Discipleship training wheels

I taught my boys how to ride bikes recently, and I was pretty pumped about it. I was beaming. Natalie was bragging on them. (I was slightly jealous I didn’t hear more bragging on me.)

Learning to ride a bike

They’d wanted to ride with training wheels too long, and when we said the training wheel stage was over they quit trying. But it was time to learn. Like good 21st century parents, we watched a YouTube video with them to teach them to ride a bike. The YouTuber was a hyper-masculine guy who said learning to ride a bike is as simple as three easy steps:

1. Ask the kid, “Do you want to learn to ride a bike?” If it’s a no, forget it — you can’t teach an unwilling kid. If it’s a yes, move to step two.

2. Put your hands between the handle bars and have the child, with hands on handlebars and feet on pedals, learn to catch himself or herself as you gently lean the bike to the right and left. This step teaches them balance.

3. Finally, the kid has hands on handlebars and feet on pedals as the adult puts his hand on the seat of the bike; the child begins to pedal and keep the handlebars straight, and the adult gives the bike a push. Within 15 minutes, my boys were both riding around the track like experienced pros!

Learning to live the Christian life

Discipleship is probably a lot like learning to ride a bike. Sadly, many have given up on ever learning and have resigned themselves to riding on the training wheels of our programs and being spoon-fed by our messages. I’m realizing, thanks to COVID-19, that I had better be about the business of teaching people to live the Christian life and stop letting believers coast on training wheels or give up altogether.

So I am beginning to walk them through the same three steps:

1. “Do you want to learn to live the victorious Christian life?” Assuming that’s a “Yes”…

2. Teach them balance. We want people to live a “balanced” Christian life, avoiding the extremes of both fundamentalism — placing rules over relationship with God — and theological liberalism — positioning themselves as an authority over God. A balanced Christian life doesn’t lean toward or fall down into either extreme. Once they understand that…

3. Teach them spiritual disciplines and release them to run the race marked out for them!

Mastering independent spiritual disciplines

We’ve identified a handful of disciplines Christians need to master to remove the training wheels. Of course, we believe the Christian life consists of more than these practices, but a maturing Christian isn’t doing less than these practices. We are talking about these practices in a series of 3 minute videos; we want to keep it as simple as learning to ride a bike. (If you’re interested, you can find the videos here.)

We Protestants have historically clung fiercely to the priesthood of the believer, but, if we are honest, we’ve created more codependent, spoon-fed baby Christians in the last century than we care to admit. These not-yet-fully-formed believers aren’t to be blamed for their predicament; we are! I believe COVID-19’s greatest gift to the church may be the restoration of the priesthood of the believer.

Since we can’t feed them corporately with our services, we can teach them to feed themselves. Since we can’t be their training wheels, we can teach them to ride. God has removed their training wheels. Now let’s empower and release them again!

JD Mangrum is the church planting pastor of Christ Church Charlestown in Charlestown, MA.