by Eddie Pipkin
I heard a story a couple of days ago in which a highly accomplished man remembered the time he flunked swimming class. The guy had always been a straight A student, so he enrolled in this class thinking he would master it just as he had mastered everything else up to that point in his life, but the skill wouldn’t click for him. He couldn’t get it. He could repeat back the rules, and he could diagram the technique, but he couldn’t demonstrate the practical application of that acquired knowledge. The instructor gave him an “F.” Does that say more about the instructor or the student? And what about us, as the people with the mission of passing along the skills of Christian discipleship? What do we do when the people we are called to help can’t figure out how to sink or swim?
The context of this story, as I received it, was within a discussion about how we learn things. The consensus of the participants in the conversation was that the swimming instructor / teacher missed the point completely. The point was not to grade someone on their knowledge. The point was to help someone become a swimmer – to help them join the people for whom water is a joy and an adventure – to help them unlock the mysteries of being in and under the water with confidence. Or at the very least to keep them from drowning. Learning to swim is both a matter of safety in the physical environment and a path to experiencing the world from an entirely different perspective.
Perhaps, the people in the conversation speculated, the instructor deserved an “F.” Her teaching technique was clearly lacking. If the technique failed this student, then there was an obligation to know the student better; to motivate the student differently; to reach the student from a different angle.
So it goes with discipleship in the local church.
We talk about discipleship. We actively encourage the pursuit of discipleship. We sing about discipleship! We send a clear message that we expect discipleship. We even teach discipleship. But discipleship is not an academic pursuit; it is a practical, active, lived pursuit. If all we are doing is talking “at” people about it, it’s like we’re teaching swimming by showing pictures of a pool on a big screen and telling stories about others who have learned to swim.
If we frame certain spiritual knowledge, a collection of biblical facts, as if possession of them and the ability to recite them on cue, is in and of itself a form of powerful discipleship, it’s like we’re teaching people to swim by outfitting them with a life jacket and tossing them into the deep end of the pool. This strategy may indeed help someone keep their head above water, but to really move through the waves with purpose, they need a practical skill set, honed by practice and repetition and real-world exposure (starting in the shallow end and working their way to the deeper, more challenging water).
Every student is different, and while the principles of buoyancy and maritime propulsion are universal, success for individuals begins with knowing their strengths and their fears, their experiences and their goals.
In discipleship planning, local churches are too often working with a one-size-fits-all model, and if that model does not work for some people, we metaphorically assess them with an “F” and shrug our shoulders. We say it is their failure to absorb and apply the material, not ours for missing the mark in helping them understand what it is to live as a disciple in useful, productive, and life affirming ways. In fact, because we so often lean on academic / teacher types to lead discipleship initiatives via a traditional classwork model, we mistake knowledge (facts and principles) for active application (discipleship as action).
If you’re going to teach someone to swim, you have to . . .
- Get in the water with them.
- Give them basic skills for how to avoid drowning. When a situation becomes overwhelming and panic threatens, there are some basic skills that will keep you alive until help can arrive.
- Provide different strategies for achieving the same goal. There’s more than one stroke for getting from Point A to Point B. Everybody has a different comfort level. That’s how we get the phrase “different strokes for different folks.”
- Find the joy in it. It can’t be drudgery alone. There is fun and adventure to be unlocked.
These principles hold as true for discipleship training as they do for swim training:
- We should be doing active life with those learning to be disciples, not just teaching abstract principles.
- We begin with the basics from prayer to service (looking to the needs of others) to anchoring ourselves in Scripture to living supportively in community so that tough times don’t crush us. We know how to tread water until help can arrive!
- We expose discipleship trainees to a variety of paths to explore their journey. We do not become fixated upon what works for us at the expense of different, equally valuable approaches.
- We find the fun and adventure in discipleship. We don’t make it a list of onerous tasks that must be accomplished.
I don’t know about you, but I really, really love being in the water. I attribute that love, among other things to having the support and guidance of good people who taught me well, who exposed me to exciting excursions, who kept me safe while doing so, and who opened up a world of aquatic possibilities for me. My heart broke a little for the man who had the horrible swim class experience. I do not know if he ever learned to swim, but I sure hope he did.
It’s the same feeling I get whenever I hear someone is struggling to connect with what it means to follow Christ day-to-day. I hope they find a local church where their journey is encouraged by people who get to know them well enough to know what they need and how they can be best equipped to get there. As a famous animated fish once said, “Just keep swimming!”
