David Watson, Church planter, has earned the respect of many through his long career of God-honouring Church planting work in some difficult places. Despite a major setback mid-career he is, by the grace of God, and through a rigorous commitment to communicate only God’s message, minus the husk of (western) church culture he has being exponentially fruitful. He who walks with wise men will be wise. What can we learn from David and his work that can be applied to serving the developing world through eLearning?
All Churches Will be Heretical For the First Two Years (and will then self-heal)
Church planting work requires a high tolerance for heresy. Have you read the new testament letters? Those churches were vigorous! But they were also plagued with false teaching, which had to be dealt with by… the pastoral epistles. Short of open rebellion, churches will self-heal if they have the DNA of obedience built-in.
What is the DNA of obedience? If the Bible says to do it, you must do it! If the Bible says don’t do it, you must not do it! Simple. The Bible is the Word of God which much be obeyed, ignorance, lack of experience and sin will progressively be conquered, if the building blocks are in place. Simple, but our way of doing church and training militate against this approach because;
1. Leadership training and doing church is knowledge and congregation-focused.
Bible colleges, seminaries and university theological programmes teach facts (sometimes) and opinions, which have to be know for exams. The measured metric is knowledge, there is no obedience requirement beyond returning books to the library on time and avoiding plagiarism. Embarassing, gross sins, are, of course to be avoided. Informally the minister is rewarded as he conforms to the tastes of the people in church tradition, conservative or progressive, and their taste in rhetoric, hard-hitting, or friendly.
2. ‘Lay’ training and doing church is knowledge and institution-focused.
Perhaps it was just me, but my church-located Christian education rewarded knowledge through quizzes. Informally, public speaking and evangelism, a move from laity to clergy-status were rewarded with respect, as was coming to Church twice on a Sunday and going to mid-week meetings, subordinating yourself to the institution.
If eLearning programmes want to keep that healthy focus on obedience and avoid the pitfalls of western broken-church then we need to;
1. Orientate training to obedience, not knowledge
Be careful of knowledge dump – quizzing. By definition this only puffs up. Through scenario-based training with 1/4 principle/command training and 3/4 in-context, real-world guided application of principles.
2. Orientate training to obedience to the Word of God, not subjection to the institution
This means people need to know how to understand the Bible without the mediation of a book or a professional Christian. Hermeneutics should be taught. The teaching should certainly encourage respect to those in leadership, but any clergy-olatry must be rigorously rooted out.
3. Teach everyone, not just the clergy
A church can’t self-correct if no-one knows anything. A church can’t self-correct if only the minister knows. A church will thinking correcting the pastor is a sin if they’re taught to be subject to the institution rather than the word of God. Everyone must know as much as they can and all with a Bible-obeying focus.
4. Teaching Obedience to God Means Looking for Leaven?!
Israel was commanded to search ’round their houses for leaven before the passover. Leaven can represent sin, but it also represents things which are morally fine but, corruptible, being man-made. Everything man made must be systematically and unmercifully purged from every inch of your content. It may not be sinful, but it must go.
Negatively, extraneous material is by nature unhelpful and retards learning.
Positively, the leaven of human ‘stuff’ can be sinful, spreading false ideas or idols. No animistic sinners prayer, no ‘make my flesh-life melt away’ WWJD bracelets. Like it or not, no Reformed Presbyterian ever picked up false ideas about God when singing in church (exclusive psalmody).
Is doctrine leaven? Do we find doctrine per se in the Bible? Should we include creeds and catechisms? Do we really mean Sola Scriptura (scipture alone) or are we fooling ourselves?
Teach the Minimum Practice
What is the bare minimum according to scripture alone which a church needs institutionally to be a chuch. Always teach the bare minimum from scripture in each domain of Christian knowledge.
Persecution is Normal
Exponential Chruch growth works best where persecution is greatest.
Take a minute to think about these two questions;
Question 1: “What would the ideal church look like is money was no object?”
Question 2: “The country has been taken over by an anti-Christian tyranny. What could you keep from your ideal church and still be a church?”
Hmmm….
What eLearning solution will thrive best under persecution?
Whatever eLearning soltuion you put into place must be persecution-proof. The solution should be mobile, easily concealable, rely on dual-purpose techonology. Of course I’m thinking ‘cellphones.’ Desktop computers and certainly networked computers in big Bible colleges will be more vulnerable
Teach People How to Die Well
Gulp! How do you do that on a cellphone? I’m not sure, but if you can do it on paper, you can do it on an LCD.
Conclusion
Heresy is to churches what scuffed knees are to riding a bike. Anyone who keeps falling off should stick to walking however. Failure to success on your own means genuine learning. A fully-grown tree which appears overnight and never sheds a leaf is a fake. The key is to build in the DNA of obedience by teaching everyone to be subject to the word of God (and nothing but the word) alone. This means purging the leaven, all of it! Persecution is a fact, teach accordingly, at make sure your eLearning distribution system is robust enough to cope with it.
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