Right Thinking Produces Right Behavior? Or The Other Way Around?

I'm becoming more and more convinced that the book The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch is the quintessential book that you must read when it comes to the missional church. There are other books I like as well, including one Hirsch co-authored with Michael Frost called The Shaping Of Things To Come, but for some reason as I've been reading The Forgotten Ways for the fourth time, it's just been so helpful in developing in my mind a strategy for missional living.

Right now I'm on the second important aspect of what Hirsch calls mDNA - what the church needs built into it, like body DNA (but in this case missional DNA), in order to be a missional church. The first one is what he calls "Jesus Is Lord" - in other words, everything should revolve around this idea that Jesus is Lord. I'll go into that one in another post, because I thought it was fascinating and really hit me like a ton of bricks - but the second one is "discipleship". Hirsch really makes the case that discipleship is the key purpose of the church, and I'm beginning to agree with him. In this chapter on discipleship, Hirsch makes the point that we are way off base in our discipleship methods. One way that we are off base is that we have somehow caught on to the belief that the Hellenistic approach to discipleship will make disciples - he defines this approach as "right thinking produces right behavior." This is very obvious in all of our adaptations of the Purpose-Driven Church model of getting people around the bases. If we can get Christians to go to four different classes that teach different aspects of the Christian life - membership, discipleship, ministry and mission - they will automatically become disciples of Jesus and grow in their faith. Or will they? I have to admit, I've seen this done in churches for many many years. I'm not sure that this type of approach really makes disciples.

Hirsch counters this approach with the Hebraic way of discipleship. He points to the way of Jesus, how he hung out with his disciples, and his disciples inherited Jesus' DNA of discipleship through spending time with him, and him putting them in situations where they had to act first. In this approach, right behavior produces right thinking which produces right disciples. This is what Hirsch has to say:

"How have we moved so far from the ethos of discipleship passed on to us by our Lord? And how do we recover it again?

The answer to the first question is that Western Christendom was so deeply influenced by Greek or Hellenistic ideas of knowledge. By the fourth century AD the Platonic worldview had almost completely triumphed over the Hebraic one in the church. Later on it was Aristotle who became the predominant philosopher for the church. He too operated under a Hellenistic framework. Essentially, a Hellenistic view of knowledge is concerned with concept, ideas, the nature of being, types and forms. The Hebraic view, on the the other hand, is primarily concerned with issues of concrete existence, obedience, life-oriented wisdom, and the interrelationship of all things under God. It is quite clear that, as Jews, Jesus and the early church operated primarily out of a Hebraic understanding...

If our starting point is old thinking and old behavior in a person or church, and we see it as our task to change that situation, taking the Hellenistic approach will mean that we provide information through books and classrooms, to try and get the person/church to a new way of thinking, and hopefully from there to a new way of acting. The problem is that by merely addressing intellectual aspects of the person, we fail to be able to change behavior. The assumption in Hellenistic thinking is that if people get the right ideas, they will simply change their behavior. The Hellenistic approach therefore can be characterized as an attempt to think our way into a new way of acting. Both experience and history show the fallacy of such thinking. And it certainly does not make disciples. All we do is change the way a person thinks; the problem is that his or her behaviors remain largely unaffected. This can be a very frustrating exercise, because once a person is in any new paradigm of thinking, it is very hard for that person to deal with the situation from which he or she came."

This makes sense to me in the many years of seeing the "information" approach tried. It fails for the most part. Even in my own life, the times when I've actually grown in my discipleship is when I was pushed to go and do something, to get out of my comfort zone. I have never grown as a disciple of Jesus by taking a three or four hour class that informed me of the next steps for me to take.

What would this look like in the church today? I don't know. Perhaps older, more mature Christians would take ten or so newer Christians under their wing and disciple them through mentoring, through pushing them into situations that would challenge and stretch them. I don't know, but it's a fascinating thing to think about (but I should act on it first, right?)