Central Passage: "All these men [from the tribe of Issachar] understood the signs of the times ..." (1 Chron. 12:32 NLT).

Discipleship in the Twenty-First Century Presents Unprecedented Challenges

The pervasiveness of electronic communication presents a multipronged challenge to the cultivation of a vital inner life, creating new demands for discipleship.

I am deeply concerned that the church seems to be losing ground in producing mature followers of Christ. I do not see our discipleship process in the early part of the twenty-first century as being very effective. It is not that there is anything inherently wrong with traditional discipleship methodology, but that time has moved on, and I am not sure the church has moved adequately with it when it comes to discipleship.

I fear that the typical education and discipleship approach used in the United States today is doomed because it does not match up with the characteristics of newer generations. It is not that typical material and approaches are useless. Fortunately, there will always be those who are willing and able to adapt themselves to the more traditional methods and materials. But when it comes to reaching a broad spectrum and large number of typical Christians today, I fear that the methods and materials of the past will prove ineffective for the future.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the church in America today is the shallowization of the church. For the last couple of decades many of us have read the statistics produced by the Barna Group and other polling groups that show the attitudes, values, and behavior of Christians not being statistically significantly different from non-Christians. Christians are supposed to be different from the world, but as a category, we are not—or at best there may be a five- or ten-year lag. Research indicates that not only are we losing our distinctive lifestyle, but we are also beginning to lose our distinctive beliefs on which a distinctive lifestyle is built. Pastors of some of the nation's largest churches describe their congregations as "a mile wide and an inch deep."

This would be a significant problem even if the historically Christian culture in the United States were remaining constant. But that is not the case. It is collapsing like a burned-out barn, which means that Christians are collapsing with it, making it spiritually catastrophic.

Christian author Dallas Willard has written that Christians are shallow, not in spite of what the church is doing, but precisely because of what the church is doing. He applied the well-known business maxim to the church: "the system you have in place is perfectly designed to produce the results you are getting." If we want different results, he contends we must use a different system.

Believe me, this is not a criticism. I have struggled for decades to analyze and decipher what is happening to the church and what to do about it. But in this context, it is time to ask ourselves, In our age of rapid and massive change, is our discipleship system producing disciples who know the Bible well—who have mastered the Bible so well that the Bible masters them?

Is our discipleship system producing disciples whose character reflects Christ—who are holy toward God and loving toward others, whose lives are separated from sin, dedicated to biblical pursuits, and committed to eternal reality?

Is our discipleship system producing disciples who have dedicated their resources of time, talent, and treasure to the service of others, helping extend the kingdom of light into the kingdom of darkness around us?

There are many extraordinary examples of people who do just that. But evidence suggests that on the whole, the church is dramatically falling short on discipleship. As I speak with people about this subject, there seems to be a pervasive sense among church observers that we are categorically failing at this central responsibility.

The reasons are complex. But one reason is that it may be generally more difficult to live the Christian life in the twenty-first century than at any other time in history. This is, in part, because of the pervasiveness and power of electronic communication. From music in elevators to television monitors and touch screens in taxis to smart phones, tablets, computers, electronic games, smart watches, and televisions that often go on first thing in the morning and stay on until the last thing at night, our minds are awash in input from electronic media. And because we become what we behold, we are dramatically impacted by the pervasive presence of electronic media.

This creates two serious problems. First, it gives the mind no downtime, no solitude, no time for reflection, planning, evaluating, or thinking. The result is that it is very difficult to conceive of higher things, to rise above where we are at the moment. We get trapped in the present with little hope for the future because we give no thought to it.

Second, the input that we receive is often godless. By godless, two things are meant. On the one hand, it may be an affront to the moral standards of God. The input may include violence, hatred, greed, and sexual immorality. On the other hand, even if the input is not an obvious affront to God, media typically represents life and values that do not include God or accurately reflect Him. So, even if a given program on television is not morally reprehensible, it still tends to teach us to think and live without God because an accurate and authentic relationship with God is virtually never modeled. All we ever learn by example is how to live without...