So Many Christian Infants

So Many Christian Infants
By Gordon MacDonald, Leadership Journal




I have been musing on the words of Martin Thornton: "A walloping great congregation," he wrote, "is fine and fun, but what most communities really need is a couple of saints. The tragedy is that they may well be there in embryo, waiting to be discovered, waiting for sound training, waiting to be emancipated from the cult of the mediocre."




"Saints," he says. Mature Christians: people who are "grown-up" in their faith, to whom one assigns descriptors such as Christ-like, godly, or men or women of God.




Now mature, in my book, does not mean the "churchy," those who have mastered the vocabulary and the practices of church life. Rather, I have in mind those who walk through all the corridors of the larger life and do it in such a way that it is concluded that Jesus' fingerprints are all over them.




I have concluded that evangelicals are pretty good at wooing people across the line into faith in Jesus. And we're also not bad at helping new believers become acquainted with the rudiments of a life of faith: devotional exercise, church involvement, and basic Bible information—something you could call Christian infancy.




But what our tradition lacks—in my opinion anyway—is knowing how to prod and poke people past the "infancy" and into Christian maturity.

The marks of maturity? Self-sustaining in spiritual devotions. Wise in human relationships. Humble and serving. Substantial in conversation; prudent in acquisition; respectful in conflict; faithful in commitments.




Take a few minutes and ask how many people you know who would fit such a description. Apparently, Paul pondered the question when he thought about the Corinthian Christians and said, "I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:1).




I'm wondering if we church people have forgotten how to raise saints. And if so, then what's been going wrong?




Maybe the answer is that would-be saints are mentored: one-on-one or one-on-small group (three to twelve was Jesus' usual practice). Mature Christians are made through the influence of other Christians already mature.




Additionally, mature Christians become mature by suffering, facing challenges that can arouse a sense of inadequacy. Mature Christians learn to wrestle with questions that defy simple answers. Oh, and mature Christians wrestle against the Devil, and sometimes even lose. But they learn to get up again. Could I add, while I'm on a roll, that mature Christians are experts at repenting and humility?




They learn this stuff under the tutelage of one who has gone before them and is willing to open his/her life so that it becomes a textbook on Christ's work in us.




But we have a problem in the modern church. Older people don't want to be tutors or mentors. Too busy, too distracted, too afraid. So a younger generation of spiritual infants is really struggling because an older generation doesn't want to get involved.




I'm meeting too many infant Christians who tell me that they're looking for fathers and mothers in the faith to help them grow up. And they're not finding them. And many churches aren't cultivating them.




Result: We could lose a large part of a new generation of Christians who couldn't get past spiritual infancy and went somewhere else.