August is here, and with it the start of another school year. That makes this a fitting month to confess something: for more than a hundred years, the church in America has modeled what we call "discipleship" after the American education system. The result? We have produced many good students but few disciples: many spiritual teachers, but few disciple-making spiritual fathers. Somewhere along the way, the church started taking its cues from the world instead of remaining committed to the methods of Jesus.Sunday School replaced family devotions. The Sunday sermon became the primary means of biblical engagement for the churchgoing American. But the Bible was written in a different time, and a disciple then was more than a student in a class; he was an apprentice of a trade. The apprentice still learned, but apprenticeship looked "inefficient" to a modern, industrialized world that needed a different kind of worker. America's education system was designed to produce that worker, and the church adopted the mentality. We traded the physically taxing, dirty work of apprenticeship for a sterile classroom: a slate, some chalk, a teacher, and rows of silent, well-behaved pupils. Discipleship was never intended for that environment, and over time, we forgot. We read our own experience over the text instead of allowing the Bible, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to inform our practice. 

    Listen to the words of Jesus: "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" (Matthew 28:19-20, ESV). We are called to make disciples AND teach them, not to make disciples BY teaching them. There is an educational component to discipleship, but Christian education does not equal discipleship. Notice what the teaching is for: to observe. To obey. 

   I learned this while becoming a paramedic. The course had a didactic portion and a skills portion, and no one becomes a paramedic on classroom knowledge alone; you must demonstrate that you can actually do the job. In fact, you can't even skip straight to paramedic; state and national requirements demanded I first become an EMT-Basic and prove entry-level capacity. Discipleship works the same way. There are truths we must know: salvation by grace through faith, justification by faith, repentance, and determined dedication to the Lordship of Jesus.

      But if head knowledge never becomes heart-motivated obedience to the practices Jesus commanded, we are not becoming disciples.