Discipleship is all about learning. Discipleship is a lifestyle,
not an event, so it is about continuing to learn
throughout our lives.
What I describe here is simple, but it is not familiar to most
people in the Church today, so it can be hard to understand and
apply. Here are a few brief observations to help you live it.
A Few Basic Principles
Learning is Difficult
Learning is never easy. Learning involves change, and change is
always painful. We do not change, and we do not learn, unless we
have to.
The fundamental challenge, before we can even get started, is the
question of motivation.
How do we learn?
Very few people learn anything important through academic
teaching, and when we do, it is always because the right teaching is
being provided at the right time, and in the right context.
The right time for teaching is when we know we need it. The
process usually goes something like this.
We learn firstly by doing or trying to do
it ourselves;
secondly, we learn by observing others who can
do it better than us; and
thirdly, when we have learned how difficult it is, we learn by
being taught the facts and principles we now
realise we need to know.
We learn by doing, not hearing. The problems we discover through
doing make us open to to learning. Our failures give us a reason to
change and grow. Our undeserved successes remind us that we cannot
succeed without God doing the things we cannot do ourselves.
When do we learn?
We learn best when we are able to do something which
matters. Working at something which does not matter saps
the spirit. More than that, if I do not have a strong incentive to
make something work well, I will not be willing to invest in
learning in order to achieve this goal.
We only learn when the outcome is not certain. We plan
things to avoid the possibility of failure and risk, because this
is what our culture tells us to do. But while the people work hard
in this system, the system does not work for the people: they cannot
learn and grow in such an environment.
Risk and failure must be present but managed: the activity needs
to be safe enough to be sustainable, effective enough to be
worthwhile, challenging enough to be enjoyable, and impossible
enough so that we cannot do it without God.
What do we learn?
This is one of the deep challenges: when we do learn, we do not
always learn the right lessons.
We lock up criminals to 'teach them a lesson'. The lesson they
often learn is how not to get caught.
We learn most often by our own mistakes, but we rarely
learn the right lessons that way. We usually see mistakes more
clearly in the lives of other people.
We need mature, experienced people: we need
their example, and we need their help and guidance to reflect on
what we see and do in order to make the connections between the
things which damage other people and the things which are wrong in
our own lives.