made in institutions or daily life? Has the American church done well in making disciples? Why or why not? If yes, what can we learn? If not, what can we learn? What do you think? I wonder if our churches might look different if life-on-life discipleship was at the center of what we did? Would we still seek to fill classrooms multiple nights of the week? Would Sunday morning be the main-point of our weeks? Or might we actually try to live life together, holding each other accountable, learning together in community on mission? What if the bulk of responsibility to do “the work of ministry” (Ephesians 4:11-13) is not on paid staff but on the saints? Would paid ministers approach their “work” differently if convinced that their goal was to equip the saints, to, in a sense, work themselves out of a job? Would church plants still need a year of fundraising before “launching”? What does it even mean to “launch” a church if Sunday morning is no our organizing principle? If discipleship is our aim and not Sunday morning, should the amount of time and energy that go into making Sunday morning “go off” well be changed? I could go on but I won’t. What do you think?

Featured artist: Stephen Roach/Songs of Water. Music from J. Tillman, Buddy Miller, Patty Griffin, The Call and more. Experience the audio goodness that is Episode 12 of the Habañero Hour.

Welcome to Episode 12 of the Habañero Hour, the occasional music/interview podcast of Brent Thomas and Mark Whiten where we dissect and rearrange the idea of “Christian” music. We introduce you to artists we know and love and we talk to some of them along the way as well. We hope you enjoy and we’d love to hear from you.

Episode 12 Tracklist:

1. “Something In The Water” by Brooke Fraser
2. “Ode To A Patient God” by The Arrows
3. “Love No Less Worthy” by J. Tillman
4. “Mufafa’s Kitchen” by Songs of Water
5. “Where They Sleep” by Jeremy Larson
6. “Rich Man” by Hark the Herons
7. “Burn Me Down” by House of Heroes
8. “Broken Mess” by The Classic Crime
9. “That’s All” by Sister Rosetta Tharpe
10. “Washaway” by The Israelites
11. “Through the Dead Wood” by Songs of Water
12. “Shelter Me” by Buddy Miller
13. “When It Doesn’t Come Easy” by Patty Griffin
14. “I Still Believe (Great Design)” by The Call*

*This episode was recorded and uploaded prior to the death of Michael Been. He is missed.

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More from Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian:

“What if the blasé religiosity of most American teenagers is not the result of poor communication but the result of excellent communication of a watered-down gospel so devoid of God’s self-giving love in Jesus Christ, so immune  to the sending love of the Holy Spirit that it might not be Christianity at all? What if the church models a way of life that asks, not passionate surrender but ho-hum assent? What if we are preaching moral affirmation, a feel-better faith, and a hands-off God instead of the decisively involved, impossibly loving, radically sending God of Abraham and Mary, who desired us enough to enter creation in Jesus Christ and whose Spirit is active in the church and in the world today? If this is the case – if theological malpractice explains teenagers’ half-hearted religious identities – then perhaps most young people practice Moralistic Therapeutic Deism not because they reject Christianity, but because this is the only “Christianity” they know.

- Kenda Creasy Dean – Almost Christian

• Read Almost Christian

“the hot lava core of Christianity – the story of God’s courtship with us through Jesus Christ, of God’s suffering love through salvation history and especially through Christ’s death and resurrection, and of God’s continued involvement in the world through the Holy Spirit – has been muted in many congregations, replaced by an ecclesial complacency that convinces youth and parents alike that not much is at stake.”

Dean goes on to argue:

“In the view of American teenagers, God is more object than subject, an Idea but not a companion. The problem does not seem to be that churches are teaching young people badly, but that we are doing an exceedingly good job of teaching youth what we really believe: namely, that Christianity is not a big deal, that God requires little, and the church if a helpful institution filled with nice people focused primarily on “folks like us” – which, of course, begs the question of whether we are really the church at all.”

- Kenda Creasy Dean – Almost Christian

• Read Almost Christian

I have not read Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity, so it could be that I entirely have a wrong impression of the book. But what I have seen of it and heard from McCracken irks me and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until today when I read James Smith’s dismantling of the book.

In his piece for Christianity Today, McCracken describes the onset of what he calls “hipster Christainity:”

Enter the age of the Christian hipster. As the ’90s gave way to the 2000s, young evangelicals reared in the ostentatious Je$us subculture began to rebel. They sought a more intellectual faith, one that didn’t reject outright the culture, ideas, and art of the secular world. In typical hipster fashion, they rejected the corporate mentality of the purpose-driven megachurch and McMansion evangelicalism, and longed for a simpler, back-to-basics faith that was more about serving the poor than serving Starbucks in the church vestibule.

Smith nails it when he considers McCracken’s analysis and notes: “This, I think, tells us more about Mr. McCracken than it does about so-called hipster Christianity.” Smith drives the nail deeper by noting that “McCracken lacks a theology of culture.”

It seems to escape McCracken entirely that people shop at the Goodwill because they’re poor or tired of supporting our market-driven economy. It seems improbably to McCracken that people read Flannery O’Connor or Wendell Berry simply because they’re good authors. To make the argument that all people who do these things are hipsters, and that worldly hipsters have sex outside of marriage therefore Christians who read Berry have sex outside of marriage is simply laughable. Yet that seems to be exactly what McCracken has done.

While here are certainly people who claim to be Christians who live the licentious lifestyle McCracken rightly rails against, it is not particular to one subset of Christians and McCracken does not aim the righteousness gun, as Smith notes, as the sins of his own subset:

things like the Christian endorsement of torture and wars of aggression, evangelical energies devoted to policies of fiscal selfishness, and lifestyles of persistent, banal greed.

But Smith also rightly adds another dimension to this whole conversation: “Relevant-magazine hipsters are really just posers.” The very name of the magazine, Smith reminds us, proves that they are not “relevant:”

If Relevant magazine is the epitome and embodiment of Christian hipsterdom, then pretty much everything McCracken says makes sense. Relevant magazine is simply the latest in a long line of evangelical subcultural production: derivative, secondary, reactionary, and dependent on wider cultural trends, all with the hopes of showing that following Jesus doesn’t really require one to be a loser. Indeed, the magazine’s very title is a signal that this is just the continuation of the seeker-sensitive project of the megachurch. Its edgy rendition of evangelical faith doesn’t really displace the fundamental, core values of a constituency still comfortable with the status quo of bourgeois American individualism, consumerism, nationalism, and militarism. In other words, being a Relevant-hipster is the sort of thing you can add to your life without really disrupting the rest of it. It’s a style, not a way of life.

Smith reminds us that, what McCracken really seems to miss is a theology of culture that includes healthy contextualization coupled with the fact that it really is possible to read Berry, O’Connor, have tattoos, shop at the Goodwill, light candles in worship and be a Christian.

There is much more to be said here but instead, why don’t you grab a cup of coffee, read McCracken’s piece for Christianity Today and Smith’s review of McCracken’s book, and then we’ll all meet back here for a hipster  powwow and discuss.

• Read Hipster Christianity by Brett McCracken

Francis Chan at the recent Desiring God conference.

When my wife and I began praying about planting Church of the Cross three or so years ago, we also began talking to a lot of people. At the time, our line of thinking was that it was important for the name to, as clearly and concisely as possible, communicate who we are and what we’re about. We are a Church and we’re about the Cross. Done and done.

I also strongly believed that it was important to use the word “church” in our name. After all, we are a church. We are not just a gathering of people, we are not a center, we are a church. At the time, this was as much a theological conviction for me as anything else.

But as we continue to talk with people, I continually encounter people who insist that, for their context, having the word “church” in their name actually brings with it a lot of unnecessary baggage. I find this more and more within the more missionally-minded churches. I can understand this line of thinking. I am a pastor and I have a lot of baggage with “churches” for crying out loud! I’ve encountered people who have had a tremendous influence over my thinking and practice not use the word “church” (The Crowded House, Soma Communities, Adullum etc.) and some of my good friends have moved away from using the word church in their name (Missio Dei Communities, etc.)  so I have been thinking a lot about what’s in a name.

We continually and repeatedly remind our people that we do not go to church, we are the church. We remind ourselves often that Sunday morning is not the organizing principle of who we are and what we do. We are not planting a worship service, we are planting a church. The emphasis of our life together is in our community groups. This seems to lend support to the use of “communities” in our name, but then again, we are still a church.

But if this is a missiological question then it is also one of cultural context. It might not be all that helpful to use the word church in the Pacific Northwest but I think it would be equally unhelpful not to use the word in the south. Here in Phoenix, at least in the West Valley, it could go either way. We have so many transplants from other parts of the country and Phoenix has so little heritage of its own that we need to be sensitive to both sides of the baggage question. By and large, in the West Valley, it is the churches that don’t use the word church that seem a bit out of place. But then again, we are not setting out to be a church like most of the others here in our cultural context, so maybe it would serve us better to differentiate ourselves even in our name?

As you can tell, I’m not really taking a position here, just letting you in on my internal dialogue. What do you think? Is this a missiological question or an ecclessiological one? If it is missiological, then there seems to be flexibility to contextualize. If it is an ecclessiological question, there seems to be more weight towards using the word church.

Thoughts?